What we’ve shipped so far in 2019: 20 new features and updates

Last year, we shipped out several new key features and enhancements that demonstrated a substantial shift in what a modern-day CRM should be like today. And your response was overwhelming.

This year too, we set out to continue to improve and enhance Freshsales in a way that would help take your business to the next level of where you want it to be.

We’ve already shipped 20 new features and updates to power up your sales with Freshsales. Here they are.

Do more on the go with the mobile app  

1. Create voice notes to recap your customer meetings and link them to a record 🎤

You can now record your notes after a meeting or call with a customer on your mobile app. Sure you can type them too, but recording is far easier, right?  Finish a call, and add a voice note to leads, contacts, accounts, or deals.

You can find your voice notes in the related record under the Notes tab on the mobile app. Sales reps with access to those records can listen to voice notes, and stay updated. So the next time you have to take down notes, record yourself,  even while walking out of your meeting. Read our article to know more about voice notes.

2. Compose and reply to emails, and track engagement 📧

View and send emails on the mobile app. Not only that, you can pick an email template, attach files, track, and even schedule emails. That’s everything you can do on the web app and now on the mobile too.

Find all your emails—received, sent, and drafted— in the Emails tab of a record. If you have placeholders in your email template, they get automatically updated for the chosen recipient. You can even pick the From and Reply to address from the available email accounts.

3. Check-in when you reach your appointment location and let your manager know📍

If you’re a sales rep who’s always on the move, this one’s for you. Now, you can quickly check in to your current location, letting your sales team know you’ve visited the contact.

Checked in activities are recorded in the timeline view with details on date and time, allowing you to create reports for such activities. You can see check-ins on both web and mobile.

4. Make more sales calls with Freshcaller and slash your phone bill 📞

While you were able to make phone calls from the app using your mobile service provider, that’s changed now, for the better. With Freshcaller, you can make calls on the Freshsales mobile app.

Once you make a call, you can add a call log to record details like whether it’s an outgoing or incoming call, the outcome, and add notes. Call logs are synced to the web as well. To get started, install the Freshcaller app.

5. Stay informed on the go by personalizing your mobile notifications🔔

Now it’s easier to personalize your mobile notifications.  With the new Settings feature on the app, you can turn on/off notifications for specific activities. You can get notified (or not) for your record assignments, tasks and appointments, and email tracking. Email alerts and Daily Email Digest notifications sync across the mobile and desktop apps.

6. Landscape mode for iPad🖼 

Take advantage of the landscape mode on the iPad when you’re on the Freshsales app. All your records are optimized for landscape too. So when you rotate your iPad, Freshsales automatically adjusts to the orientation you prefer.

Manage deals

7. Automatically fetch currency conversion rates for your multi-currency deals 🤑

Exchange rates are likely to change almost every day. And manually updating conversion rates is not the best practice when you’re dealing with multiple currencies. So we added automatic conversion to update exchange rates of currencies in Freshsales every day.

Using the exchange rate from Open Exchanges Rates, Freshsales converts your deal value to your base currency. While automation makes life easier, the option to update conversion rate manually is still available.

8. Get a more accurate picture of your revenue forecast with weighted sales pipeline 📈

With Freshsales, you can now get a better analysis of your deals with a weighted pipeline. Associate a probability to each deal stage in a pipeline based on your unique business process to indicate the likelihood of closing a deal. Now in your pipeline, you’ll see the weighted sales forecast based on the probability of a deal closing in that stage. You can also use this data to create reports in the CRM.

 

9. Define when deals will rot, so sales reps don’t let them slip away without notice 

In the previous image, you’ll notice that two deals are highlighted red. These deals have remained idle in that stage of the pipeline giving sales reps the nudge to take action on the deal and move it forward. You can now define the number of days based on your average sales cycle length after which deals rot.

On the sales pipeline, any deal that has crossed your defined period are in red. Clicking on a deal will tell you the exact number of days the deal has been rotten. You can take notice of rotten deals on the mobile app too.

Faster collaboration

10. Create a team of users to collaborate better with your sales reps 🤝

You can group users as a team to improve collaboration in your CRM.  Pick a list of users in Freshsales and create your Team to facilitate faster and easier sharing of reports, campaigns, workflows,  tasks, appointments, and adding reps to territories.

