What is Freshsales CRM ?
Hey folks!
I am confident that you guys are doing great, the world is beautiful because of you :)
It’s been more than a month since I have joined the Freshsales team of Freshworks, and it’s been an interesting journey till now. In this post I am going to talk about Freshsales CRM.
I love Sales, It is a rewarding career and involves lot of hard work. The more you work hard, the more you are successful in this challenging field. It requires skills like product knowledge, listening, human psychology etc. Old jungle saying “You can take a sales man out of Pepsi. You can’t take Pepsi out of a that sales man”. This quote relates to every successful salesman who believes in his company and it’s products.
Being a Sales engineer for a sales software is a blessing. I can learn the sales process across different industries and I could deliver them the value of how a CRM like Freshsales can be used for their sales productivity.
Freshsales, a CRM for high-velocity sales teams was launched on June 21.2016 by Freshworks Inc. A 2 year old product is doing a great job in the market with high reviews on Capterra and G2 Crowd and competes with the top CRM players like Salesforce, Hubspot, Pipedrive, Insightly etc. Kudos to the entire team behind Freshsales !
Let’s play a game.
Assume that you got shipwrecked and you are stuck on a island and you have to cross 9 stages to build a new ship.
At the end of each stage you have to take up a short quiz.
Stage 1- LEAD MANAGEMENT.
When you setup a CRM, the first step is to dump your leads into it. In freshsales you can import leads, quickly add leads and also automatically add leads by integrating with your website.
Through webforms you can add leads and also track activities of your leads on your website.
Awesome, now the leads are in your system but to whom you should assign?. In freshsales you can add your sales reps and assign leads to them based on their sales territories automatically in a round robin manner!
You are half way done. Now the sales rep doesn’t know who are the best leads! Instead of him doing the discovery and qualifying the leads freshsales can help in ranking the leads based on certain conditions which you can set via Lead Scoring. Freshsales also automatically enriches leads with the social and publicly listed information.
With the email integration and inbuilt phone the sales rep can make conversations with leads and he can also make notes, attach files, create tasks and appointments. Now he can convert that lead into a contact and can associate it with a deal and an account.
“Now you are ready to take the Quiz on Leads Management”
Stage2 - DEAL MANAGEMENT
The next stage is deal management. In freshsales you can build upto 10 sales pipelines with no cap in the number of stages, and you can look in which stage the current deal is in.
In the deals module you could see the deals in the kanban view/list view and you can drag and drop a deal from one stage to another.
Similar to other 4 core modules in deals you can add notes, files, tasks and appointments. You can also email and call the related contacts.
“Now you are ready to take up the Quiz on Deal Management”
Stage 3 EVENT TRACKING
Insights on user behaviour activities in your company’s website is very important.
Using freshsales for web you can capture website visitors as leads/contacts and track their interactions on your website and web app, helping you to better understand your customers.
Under every Lead/contact you can see a section called “recent activities”. It helps you provide information on client activities like Website visits, events, emails, Phone calls, Appointments, Tasks, Lifecycle events, Chat and Sales Activities. You can also filter certain activities you want to see.
It’s time to take up the Quiz which is on “Event Tracking”
Stage 4 - PHONE
Sales reps spend most of their time calling clients, having this in mind freshsales was built with an inbuilt phone feature via which sales reps can call their clients. They don’t need to juggle between tools to make a call.
The Phone numbers purchased can be assigned to sales reps and territories and the call logs are also automatically recorded. Freshsales uses Twilio as the phone provider, please click here to know the call rates.
It’s time to take up the Quiz on “ Phone”
Stage 5 - Email
Stage 5 is a very important stage, yes it’s EMAIL.
The interesting features are Sales campaigns, Email tracking, Email templates, 2 way email sync etc.
Sales campaigns -> Using sales campaign you can can target specific leads/contacts who can enter the campaign and define steps like emails, follow up activities and call reminders. There are two types of campaigns classic and smart.
Email tracking -> Through email tracking we can track the email activities link opens, clicks and bounces.
Email Templates -> Email templates allows you to save email content with a personalised touch by choosing “placeholders”.
You can also have a 2 way sync with your personal email address, you can auto forward your sales emails and create leads directly from your sales email address to the CRM and many more!
Now you are a freshsales rockstar, your next quiz is on “Email”
Stage 6 - Reports
Inbuilt reports in freshsales gives you insights on your sales team’s performance and also helps you to understand the areas for improvement.
You can create your own reports and it can be scheduled [ Ex. You can send reports to your CEO at a particular day] and exported. You can impose access restrictions to reports for the users in the CRM.
You also have a dashboard view, in which you can choose the specific reports you want to see. You can see upto 6 reports in a dashboard.
Now it’s time for a quiz on “Reports and Dashboard”
Stage 7 - Workflows.
Automations is everywhere and it’s also in Freshsales!
No sales rep like to do the same mundane tasks like sending an welcome email for new leads, updating deal stages, creating invoices etc. If he can avoid wasting time on doing the boring tasks, he can certainly be more productive.
To execute a workflow choose the record type[lead, contact, account, deal], select when you want to execute it [time based workflows], choose the conditions and finally select the actions to be performed. Bingo! your workflow is ready.
Now it’s time for a quiz on “Worklflows”
Stage 8 - Mobile
For a company that has a field sales team,they need a CRM on the go!
Freshsales mobile app is available for both android and ios users.
In the mobile app you can access all four core modules, add notes, attach files, create tasks and appointments, make calls, add call logs etc.
You can get directions to the customer’s location and you can also book a Uber Ride via the freshsales mobile app.
Your next quiz is on “Mobile app”
Stage 9 - Integrations
I am overwhelmed and I want to appreciate your time and patience for making it to the last stage. Your time invested on learning freshsales will help your sales team to attain productivity!
This stage tells about the integrations available with freshsales. Freshsales support native integration with 16 apps and can be integrated with 1000+ apps via Zapier.
Your final quiz on “Integrations”
Congratulations, you made it, now you are ready to onboard the ship!
We would love to hear from you, if you need any assistance you can always contact us.
We have an excellent blog where you can find lot of sales tips, case studies of our customers etc. Also have a look at our upcoming webinars.
You can also reach out to me by dropping an email to akshay.karthik@freshworks.com. Thanks again for your time and patience, you are awesome :)
