How Freshworks is Turning Digital Channels into Predictable Revenue Streams

Freshworks provides intelligent customer engagement software for businesses of all sizes, making it easy for teams to win customers for life. Freshworks SaaS products are ready to go, easy to use, and offer quick return on investment. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks has a dedicated team operating from 13 global locations throughout the world. 

The Problem: Missing Measurements and Budget Management

In 2019 Freshworks’ marketing operations team began streamlining various marketing and operational activities. They were looking for a one-stop solution to address:

  1. Marketing budget management – they have hundreds of campaigns cutting across verticals in their global marketing organization going live each year.
  2. Measuring ROMI – with little visibility into spend, it was increasingly difficult to calculate the corresponding ROI to their campaigns. The biggest challenge to this was inability to track spend on Google advertising due to multiple cross-functional teams being involved. 
  3. Tracking the buyer journey – they wanted to measure which touchpoints were the most successful in converting prospects and where the spend could be cut or optimized. 

They discovered Uptempo and recognized the platform’s multi-faceted approach as the answer to their complex use case.

The Solution: Taking Control of Budgeting, Plans, and Measurements

Freshworks was in the early stages of implementing Coupa and decided to implement Uptempo at the same time. They rolled out Uptempo in Q1 of 2020 and within 6 months, Freshworks had automated the reconciliation of data from financial sources into Uptempo in real time, enabling dashboards to show accurate financial data that provided marketers with actionable insights. With these integrations, Uptempo became the new backbone of their tech stack. 

All of their planned campaigns are created as line items to generate the Uptempo ID. Through the Coupa integration, a purchase request (PR) is raised and the PO is generated. Then, the actuals are updated and a complete view of the quarter – plan, forecast, PR, PO, and actuals – is visible in the Uptempo dashboard. 

Freshworks used the Uptempo ID to connect all data points in different systems. Uptempo IDs are passed to Freshworks’s CRM, as an activity for each new contact created so marketers can see the entire history of the contact in terms of campaign touchpoints. Leads coming in from external third party content syndicators also were tagged through an integration between Freshworks CRM and their Demand Acceleration Platform (DAP), Integrate. Finally all of the marketing spend data tracked in Uptempo is fed into a BI platform to represent their returns on their marketing investments (ROMI).

Along with better marketing budget control and performance measurement, Uptempo also helped improve Freshworks’s marketing planning process. At the beginning of every quarter, all marketing teams formulate their activity plans and forecast their budgets in Uptempo. Then at the end of the quarter they can compare plans against actual execution and use that to better inform the next round of planning.  

Calculating the ROI of Digital Channels

Optimizing ad spend was a critical component for why Freshworks chose to partner with Uptempo. Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads make up a significant portion of their budget and they needed to make those channels as efficient as possible. 

Freshworks marketing operation team championed the first ever Uptempo and Google Ads integration in Q1 2020. With the shift to all-digital when the COVID-19 pandemic struck shortly thereafter, the integration was timely – and successful.

Their goal was to make spend information and performance metrics available at a Google Ads Campaign level within Uptempo. They were able to achieve this using the Uptempo IDs as a marker. 

The Uptempo IDs are passed on to Google Ads to track campaign performance and customer journey touchpoints. Since Coupa’s dataset was also connected, Uptempo now held real-time insights to Freshworks’ digital budgets and metrics.

The successof Uptempo and Google Ads integration encouraged Freshworks to also integrate LinkedIn Ads in order to view the ROI of that channel. At present, every dollar spent on LinkedIn campaigns is automatically written into Uptempo and the PR/PO is updated. 

The modelling is something Freshworks continues to review and optimize. But these integrations have allowed them to better track digital ad spend by platform channel as well as by various campaigns, which hasled to better business conversations about how much to invest where. 

Greater Transparency Leads to Revenue Predictability

Bringing all their financials into one platform has made budget transparency and visibility a reality.The quarterly reviews with their leadership and senior management team are so smooth now as the Freshworks team can generate reports on marketing investments and their outcomes through the Uptempo and BI platform connection. 

With Uptempo as the backbone of their tech stack, Freshworks marketers know where they can invest next to meet their long and short term revenue goals.