A user can belong to multiple teams too. Privilege to access records is based on the user’s role and permissions in Freshsales. You can apply Teams to filters too. Instead of having to choose users individually when you filter records, you can apply your Team as a filter to find what you’re looking for faster.

Customize fields

11. Use Lookup Fields to link different modules 🔗

There are default lookup fields in Freshsales that link an account name to a deal and contact, parent account to a child account, and owner to a record in any of the four modules. Now you can create custom fields to create a many-to-one relationship between fields across modules using lookup fields.

For example, you could relate contacts as primary and secondary decision makers of a deal. To do this, create lookup fields in the Deal module and relate them to the Contact module. Now you can mark a contact as a primary or secondary decision maker, and view the decision makers of a deal on the record.

Communicate through text messaging

12. Send SMS messages by integrating with Twilio and ClickSend 📱

Follow-up and connect with your leads and contacts via SMS straight from Freshsales using the Twilio and ClickSend integrations. You can bulk send SMSes, and use placeholders to personalize your message.

You can also trigger SMS messages using workflow. Learn more about the capabilities of SMS integration here.

Change photo on profiles

13. Upload an image for your leads, contacts, and accounts  📸

Freshsales auto-enriches profiles with publicly available information like photo, social profiles, and company details using the lead’s or contact’s email address. In the event a profile doesn’t get enriched with a photo, you now have the ability to upload an image for your records so you can identify them better in your CRM.

Click on the profile picture of a lead, drag and drop an image, crop and set the area, and click add to update the profile with the new image.

Email productivity hacks

14. Peek into an email without having to open it 🔍

To easily see the contents of an email, hover your cursor over a conversation. From the hovercard, you can quickly add a task or reply to the email.

15. Schedule follow-up actions without any delay ⏲

Here’s a nifty productivity feature. Before you send an email, you have the option to schedule a follow-up task immediately. Once you hit “Send email and add-follow up,” your email is sent, and a task window opens on the same page allowing you to create a follow-up task on the record.

16. Modify Unsubscribe links in your emails 🚫

We’ve made unsubscribe links as a placeholder so you can put them anywhere in your email, and edit the link to say whatever you want it to. You can also add it to your email templates, so you don’t forget to include them in your communications. The old way to add an unsubscribe link is also in place, in case you like it that way.

More power to workflow automations

17. Auto perform an action based on the outcome of a task or an appointment ⚙️

We’ve added Tasks and Appointments to Workflows. So now you can automatically perform actions based on defined triggers. For example, move a lead to the “interested” stage if a meeting’s outcome was marked interested.

18. Tag and detag records, automatically  🏷

If you’re a power user of Tags in Freshsales, make life easier by adding tags through Workflows. Here’s an example to auto-tag a contact if they’re an authority figure. Once you add tags, simply search for a tag name and the tagged records will be displayed in the search results.  You can also search for tags through filters.

Remember, you can tag any record in Freshsales, even deals. How about tagging any deal greater than $1,000 as Big Deal. Go ahead, try it! And if Big Deal changes to $3,000 in the future, you can remove the tag on those deals, using Workflows. ?

Create successful sales campaigns

19. More ways to choose who will enter your campaigns 🎯

We’ve made improvements in Sales Campaigns that give you more flexibility to build your list.

  1. Accounts are now included in Sales Campaigns, so you can target account-related contacts with your killer emails. Choose to include either primary or both primary and secondary accounts for a contact.
  2. Before you start your campaign, take a quick look into who’ll be part of it. Preview who enters your campaign based on the conditions you set. You’ll see their name, status, email address, phone and last contacted time in the preview window.
  3. If you’re running more than one campaign at a time, you have the option to include or exclude contacts who are in an active campaign or completed a sales campaign.
  4. You can now define filter conditions for multi-select fields.

20. Drill down into campaign metrics 🚀

View the status of your lead or contact for each step in your campaign—entered the campaign, currently in the campaign, and have exited the campaign. When they pass the conditions of the last step of a campaign, they now automatically exit the campaign.

Phew! That’s it for now. But there’s more to come.

To be up to date with our features and updates, watch this space or our product updates page.

Cover design by Anandh