Why chatbot solutions Reply.ai jumped from Trello to Freshsales for a more sophisticated sales process

Founded in February 2016, Reply.ai helps businesses to optimize conversations with customers across channels, markets and languages. They couldn’t scale with Trello, and bumped into several limitations that lowered productivity. As they began to expand, they needed to establish an efficient sales CRM solution for managing business. In July 2016, they switched to Freshsales CRM and have introduced more system and visibility to their sales actions.

 

Reply.ai—enabling 1:1 conversations with chatbots

Reply.ai, headquartered in New York, is an enterprise level chatbot building & management platform for B2C communication.

Reply works with major brands and retailers to bring them into the ‘Messaging Age’ by scaling their 1:1 communication with customers across messaging channels, markets, and languages, all while maintaining the highest security standards.

Erica Mannherz
Co-founder, Business Development + Growth

Erica at Reply chatted with us about why she discontinued using Trello, and how Freshsales helped manage sales pipeline and leads, and successfully reduce sales cycle.

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Bye Trello. Hello Freshsales CRM.

Erica and her team at Reply were initially using Trello for project management, primarily for its simplicity.

Although an efficient method of tracking progress on projects, a tool like Trello did not offer customer insights which is an important aspect for sales reps. Filtering deals on type or region was not a one-click action and required more effort.

It did not prove capable for managing contact data in the long run for a growing business like Reply:

Our small team was expanding owing to our growing customer base, and it was difficult to scale with Trello due to its limited features. We started to grow out of it.

Furthermore, the lack of reporting features made it cumbersome for Erica to update investors and team on business developments.

In order to better serve their customers, the team at Reply desired an ideal sales CRM solution to effectively manage business, generate reports, and reduce manual dependency.

One year ago, Erica signed-up for Freshsales. Since then, Freshsales is energizing Reply’s sales practices:

Freshsales came with collated functions that really enriched our sales process. We‘re able to optimize our deals in a visual pipeline, generate reports, and auto-log conversations—revealing valuable insights in one place.

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Deal pipeline trumps Trello sales board

Erica and her team experienced a stark difference in deal management between Freshsales and Trello:

One of the main challenges we faced in Trello was multiple views of the pipeline—owner, region etc. In Freshsales, the deal pipeline is extremely advantageous. Its quick access features— sort, filter, drag and drop, phone, email, tasks, etc. is helping us close deals faster.

By having the ability to customize the pipeline to suit their business process, Erica says the sales team is able to track progress easily. The full visibility on deals by stages in pipeline enabled the sales team to reach a 25% reduction in sales cycle.

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Automation replaces manual data entry

Adding leads manually to Trello was not an easy job for Erica and her team. Especially since the business reaches out to hundreds of leads, and relies on conversation history.

Trello put a lid on scaling customer base due to its limitations in managing leads/contacts. But this was easily overcome in Freshsales.

Reply is now able to automatically add leads directly in Freshsales through email integration:

Freshsales is our centralized spot to search for people. Our sales reps get context on any person—lead, collaborator, investor, etc. through a simple name or company search within seconds. We can filter and sort them too.

The biggest impact?

Erica discloses that by adding their Freshsales email address to the Auto-Bcc feature in Mixmax, they’ve reaped the value-added benefits of the CRM’s lead/contact-email management:

Our team uses Mixmax for email marketing to conduct surveys, polls, scheduling, etc. We’re able to automatically log those emails to the lead or contact directly in Freshsales with no effort. This has upped our sales game.

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Reporting saves time

Erica says the reporting feature in Freshsales makes analyzing sales pipeline and activities possible and helpful for the team to keep up with their progress regularly.

The ease in creating custom reports like trendline reports helps the team to share more frequent updates with investors on business growth.

Previously, Erica admits that creating sales reports was their biggest time thief. But now:

With Freshsales reporting features, we’ve cut down that time by 60%. We can generate reports at any point in time, and summarize information 10X faster than before. This has immensely improved our productivity.

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Embracing Freshsales

Switching from Trello to Freshsales, the team at Reply were introduced to a new and organized approach to sales. Freshsales keeps the team on track through its comprehensive solutions.

Being revamped to a solid sales system like Freshsales, Erica says:

It organizes our business and gives an overview of our sales. If you embrace Freshsales for your sales process, then onboarding new members of the sales team is easy. We haven’t looked back.