Health Scoring
Health is a composite of three signals that you can compute inside Freshsales without a dedicated CS tool: product usage (last login date, weekly active users from your product API), engagement (open rate on CSM emails, response cadence), and support load (open tickets in Freshdesk, ticket sentiment from Freddy). Build the score as a custom number field on Account with a workflow that recalculates nightly. Bands at 0-40 (red), 41-70 (yellow), 71-100 (green) keep the dashboard scannable. Low scores trigger an automatic CSM task: “review account, log save plan.” The score is only as good as its inputs — start with three inputs, not eight.
// Webhook from product analytics into Freshsales custom field
fetch(`https://${domain}.myfreshworks.com/crm/sales/api/sales_accounts/${accountId}`, {
method: 'PUT',
headers: { Authorization: `Token token=${apiKey}`, 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
body: JSON.stringify({
sales_account: { custom_field: { cf_health_score: 62, cf_last_seen: '2026-04-26' } }
})
});Onboarding
Sequence-driven onboarding lives in Freshsales as a Sales Sequence applied to the new-customer contact within 24 hours of close. Milestones map to your product’s adoption gates (account created, first project shipped, second user invited, integration live). Handoff from sales at close-won runs through a workflow rule: when deal stage moves to Closed Won, fire actions to assign a CSM (round-robin within the territory), enroll the primary contact in the Onboarding sequence, and create a 30-60-90 task series on the account. The handoff meeting between AE and CSM has a templated agenda stored as a canned response.
Renewal Cycles
Renewal deals belong in a dedicated pipeline with stages like Renewal at risk, Engaged, Quote sent, Negotiation, Renewed, Churned. Start tracking 90 days before the renewal date — earlier than that and reps lose focus, later and there is no time to save a deal. Multi-stakeholder coordination is enforced by required fields on the deal: economic buyer, executive sponsor, technical champion, and legal counterpart. A renewal where any of those slots is blank gets flagged in the weekly pipeline review.
QBR Prep
Build a per-customer dashboard in Freshworks Analytics with four panels: 90-day usage trend, open and recently closed tickets, CSM activity log, and feature adoption (which modules are in use vs available). The CSM should be able to open this dashboard and have the QBR talk track in 10 seconds. Save the dashboard as a template so every CSM uses the same layout — comparison across accounts becomes possible.
Expansion Motion
Signals from product usage feed an Expansion pipeline: a customer hitting 80% of a license tier, an account adding a new department to the integration, a champion changing roles to a new business unit. Each signal creates a deal in the expansion pipeline assigned to the AE (with the CSM as collaborator) and starts a 30-day clock for first contact. The handoff from CS to Sales is the most under-built motion in most orgs — automate the deal creation, don’t rely on CSMs remembering to message the AE.
Common Failure Modes
Three. First, health score that no one looks at — build it into the CSM weekly review meeting agenda or it dies. Second, renewal pipeline that double-counts revenue against the new-business pipeline; tag deals with a Pipeline Source field and exclude renewals from the new-business forecast. Third, expansion deals owned by the CSM rather than the AE; CSMs aren’t comp’d to close, the deal stalls.
What to do this week
Pull the list of accounts with renewal dates in the next 90 days. Cross-check against health score. Any red-band account whose CSM hasn’t logged an activity in the last 14 days is the priority list — that is where churn happens.
