Freshsales Review, Pricing & Features

What is Freshsales?

Freshsales, previously known as Freshworks CRM, is a CRM platform with over 40,000 customers. It offers lead capture methods, contact and deal management tools, workflow automations, and insights reporting. We recommend Freshsales to those who need a beginner solution with a strong set of communication channels and digital marketing tools.

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Table of Contents

• What is Freshsales?
• Freshsales Review Summary
• Freshsales Pricing & Cost
• Freshsales Features
  • Lead Capture
  • Contact Management
  • Communication Channels
  • Deal Management
  • Triggered Events
  • Reporting
  • Integrations
  • Mobile
  • Legal & Security
• Freshsales Customer Support
• Freshsales vs. Competitors
• Is Freshsales Right For You?

Freshsales Review Summary

Freshworks, the parent brand of Freshsales, was founded in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy. The company's mission is to build the ultimate, all-encompassing customer engagement management platform. Today, Freshworks has over 3,600 employees and is based in San Mateo, California.

Freshsales helps sales and marketing teams generate qualified leads and close deals faster. It offers tools for lead capture, contact and deal management, workflow automation, and insights reporting. Overall, Freshsales is an easy-to-use, beginner platform with high-quality customer engagement tools.

In terms of pricing, Freshsales falls on the more expensive side. Its most popular plan costs $85 per month and its most expensive plan costs $149 per month. Freshsales is much more expensive than similar platforms like Copper and Pipedrive, and even advanced platforms like Zoho CRM.

Overall, Freshsales is an intuitive, beginner CRM solution. We recommend it to smaller businesses with a slightly larger budget, who would benefit the most from a wide range of strong communication and digital marketing tools.

Freshsales Pricing & Cost

Freshsales pricing ranges from free to $83 per month. You can also save up to ~17% if you pay for an annual subscription upfront. Freshsales also offers a 21-day trial of each plan.

Freshsales Features

In our review, we will walk through the features offered by Freshsales. We’ll discuss Freshsales’s usability, customer support, and the major benefits and drawbacks of the software. We’ll also show real images of the software to give you an idea of what it’s like to use the tool.

Lead Capture

A lead is an individual or organization that has an interest in your services or products. Lead capture is the process of acquiring someone’s information with the goal of converting them into a paying customer. Overall, the more lead capture channels you have, the better you are able to reach a wider audience of potential customers.

Freshsales only offers three lead capture methods: forms, live chat, and email.

Lead Capture Forms

Forms are one of the easiest ways to capture leads because they let the leads provide their information themselves. Freshsales offers an in-platform feature that lets you create embedded forms. Overall, this feature is easy-to-use and best for creating simple forms.

Freshsales lets you choose different fields to include in your forms – including name, phone number, email, social media profiles, and location fields. Freshsales also lets you customize the colors of your form and preview how it will look on the web.

Live Chat Lead Capture

Freshsales offers a native live chat feature that lets you embed code on your website or integrate with other chat platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, and Apple Business Chat. Overall, lead capture through live chat is very easy-to-use. This is because anyone who messages you, either through your website or one of the platforms listed above, is automatically captured as a lead and added to your contact list.

Email Lead Capture

Freshsales has a feature that creates leads from emails that you receive. This feature automatically captures email senders who are not already labeled within your system as sales qualified leads. This feature is very easy-to-use.

However, a disadvantage of this feature is that it does not automatically capture other information that can be found in emails like phone numbers, company names, and websites.

Contact Management

Capturing a lead’s contact information is crucial in converting them into a paying customer. However, the type of information you can record, and how it’s stored and managed will determine the value you gain from your CRM. This is known as contact management.

Contact Profiles

Freshsales lets you create a profile for every lead that you’ve captured. The more information you have on a contact, the better the chance you have of converting that lead. Overall, Freshsales’s contact profile feature is above average, especially since Freshsales is not an advanced CRM solution.

Besides standard contact information like emails, phone numbers, and related deals, you can also view if there is a duplicate contact, and view insights from Freddy AI.

Freddy AI

Freddy AI is Freshsales's own artificial intelligence system that provides insights as to whether or not a contact would be a good fit for your business. This includes contact scores and customer fit ratings that are based on historical customer engagement.

Freddy AI uses your CRM data, including other contacts and deals, to predict a contact’s score. You can train Freddy AI by inputting positive and negative data including contact properties, engagement, and web or in-app activities.

Contact Storage

It’s important that your contacts are stored in an organized manner and are easily accessible. Overall, the Freshsales contact storage feature is effective and intuitive to use, but best for those managing less than 50 contacts at once.

Freshsales lets you create custom views of your contacts through a variety of filters. This includes filters for campaigns, deal status, emails, and general keywords. You can also use Freshsales’s search bar to find specific contacts.

Contact Activity Feed

Freshsales offers an activity feed for each of your contacts. Contact activity tracking lets you know where someone is in the sales process and the best next step you can take to engage them. Tracking a contact’s activity also reduces the chance of losing a lead. Overall, the Freshsales activity feed is robust.

As shown above, Freshsales lets you view contact activity within a certain range of days or on a custom date. You can also filter for specific activities such as events, emails, website visits, phone calls, meetings, chats, and tasks. An advantage of the Freshsales contact activity feature is that you can view when this contact was last contacted and seen.

Communication Channels

One of the key elements in converting your contacts into paying customers is maintaining consistent communication. With Freshsales, you can communicate with leads through the following channels:

Email Marketing

Freshsales lets you send basic mass emails and set up email campaigns. Overall, these features are easy-to-use and more advanced than the email tools found in Pipedrive and Copper.

For mass emails, you can create basic email templates. You can use merge fields to pull data from your CRM, like contact and deal information, and automatically insert them into your emails.

