Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Contact management determines whether a CRM remains effective or devolves into chaos. Close CRM and Brevo.
Social selling thrives at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool struggles to keep pace with LinkedIn activity, comments, and warm introductions, you not only lose visibility but also risk losing deals to teams that maintain closer relationships.
Folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-driven CRMs. Clarify excels at transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while Folk offers teams a flexible, social-selling-friendly workspace for tracking contacts, signals, and pipelines all in one place.
In this comparison, we will 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 originate from a cold email or a demo request; they begin with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or a silent profile visit. If your CRM can't capture these signals and connect them to real individuals and pipelines, your team is navigating without a compass while your competitors cultivate relationships right before your eyes.
A social selling CRM consolidates those interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, where they originated, what their interests are, and how close they are to making a purchase. Rather than viewing LinkedIn as merely a 'nice-to-have,' it transforms 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 views, converting them into follow-ups
✔️ Track which prospects are familiar with your content versus those reached through outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging
✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers—beyond just contacts in a list
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity, rather than attributing all credit to last-click channels
What is Close CRM?
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Close CRM is a dynamic sales platform designed for high-velocity inside sales teams, integrating calling, SMS, and email. With its built-in two-way email sync, sales representatives can effortlessly send, receive, and track messages directly within Close, linking every conversation to the appropriate contact and opportunity automatically. Features like bulk emails, sequences, and performance reporting transform email into a cohesive outreach tool rather than an isolated inbox.
What is Brevo?
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Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, is an email, SMS, and marketing automation platform that integrates CRM capabilities for added functionality. It appeals to companies that focus on engagement and campaign management rather than intricate sales processes. While its CRM features adequately meet basic requirements, they lack the depth found in dedicated sales CRMs.
Feature comparison of Close CRM and Brevo
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
Integrating email with Close is incredibly straightforward: simply connect your Gmail or Outlook account, authenticate using OAuth, and every email exchanged with a matched contact will automatically populate Close’s timeline. Although Close lacks native calendar event syncing, you can seamlessly integrate meetings into the CRM using Zapier or Google Calendar, ensuring your schedule is in sync with your sales pipeline.
In contrast, Brevo does not offer profile enrichment through social media, relying instead on data gathered from forms or email interactions.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
With Close's email integration, you benefit from immediate two-way sync through OAuth-based connections to Gmail and Outlook. When a contact emails you, Close instantly logs it—eliminating the need for polling intervals or manual BCC. Outbound emails sent from Close are reflected in your email provider in real time, and the same applies in reverse. For calendar events, you can connect a Google Calendar via Zapier for automatic updates, though note that these triggers may run every few minutes based on your Zapier plan.
On the other hand, Brevo lacks social listening and alert features, focusing primarily on email, SMS, and transactional marketing tools.
Social Selling: Which channels?
Close may not feature 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 cohesive sequence. You can enroll leads, customize messages using templates, and let Close automatically execute steps at your preferred pace, while it logs every interaction in its unified Inbox. That said, Close does not provide a visual campaign builder or in-depth email campaign analytics, meaning you won't find open-rate trends or A/B testing insights within the interface.
On the other hand, Brevo is centered on email and SMS, and it does not offer social selling or integrate it into its product suite.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
While Close doesn’t provide a traditional mail merge interface, it allows you to create multi-step drip campaigns through its Workflows engine, integrating email, calls, and SMS into a cohesive sequence. You can enroll leads, customize messages using templates, and let Close automatically dispatch steps at your preferred pace, recording every interaction in its unified Inbox. However, Close lacks a visual campaign builder and comprehensive 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, Brevo does not support templated messaging or browser-based sequences, restricting campaigns to email and SMS formats only.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
Close automatically monitors email opens from its unified Inbox, displaying open counts and timestamps for each message.
This engagement tracking encompasses email opens, clicks, and SMS delivery rates, while social activity is not documented in the contact history.
folk CRM: The Best CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is an innovative social selling CRM that transforms your social selling efforts into a streamlined workflow. It quickly captures contacts, maintains conversation context, and minimizes manual tasks through smart fields and enrichment, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Designed specifically for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to consolidate leads from various sources, organize them in tailored pipelines, and monitor every interaction in one convenient location. Automatic contact enrichment fills in gaps, deduplication keeps your database organized, and shared notes and tags facilitate easy warm introductions and relationship tracking across the team.
For daily social selling activities, folk ensures consistent execution: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline, all while retaining the essential human touch that seals the deal.
Conclusion
In conclusion, while Close CRM excels at integrating communication tools for high-velocity sales, and Brevo offers solid email marketing automation, they lack the robust social selling capabilities needed for today’s market. Folk CRM stands out as the premier choice for teams prioritizing email integration, automation, and sequencing. It streamlines contact management and enriches data seamlessly, ensuring teams can maintain context, execute personalized outreach, and foster meaningful relationships effortlessly. For effective social selling, folk is undeniably the best alternative.
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