Why Santa Needs A CRM

|| ‘Twas the month before Christmas night,
And Santa faced a daunting plight

The list of kids wanting gifts was mounting
Time left to procure gifts was lost in counting

Under pressure, he summoned the Elves
Little helper men who were baffled themselves

Santa and his Elves looked around
Realizing that chaos was abound

Bemoaned Santa, “We need a process boys,
To track, pack, and ship all the toys!”

Suggest an elf, “How ‘bout a CRM tool
To manage all our shipments this yule”

A great idea! – they all agreed
Thus bringing in Freshsales to solve their need. ||


Welcome to the 21st century. While our lives and lifestyles are no longer like the days of yore, our dreams and wishes remain rather unchanged. The joy of Christmas transcends age groups and truly needs no explanation. And if you grew up listening to the story of Santa, then we are sure you must have woken up to gifts mysteriously delivered by Santa. Why did you get those gifts? You were on the ‘Good Kids’ list!

Being a good kid is easy. The hard part, is being Santa.

The problem of being Santa

Santa’s life isn’t easy. He has to take care of everything— compile a list of all the kids, read all their letters, come up with a final list of kids, procure their gifts, pack them, and drop them off at each kid’s doorstep on Christmas Eve.

Now that’s a lot of work for one person!

To reduce the workload on poor old Saint Nick, the elves put their heads together, to come up with a solution. All they needed, was something that would bring order to the chaos. Something that could handle a large number of requests with precision.
He needed a good CRM.
He needed, Freshsales.

Santa gets a CRM

The Elves scrutinized every step of Santa’s Christmas Eve chores, and simplified it by bringing in Freshsales wherever possible. Here’s how they did it:

Step 1: Santa goes digital. Gets a fancy website with a webform.

It’s the 21st century and nobody writes letters, leave alone kids.
Why Santa needs a CRM_Webforms

The elves did away with the whole letter-writing gig, and created a website with a webform for Santa. This made it easy for kids to reach out to Santa and send him their wish lists. The elves also modified the CRM to suit Santa’s operations. So the kids became leads, and their wish lists turned into deals!
Santa needs a CRM_Freshsales_Module Customization

Step 2: Santa automates thank-you notes.

In the past, Santa had to painstakingly write an acknowledgment to every kid that sent him a letter. With Freshsales, he could do away with this tedious task! The elves set up a workflow that automated the task of sending emails to kids whenever they submitted a form. This way, every kid who submitted a wishlist received a personalized Christmas greeting and acknowledgment in their inbox. Win-win for everyone!
Santa needs a CRM_Freshsales_Workflows

Step 3: Santa gives personalized attention to every kid’s request.

Keeping track of every kid by their names was getting too much for Santa to handle. Santa needed a way to track every single kid, and every single wish list. Enter, Freshsales. Anytime a kid submitted a form, the name of the Kid, the phone number of the parents, and the wish list would automatically get created on Freshsales. This made it easy for Santa and his deputies, the elves, to pull up every kid’s record and attend to it without any hassle.
Santa needs a CRM_Freshsales_Landing page


Step 4: Santa sorts kids with ease.

Sorting the good kids from the bad? That doesn’t sound like work anyone would enjoy, let alone Santa. And nobody wants to call any kid ‘bad’.

However, Santa can’t help it; it’s his job. He had to sort the kids; based on their city, the area they lived in, and by their age (to get them age-appropriate gifts, of course). This way he could assign elves to each different groups. How do you think he managed to sort the kids and allocate the groups to his elves? With Freshsales, of course! The team used territories on Freshsales to automatically assign every kid to an elf that handled their locality.

Santa needs a CRM_Freshsales_Territories

Step 5: Elves divide and take care of the kids.

Each kid was assigned to an elf as a lead. The elves then used Freshsales to coordinate with the parents and ensure that all the submitted details were accurate. Once this was done, the elves converted their kids (Leads) into contacts. Along with this conversion, the gift each kid asked for, gets created into a wish list (Deals) on Freshsales.

Santa needs a CRM_Freshsales_Lead Conversion

Step 6: Santa automates gift ordering.

It’s the age of online shopping, and handmade gifts are quite passè, even for the elves. They merely procure it, and ship it to kids. However, when there are thousands of kids to cater to, procuring each gift individually is still a daunting task. So, the elves split themselves into teams and took up individual tasks. While one team took care of the kids, the other handled ordering and procuring gifts. And how did these elves receive their gift requests?

Simple. They created an intelligent workflow on Freshsales that triggered an email whenever a kid was converted into a receiver. The elves received an email about the wish lists, as well as a task notification on Freshsales, thereby making it easy for them to order the gift from the right vendor.

Santa needs a CRM_Freshsales_Tasks

Step 7: Santa synchronizes internal communication.

Elves may be magical, but they weren’t really known for their telepathy skills. There was always a need for an efficient channel of communication between the elves that were in charge of the children and those that handled gift procurement and logistics. Initially, the elves contemplated using the good ol’ email or phone for collaboration, but neither of these can stand up to the challenge of coordinating across thousands of individual requests over the course of the season.

Here again, Freshsales solved a critical problem thanks to its integration with Freshconnect, a collaboration tool. Integration with Freshconnect enabled the different teams to communicate with each other from within Freshsales, and also get the entire context of a wishlist (Deal) before getting onto a chat. This meant that there was no information lost throughout the process and any issue could be addressed in a hassle-free manner.

Santa needs a CRM_Freshsales_Freshconnect

Step 8: Santa simplifies Christmas shipments.

With a battalion of elves under his leadership, Santa managed to put in place a process that could now handle everything— from capturing requests from kids, to processing them, assigning elves to each kid, and finally procuring and packing gifts– the process was now in place.

When the final step was completed, each elf simply moved the wish list, to ‘won’. This automatically triggered an email to Santa’s team of elves who handled last mile delivery. These elves ensured that each gift was individually dropped at the correct doorstep, on Christmas Eve.

And this, is the grand tale of how Santa used Freshsales CRM to liven up every kid’s Christmas.

Try Freshsales CRM for free