How Facilitron increased sales visibility by 10X and redefined its sales management using Freshsales

Silicon Valley-based Facilitron is a cloud-based facility use management platform designed for school districts and colleges to manage how their facilities are being used, and provide a portal for community groups to find and rent available space. Since its inception, the company had been looking for a favorable CRM software to establish sales management strategies and target the 350,000+ campuses across the country. In July 2017, Facilitron signed up for Freshsales CRM on the Estate plan. Since then, it has significantly honed its sales practices and attained 10X more visibility into opportunities and activities.

Facilitron—facility management, evolved

Facilitron, founded in 2014 and headquartered in Los Gatos, CA, is a facility reservation platform and marketplace for public facilities. It transforms the way schools and cities manage and schedule their gyms, fields, theaters, and classrooms—both for internal use and for use by community groups.

The platform has two parts: a community facing front-end and an administrative back-end. By consolidating both in one platform, Facilitron is enabling community users such as sports teams, businesses, individuals or non-profit groups to make requests to use facilities without having to bother school officials, and empowering schools, colleges and municipalities to showcase, manage and recover a portion of the operational costs.

Meet Brian Engles, Director of Partnerships at Facilitron. We had Brian talk about what their experience with Freshsales has been like, how they’re benefitting and what kind of results they’ve been seeing.

Brian Engles
Director of Partnerships, Facilitron

Discovering Freshsales

Facilitron needed to implement a CRM software that would not only organize their data, but also one that can be customized for their sales process. The team, before Brian joined, started off using Agile CRM. Due to the lack of direction and guidance, adoption was poor and the team didn’t fully implement it.

After Brian joined Facilitron, things changed. Brian’s expertise was primarily in technical sales and sales management. And, coming from a company that used CRM heavily, he understood the benefits of a CRM software and why it was necessary for business. Once Brian joined the team and found Agile CRM in place, he gave it a shot but soon realized it wasn’t flexible enough to be customized for Facilitron.

While the team was on the lookout for an efficient CRM, Brian learned about Freshsales from one of Facilitron’s board members. A combination of Freshsales features, customization capabilities, and the complete sales visibility it provided impressed Brian right away and led him to sign up for the product.

Why Freshsales

Before Freshsales, the team didn’t have a complete system in place. Information was in spreadsheets, scribbled on boards or post-its— which provided no organization or visibility to their data. Without a centralized system to maintain data, the process was haywire.

A user of Salesforce in his previous job, Brian chose to look elsewhere when evaluating features because Salesforce lacked simplicity in customizing sales pipelines and provided little visibility into lost opportunities. With Freshsales, Brian was able to easily streamline data management and customize a deal pipeline unique to Facilitron’s needs:

“Freshsales helps us prioritize and focus on our opportunities. We’re able to customize our pipeline, from deal stages to filters, unique to our business process. Other CRMs did not allow us to do this as intuitively and flexibly as Freshsales does.”

Sales pipeline in Freshsales

Brian’s CRM ideology is simple: save time, improve productivity. So it was important that the software came with automations. For example, when his sales rep updates a deal, its related account information should also be automatically updated based on predefined conditions. Using Workflows in Freshsales, Brian is able to easily execute actions without additional manual work.

Workflows in Freshsales

With over 20,000 school districts in the U.S. as prospective clients, every school is a unique opportunity for Facilitron. So recording every interaction with clients is crucial to keeping everyone informed in the company. By customizing sales activities in Freshsales, Brian is able to record any kind of meeting and communication for future references:

“We do have a unique sales process and do things differently than other companies. We may stop by unannounced at schools, have lunch or dinner with clients, meet them at events, etc. These little customizations in logging sales activities helps us track our efforts and see a timeline of communication with each client.”

Sales activities in Freshsales

So far Brian and his team have assembled data for schools in ten states. And, have another forty to go. The database is arranged in spreadsheets, and prepared for import to the CRM software. Using the data import feature, they’re able to map fields during import, and have the data up and running in no time.

Spearheading the sales team means tracking progress using sales data. Brian uses the reporting feature to stay on top of sales metrics. He’s able to create any custom report for business meetings and view them on his sales dashboard instantly. Another thing Brian discovered and likes is the swift way of drilling into a report from the dashboard— he’s able to view the extended chart and table without having to go to the reports module.

And when he’s not at his desk, Brian uses the Freshsales mobile app while on the go to access customer data and to record his appointments.

“We travel a lot, and the app is very useful during those trips. We log sales activities directly from my mobile, and add notes too. A quick way to reach the CRM.”

Freshsales mobile app

With a new Facilitron website just launched, Brian plans to push the lead data collected on the site from web forms to the CRM software using the Smartforms feature. When a visitor signs-up on the web form, Smartforms will capture the form details and create a new lead or contact. By automating this process, Brian hopes to remove the need for manual dependency.

By bringing together sales and support through the Freshsales-Freshdesk integration, Facilitron enables the two teams to collaborate with each other to offer exceptional customer experience.  Also, the company is soon to implement Freshchat, and have it integrated with Freshsales so sales reps can chat with web visitors directly from the CRM.

“We love the vendor consolidation that Freshworks offers—marketing, sales, and support in one place.”

Results

Brian’s biggest win with choosing Freshsales as their CRM software was the total visibility in their opportunities as well as activities among peers. This instills a healthy competition among sales reps to work harder, and resulted in a 30% increase in overall sales activities.

Within their first six months of using Freshsales, Facilitron has seen at least 80% improvement in productivity, and gained 10X sales visibility.

“Working with spreadsheets was like forgetting something every time you pack for a trip. With Freshsales, what’s very important for us is the confidence we have in the integrity of our data, and the total visibility throughout the different stages of the sales process.”

A major consideration for Facilitron choosing Freshsales was not just about the product but also his pre-purchase and post-purchase experience with our team:

“A huge takeaway, product aside, the team at Freshsales is world-class, with outstanding support, success and service from both the sales and product teams.”

The future  

Growing the company and sales team is what lies ahead for Facilitron. The team is expected to grow with both inside sales reps and outside sales reps in strategic areas, and all of whom as Brian states, “will be utilizing Freshsales for their sales process.” And by then, Brian plans to effectively set up Freshsales so that the CRM can be looked at as “a treasure chest” by the sales reps and not as additional work.