Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Contact management is crucial; it's where a CRM can either remain effective or become overwhelming. Freshsales and Attio
Social selling thrives at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool struggles to keep pace with LinkedIn interactions, comments, and warm introductions, you risk losing not only visibility but also deals to teams that foster closer relationships.
Folk and Clarify both position themselves as contemporary, relationship-driven CRMs. Clarify specializes in transforming unstructured engagements into organized records, whereas Folk offers teams a flexible, social-selling-friendly workspace to monitor contacts, signals, and the pipeline all in one location.
This comparison will explore how each CRM facilitates genuine social selling workflows, empowering you to determine which one aligns with your team's relationship-building and nurturing strategies.
Why is a social selling CRM essential in 2026?
Most B2B transactions do not begin with a cold email or a demo request; they often initiate through a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or a discreet profile visit. If your CRM fails to capture these signals and connect them to real individuals and pipelines, your team operates blindly while competitors cultivate relationships openly.
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 a purchasing decision. LinkedIn shifts from being merely a “nice-to-have awareness tool” to a measurable, repeatable action within your revenue engine.
With a social selling CRM, your team can:
✔️ Identify buying signals from likes, comments, and profile views, transforming them into follow-ups
✔️ Track which prospects are familiar with you from content versus outbound efforts, enabling tailored messaging
✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers—not just maintain a contact list
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity, rather than attributing all credit to last-click channels
What is Freshsales?
Freshsales is the sales CRM from Freshworks tailored for small to mid-sized teams seeking an intuitive interface combined with robust automation features. Users can easily integrate Gmail or Microsoft 365 and opt for either one-way or two-way sync, ensuring that email threads remain synchronized between their inbox and the CRM. With the addition of templates, bulk email capabilities, and activity timelines, email becomes a vital tool for representatives managing their leads and opportunities.
What is Attio?
Attio is a versatile, data-model-first CRM that empowers teams to create custom objects, views, and workflows. It is ideal for organizations that desire complete control over the structure of their relationships and pipelines. However, this flexibility may come with a more complex setup process and a steeper learning curve compared to more structured CRMs.
Feature comparison of Freshsales and Attio
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
Freshsales provides native plugins for Gmail and Outlook that display email threads, scheduling tools, and relevant contact details directly within your inbox. By connecting these plugins, Freshsales automatically scans incoming emails for recognized contact addresses and logs conversations, allowing you to minimize clutter by selecting which folders to sync.
Similarly, Attio enriches your contacts with essential details such as company name, title, social media profiles, and company logos through integrations with platforms like Clearbit and Dun & Bradstreet, ensuring your lead database stays current with minimal manual effort.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Freshsales seamlessly connects through native plugins, creating a continuous link to your Gmail or Outlook account while synchronizing email and calendar events in real time. Incoming messages from recognized leads appear within seconds, and any outgoing emails logged in the CRM are instantly reflected in your email thread. Calendar events are updated immediately as well, ensuring that meetings scheduled in Freshsales are promptly visible in your personal calendar.
In contrast, Attio does not offer real-time alerts or social activity tracking. Its primary focus is on email, contact data, and workflow management, rather than on live engagement signals.
Social Selling: Which channels?
Freshsales offers a comprehensive Marketing Campaigns module—simply go to Campaigns > Email to create email blasts or automated Journeys based on user behaviors. Features like drag-and-drop templates, dynamic segments, and analytics dashboards provide insights into delivery rates, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. Additionally, built-in retry logic and ISP throttling enhance deliverability. However, keep in mind that more advanced features, such as heat-map click analysis and AI-driven send-time optimization, require an upgrade to Freshmarketer.
Attio focuses on outreach primarily through email and Gmail workflows, lacking native support for direct messaging or social media posting.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
Freshsales offers a comprehensive Marketing Campaigns module—simply navigate to Campaigns > Email to create email blasts or automated Journeys based on user behaviors. With drag-and-drop templates, dynamic segments, and detailed analytics dashboards, you can track delivery rates, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. Built-in retry logic and ISP throttling enhance deliverability. However, note that advanced features such as heat-map click analysis or AI-driven send-time optimization require an upgrade to Freshmarketer.
In contrast, Attio does not support in-context messaging or templated outreach. Instead, communication occurs via Gmail or integrations rather than natively within the browser.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
Freshsales allows you to enable the “Track opens and clicks” feature in Settings > Email Settings, ensuring that every email sent through the native plugin logs open events and link clicks in the contact timeline. You'll find delivery, open, and click metrics displayed in both the Deal dashboard and the Campaigns module. Keep in mind that opens depend on image-based pixels—if a recipient blocks images or views links in preview panes, you may encounter underreported statistics.
Attio monitors email interactions, call logs, and contact history within the CRM, but it does not track social media activity or engagement metrics.
folk CRM: The Best CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is a cutting-edge social selling CRM designed to streamline your social selling efforts into a clear, repeatable workflow. It swiftly captures contacts, maintains conversation context, and minimizes manual tasks through enrichment and intelligent fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Tailored for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to centralize leads from various sources, organize them within custom pipelines, and monitor every interaction in one unified space. Automated contact enrichment fills in missing details, while deduplication keeps your database pristine. Shared notes and tags simplify warm introductions and facilitate easy access to relationship histories across the team.
To support daily social selling activities, folk fosters consistent execution: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline—all while retaining the personal touch that truly closes deals.
Conclusion
In summary, Freshsales excels with its intuitive automation and email integration features, making it ideal for teams that rely heavily on email communication. Attio offers advanced customization and data modeling for those who prioritize control over simplicity. However, folk stands out as the best choice for teams focused on social selling. Its seamless email integration, automated contact enrichment, and streamlined workflows ensure that every interaction is captured and leveraged effectively, making social selling not just efficient but predictable.
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