LinkedIn has evolved beyond a mere networking platform: It has become the largest battleground for B2B sales.

Choosing the right CRM can determine whether you conquer your pipeline or get lost amidst the chatter. When comparing Close CRM and Clarify, the crucial question isn't solely about features; it's about which platform offers the smartest advantage for cultivating relationships, tracking engagement, and converting LinkedIn interactions into successful deals.

While Close CRM and Clarify are solid options, if you're seeking a CRM specifically designed for LinkedIn workflows, folk CRM often sets a new standard.

Why a CRM for LinkedIn Is Essential in 2025

LinkedIn has established itself as the command center for B2B sales. By 2025, almost every decision-maker you wish to connect with will be there, sharing insights, engaging with colleagues, and making purchasing decisions in real time. If your sales strategy isn’t tailored for LinkedIn, you're missing out on valuable opportunities. A CRM designed for LinkedIn has transitioned from being a luxury to becoming the foundation of effective prospecting, relationship-building, and pipeline expansion.

Its true power lies in facilitating a multi-touch sales journey. Simply sending one cold email and hoping for the best is no longer sufficient. With an effective CRM, you can effortlessly track, manage, and engage prospects across various channels:

• Initiate conversations on LinkedIn. Connect, comment, and establish familiarity where your buyers are already engaged.
• Follow up through emails or calls. Your CRM preserves context, allowing each interaction to feel personalized.
• Nurture relationships over time. By synchronizing LinkedIn activity, you’ll know when to engage and when to close the deal.

In 2025, the teams that succeed will be those that engage prospects in their online habitat. LinkedIn is the epicenter of business interactions. Without a CRM tailored to harness its full potential, every outreach effort becomes slower, less precise, and more challenging to scale.

What is Close CRM?

Close CRM is specifically designed for inside sales, seamlessly integrating calling, emailing, and automation into one platform. Its built-in power dialer and sequence workflows enhance productivity and improve connection rates. With real-time reporting and customizable pipelines, Close empowers small teams to achieve consistent revenue growth.

What is Clarify?

Clarify is an AI-driven CRM designed to accelerate LinkedIn prospecting and networking for sales teams. Featuring a Chrome extension, it allows users to effortlessly capture and enrich contact details from LinkedIn profiles with just one click, automatically adding new prospects to Clarify. Its AI analyzes your LinkedIn interactions to recommend the best times for outreach, ensuring your messages reach prospects when they're most likely to respond. Additionally, Clarify offers smart follow-up suggestions based on past conversations, enabling you to maintain warm connections without guesswork.

Feature comparison of Close CRM and Clarify

AI Follow-ups

Close CRM currently lacks native LinkedIn profile capture functionality. When you encounter a prospect on LinkedIn, you must manually transfer their information into Close or use an external tool like Surfe or Leadjet. Unfortunately, there is no Chrome extension from Close that integrates with LinkedIn or overlays buttons on profiles, resulting in additional steps for sales reps who depend on LinkedIn as a key lead source, particularly in outbound-heavy workflows.

In contrast, Clarify’s LinkedIn Profile Capture leverages a Chrome extension, allowing users to create or update contact records directly from LinkedIn profiles. While browsing, reps can easily add a contact to Clarify with just a few clicks and associate them with the appropriate company. This process automatically transfers essential profile information into the CRM, eliminating the need for manual entry and ensuring that LinkedIn sourcing aligns with structured records that can be utilized in lists, filters, and pipelines.

Automated Contact Enrichment

Close CRM lacks the ability to enrich leads with LinkedIn data, as it does not integrate with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and fails to automatically sync job titles or profile links. Although Close can connect with third-party data providers, none offer direct integration with LinkedIn. Therefore, if you capture a lead from LinkedIn, you must manually update the CRM fields or utilize external enrichment tools.

