Our review of Freshsales

Freshsales is a commercial CRM software designed primarily for SMEs, although more advanced sales organizations can also benefit. The interface is very clean and modern, making the tool easy to use. All the features you’d expect from a CRM are there, and the value for money is excellent: in short, if you’re a company looking for a CRM to manage your sales pipeline and customer relations, Freshsales is well worth a look. Here’s our detailed Freshsales review. You’ll know in a few moments whether Freshsales is for you (or not).

My opinion on Freshsales in a nutshell

Perimeter	Score	My opinion
Overall rating	4,5	Freshsales is a comprehensive, easy-to-use CRM that offers excellent value for money. The two main limitations are that support is only available in English, and integrations are fairly limited (although there is an API).
Ease of use	4,6	Freshsales offers a very successful, modern and ergonomic interface, providing a very pleasant user experience that will encourage sales staff to adopt the tool.
Easy to install	4,3	Freshsales is SaaS (Software as a Service), i.e. online software accessible from any device with an Internet connection. No local installation is required. The Freshsales team supports its customers in setting up the solution.
Customer service	4,2	Freshsales offers very good, responsive support…but only in English, which can be a hindrance for some. 24/7 support by chat, phone or email. Extensive documentation is available on the publisher’s website.
Integrations	3,8	Freshsales only offers around thirty native connectors with third-party tools. The Freshsales API and the connectors available with Zapier and Make help to overcome this limitation…
Value for money	4,6	Once quite expensive, Freshsales has significantly lowered its prices, much to the delight of its users. The entry price, $9 per month per user, gives access to the tool’s main functions. Value for money is one of the CRM software’s strong points.

Freshsales: a tool in the Freshworks suite

Freshsales is the CRM software published by Freshworks. Founded in 2010 by Zoho CRM alumni, Freshworks is a suite of enterprise software for customer relationship management, including the following products:

• Freshdesk, a solution for managing tickets on the web, email and social networks.
• Freshcaller, contact center management software (CCaaS) to manage inbound and outbound calls.
• Freshchat, a tool that lets you create and deploy a chatbot on your digital channels (website, in particular).
• Freshmarketer, CRM marketing software to manage your marketing campaigns and scenarios.

Freshworks products enable you to manage all aspects of your customer relationships: sales, service and marketing.

So be careful not to confuse Freshworks with Freshsales. If you’ve heard of Freshworks CRM, you’ve heard of Freshsales!

The Freshsales dashboard

Without further ado, let’s dive into the Freshsales interface. The tool features a menu on the left, giving access to the various Freshsales functions. The first menu button takes you to the dashboard. The one shown in the screenshot above is an example of what’s possible, but please note that the Freshsales dashboard is 100% customizable.

You can customize in detail the data display mode and the indicators you want to track. Freshsales offers astonishing flexibility here. In addition to the performance chart, you can also view upcoming tasks, appointments and reminders.

Contact management on Freshsales

On Freshsales, contact management is very simple: you have access to a list of all contacts, with columns displaying key information. You can use a search engine to find your contacts more easily and customize the columns in the contact database. If you click on a contact, a window appears with the details of the customer in question.

The customer file displays all the information about the customer: his stage in the sales funnelYou’ll be able to see all your contacts, their attributes/information, contact details, conversation history, activity/events timeline, attachments, score (if you’re using Freddy AI, Freshsales’ AI accessible from the Growth plan), etc.

From a customer file, you can add a task or meeting relating to the customer, or directly make a call or send an e-mail or SMS. In short, Freshsales is a highly efficient way of managing sales contacts (prospects, opportunities, customers) – all served up by a streamlined, user-friendly interface.

Account management

The account management interface is very similar to the contact management interface. Clicking on an account opens the account card. This allows you to view all key company information and data: firmographic data, list of people with whom you are in contact within the company, history of conversations with company contacts, activity chronology, deals concluded or in progress, etc.

Business management (sales pipeline)

The sales pipeline takes the form of a Kanban board. It provides a detailed view of your prospects’ sales activity and processing cycle, from contact creation to deal. If you use a tool like Asana or Trello, you won’t feel out of place. It’s the same here: you move the “cards” to the right as the leads progress through the sales tunnel to the “Won”…or “Lost” column.

Click on the card to access its associated account information. In short, the sales pipeline offered by Freshsales clearly does the job. It’s clear, simple and complete at the same time.

For your information, if you subscribe to the Pro or Enterprise offers, you can create up to 10 separate sales pipelines. This is useful if you have several teams, several departments, with a segmentation of sales activity management.

