Freshsales Review (2024): Is This the CRM You’ve Been Looking For?

Freshsales is renowned for its AI-powered sales tools, robust automation, and flexible yet intuitive interface at a much lower cost than comparable CRMs.

The post Freshsales Review (2024): Is This the CRM You’ve Been Looking For? appeared first on eWEEK.

Freshsales Quick Facts

Our Rating: 4.3/5
Pricing: Free to $59 per user, per month
Key Features:

• Contact management
• Visual sales pipeline
• Freddy AI
• Workflow automation
• Built-in communication tools

Continue reading to learn more about Freshsales’ pricing, core features, ease of use, and customer support, or see how we scored it across six main categories.

Who Should Use Freshsales?

Freshsales is a leading sales CRM catering to a wide range of businesses in various industries. It’s trusted by over 60,000 companies, enabling teams to maximize revenue with its robust sales tech stack and flexible platform. Freshsales offers affordable plans and is easy to use, making it an ideal choice for startups and businesses with limited budgets. Its customizability, built-in communication tools, and multilingual support also make it a great option for multinational businesses.

Freshsales primary use cases include the following:

• Startups and SMBs Needing a Cost-Effective CRM: Freshsales’ free plan and affordable pricing structure are ideal for startups and small businesses with limited budgets. Its free plan offers contact management features and built-in communication tools, while users can upgrade for advanced sales tools and customization. Freshsales Pro and Enterprise plans also provide growing businesses with the flexibility and features they need as they scale.
• Teams Requiring AI-Powered Sales Tools: Freshsales is one of the leading AI CRMs, particularly well-suited for sales teams with complex processes. Its sales assistant, Freddy AI, particularly stands out in automating sales tasks and lead nurturing campaigns, as well as providing insights into deals and team performance.
• Industry-Specific Companies Seeking a Customizable Platform: Freshsales empowers niche-specific businesses to tailor the CRM according to their needs by customizing fields, modules, and roles. It also allows teams to personalize customer experiences and campaigns based on their behavior and preferences with its generative AI feature.
• Multinational Companies and Communication-Focused Businesses: Businesses that work with sales reps and clients in other countries will be able to customize Freshsales according to their currencies and language preferences. Freshales’ mobile CRM supports over 10 languages and more than 150 currencies. Additionally, Freshsales’ built-in telephony and tight integration with messaging apps make it a great option for communication-focused businesses and call centers.

Who Shouldn’t Use Freshsales?

While Freshsales provides a comprehensive feature set, it may not be the ideal solution for every business. For the following scenarios, other CRM options might be a better fit:

• Businesses Heavily Reliant on Marketing Features: While Freshsales offers basic marketing functionalities, it’s not a full-fledged marketing automation platform. Businesses that need to manage complex marketing campaigns might look into other CRM solutions that offer complementary marketing features.
• Companies Requiring Lots of Third-Party Integrations: Freshsales syncs with a good amount of third-party tools, but its selection might be limited to more established CRM solutions. If your business relies on a high volume of integrations or uses highly specialized apps, Freshsales might not offer the level of connectivity you require.
• Teams Needing In-Depth Reporting and Analytics: While Freshsales provides insightful sales reports via Freddy AI, some companies or organizations might require more robust reporting capabilities. If your business needs in-depth data analysis and granular insights, a CRM with more advanced reporting and analytics functionality might be a better alternative.
• Companies Seeking Responsive Customer Support: Freshsales offers customer support options via phone, email, and live chat. But unlike other CRMs, it only offers 24/5 support. Companies requiring round-the-clock customer support for their CRM might need to consider another platform.

Freshsales Pricing

Freshsales offers a free-for-life platform available for up to three users designed for small teams just learning how to use the platform for managing customers. The free plan comes with Kanban views, email templates, a built-in phone, and live chat. As your business grows, you can upgrade to its Growth plan ($9 per user, per month) for contact lifecycle stages, basic workflows, custom fields, and more. Midsize businesses can opt for the Pro plan ($39 per user, per month) for AI-powered contact scoring, auto-assignment rules, multiple sales pipelines, and more advanced customizations.

The Enterprise plan ($59 per user, per month) includes all the features in the Pro plan and offers additional tools, including AI forecasting, custom workflows, a sandbox for developers, field-level permissions, and more. All Freshsales paid plans come with a 21-day free trial.

Freshsales also offers a selection of add-ons to extend the functionality of current features at costs ranging from $5 to $100. Users can purchase an additional 10 workflows for $5 when they’re subscribed to paid plans, while its CPQ add-on (Configure, Price, Quote) costs $19 per user, per month for generating documents like invoices, quotes, and contracts. Additional Freshbot sessions for engaging with customers across multiple channels are also available for $100 for 1,000 sessions.

