How Lori Systems transformed its sales and business with Freshsales

Lori is a tech-driven logistics services company that seamlessly coordinates haulage across frontier markets. Lori’s mission is to drive down the costs of goods in Africa where $180 billion is spent annually on haulage. Across the continent, logistics account for as much as 75% of a product’s price, compared to 6% in the US. Lori’s tech and operations-driven marketplace efficiently connects transport to shippers and moves billions of dollars worth of cargo. In three years, Lori has significantly improved logistics transparency, flexibility, reliability, and costs. Lori operates in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, DRC, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Ghana with plans to expand.

Their sales team works with both spectrums of a traditional business, that being supply and demand—Transporters (Supply) and Cargo Owners (Demand). The cargo sales team looks for companies with high volumes of cargo that need to be moved, while the transport sales team ensures a steady and sufficient supply of trucks.

The need for a CRM

In Q4 of 2018, the company was growing at a steady rate, but most of its sales process was still carried out on Google Sheets. This resulted in lesser visibility into clients and contracts. “It was not possible to see the history of notes of a client and how the relationship evolved; No action items or reminders made it difficult for the sales teams to follow-up; a limited mobile functionality made it difficult to update when making client field visits”, recalls Louise Bouton, the product operations manager at Lori. 

As the company grew, they were not able to integrate it with other systems such as a customer service ticketing system or email. And most importantly, there were limited roles and access management capabilities.

When they expanded towards multiple new verticals (Containerised Cargo and FMCG) and countries (Nigeria, Ghana), the added business complexity forced them to rethink and reorganize their sales processes.

Enter Freshworks Sales Cloud

Lori wanted to improve the visibility and categorization of their sales pipeline. They required all the information related to every client, lead, and deal in one place, including contacts, calls, past meetings, opportunities, etc.

While keeping track of the client data in one end, they also wanted insights into the performance of their sales teams, and keep them proactive by scheduling task reminders and follow-ups. With the advanced reporting in Freshsales (formerly Freshworks CRM), they were able to get sales activity reports with objective metrics to evaluate their team’s performance.

Freshsales also helped Lori scale as they grew. Once Freshsales was set up in their main office, they were able to easily replicate the CRM processes when they opened in a new region. With the company evolving fast, the solution was able to seamlessly transition them to the upgrade they needed—new tools for the new challenges they faced.

Freshsales, with its 2-way email and calendar sync, allowed their salespeople to adopt one platform as the single source of truth. It also integrated with the native customer support software, Freshdesk, enabling them to view the full context of their clients and leads.

The top three features that Lori Systems likes about Freshsales are its capability to create cross-reporting between different components of the business; the intelligent workflows that allow automating the sales processes; and the flexibility in customization to sync in with the business environment.

When asked to describe Freshsales in a few words, Louise says, “Highly customizable, flexible, and first-class customer service.”