Freshsales – It goes okay.
Updated November 20, 2018

Freshsales – It goes okay.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Freshsales CRM

We initially came to Freshsales after hunting around for a CRM solution with a sales-focus and integrated telephony– as we found that the system we use to manage projects and inbound enquiry (Trello) was falling short on functionality, such as automatic recording and logging of email/phone interactions.

Only a very small subset of our staff use Freshsales, but it is used by sales representatives for the purposes of managing interactions with staff and prospects, as well as tracking ongoing and closed deals.
  • Phone and Email integration
  • Ability to fully customise the platform, fields, and workflows
  • Value for money
  • Automation ('workflows') need a bit of work. In comparison to other sales CRMs that automatically 'nudge' sales staff when a phone call or email hasn't been returned (for example), these nudges can be created as 'tasks' in Freshsales, but only by someone who knows what they're doing, setting explicit trigger and action rules that don't always cover all scenarios.
  • Event tracking with Segment (or just with their JS library) is a little bit haphazard. I'm sure it works well for in-app actions, but if a user visits your website and interacts with you and you aren't using the Freshsales forms on your website, it can be hard to identify users and track website visits and actions etc.
  • Learning curve– seems to be aimed at users with a bit more technical know-how; so might work well for SaaS sales teams or sales engineers, but not so much for users in other industries. Our non-technical staff have found it to be confusing.
  • Mobile Application– works very well as a contact directory, retrieving a quick overview of interactions, and now you can place voice notes that sync with the web app; these features aren't necessarily critical to our field salespeople. A user will still need to 'come back to the office' to retrieve missed voicemails, update deals notes, as well as place calls from their VoIP number. Freshsales will forward calls to a mobile, but won't allow the sales staff to place calls from their mobile device using their VoIP numbers (or receive calls from these lines).
  • 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)
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.
Freshsales is great for a CRM with integrated telephony, where users are of an entirely Inside Sales team. It is also very strong if you value a CRM that allows you to customise fields, descriptions, and displayed information for all of your Leads/Customers/Accounts/Deals.
It is also great if your users have technical backgrounds, as the customisation and manual configuration of automation steps can be somewhat cumbersome.

It isn't great if you are not happy to use their webapp to replace your email client (It works well for sending and receiving emails, but if you switch back to Gmail and open a sent message it is marked as read by the recipient, so it is important to only stay within the Freshsales client for reviewing sent emails - at the time of writing).

For those who rely on outside sales teams, or want a solution that plays nice 'out of the box', I imagine you might find Freshsales to be a little difficult to use.

Freshsales Feature Ratings

Customer data management / contact management
8
Workflow management
4
Territory management
8
Opportunity management
6
Integration with email client (e.g., Outlook or Gmail)
6
Interaction tracking
7
Channel / partner relationship management
Not Rated
Lead management
7
Email marketing
6
Task management
6
Reporting
9
Forecasting
6
Pipeline visualization
10
Customizable reports
7
Custom fields
10
Custom objects
10
API for custom integration
6
Role-based user permissions
8
Single sign-on capability
8
Mobile access
6