7 Key Features of Freshsales

Freshsales is a powerful yet intuitive sales-forward CRM integrated with artificial intelligence to capture and nurture leads, streamline workflows, and facilitate team collaboration.

Freddy AI

Freshworks is one of the leading AI companies and has continuously developed its AI-powered sales assistant, Freddy AI. Freddy AI is a built-in AI solution that helps teams find and nurture potential customers efficiently (Freddy Copilot) and enables reps to prioritize opportunities and identify risks (Freddy Insights). Freddy AI analyzes data points and behavioral patterns to help you score contacts, automatically resolve duplicates, create personalized emails, and offer real-time recommendations to optimize sales processes. While Freddy AI delivers a strong feature set, it’s only available in the Pro and Enterprise plans, which might not be a cost-effective option for startups and small businesses.

Contact Management

Freshsales helps sales teams centralize all customer interactions, offering a 360-degree view of sales and marketing contacts. Users can gain a chronological view of customer engagement with its activity timeline feature, including website activities, email responses, and brand interaction. Teams can also customize lifecycle stages to map sales or marketing activities and better understand where the leads or customers are in their journey. More advanced contact management tools employ Freddy AI for contact scoring, duplicate data deletion, and automatic profile enrichment.

Lead Management

Monitoring and nurturing leads are essential in the sales process, no matter the size and type of your business. Sales managers can set up auto-assigning rules to assign leads to the right agents, so they can follow up on their prospects as soon as they get captured. Reps can identify the best prospects and determine the next best action to engage with them with Freddy AI’s lead scoring and deal insights capabilities. You can also set up sales sequences to automate lead nurturing efforts, such as sending emails, personalizing shopping recommendations, scheduling calls, and more. Freshsales’ lead scoring and nurturing tools stand out and rival many CRM competitors.

Pipeline Management

A customizable sales pipeline is standard with every FreshSales paid plan. Subscribers can visualize the sales process, identify bottlenecks, and organize them as a kanban, funnel, or timeline. You can also break down the sales process into actionable tasks and monitor them easily. With Pro and Enterprise plans, users can create up to 10 pipelines that allow them to set up processes for different sales teams, even across regions and industries. Freshsales also offers advanced features such as deal rotting, pipeline health trackers, and AI-powered revenue forecasting.

Workflow Automation

Freshsales features a simple point-and-click interface for creating workflows to automate complex business processes. Sales reps can set up triggers for creating tasks, sending follow-up emails via SMS, adding reminders, and assigning records. Freshsales offers pre-set templates that you can use instantly and also provides the option to build a customized workflow from these templates. Sales teams working with complex sales processes can implement advanced workflows by setting up actions based on multiple factors. Paid users can use between 20 and 100 workflows or purchase an additional 10 workflows for $5.

Phone, Chat, and Messaging

Freshsales’ built-in cloud telephony is one of its standout features. It helps sales reps monitor and measure sales calls and their impact without the need to integrate with a third-party application. Customer-facing reps can easily purchase virtual phone numbers in over 90 countries, as well as make direct calls from their laptops or smart devices. Managers can also track their teams’ usage and gain visibility into their performance on calls with robust analytics.

Moreover, the live chat functionality offered across all its plans gives FreshSales an edge over its competitors. Freddy AI also enables reps to deliver personalized conversations and automatically route leads to the available agent. Meanwhile, all paid users can integrate with SMS providers, including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and send messages directly from the CRM.

Mobile CRM

Freshsales offers a free iOS and Android app across all plans. The mobile app enables you to manage contacts, deals, accounts, and team collaboration wherever you are. You can track the outcome of your sales activities, such as completing a task, scheduling an appointment, or setting up a Skype call, even when you’re on the road. The check-in feature confirms your attendance for an offline meeting with a prospect, so your team is up-to-date on your activities. Additionally, reps can use push notifications to keep track of their assigned tasks, contacts, or deals. The platform’s mobile CRM also has an offline feature that gives Freshales a competitive edge against other CRMs in the market.

Ease of Use

Sales teams choose Freshsales primarily for its user-friendly interface and intuitive design. Startups and small businesses without in-house technical support and users with limited experience can navigate the platform with ease. Its clean user interface and clear workflow templates also allow users to implement quickly and minimize the need for extensive training. While Freshsales offers extensive customization, users can learn from expert insights and step-by-step guides. After signing up for a free plan for a free trial, you can receive follow-up emails from FreshSales experts in case you have questions or need assistance.

