Freshdesk, Zoho takes on Salesforce in its homeground San Francisco with satirical campaigns on ground and the skies

CHENNAI: Chennai based Freshdesk took on CRM giant Salesforce last week with a series of satirical ads splashed across municipality buses in San Francisco. The month long ad campaign was launched right at the heart of Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual event. Using feedback from Salesforce customers and also using their own past experience with the product, Freshdesk created ads using customer pain points.These MUNI or municipality buses can be spotted on roads in San Francisco and have been raising a lot of eyebrows and curiosity amongst the CRM community.
The satirical campaign called 'Sorry we didn't launch earlier' is an apology from Freshsales to all CRM users scorned by Salesforce. The ad talks about how users wasted money, time and resources trying to get Salesforce to work for them. Freshsales goes on to apologise for not launching earlier.
Dreamforce by Salesforce is a big CRM event that happens every year, this year held between October 4-7,2016. With over 180,000 attendees, Dreamforce has become a destination of enormous magnitude inviting hundreds of tech enthusiasts and users of the Salesforce products and services.
While Freshdesk took Salesforce on ground, another state based player Zoho took to the skies. An airplane in San Francisco carried phrases “#Outsmart Einstein. Zoho CRM” and “zoho.com/outsmart” in the sky around the same time.

When Salesforce.com was launched in 2000, it revolutionized the software industry and the cloud movement was born. While the motto was ‘the end of software’, the Salesforce promise was that its application was designed for and to help salespeople be more effective.
Freshdesk is has over 80,000 customers, 700+ employees across the globe and $94 million in funding. Freshdesk was the only company added this year to Gartner’s 2016 Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center.
With Zendesk setting up base in India at Bengaluru recently and Salesforce launching Salesforce DX, a new model for building and deploying applications to their platform, the CRM space is heating up as players vie for the top spot.