The offering is a combination of the company’s Freshmarketer, Freshsales and Freshdesk products, but it’s the first time this has been packaged together for targeting startups.
The initiative is an expansion of Freshworks’ startup programme that was launched in 2019, through which it has onboarded 2,500 startups so far, 500 of which are already paying customers for the company. It added that its products are used by over 150 unicorns, or about 20% of all unicorns globally.
“If you are building the future, why should you have CRM systems of the past and why do you need to have silos of sales, marketing and support?” Girish Mathrubootham, co-founder and CEO at Freshworks said. “We’re bringing in Freshstack, a fully integrated CRM suite where startups can start engaging with their customers across their entire lifecycle.”
Mathrubootham added that the idea behind Freshstack came about from his own experience of building Freshworks, where at one point the company was spending $250,000 and employing six developers just to maintain the various enterprise CRM tools it was using for marketing and sales.
He said that startups would also benefit from having data visibility across marketing, sales and customer support, allowing them to better derive insights and service their customers.
As part of Freshstack, the company will offer startups a $3,000 credit to utilise its service. Freshworks has identified 87 partners, including venture capitalists and others, globally through whom startups will be able to apply to become part of the programme. The company has through its startup programme also helped startups with mentorship and access to VCs.
“If you do not have Freshstack, you’re going to be using four different systems and the customer data is actually in four different databases and that’s why they struggle,” added Mathrubootham. “If their data is in four different systems, they lose context and that’s why we’re bringing this in saying start off with a customer cloud.”
The announcement comes just as Freshworks kicks off its annual conference Refresh at which the company will announce a slew of new capabilities for its existing products such as Freshsales, apart from meeting with key industry partners and customers.
