Freshsales is a sales force automation solution for sales teams. It provides features that help salespeople to attract quality leads, engage in contextual conversations, drive deals with AI-powered insights, and nurture customer relationships. With built-in email, phone, chat, and telephony, Freshsales gives sales teams more time for selling by automating the sales process. It includes Freddy AI, salespeople can get insights into the best deals to go after and what actions to take and predict…
$11
per month per user
WORKetc
Score 7.0 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
WORKetc is a cloud-based business management system. With integrated CRM, project management, billing, help desk, reporting, and collaboration, teams can access one system for all relevant information. The system supports popular third-party apps such as Google Workspace, Xero Accounting, Quickbooks Online, Outlook, Dropbox, and Evernote.
$78
per month
Pricing
Freshsales
WORKetc
Editions & Modules
Growth
$9
per month (billed annually) per user
Pro
$39
per month (billed annually) per user
Enterprise
$59
per month (billed annually) per user
Starter Edition
$78
Per Month for up to 2 Users
Team
$195
Per month for up to 3 Users (Each extra user + $49/month)
Foundations
$395
Per month for up to 5 Users (Each extra user + $59/month)
If you are a smaller organization you are probably ok to use [Freshworks CRM (formerly Freshsales)] vs Salesforce - you will save money and still get some great features. I would not recommend for a very large enterprise. It is also challenging to have the support come from another region although they do try to be very responsive.
If you are looking for a way to organize customer data and projects across regions, then WORK[etc] will get the job done. For our company, the country is divided into 3 regions and each region has a team of workers in charge of providing ongoing support services to that region. WORK[etc] has organized our company exponentially and given us a solid database to pull from to ensure we're meeting contractual requirements, providing timely deliverables and staying ahead of the game. Because I only work in a service industry, I don't know if WORK[etc] would be appropriate for product based companies, However, if you were offering anything [product or service] that required online support, the system will function well.
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.
Connecting all the different methods of communicating with our clients into one place is the best part of the application to us. The Google Apps integration lets us update all of our WORK[etc] details directly from our email page which saves a huge amount of time. It lets us move back and forth freely between WORK[etc] tools and our Google Apps email, documents, calendar, etc. with ease.
Breaking work according to what we are doing helps us group and ungroup things as needed. Since we do tech support and so much more having the ability to connect projects, support cases, to dos, documents, discussions, and more all together makes it easy to work with the relationships of all the different activity.
We have found the discussion tool to be vital to moving things through quickly. There are many discussions that are just FYI while others really need a decision or answer form the team members. Discussions allows us to quickly note the people we need to answer us and what is there as an FYI. It keeps all that history so our decision process become documented easily and not lost in email chains.
The one key issue that it doesn't solve is resource utilisation. You are able to add the number of hours that each "to do" will take but you can't allocate that to an employee and then aggregate all that up to show how much capacity you are using or have left.
One if its great benefits is its flexibility but that is also a drawback because there are multiple ways to do the same thing. This means that to ensure consistency across all employees having your own business procedures on how to use WORKetc is vital.
Some of the financial processes don't fully reflect UK practice currently. For instance it doesn't deal with VAT on expenditure well. However we have been assured that this is being resolved.
We, as a company, have put a lot of time and energy into building the system to where it is for us today. With its constant improvements and our continually learning and developing, I couldn't imagine moving away from WORKetc to try a different system out. This really does give us everything that we've wanted/needed in a system without having to utilize 2-3 different products. The part that makes this so unique compared to other systems that we've used in the past is the fact that it has a project management piece built in, and that in itself is a huge driving point in why we will continue to use this.
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
My staff hates it, our clients require transparency and you manual have to enter notes, billing is horrific, as it does not subtotal by type - so as a T&M shop there is no way to easily see how much was spent to each matter or service type.
WORKetc compares well in regards to speed and reliability to other cloud-based products we use such as Google for Work. Compared to our old in-house based CRM, it is a superstar; faster, more reliable and easily run on a variety of browsers and smart phones. The program loads fast as do data screens for contacts, projects, invoices and more
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...
WORKetc offers maybe the best support in the business. Product documentation and training resources are outstanding. Support tickets or inquiries are answered quickly. If you do need to address an issue in person, it is easy to schedule a 15 or 30 minute live call with their fantastic support staff who are fast, friendly and skilled
The implementation of the system was fairly easy. Because of our previous experience with a similar system, we were ready and working on the product as soon as we announced the switch. The system also allowed us to simplify our processes by integrating timesheets and project management directly into our CMS.
Close.io has less features, costs more, and equally has an inside sales team focus, rather than being just as suitable for both inside and outside sales. Having said this, Close.io has important features and smart automations, a cleaner interface (easier for non-techs to use), and has very strong integrations using Zapier, plus SMS-based support. Where Freshsales won for us is that it ended up being nearly half the cost of Close.io, as well as included telephony support for our local country (Australia), whereas Close.io comes with USA/Canada numbers and requires the top pricing tier to include calls to other countries. We needed a telephony system that worked well for making and receiving from Australia. Freshsales won for us because their pricing is at a good point, had the telephony requirements we needed, and all the features that we required were good enough, or we found a workaround.
We needed a CRM that would work with US. We found WORK [etc] was exactly what we needed. being able to customize the CRM around our company and further change as we go has been the best thing about it. We haven't been locked into how it is set up and can change it very quickly.
Setting up project templates is time-consuming - if you want to do it right. Nevertheless, it is well worth it! Routine complex projects that used to require at least six people and at least as many "silos of information" are now done with two or three people, and - at most - 2 or 3 silos of information. And that's only because I haven't fully integrated the program with our Accounting programs (and there is an API for Quickbooks). I'd say the initial investment of perhaps 80 hours on my part was saved five or ten times over during our first six months, with better accuracy, accountability, and documentation. Since then, the ROI is at least 20 or 30 times annually of my time...the one thing I can't buy more of.
