Freshsales vs. Google Tag Manager

Generally speaking for small to mid sized team I really cannot recommend it enough. It has an excellent feature set, good amount of integrations, fairly customisable and backed by solid support. And the pricing is very competitive too. I feel like if your team is larger than that, you might want to look at other alternatives but for teams that size, its really perfect.

Incentivized

I use Google Tag Manager (GTM) daily and create tags/triggers for all of our client's websites. It is easy to set up but for some of my tasks, the process does get repetitive so it'd be nice to have a default setting I can use when I have to create accounts, and then tweak/add things to them as needed. It is a great way to collect data and have code on the site without having to log into the site builder all the time. It makes it convenient to make edits or add code after our client's sites go live with us.

Incentivized

• It helps you automate your onboarding process for new leads.
• It has lots of integrations with other apps, so you can interact with other things like calendars and calls.
• It's pretty easy to set sequences so the platform automatically follows up with people for you. This is not only helpful for your sales pipeline, but also for client communication when working on a project that requires their input.

Incentivized

• Selecting elements on a site [object, class, cookie, etc] (to later fire an event, send some data, etc) is very easy with triggers. Want to add an event when someone clicks on a button? Super easy. It was many many DOM selectors and you can even add custom functions if you need to do something more specific
• In general, firing events in different circumstances is very easy mixing triggers and tags. You can track almost any element of the DOM and do whatever you want with it.
• Testing is a great functionality. Only you can see what's on the site and you can debug it easily by seeing which events or tags were triggered and all the DOM elements involved (and why they matched the trigger).
• Working in environments (staging, production) and versioning is easy to do, deploying changes in 2 clicks.

Incentivized

• Leads and Contacts do not seem to be adequately defined.
• Reporting is not as robust as we would like it to be
• Integration with FreshDesk is one way - we can see information from FreshDesk to FreshSales but not vice versa

Incentivized

• There are several good integrations, but there can always be more. Native tracking for call tracking solutions, analytics providers, non-Google advertisers would be top of my list.
• Documentation is just dreadful. Luckily there are some awesome folks out there doing crowdsourced tutorials (shout out to Simo Ahava) but by and large the Google Tag Manager instructions are worth what you pay for them.

Incentivized

Google Tag Manager makes tracking traffic to our websites effortless, which enables our developers to focus on other tasks. Setting up a new instance takes only minutes and additional scripts can be added/modified without touching the source code of a site in production. This enables our marketing directors to coordinate tests and experiments with minimal effort.

Incentivized

I would give Freshworks CRM's overall usability a 7 out of 10. Although the software has improved since we first obtained it, it still could use improvements to make functionality more intuitive and easier for the average user. It is not that challenging but there is definitely a learning curve

Incentivized

No difficult obstacle to overcome but Google Tag Manager can still be difficult for many users to deploy. Sure the basic HTML script can be deployed quite easily, but when you start to require triggers, variables, etc, it can be a little daunting.

Incentivized

When you initially log in to Freshworks, you get snippets to guide you on how to set up. You have a chat option on every page so you can reach out to the support agent and get your issues resolved in real time. The agents are fast, responsive, and experienced in handling even a person who introduced CRM to the world...

GTM does not provide support. This is one of GTM's biggest issues but it's due to the level of customization for each website. If your team thinks they would heavily rely on the need for a support staff it is probably better to invest in a paid service with a team that can support your needs.

Incentivized

I thought there was a little bit too much emphasis on AdWords stuff, not enough on the generic application of GTM.

Planning and communication will help greatly with an in-house implementation. If there are large teams, try to limit the number of people involved to 1-2 developers (back-end dev may be necessary depending on your platform), one analytics marketer and one project manager.

Incentivized

We selected FreshSales because we needed something cheaper and more user-friendly than Salesforce, but we're now in the process of switching to HubSpot because it gives you the best of both worlds - ease of use + scale and reliability

We moved to GTM from a standard Google Analytics implementation. GTM is much more flexible and easier to make changes, especially as the changes relate to multiple sites and environments. While there is a learning curve when figuring out how to use GTM, I believe the change has been worth it because it helps us understand at a more fundamental level how our tracking works and gives us a lot more control over what we track and how.

Incentivized

• Increased visibility of open deals, as well as encouraging 'clean' data
• Faster data updating (if Freshsales is used as our sole source of data)
• Some follow-ups are missed, as sales staff forget to create new tasks after each follow up, depending on if the call was answered or not (for example)

Incentivized

• GTM is very useful to determine if a particular element on the site is useful (i.e. is it being watched, is it being clicked, does it help customers navigate through more pages). As an SEO person, I can use this information to decide what to optimize for but also to track progress and see improvements in engagement.
• With the use of Google Tag Manager, I was able to easily inject an A/B testing tool which lead to several improvements in lead generation.

Incentivized