[Freshworks CRM Tips] From Lead Acquisition to Closing Deals: Accurately Target Your Ideal Customers

In customer relationship management, the sales process is often divided into three stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.

Awareness

The awareness stage is where potential customers become familiar with your company, products, and services. At this point, they are far from making a purchase decision but have gained some understanding of what you offer.

Consideration

At the consideration stage, potential customers have identified their problems and are actively looking for solutions. They begin researching their options—often comparing competitors—to determine whether your product meets their needs.

Decision

In the decision stage, prospective customers are ready to make a purchase but may still need some additional motivation—such as advertisements or promotional campaigns—to take action.

In our previous blog post introducing all of Freshworks' products, we highlighted that Freshworks CRM is a three-in-one software that functions as a MAS (Marketing Automation System), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and CDP (Customer Data Platform).

This means its capabilities extend beyond a traditional CRM: it can manage processes from the awareness stage all the way through to sales actions during the decision stage. As such, it is well-suited to support customer relationship management from lead generation to pre-sale analysis.

In today’s blog post, we’ll use the five major buyer journey stages commonly seen in B2C and B2B sales funnels to demonstrate how to effectively manage leads—from building awareness to encouraging purchase behavior—using Freshworks CRM.

The Subscriber Stage

When a visitor lands on your website, they enter the awareness stage. However, not every lead acquired at this point will go on to make a purchase. In an age saturated with social media, search engines, and web ads, customers don't click on everything—but when something catches their attention, there's a good chance they'll click. Once clicked, they’re usually directed to a landing page or article.

Even if they're not ready to buy, they might submit their email in exchange for a discount, newsletter, or valuable content like a free e-book or checklist. By entering their email, they become a lead. Over the following days or weeks, they may receive product-related emails or see social media ads that help reinforce brand awareness.

As soon as a customer enters their email, Freshworks CRM starts collecting their data, storing it in the system as a lead.

The Lead/Nurturing Stage

In reality, new subscribers may ignore many of your emails at first because they don’t yet know your brand well. However, as interest grows, email open and click rates may improve, and they may start engaging with your emails and visiting your website more often.

According to statistics, companies that establish a solid lead nurturing process can increase lead effectiveness by 50%.

External Source: 34 Lead Nurturing Statistics to Boost Your Sales

By offering valuable content—such as e-book downloads, webinar registrations, or online event signups—you can encourage leads to visit your site more frequently.

At this stage, you’ve likely collected more detailed subscriber information such as their name, phone number, and even location. These leads are now in the nurturing phase. Based on the types of content they engage with, you can further interact with them through articles, infographics, and more.

The two most critical actions in this stage are:

• Within 24 hours of a lead entering your CRM system, send a personalized welcome email to introduce your company.

• Set up reminders in your lead management system for follow-up calls and emails to maintain engagement.

Using Freshworks CRM, you can configure workflows to send targeted email campaigns to new leads based on factors such as location or gender. This allows you to tailor messages for different segments, successfully attracting a wider range of customers.

After gathering your lead list, you can forward the data to your sales team for follow-up. Sales representatives then contact their assigned leads via email, LinkedIn, Facebook, or phone to nurture relationships and guide them to the next stage.

The Marketing Qualified Lead Stage (MQL)

After going through the nurturing stage and gaining a good understanding of your business, leads who sign up for a free trial or request a demo become Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).

At this stage, you’ll want to collect deeper insights such as company name, company size, location, whether they are decision-makers, and their target audience. These details help you determine whether the lead qualifies as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL).

Some companies refer to this process as lead scoring. By creating rules to assign scores to leads, you can ensure your sales team focuses on high-quality prospects. This improves the alignment between sales and marketing, enabling your sales team to offer the right products to the right customers.

With Freshworks CRM, you can define positive and negative scoring factors to assess lead quality more accurately.

The Sales Qualified Lead Stage (SQL)

Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) usually have clear needs, an implementation timeline, and a set budget. Most importantly, they are ready to make a final purchase decision.

These leads represent significant sales opportunities. At this stage, they already show strong interest in your product or service. Compared to other leads in earlier funnel stages, SQLs are far more likely to become paying customers—essentially, they are prospective buyers.

The Opportunity Stage

At this point, customers may be comparing multiple vendors or similar products, possibly considering lower-cost alternatives.

This is where your sales team must seize the opportunity! You need to offer high-value services, such as personalized product demos or customized solutions addressing their pain points. This builds trust and convinces them your product is the best fit—helping them reach a final decision.

At the Sales Qualified Lead and Opportunity stages, the sales team needs to maintain ongoing interaction with potential customers through continuous communication. Freshworks CRM comes with a built-in email feature and can integrate with Freshchat and Freshcaller to ensure seamless conversations between sales reps and prospects.

With Freshworks CRM, you can also record customer data, track all activities from the moment they become subscribers, log customer needs, schedule meetings, manage quotations, and store client-related files (such as contracts and more).

Conclusion

Freshworks is highly flexible and can be adapted to various workflows and integrations based on user needs.

Feel free to contact us to apply for a free trial or to learn more about Freshworks features and capabilities.

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