Google-backed Freshdesk takes on Salesforce with a new tool

Photo credit: Freshdesk.

Cloud-based software provider Freshdesk, the first company outside the US backed by Google Capital, today launched a new tool to rival Salesforce. It’s called Freshsales.

India’s Freshdesk is no stranger to taking on global rivals, outdoing American rival Zendesk within five years of its founding. Last year, software review platform G2 Crowd rated it above its American counterpart. And this year it became the first Indian startup to enter Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for customer engagement.

Now the customer support software maker has a new product for sales which goes head-on against the big gorilla in this market, Salesforce.

US-based Salesforce had itself disrupted traditional providers of CRM software for sales, such Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. It’s selling point was a cloud play, that is software-as-a-service (SaaS), whereas the incumbents had a legacy of installing software on client premises. Now, Salesforce will feel the heat from a pure cloud player which already has 70,000 clients worldwide, including Honda, Toshiba, and Cisco, for its customer service products.

The new tool Freshsales will ride on the experience gained from nimble, intelligent customer engagement.

See: Secrets to scaling up globally from Freshdesk

All-in-one tool for intelligent sales

Currently, enterprise sales teams cobble together multiple tools like Salesforce, Kissmetrics, MixPanel, Mailchimp, and so on for various purposes from sales lead management and insights to email marketing. Freshsales offers an all-in-one solution.

“For high-velocity sales teams that rely on inbound leads, finally we have a product that seamlessly offers all these functionalities in one tool,” Freshdesk founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham tells Tech in Asia.

From sales lead, deal, and account management to email and phone integration and user behavior tracking – they are all integrated into Freshsales. “We found that there is nothing like that available for companies that deal with high velocity sales. That is, companies which rely on people coming inbound to the website, signing up for products, or doing business with telesales – where we are not dealing with one or two million dollar clients per quarter but dealing with hundreds or thousands of customers every month with smaller deal sizes,” explains Girish.

The tool provides intelligence on active sales leads, whom to call immediately on phone, what the logged-in leads are doing on the website and so on. “Today, if you want that kind of intelligence, you have to buy three or four different tools which are not very simple and easy to use. And you have to integrate all these tools together in your backend. That is the key differentiation for Freshsales,” adds Girish.

Image grabbed from the Freshsales dashboard.