Freshsales

Freshsales.io is a sales-oriented CRM platform produced by the company behind Freshdesk, the customer engagement platform. In 2012, burdened by a major vendor’s price for a CRM that had support for APIs, and using valuable developer resources simply to maintain their system of additional integrated platforms, Freshdesk built their own CRM with the built-in features their salespeople preferred.

Freshdesk was founded in 2010 by current CEO Girish Mathrubootham in Chennai, India.

Freshsales Pricing and Services

Intended Customers
Small to Midsize Businesses

Money Back & Free Trial
30-Day Free Trial of Estate Plan, No Credit Card Required

Free Version
Yes; Free up to 10 users

Most Popular Plan
Garden; $25/user/month

Features

All Available Plans & Services

Prices reflect monthly prices per user when billed month-to-month and when billed annually.

• Sprout - Free forever
  • Unlimited Users
  • Unlimited Contacts
    
  • Unlimited Support
    
  • Lead Management
    
  • Contact Management
  • Deal Management
  • Tasks, appointments and notes
  • Filters
  • Custom Views
  • Merge Records
  • Clone Records
  • Search

• Blossom - $19/user/mo billed monthly
  • Everything from the Sprout plan, plus
  • 250 bulk emails/user/day
  • Built-in-phone
  • 2 Sales campaign per user
  • Lead scoring
  • Adding and sharing files
  • Sales Pipeline
  • Conversations View
  • Notifications
  • 100 custom fields
  • 2 Workflows
  • Basic Reporting
  • Integrations
  • iPhone and Android Phone Apps

• Garden -$35/user/mo billed monthly
  
  • Everything from the Blossom plan, plus
  • 500 bulk emails/user/day
  • 5 Sales Campaigns/user
  • 10 Intelligent Workflows
  • Advanced Reporting
  • Territories and Lead Assignment
  • Advanced CRM Customization.

• Estate - $49/user/mo billed monthly
  • Everything from the Garden plan, plus
  • 1000 bulk emails/user/day
  • 10 Sales Campaigns/user
  • Advanced Lead Scoring
  • 25 Intelligent Workflows
  • Auto Profile Enrichment
  • Reports Dashboard
  • Smartforms and even tracking
• Forest - $79/user/mo billed annually
  • Everything from the Estate plan, plus
  • 2000 Bulk emails/user/day
  • 25 Sales Campaign/user
  • 50 Intelligent Workflows
  • EUC Data Center
  • IP Whitelisting

Help & Support Options

• Freshsales offers 24 x 7 email support, which can be reached via support@freshsales.io.
• They also offer 24 x 5 phone support for all plans. Their contact number in the US is +1 (866) 832-3090.

Editor’s Bottom Line of Freshsales

Freshsales is geared towards high velocity sales teams - rather than a few big clients, these teams would have a large number of moderately-sized clients. With so much activity on different accounts, combined with the modern data needs and responsibilities of a salesperson, sales teams need a platform that combines multiple applications into one. The platform that’s easiest to use and saves users the most clicks per task wins out.

Towards this end, Freshsales is a competitive sales-oriented CRM - it’s got an open, straightforward UI, integrated phone and email, lead management, a deals pipeline, event tracking, a mobile app - all the features you’d expect for a sales CRM. The pricing is competitive; while users can get a barebones version of the platform for free up to ten users, the main functionality comes from email tracking, templates, notifications and Google calendar integration.

The ‘360 degree customer view’ presents comprehensive customer details in one place - their contact information, correspondence history, and sales history. The deals pipeline can be customized by stages and can automatically arrange leads by progress and allows manual arrangement through drag and dropping leads. Leads can be imported through CSV files, web forms or emails, but unfortunately, Freshsales does not automatically pull contacts in from Google, which is a handy feature of other CRMs like Insightly. Aside from the importation options, contacts can be added manually, but starting with the Garden plan users can enjoy Auto Profile Enrichment which draws information and photos automatically from social media.

The Garden plan is Freshsales’ most popular plan. Users get the email tracking features with associated metrics, the email templates, the configurable lead assignment by size, industry and territory. It falls short of the in-app event tracking and website events tracking. Therefore the Garden plan seems best suited for sales teams selling services or a products without a need (or desire) for a highly nuanced online sales or marketing presence.

Note that some CRMs with built-in phone features offer unlimited calling for certain plans; Freshsales does not. Users must pay $1 per phone line and then calling rates apply. In contrast, an even more heavily sales-oriented CRM such as Close.io - which was also developed as an internal solution for salespeople - is more expensive but allows unlimited calling with more automated features out of the box. Companies that spent a lot of time on the phone may prefer the predictable albeit higher fees of Close.io to those of Freshsales, which would fluctate depending on phone activity. On the other hand, Freshsales offers more ‘traditional’ CRM features than Close.io, and notably offers a mobile app, which Close does not.

Freshsales integrates with Freshdesk, Segment, and Google Calendar. Zapier and access to the developer API can handle many other integrations.

If sales is a major part of your business and you’re looking for a lightweight but fairly functional CRM, Freshsales offers nice functionality for the price. It’s not highly customizable, but it’s easy to setup, friendly on the eyes, and incorporates enough email functions - templates, scheduling, metrics, logging - for a nice balance between phone and email sales correspondence. They’ve got a 30-day free trial, no credit card required, which is more than most CRMs. If you’re in the market for a sales CRM solution, it’s worth giving a shot.