Customer Service

Freshsales offers 24/5 user support through phone, chat, and email for both its free and paid users. However, users report inconsistencies in FreshSales support, such as not providing timely or efficient service. It also has a slight disadvantage compared to its competitors, who offer 24/7 support. Fortunately, users can access Freshsales’ self-service knowledge base to deal with technical issues without support. They can learn from how-to articles, videos, and FAQs to navigate the platform and set up the CRM’s key features.

Freshsales Alternatives

While Freshsales offers a compelling set of features for various companies, it might not be the ideal solution for everyone. Here are some CRM alternatives to consider if FreshSales doesn’t align with your business goals and needs:

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is a leading CRM software popular for its multichannel marketing tools, AI-powered features, and customization. Zoho CRM is a powerful contender against Freshsales, especially its AI assistant Zia, which is on par with Freddy AI. Aside from its advanced sales tools, it offers a wide range of native marketing capabilities, which Freshsales lacks.

Both Freshsales and Zoho CRM also offer reasonably priced plans and options for large enterprises to scale with premium plans. However, Zoho CRM has a steep learning curve, which might be overwhelming for new CRM users. If you’re looking for a more intuitive marketing CRM, consider HubSpot.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a visual sales CRM designed for simplicity and ease of use. Like Freshsales, Pipedrive has a straightforward interface, a wealth of advanced sales tools, and robust automation across its plans.

However, Pipedrive’s pipeline management has an advantage as it offers unlimited pipelines, starting with its entry-level plan. While Pipedrive is a great option for teams seeking a user-friendly CRM, its AI capabilities could be better. For a CRM solution with a powerful AI assistant, look into Zoho CRM.

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM is an industry-leading platform renowned for its robust free plan and premium sales and marketing tools. Its free plan offers a deal pipeline, contact website activity, contextual bots, and a meeting scheduler. Users can upgrade to paid plans for more advanced features such as sales automation, custom reporting, forecasting, and automatic lead rotation.

While both HubSpot and Freshsales offer a free-forever plan, HubSpot offers a more comprehensive feature set and a balance of its sales and marketing tools. However, HubSpot’s reporting capabilities could be better. If you’re looking for a sales and marketing CRM with better reporting and analytics features, consider Zoho CRM.

How I Evaluated Freshsales

In assessing Freshsales, I determined six categories that are essential to companies or organizations looking for a sales-forward CRM with a user-friendly interface and affordable pricing. I also divided each category into weighted subcategories that total an overall score out of five to see how Freshsales performed across the six major criteria.

Evaluation Criteria

I placed the highest weight on core features, cost, and ease of use to help users find a cost-effective and intuitive CRM platform. I then assessed Freshsales’ advanced features, followed by customization and customer support.

• Core Features (25 percent): Every CRM should offer basic functionalities to ensure that any sales process operates smoothly. This category considers the core CRM offerings of Freshsales, including contact management, lead management, sales pipelines, and workflow automation.
• Cost (20 percent): CRM pricing models can vary significantly, but businesses should prefer a more cost-effective option. Here, I considered Freshales’ per-user pricing plans for both annual and monthly options, free trial length, free version, and add-ons.
• Ease of Use (20 percent): A user-friendly CRM empowers sales teams to be productive and collaborate effectively. For this category, I evaluated Freshsales’ ratings from certified sites, its admin dashboard’s interface, and ease of data migration. I also looked into how comprehensive and accessible its knowledge base is.
• Advanced Features (15 percent): While core features are essential, some businesses require more advanced functionalities. Freshsales is known for its AI-powered capabilities, so we used this category to evaluate tools such as lead scoring, routing, and forecasting. I also assessed its AI assistance in terms of its current offerings and latest developments.
• Customization (10 percent): Businesses and teams should be able to tailor the platform to specific sales processes. I looked into Freshsales’ flexibility in this category when it comes to pipelines, deal stages, web forms, third-party app integrations, and more.
• Customer Support (10 percent): Here, I considered the support solutions Freshsales offers via email, phone, and live chat. I also assessed real user ratings from reputable sites, the user community, and the onboarding process.

Bottom Line: Freshsales Review

Freshsales is a user-friendly and affordable CRM solution that empowers businesses to optimize their sales processes with AI-powered sales tools. Teams can effectively track deals, nurture leads, and collaborate with team members without exhausting their resources. However, companies requiring marketing features, highly specialized integrations, and robust customer support might want to explore alternative options.

If you’d like to explore other CRMs that offer AI-powered capabilities, see our list of the top AI CRM software for 2024.

The post Freshsales Review (2024): Is This the CRM You’ve Been Looking For? appeared first on eWEEK.