Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Contact management is crucial for a CRM's usability; it can either enhance your workflow or become a source of confusion. Close CRM and Clay.
Social selling thrives in the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool can't keep pace with LinkedIn activity, comments, and warm introductions, you risk losing visibility and, ultimately, deals to teams that maintain closer ties to their relationships.
folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-centric CRMs. Clarify excels at converting unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk offers teams a flexible workspace that supports social selling, allowing them to track contacts, signals, and pipelines seamlessly.
In this comparison, we will explore how each CRM facilitates genuine social selling workflows, helping you determine which one aligns best with your team's approach to building and nurturing relationships.
Why is a social selling CRM essential in 2026?
Most B2B deals initiate not with cold emails or demo requests but with LinkedIn comments, reposts, direct messages, or even casual profile visits. If your CRM fails to capture these signals and connect them to actual people and pipelines, your team operates in the dark while competitors cultivate visible relationships.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to convert these interactions into structured, actionable insights: identifying who engaged, their origins, interests, and proximity to making a purchase. Rather than viewing LinkedIn as merely a 'nice-to-have' awareness tool, it becomes a measurable, repeatable component of your revenue engine.
With a social selling CRM, your team can:
✔️ Identify buying signals from likes, comments, and profile views to transform them into follow-ups
✔️ Track which prospects are familiar with you through content versus outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging
✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers, rather than just maintaining a list of contacts
✔️ Analyze deals influenced by social activity instead of attributing all success to last-click channels
What is Close CRM?
Close CRM is a powerful sales platform designed for high-velocity inside sales teams, integrating calling, SMS, and email seamlessly. With its two-way email sync, sales reps can manage their communications directly within Close, ensuring every conversation is automatically linked to the appropriate contact and opportunity. Features like bulk emails, sequences, and performance reporting transform email into a structured outreach tool rather than just a standalone inbox.
What is Clay?
Clay is a data-centric prospecting and enrichment tool that many teams utilize alongside their CRM systems. It aggregates information from various sources to create highly targeted lead lists and workflows. However, you will typically require a separate CRM to effectively manage ongoing relationships and sales pipelines.
Feature comparison of Close CRM and Clay
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
Integrating email with Close is incredibly straightforward: simply connect your Gmail or Outlook account, authenticate using OAuth, and every message from a matched contact will seamlessly appear in your Close timeline. Although Close does not natively sync calendar events, you can easily bring meetings into the CRM using Zapier or Google Calendar integration, ensuring your schedule remains in sync with your sales pipeline.
In contrast, Clay depends on manual data entry or enrichment through integrations and does not automatically enhance profiles with social data, such as titles, bios, or photos.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Close’s email integration offers instant two-way synchronization using OAuth connections to Gmail and Outlook. When a contact emails you, Close automatically logs it—no need for polling intervals or manual BCC. Outbound emails sent from Close are instantly reflected in your email provider, and the same goes for inbound messages. For calendar events, you can connect your Google Calendar through Zapier for automatic updates, though these triggers operate every few minutes based on your Zapier plan.
In contrast, Clay lacks social listening, alerts, and real-time interaction tracking. Its primary focus is on workflow automation and task management.
Social Selling: Which channels?
Close may not offer a traditional mail merge interface, but it allows you to create multi-step drip campaigns through its Workflows engine, seamlessly integrating email, calls, and SMS into one sequence. You can enroll leads, personalize messages using templates, and let Close automatically send steps at your preferred cadence, while it logs every interaction in its unified Inbox. However, it's worth noting that Close does not provide a visual campaign builder or in-depth email campaign analytics, meaning you won't have access to open-rate trends or A/B testing insights within the UI.
On the other hand, Clay is not tailored for social selling; it prioritizes relationship management through CRM-style outreach rather than social messaging or content publishing.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
Close doesn’t provide a traditional mail merge interface, but it does allow you to create multi-step drip campaigns through its Workflows engine, integrating email, calls, and SMS into one seamless sequence. You can enroll leads, customize messages using templates, and let Close automatically dispatch steps at your preferred cadence, recording every interaction in its unified Inbox. However, it's worth noting that Close lacks a visual campaign builder and in-depth email campaign analytics, so you won't find open-rate trends or A/B testing insights within the interface.
Additionally, Clay does not support in-browser messaging, meaning you cannot send templated outreach via LinkedIn or other social media platforms.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
Close automatically monitors email opens from its unified Inbox, displaying open counts and timestamps for each message.
While Clay tracks CRM events and internal activities, it does not provide insights into external engagements such as social media interactions or clicks.
folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is a cutting-edge social selling CRM that streamlines your social selling process into a clean, repeatable workflow. It swiftly captures contacts, keeps conversations organized, and minimizes manual tasks with automatic enrichment and smart fields to ensure timely follow-ups.
Designed for outbound strategies driven by LinkedIn, folk enables teams to centralize leads from various sources, manage them in customized pipelines, and monitor every interaction in one accessible location. Automatic contact enrichment fills in missing information, deduplication maintains a tidy database, and shared notes and tags facilitate warm introductions and easy tracking of relationship histories across the team.
For effective daily social selling, folk encourages consistent execution: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline without sacrificing the human touch that seals the deal.
Conclusion
In conclusion, while Close CRM excels in seamless email integration for high-velocity sales teams, offering robust communication tools, and Clay focuses on data-centric prospecting, it lacks the real-time engagement features. For teams prioritizing effective social selling, folk stands out as the ultimate choice. It combines automated enrichment, customized pipelines, and a centralized workspace, ensuring timely follow-ups and streamlined workflows. With folk, your team can navigate social selling effortlessly, keeping conversations and connections alive.
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