Freshworks isn’t your typical CRM. It’s a cloud-based business suite with solutions for customer service, sales, and IT. And more recently — marketing.
When the company debuted Freshmarketer in 2017, it augmented the rest of the platform with conversion optimization and automation features to help its customers understand and capture more revenue from their websites.
Freshmarketer was a hit among digital marketers for growing conversions using web forms, visitor tracking, and chatbots. It was incredibly powerful but required some technical expertise to fully reap its benefits.
Five years ago, Girish Mathrubootham, Freshworks CEO and co-founder, looked into potential landing page builder solutions. The company was already familiar with BeeFree for its email editor but needed some core functionality. He suggested Guru take a look into Convrrt.
There wasn’t any directive to use Convrrt, but rather just a suggestion. After comparing the options on the market, it was clear Convrrt was the right choice. “It was a full-stack solution for us,” said Guru.
“A product like Unlayer focuses on one aspect, just the editor part — what happens after the editor?” He elaborated on the numerous responsibilities that SaaS companies burden, including hosting, reliability, security, scalability, and speed. “So all the stuff that needs to be managed by us, which is actually a lot of effort,” said Guru.
“Convrrt perfectly fitted our needs.”
One of the aspects of Convrrt that excited Guru was the deep customization options the page builder experience provided. “We nailed it,” bragged Guru. “It blends inside the customer’s workflow.”
Freshmarketer’s landing page builder is fully branded as Freshworks without any signs it’s by Convrrt.
And a major opportunity emerged as more teams began using it. The Freshworks leadership team wanted to expand Freshmarketer’s demand generation capabilities.
Santosh Guru, then product manager, was at the forefront of adding product innovations. One of his ambitions was to add an email editor to the software. He had done so successfully using the Bee Editor but felt its landing page capabilities were lacking.
“Our vision was always to build a marketing automation tool to help customers acquire leads. We already have a tool for lead management — our CRM tool,“ said Guru. “We wanted to double down on generating leads for our customers, which is why we were expanding our footprint.”
Headquarters: San Mateo, CA
Founded: 2010
CEO: Girish Mathrubootham
Employees: 5,000
Freshworks Inc., (NASDAQ: FRSH) makes business software people love to use. Purpose-built for IT, customer support, and sales and marketing teams, its products empower the people who power business. Freshworks is fast to onboard, priced affordably, built to delight, yet powerful enough to deliver critical business outcomes. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks operates around the world to serve more than 60,000 customers, including Allbirds, Blue Nile, Bridgestone, Databricks, Klarna, NHS, OfficeMax, and PhonePe.
The topic landing page features accelerated in January 2021. “There was a customer who said, ‘I need landing page building features by March, and only then will I sign up,’” recalled Guru. It was a big enterprise deal, but everything was falling into place.
Regarding a top customer in the travel industry, Guru pointed out that users don’t want to connect multiple apps with APIs. And with the Convrrt partnership, they don’t have to. “Just one single click, and everything is taken care of.” Getting the landing page features live on a tight timeline was a big challenge, but Convrrt was up to the task. SaaS companies like Freshworks have a rigorous legal and business review process. Convrrt worked with legal, security, and the product team at every step.
The Freshworks team needed a custom staging environment to test upcoming features and validate the user experience during development. Convrrt set these up to adapt to the engineering team’s workflow.
The user experience was vital to the Freshworks product team. They provided Convrrt with their design system in Figma; the full-service onboarding was underway. Convrrt tailored the builder interface to align fully with the Freshworks design patterns.
Before launch, it was time to battle-test the integration against real-world threats. Freshworks employed an independent security auditor to pen-test the features. After it passed with flying colors, it was ready to release to a general audience.
And in less than 45 days, its landing page functionally was live.
Convrrt’s grid builder earned high praise from Guru.
“The grid builder is amazing. It’s very, very intuitive,” said Guru as he compared it to the likes of Microsoft OneNote for its flexible canvas. “You don't need to be an engineer-turned-marketer to build a landing page.”
Another top feature that Guru likes is the built-in mobile responsive functionality. “I love the way in which you’ve covered the mobile part and how it's how seamless it is. It's very thoughtfully done.” This page builder feature ensures landing pages look the best way possible on mobile devices without any code.
Landing pages have proven valuable for the company’s massive growth. “Convrrt has influenced a lot of big deals for us in influencing our enterprise and mid-market deals,” said Guru.
The Freshworks product team is eager to add Convrrt’s pop-up builder feature in an upcoming release. “Many customers are asking for pop-ups or flyouts and want all sorts of jazzy things to be added to the pop-ups within the page builder.”
After the success of Freshmarketer and the launch of the landing page features, Santosh Guru was promoted twice.
He became the lead product manager for Freshworks in March 2021. Less than a year and a half later, he was promoted to group product manager.
It’s worth mentioning because when product and engineering leaders think creatively about delivering innovations to market faster, they position themselves for professional growth.
The new landing page features also show up in online reviews. Here are some reviews posted about Freshworks:
Ruben L. on G2"We also like your landing page management tool, with which you can also manage forms online. Its communications panel is quite centralized.”
Rogimar M. on G2“It’s helping us to manage our leads from web forms and landing pages. A very organized tool of CRM for a sales guy.”
Group Product Manager, Freshworks
“Freshmarketer is a powerful marketing CRM program at a competitive price point. It offers advanced features such as automatic marketing journeys and a drag-and-drop landing page builder. This advanced feature set, combined with a price point that is well below that of its two biggest competitors, makes Freshmarketer an attractive option for a budget-sensitive buyer.”
Product managers often make calculated bets when green-lighting product features. They must balance speed, market opportunity, budget, and team resources.
Santosh Guru didn’t compromise on delivering these product updates. How?
Convrrt was a proven leader at integrating its landing page builder within SaaS products. And onboarding was smooth, with plenty of support to ensure a legendary product launch.
Guru is quite confident about the technical partnership. “I've been impressed with the integration of the partnership that we have had with Convrrt. You bring the craftsmanship in your work, and that helps us bring delight to our customers.”
Convrrt is a landing page platform for SaaS companies. Its white-label solution helps users create and publish conversion-friendly landing pages from select CRM and marketing software. More than 67,000 users across more than 100 countries use Convrrt’s landing page builder to engage target audiences and collect more than one million contacts.