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Freshsales is fast to spin up and easy to break in the first month. Most owners skip the account-level defaults, invite users with the wrong roles, and end up rebuilding 60 days in once Freddy AI starts producing garbage scores. Here is the setup sequence that holds up.
Who this is forFounders, RevOps leads, and sales managers opening a brand-new Freshsales account — or anyone who created a trial weeks ago, never finished setup, and is about to invite the sales team. If three teammates are already in the portal making changes, this tutorial is for you.
What you'll need
Step 1
Time zone, currency, fiscal year, and date format are global. Changing them after data exists creates reporting headaches forever.
Open Freshsales → click the profile avatar (bottom-left) → Admin Settings → General Settings → Company Profile.
Set Company Name, Country, Time Zone, Date Format, and Language. The Time Zone field is the one that bites later — it controls how every Freshsales report rolls up days, weeks, and months.
Admin Settings → General Settings → Currencies. Set the Base Currency. If you sell in multiple currencies, add the others now and set conversion rates. Base currency cannot be changed once deals exist.
Admin Settings → General Settings → Business Hours. Used for sequence sending windows, SLA timers in Freshdesk integration, and chatbot availability. Set even if you do not use it yet.
Admin Settings → General Settings → Fiscal Year. Pick the month your fiscal year starts. This drives every quarterly forecast. Default is January.
Step 2
Logo, colors, and email signature show up in every send. Set them once and they propagate across templates, sequences, sales documents, and meeting links.
Admin Settings → General Settings → Company Profile → upload Company Logo (square, ~200×200 px). This appears on quotes, invoices, and the meeting scheduler.
Admin Settings → Email Settings → Email Signature. Build the default signature template (name, title, phone, calendar link). Each user personalizes on top, but the default ensures consistency.
Admin Settings → Email Settings → Sender Domains → add and verify your sending domain via DNS records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC). Without this, deliverability for sales sequences drops within weeks and Freshsales will throttle your sends.
Admin Settings → General Settings → Personalization → set the default avatar palette and currency display format. Small consistency wins add up.
Step 3
Freshsales uses Roles + Territories + Hierarchy. Pick the wrong combination and you create either bottlenecks or data leaks.
Admin Settings → User Management → Roles. Freshsales ships with Admin, Account Admin, Sales Manager, Salesperson, and Read-only. Review each and decide if you need custom roles.
Create 3-5 custom roles that match real jobs: SDR (own contacts/deals, no admin), AE (own + view team, edit pipelines), Sales Manager (team-wide view, no billing), Marketing Ops (full marketing tools, read-only deals), Account Admin (everything except billing).
For each role, walk through Contacts, Accounts, Deals, Tasks/Appointments, Sequences, Reports, Workflows, and Admin permissions. Tighten "View only my records," "View team records," "View all records" toggles intentionally — most leaks happen here.
Admin Settings → User Management → Territories. Create territories matching how you slice the business (US-East, US-West, EMEA, EMEA-DACH). Territories drive auto-assignment rules and reporting filters.
Admin Settings → User Management → Hierarchy. Build the reporting tree so managers see their direct reports' deals/contacts automatically without manual sharing.
Step 4
Invitations expire in 7 days on Freshsales. Send them once you have roles and territories ready, not before.
Admin Settings → User Management → Users → Add User.
Enter email, assign role, assign territory, set reporting manager. Decide if they get a paid license (full Freshsales seat) or a Marketer license (limited — sequences/forms/landing pages only, no deal editing).
Paid Freshsales Pro seats are ~$59/user/mo (2026 pricing); Enterprise ~$99. Audit who actually needs the full seat — many marketing ops folks can use Marketer or read-only licenses for half the cost.
Send the invite. The user receives an email and must accept within 7 days. Stale invites do not consume a seat until accepted but they expire fast — re-send if needed.
After they accept, verify their access matches expectations. Pretend-to-be-them by logging in as Account Admin and using the Impersonate User feature (Admin Settings → User Management → Users → ⋮ → Impersonate). Confirm they can see what they should and nothing more.
Step 5
Customize the Contact, Account, and Deal record layouts so reps see what matters first. Deeper field architecture comes in tutorial 2.
Admin Settings → CRM Customization → Modules → Contacts → Record Layout.
Drag the most-used fields to the top of the Highlight Panel (the always-visible header): Lifecycle Stage, Lead Score, Owner, Phone, Email, Last Contacted.
Customize the Left Panel cards (About this contact, Recent conversations, Open tasks, Open deals) and the order. Default order should match how reps actually work — usually Open Deals first for AEs, Open Tasks first for SDRs.
Repeat for Accounts (Industry, Annual Revenue, # Employees, Owner, Health Score) and Deals (Amount, Expected Close Date, Stage, Pipeline, Probability).
Set this once at the account level for each role — Admin Settings → CRM Customization → Modules → [module] → Layouts → assign per role. Reps can personalize on top, but the default sets the tone.
Step 6
Freddy AI and the Freshworks Marketplace are where the platform gets compounding value. Enable thoughtfully — every integration is data flowing in and out.
Admin Settings → Freddy AI → Freddy AI Copilot → enable. Freddy AI Copilot ships with Pro+ in 2026 and includes deal insights, next-best-action, AI writer for emails, and call summaries.
Admin Settings → Freddy AI → Freddy AI Insights → review the prebuilt insights (Deal Insights, Out of Office Detection, Best Time to Contact) and enable what your team will actually use.
Marketplace (top-right grid icon) → search for integrations your stack uses today: Gmail / Outlook for two-way email sync, Google Calendar / Office 365, your dialer (Freshcaller is native; RingCentral / Aircall via Marketplace), Slack, your accounting tool (QuickBooks / Xero), Zoom.
