How the HiveXchange achieved a 20% month-over-month growth rate with Freshsales

Australian startup, the HiveXchange simplifies the trade of fresh produce between producers and wholesale buyers through digital technology. In the search for a small business CRM, two known players did not make the cut for this tech startup. But Freshsales did. In three months, the HiveXchange saw a significant revenue growth by surpassing the limitations of a small team.

The HiveXchange — An innovative way to trade produce

Co-founders Damien George and Antonio Palanca traveled for six months around Australia meeting fruit and vegetable farmers. Their goal? To create a new kind of produce market that would help farmers sell more, even from remote farms. The result was the HiveXchange, a digital marketplace for fresh produce.


Antonio Palanca, CEO & Co-founder 

Our mission, Tony (Antonio) says, is to create a new type of marketplace that will grow the farms and eliminate waste in the food supply chain.

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The move to Freshsales

Tony wanted a sales CRM that efficiently manages both buyers and suppliers in the marketplace. Usability and ease of adoption were important for him.

 For a business like ours with an anticipated high-velocity sales, you only want to make a CRM decision once. We explored multiple CRMs before choosing Freshsales. Pipedrive had limited capabilities; we weren’t able to easily track our customer journey end-to-end and spot our best leads. On the other hand, Salesforce was way too complex in addition to being expensive.

Tony found Freshsales ideal than Salesforce to run his marketplace business, and made the call to join our list of happy customers.

With Freshsales, the interface is straightforward, we get deeper visibility into our sales pipeline and we’re able to generate powerful reports — in one hassle-free package.

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How the HiveXchange uses Freshsales

The HiveXchange’s sales process begins from lead generation. Leads from emails, marketing campaigns, conferences, and social media are captured in Freshsales. Using email integration, they easily reach out to prospects as part of their customer discovery process, before categorizing them as buyers and suppliers. When asked how Freshsales optimized their sales cycle and improved productivity, he recounted:

Lead auto-enrichment, email integration, bulk email, and email tracking has really improved our productivity.

What’s even more remarkable for the HiveXchange is the 20x growth in buyers and sellers, using Freshsales. Tony attributes this growth in revenue to an increased sales pipeline visibility.

Previously, it would take us more than a month to just identify new opportunities. Now with Freshsales, our sales cycles have practically reduced from months to days because we’re spotting the right leads quickly.

It’s interesting how Tony uses the deal pipeline for his business. Produce is seasonal, and the market depends on what’s in season, and who’s selling and buying. So opportunities fluctuate based on active sellers and buyers.

By breaking down the pipeline further into active and inactive sellers/buyers, Tony’s team is able to focus on which opportunities to pursue for the season. Plus, they schedule sales reports on a weekly basis to track sales progress.

Tony emphasized on how much the pipeline has improved their practices, and to him this is the best feature in Freshsales:

The ability to set up our sales pipeline in Freshsales has really benefitted us. We get rapid insights on our clients, and see our conversion opportunities and run-rates. By being able to focus on the right opportunities, we’ve witnessed a significant growth.

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Freshsales — the single source of truth for the HiveXchange

The HiveXchange sails as a small sales team. To steer their efforts in the right direction, prioritizing their sales activities is vital.

As a small team, it’s important for us to focus on where we choose to spend our time. To me, Freshsales is like having an extra salesperson on our team.

Here’s how he described his overall experience with Freshsales:

We’re now able to spot our new opportunities early, have meaningful conversations and close deals faster. With Freshsales our sales team can now stay focused on doubling our business.