Conversation management

Freshsales lets you manage your business e-mail directly from your CRM. You can connect your Gmail and Outlook addresses, setting up bidirectional or unidirectional synchronization – all in just a few clicks. Bidirectional synchronization is handy if you want to continue sending/receiving mail to your third-party inboxes.

Freshsales also lets you create team inboxes, enabling all members of a defined team to read incoming e-mails. A handy feature to facilitate teamwork and collaborative lead management.

The conversation management module is not limited to email. You can also manage phone calls, SMS messages and chatbot user sessions in the same way.

Reporting on Freshsales

Freshsales offers a dozen or so predefined sales reports that visually resemble the dashboard shown above. These include predefined reports on sales activity, products, sales team activity, sales trends and sales forecasts.

All these pre-designed reports are fully customizable: you can rearrange the layout of blocks (“widgets” in Freshsales vocabulary), delete blocks, create new blocks with the indicators and presentation modes of your choice, and so on. Here again, Freshsales stands out for its flexibility.

And, best of all, you can create reports from scratch, 100% made-to-measure. This makes report editing simple and intuitive. You can choose between different types of blocks/widgets: graphics, filters, text, images. You then position the widget of your choice on the white page of the report.

Finally, you edit the widget, choosing the indicators you want to use. Freshsales also offers sixty predefined widgets to save you time.

Customer reviews of Freshsales

Overall, users are very satisfied with Freshsales. The software achieves an average rating of 4.5 / 5 on Capterra and G2, the two main platforms for collecting software reviews. The main advantages of Freshsales highlighted in customer reviews:

• A wealth of functions. Freshsales does everything you’d expect from CRM software, and more: contact management, sales pipelines, workflow automation, chatbot…
• Value for money. In the opinion of customers, Freshsales offers excellent value for money, especially for small and medium-sized businesses.
• Integrations with other products in the Freshworks suite. Integration with FreshCaller, which enables telephony-computer integration (CTI), is appreciated by many users. Coupling with Freshmarketing, to manage marketing campaigns, is also popular with many users.

The main negative points to be found in customer reviews:

• Customer support not always responsive. Freshsales customer support is available 24/7, but that doesn’t mean your request will be dealt with promptly. Some users complain about the slowness of responses.
• Limited reporting functionalities. Reporting and analysis functionalities are deemed insufficient by some users. These opinions may come as a surprise, since Freshsales objectively offers some very nice reporting features (admittedly less elaborate than what you’d find in a reporting tool like PowerBI…).

Offers & Prices

Freshsales offers 3 billing levels that you can try for free for 21 days:

• The Growth package costs $9 per user per month. It provides access to a Kanban-style sales funnel view, contact and account management, a task, appointment and notes manager, custom field creation, phone pairing, AI-based chatbot editor, form builder and access to API and integrations. 24-hour customer support is included. The number of contacts is unlimited. This package is ideal for companies looking for CRM software with basic needs.
• The Pro Planat a price of $39 per user per month, gives access to AI-based lead scoring, and lets you create up to 50 workflows (for less time wasted on repetitive tasks), gives access to territory management and automatic lead assignment based on customized rules, and much more. The Pro plan lets you manage multiple sales teams and create multiple sales pipelines. This plan is therefore suitable for companies with a larger sales organization and/or advanced automation needs.
• The Enterprise plan costs €59 per user per month. In addition to all the above, this plan enablesautomatic lead enrichment, the creation of up to 100 workflows, and offers 100 GB per user for file storage (compared to just 5 GB in the Pro plan).

Freshworks supplements this price list with add-ons:

• Phone credits, to make and receive more calls directly in Freshsales.
• Additional workflows from $10 per month for 10 workflows.
• A CPQ module at $19 per user per month to manage invoices, quotes and contracts.
• Freshbots packs to exceed your chatbot’s usage limit. Package price: $100 for 1,000 sessions.

Integrations: Freshsales’ weak point

Of course, Freshsales integrates seamlessly with the other products in the Freshwork suite, whether Freshdesk, Freshservice or Freshchat. On the other hand, the editor offers few native connectors with third-party solutions. There are only around thirty of them (compared to the 400 integrations offered by Pipedrive or the 1,600 third-party applications offered by HubSpot…).

Freshsales’ main third-party integrations are: Google Calendar, MailChimp, Twilio Segment, Office Calendar, HubSpot, Zapier, Quickbooks, Google Suite, Xero, Calendly, Facebook, Make, 3CX, Trello.

Fortunately, Freshsales offers an API that extends the possibilities of integration. You can also use the native Make connector or the Zapier connector to create flows between Freshsales CRM and your third-party applications.