Install only what you need now. Every connected app is a permission grant and a data flow you will own forever. Disconnect anything you installed to "try."
For Gmail / Outlook specifically: install the Freshsales Chrome extension so reps get inbox-side logging, templates, and Freddy AI Copilot suggestions. Skipping this is the #1 reason rep adoption stalls on Freshsales.
Common mistakes
Inviting the whole team before defining roles and territories
What goes wrong: Every rep gets default 'Salesperson' permissions, which include delete rights on contacts and deals in their territory. Within 60 days someone deletes 200 contacts they should not have access to. You are paying $295/mo for 5 Pro seats and the data trust is already broken.
How to avoid: Build custom roles and territories first (Admin Settings → User Management), then invite. Even on Growth tier, set per-user permissions before sending the invite.
Skipping sender-domain authentication
What goes wrong: Sales sequence emails start landing in spam after 2-3 weeks. Reps assume Freshsales is broken and revert to native Gmail, losing logging and Freddy insights. You are paying $59/seat for Pro but rep adoption drops to 15% after 3 months.
How to avoid: Admin Settings → Email Settings → Sender Domains → authenticate via DNS records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC). Takes 20 minutes and prevents months of pain.
Leaving the time zone wrong because nobody noticed
What goes wrong: Default account time zone is US Eastern (or India Standard Time depending on signup region). Your team is in PST. Every Freshsales report rolls up 3 hours off. Appointments land in the wrong time zone in calendar invites. Freddy 'best time to contact' insights are garbage.
How to avoid: Admin Settings → General Settings → Company Profile → set account time zone before inviting users. Each user can also set their own time zone for personal views.
Buying too many Pro/Enterprise seats early
What goes wrong: You give every teammate (sales, marketing, ops, exec) a Pro seat 'just in case.' That is 8 seats × $59 = $472/mo. Six months later, only 3 use sequences and Freddy AI — the rest could be Marketer licenses or read-only. You burned $3K+ on unused capacity.
How to avoid: Start with Pro seats only for sales reps actively running sequences. Use Marketer licenses for marketing ops and read-only for exec viewers. Audit seat usage quarterly via Admin Settings → Billing → Subscription.
Customizing record layouts inconsistently across roles
What goes wrong: SDRs and AEs see different field orders on the same Contact record. Trainings break ("click Lead Score, third from the top" — but it is seventh from the top for AEs). New hires onboard slower because the UI is non-standard. Cost: 2-3 extra weeks of ramp per hire.
How to avoid: Set the default layout per role at the account level (Admin Settings → CRM Customization → Modules → [module] → Layouts). Document the differences. Tell reps they can personalize but the default is the training reference.
Installing every Freshworks Marketplace integration on day one
What goes wrong: You connect Freshcaller, Freshdesk, Freshchat, RingCentral, Calendly, ZoomInfo, and Apollo in week one. Three are duplicates. Each is silently writing custom fields. By month two the contact record has 14 custom fields nobody set up intentionally and Freddy AI scoring is degraded by garbage signals.
How to avoid: Install one integration per week. Test each end-to-end before adding the next. Disconnect trials immediately. Document which integration owns which field.
Recap
Done — what's next
How to set up Freshsales contacts and accounts without making a mess
Read the next tutorial
Hand it off
A clean Freshsales setup pays compounding dividends for years. A messy one creates a Saturday-cleanup job every quarter. A vetted Freshsales specialist will run the entire setup — defaults, branding, roles, territories, integrations — typically as a one-shot $300-600 engagement, or ongoing ops support at $400-1,200/mo at $14-16/hr.
See specialist rates
Free is genuinely usable for the first 90 days for a 1-3 person team — you get contacts, accounts, deals, basic email, basic Kanban pipeline. You pay only when you need Freddy AI (Pro+, ~$59/seat/mo), sales sequences (Growth+, ~$15/seat/mo), workflows (Growth+), or multiple pipelines (Pro+). Start small; upgrade when a specific feature gates real work.
Freshsales = the sales CRM (contacts, accounts, deals, pipelines, sequences, Freddy AI for sales). Freshsales Suite = Freshsales + Freshmarketer (marketing automation, landing pages, email campaigns) bundled. If you only need CRM, buy Freshsales. If you also need marketing automation in the same tool, buy Suite. Most B2B teams under 20 reps thrive on Freshsales standalone and bolt on a separate marketing tool.
Yes. Freshsales has a built-in Migration Tool (Admin Settings → Migrate from another CRM) with native importers for HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, Salesforce, Insightly, and CSV. For larger migrations (10,000+ records with lots of history), use Freshworks' migration service or a partner. DIY migrations over 5,000 records typically lose 5-15% of data quality without careful field mapping. See our [HubSpot CRM setup](/tutorials/crm-sales/hubspot-crm/set-up-hubspot-crm-from-scratch) and [Pipedrive setup](/tutorials/crm-sales/pipedrive/set-up-pipedrive-account) guides for parallel patterns.
Sales seats (Free / Growth / Pro / Enterprise) give full CRM access: contacts, deals, sequences, reports. Marketer seats are bundled with Freshmarketer in the Suite and give access to email campaigns, landing pages, and forms — but read-only on deals. Most teams need 1 Sales seat per AE/SDR and 1-2 Marketer seats for the marketing team.
A solo founder with no team can finish account-level setup in 3-5 hours. A 5-person team with custom roles, territories, integrations, and record customization is 2-3 days of focused work. A 20-person organization with custom modules and Freddy AI configuration is a 2-3 week project — usually run by a specialist or Freshworks' onboarding services.
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