What is Galaxy Freight?
Galaxy Freight is a freight forwarding company based in Mumbai, operating across multiple branches. Like most firms in the sector, their sales cycle lives and dies on response speed and relationship quality. A lead that goes cold because no one followed up in time isn't a lost deal — it's a deal that was never properly tracked in the first place.
Before moving to a CRM, each sales rep maintained their own spreadsheets. Updates surfaced unpredictably over email. If you wanted to know what was happening with a lead in another branch, you asked someone. If that person was busy, you waited. Cross-branch visibility wasn't a system problem — it was barely even acknowledged as a problem. It was just how things worked.
That's often how it goes. The inefficiency becomes invisible because everyone's adapted to it.
Why they passed on salesforce and SAP
Before settling on Bigin, Galaxy Freight looked at the obvious options. They didn't go with them.
"Pricing and user training were complicated," said Mahak Barjatiya of Galaxy Freight, explaining why they rejected Salesforce and SAP.
This is a more common decision than the enterprise software industry likes to admit. For a multi-branch freight firm with a distributed sales team, a platform that requires weeks of onboarding and a significant licensing spend isn't automatically the right answer — even if it's the most well-known one. The best CRM is the one your team will actually use consistently, not the one with the longest feature list.
Three changes that shifted the numbers
After moving to Bigin, Galaxy Freight made three specific changes to how they managed inbound leads.
Email-In for automatic lead capture. Rather than relying on reps to manually log every inbound inquiry, they set up Email-In to capture them automatically. An email arrives, a record is created. No manual step, no chance of it getting buried in a personal inbox and forgotten.
This matters more than it sounds. In freight, a lot of inquiries arrive speculatively — someone shopping around, testing the market, not necessarily committed to doing business. If every one of those had to be logged by hand, the friction alone would cause some to slip through. Email-In removes that friction entirely.
QR codes at exhibitions. Trade shows and freight exhibitions are a significant source of leads, but collecting them has traditionally meant business cards — which get lost, get entered into spreadsheets days later, and lose context entirely by the time someone follows up. Galaxy Freight used QR codes instead, so leads collected at events fed directly into the CRM without any manual transfer step.
Stage transition rules requiring identity verification. This one is worth explaining because it's a bit different from the other two.
In freight forwarding, you can spend real time progressing a deal before discovering that the person you're talking to can't actually authorise it, or that the company doesn't meet your compliance requirements. Galaxy Freight built rules into their pipeline that required identity-verification documents before a deal could advance past a certain stage.
This is Email-In operating as a filter in the broader sense — not just capturing inbound emails, but enforcing a standard that separates inquiries worth pursuing from ones that will drain time without producing revenue.
The 30% productivity lift
Productivity and revenue both improved by around 30% after the changes. Galaxy Freight are careful to describe this as directional rather than precise, and that honesty is worth noting. It reflects faster deal execution and visibility across branches — two things that compound over time rather than showing up cleanly in a single metric.
The real shift was structural. When leads are captured automatically, when exhibition contacts don't fall through the cracks, and when stage rules enforce a minimum standard before deals progress, the pipeline stops being a list of intentions and starts being a reliable reflection of what's actually happening.
For a multi-branch operation, that cross-branch visibility alone changes how teams communicate. Instead of status updates requested over email, managers can see the pipeline directly. Instead of relying on individual reps to surface problems, the system surfaces them.
The broader lesson: Filtering is a feature, not a workaround
It's tempting to think of lead qualification as a sales skill — something a good rep does instinctively. And it is that. But it's also a systems question.
If your CRM captures everything indiscriminately and then relies on human judgment to sort it, you're creating work. If your pipeline has no gates, anything can advance regardless of quality. Galaxy Freight's approach — using Bigin's Email-In to capture leads automatically, then building rules that enforce qualification before progression — is a simple version of something more sophisticated firms spend a lot of money engineering.
The principle is the same regardless of scale: your pipeline should reflect the deals worth pursuing, not every email that ever arrived in the inbox.
Faqs
What is Email-In, and how does it work in a CRM context?
Email-In is a feature that automatically creates a CRM record — typically a lead or contact — when an email arrives at a designated address. Instead of a rep manually logging the inquiry, the system does it. The rep then works from the CRM record rather than from their inbox.
Can Email-In tell the difference between a valid inquiry and spam?
Not on its own. Email-In captures inbound emails — the filtering work happens through how you structure your pipeline afterwards. Galaxy Freight combined automatic capture with stage transition rules that required verification before deals could progress. The two together act as a filter; Email-In alone doesn't.
Why use QR codes instead of a form on the website?
For trade show and exhibition contexts, a form requires either reliable internet access on the lead's device or a rep with a tablet on hand. A QR code can be printed on any material, scanned on a phone, and feeds into the CRM directly. It's a lower-friction method for a specific situation, not a replacement for web forms generally.
Is stage transition enforcement a standard CRM feature?
Most modern CRMs allow you to configure rules around pipeline stage transitions. The specific implementation varies — some require field completion, others can require document attachments or approval steps. It's worth checking what your CRM supports before assuming it's a custom build.
Why did Galaxy Freight choose Bigin over Salesforce or SAP?
Pricing and user training complexity were the stated reasons. For a distributed team across multiple branches, a platform that's faster to onboard and more cost-effective to license was the practical choice. The right CRM isn't always the most feature-rich one — it's the one that gets adopted and used consistently.
Before you chase every metric in your CRM, read this first — Why small businesses win with 3 CRM metrics, not 30 | Real-world examples
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