Freshsales also lets you send drip campaigns and trigger emails that are sent based on a user’s actions on your website or app. For both, you can choose different email design templates that let you add a variety of elements, including text, images, buttons, social handles, and videos.

Drip campaigns allow you to personally engage prospects throughout your sales cycle. Freshsales also includes templates for common email workflows like nudging users who have abandoned carts.

Live Chat

The Freshsales in-platform chat feature lets you engage your contacts in real time. This gives you a better chance of converting them into a paying customer. This feature in Freshsales is easy-to-use and robust.

While you are chatting, you can view a user’s contact information, the device the messages are coming from, and when a user was last contacted. Freshsales also offers its own live chat solution called Freshchat.

With this tool, you can create triggered chat campaigns based on where users come from and what they do on your website. You can also create targeted chat campaigns towards segments of users based on their product activity, usage, and behavior.

SMS

Unlike other solutions, Freshsales lets you send SMS messages to your contacts through an integration with Twilio. The benefit of SMS messaging is that these kinds of messages work faster than emails and are less intrusive than phone calls. Overall, this feature is easy-to-use.

Freshsales lets you send SMS messages individually or in bulk. An advantage of this feature is that you can also include merge fields, which pull data from within your CRM to personalize your messages.

Phone

Freshsales allows phone calls from within your CRM. This feature saves you time because you do not have to move back and forth between applications to make a phone call. In Freshsales, you can purchase a local or toll-free number.

You can also use The native Freshsales solution, Freshcaller, a no-hardware phone system that manages your team’s phone calls. With Freshcaller, you can take notes during calls, easily transfer calls to others in your organization, and even create workflows for certain call scenarios like if an agent isn’t available.

Deal Management

Eventually, leads become qualified sales leads. Once this happens, you’ll need an organized system to manage your deals. Effective deal management will give you the most up-to-date information and let sales representatives focus their attention on building strong relationships with the most promising customers.

Pipelines

Pipelines let you visually track the progress of prospective customers through each deal stage. Freshsales works well for businesses with less than 50 simultaneous deals.

In Freshsales, you can create custom pipelines that best align with your business’s sales funnel. This includes renaming, reordering, and creating unique stages.

Freshsales also lets you insert a "win probability" percentage for each stage. You can also set a "rotting age" of a certain number of days, which lets you know which deals need more effort or should be abandoned.

You can also use different filters to organize your deals, including for deal status, campaigns, certain dates, and probability percentage. You can also easily drag and drop stages, which makes them easier to update.

Task Management

Tasks in a CRM are actions that need to be taken to bring a deal to completion. You can assign tasks to you or others in your organization. Overall, the Freshsales task feature and task management system are easy to use, but basic. We recommend other platforms like HubSpot for handling a greater quantity and more complex tasks.

You can customize a task’s title, description, and due date. A disadvantage of the Freshsales task feature, though, is that you cannot set reminders. Reminders are key because they reduce the chance of losing a potential deal.

You can also only organize your tasks by days or whether they are open, completed, or overdue. This is very limiting compared to other solutions like Copper and Salesforce.

Triggered Events

Freshsales lets you set up automatic workflows where events trigger a certain action. For example, you can send a welcome email to those who sign up for your newsletter. This feature in Freshsales is easy-to-navigate but best for simple automations.

Freshsales lets you create workflows related to contacts, accounts, deals, tasks, meetings, and call logs. The actions that can be performed include updating fields, sending emails, and creating related tasks.

You can also create multiple actions for one trigger. For example, if a contact contains the keyword "trucking", you can change that contact’s owner, and send them an email.

Reporting

CRM reporting offers key data that helps individuals and businesses make strategic decisions and tactical changes. This includes important insight reports such as deals won and lost, pipeline progression, sales forecasting, and sales funnel.

Overall, the Freshsales reporting feature is easy to navigate. The reports are very customizable in terms of the data you can include and how it is visualized.

Freshsales lets you create dashboards, which contain multiple reports that are presented side by side. This helps you view a more well-rounded perspective of your business’s performance. For example, you can create a dashboard that captures your team’s activity, including their emails, tasks, appointments, and phone calls.

Freshsales also offers multiple types of data visualization styles. This includes heat maps, summary and matrix tables, and bubble and bar charts.

Freshsales Integrations

Freshsales comes with integrations that expand the functionality of the CRM. They also eliminate the need to toggle back and forth between systems. Some of Freshsale’s key integrations include:

Mobile

Freshsales offers a mobile app for both Apple and Android. A mobile CRM helps ensure that your team has the information it needs while on the go..

Overall, the Freshsales mobile app is well-rounded. It provides the most important information related to one’s CRM: deal, contact, and task information. You can also view general metrics related to your deal and contact activity.

Legal & Security

Having proper security and data protection is critical for your CRM. Data breaches can harshly affect your company’s reputation and be costly to remedy. Freshsales includes key security and compliance features to make sure your data is secured and protected.

Customer Support

Overall, we found Freshsales's customer support to be slightly above average. Freshsales provides a wide range of customer support channels, and its live chat customer support is quick and responsive.

However, Freshsales support articles have slightly below average readability. The font size is too small and the margin spacing between sentence lines is inconsistent. Also, while their images include indicators, like arrows, that point to the feature being discussed, the image sizes are too large and distract from the informational text.

Freshsales vs. Competitors

Freshsales most closely resembles Copper in terms of its advanced platform features. It is also similar to HubSpot in terms of the quality of their digital marketing tools and Zoho CRM in terms of its integration with its own tools like Freshchat and Freshcaller.

The top Freshsales competitors are:

Is Freshsales Right For You?

Overall, Freshsales is an intuitive, beginner CRM solution. We recommend it to smaller businesses who would benefit the most from a wide range of strong communication and digital marketing tools.