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Contact management determines whether a CRM remains effective or devolves into chaos. Freshsales and HighLevel
Social selling thrives at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool can't keep pace with LinkedIn interactions, comments, and warm introductions, you not only lose visibility — you risk losing deals to teams that maintain closer relationships.
folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-focused CRMs. Clarify emphasizes converting unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk offers teams a versatile, social-selling-friendly workspace to monitor contacts, signals, and pipeline all in one location.
In this comparison, we'll explore how each CRM facilitates genuine social selling workflows, enabling you to 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 don't initiate with a cold email or a demo request; they begin with 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 people and pipelines, your team is navigating blind while competitors cultivate relationships in plain sight.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to transform those interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, their sources, their interests, and their proximity to making a purchase. Instead of viewing LinkedIn as merely 'nice-to-have awareness,' it evolves into a measurable, repeatable process within your revenue engine.
With a social selling CRM, your team can:
✔️ Identify buying signals from likes, comments, and profile visits, translating them into follow-ups
✔️ Monitor which prospects are familiar with you from content versus outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging
✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers, rather than just maintaining a list of contacts
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity, rather than attributing all credit solely to last-click channels
What is Freshsales?
Freshsales is Freshworks’ sales CRM tailored for small to mid-sized teams seeking a user-friendly interface complemented by robust automation tools. Users have the option to connect either Gmail or Microsoft 365, allowing for one-way or two-way sync to keep email threads aligned with the CRM. With features like templates, bulk emailing, and activity timelines, email becomes an integral part of how sales representatives manage their leads and opportunities.
What is HighLevel?
HighLevel serves as an all-in-one marketing and sales platform, primarily targeting agencies. It integrates funnels, email, SMS, automation, and CRM into a single cohesive environment that agencies can either resell or manage for their clients. While the extensive features are impressive, the interface and initial setup may feel overwhelming for some users.
Feature comparison of Freshsales and HighLevel
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. After connecting, Freshsales automatically scans incoming emails for existing contact addresses and logs conversations, helping to reduce clutter by allowing you to select which folders to sync.
In contrast, HighLevel does not enhance contact information from social media; instead, it depends on form captures, manual data entry, or API integrations.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Freshsales seamlessly integrates through native plugins, providing a constant connection to your Gmail or Outlook account and synchronizing email and calendar events in real time. Incoming messages from known leads are displayed within seconds, while outgoing emails logged in the CRM are instantly reflected in your email thread. Calendar events are updated immediately too, ensuring that meetings scheduled in Freshsales appear in your personal calendar without delay.
In contrast, HighLevel lacks a social listening feature. Its real-time alerts are restricted to email/SMS replies or incoming form messages.
Social Selling: Which channels?
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 analytics dashboards, you can easily track delivery rates, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. Enhanced deliverability is ensured through built-in retry logic and ISP throttling. Keep in mind, however, that more advanced features, such as heat-map click analysis and AI-driven send-time optimization, require an upgrade to Freshmarketer.
HighLevel supports messaging through WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram DM for both inbound and outbound communication, but it does not offer support for LinkedIn or Twitter.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
Freshsales offers a comprehensive Marketing Campaigns module—simply go to Campaigns > Email to create both blasts and automated Journeys based on user behaviors. With drag-and-drop templates, dynamic segments, and analytics dashboards that track delivery rates, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes, you have all the tools you need. Features like built-in retry logic and ISP throttling enhance deliverability. However, be aware that advanced functionalities such as heat-map click analysis or AI-driven send-time optimization require an upgrade to Freshmarketer.
While sequences can be utilized via SMS and email, they are not supported on social platforms. Additionally, in-browser automation and messaging templates are not available.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
With Freshsales, you can easily enable the “Track opens and clicks” feature in Settings > Email Settings. This allows every email sent through the native plugin to log open events and link clicks in the contact timeline. You'll find delivery, open, and click metrics displayed in both the Deal dashboard and Campaigns module. Keep in mind that open tracking depends on image-based pixels; if a recipient blocks images or views links in preview panes, the stats may be underreported.
HighLevel, on the other hand, tracks emails, SMS, calls, and web chats, but it does not log interactions with social posts or profile activities.
folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is a contemporary CRM designed for social selling, transforming it into a streamlined and repeatable process. It swiftly captures contacts, maintains conversational context, and minimizes manual tasks with enrichment and intelligent fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Tailored for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to consolidate leads from various sources, arrange them in customized pipelines, and monitor every interaction in a single location. Automatic contact enrichment fills in the gaps, deduplication keeps the database pristine, and shared notes and tags facilitate easy warm introductions and tracking of relationship histories across the team.
For effective daily social selling, folk ensures consistent execution: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline while preserving the human touch that actually closes deals.
Conclusion
In summary, Freshsales excels with its user-friendly interface and robust email integration, making it ideal for small to mid-sized teams. HighLevel offers a comprehensive all-in-one platform for agencies, albeit with a steeper learning curve. However, when it comes to effective email integration, automation, and sequencing, folk stands out as the premier choice. Its focus on social selling, seamless contact enrichment, and streamlined workflows ensures that teams can effortlessly transform interactions into successful outcomes.
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