In contrast, LinkedIn Lead Enrichment in Clarify aims to transform captured profiles into actionable CRM contacts. When a user saves a LinkedIn profile using the extension, Clarify automatically creates or updates the record with essential identity and company information. This process minimizes the need for manual edits to fields like name, role, and employer, providing sales teams with cleaner data sourced from LinkedIn for their outreach and follow-up efforts.

Smart Fields

Close CRM does not track LinkedIn activity; messages, connection requests, and DMs sent via LinkedIn are absent from the contact timeline. While Close excels in email and calling workflows, LinkedIn falls outside its tracking capabilities. Therefore, reps must manually log activities to gain a complete view of prospect interactions, which can hinder companies that rely heavily on LinkedIn as a communication channel.

Moreover, LinkedIn Message Templates are not natively managed within Clarify. Teams typically create and organize their LinkedIn templates in specialized outbound or social selling tools, with Clarify serving as the central CRM. By utilizing contact and deal data stored in Clarify, teams can personalize messages when crafting them in external tools, allowing Clarify to concentrate on data and pipeline management instead of comprehensive LinkedIn messaging automation.

AI-Powered Message & Sequence Generation

Close CRM does not track LinkedIn activity, meaning that messages, connection requests, and DMs sent via LinkedIn are absent from the contact timeline. While Close excels in managing email and calling workflows, it overlooks LinkedIn entirely, requiring representatives to log their activities manually to gain a comprehensive view of prospect interactions. For organizations that rely on LinkedIn as a crucial channel, this lack of visibility can pose a significant hurdle.

On the other hand, LinkedIn Engagement Tracking in Clarify relies on integrations and workflows that funnel activity data into the CRM. When LinkedIn messages or events are transmitted to Clarify, they are displayed alongside emails, meetings, and other interactions on the contact timeline. This streamlined approach allows representatives to easily review who has been contacted on LinkedIn and when, while Clarify efficiently organizes this history without replacing the specialized tools used for everyday LinkedIn messaging.

Next Best Action

Close CRM currently lacks a Chrome extension for LinkedIn, as its primary focus is on email, calls, and tasks rather than social prospecting. Therefore, users won't find a Close overlay while browsing LinkedIn, nor is there a method to capture leads or engage with them directly in the browser. To optimize your workflow across both platforms, you'll need to install an external extension to bridge this gap.

The Chrome Extension for LinkedIn serves as a crucial link between Clarify and the LinkedIn interface, enabling users to capture prospects directly from profile pages and seamlessly send that data to Clarify in just one step. Contacts created through this method are automatically populated with essential fields in the CRM, reducing manual data entry. This extension is specifically tailored for easy, individual capture of LinkedIn profiles into Clarify, rather than supporting bulk operations.

folk CRM: The best CRM alternative for LinkedIn!

folk is the sales assistant every team has been eagerly awaiting. Designed with simplicity, integration, and proactivity in mind, this CRM handles repetitive tasks, allowing your reps to concentrate on what truly matters: cultivating genuine relationships on LinkedIn and beyond. With an impressive 4.5/5 rating on G2, folk stands out as one of the most reliable AI-powered CRMs for dynamic and ambitious teams.

Tailored specifically for startups, agencies, and sales-driven teams, folk makes AI practical, efficient, and easy to manage. It accelerates the conversion of LinkedIn connections into qualified opportunities while ensuring your workflow remains seamless.

1. Instant LinkedIn Prospect Capture with the folkX Extension

Prospecting on LinkedIn can be time-consuming, but folk simplifies the process. With the folkX Chrome extension, you can effortlessly capture leads from LinkedIn or Sales Navigator and add them directly to your CRM with just one click. Whether you're saving a single profile or hundreds from a filtered search, every detail is automatically imported into your database, including names, job titles, companies, and emails.

Say goodbye to tedious copy-pasting and managing multiple spreadsheets. Your entire prospect list is neatly organized in one place, fully integrated with your workflows, enabling your team to work more efficiently and focus on turning connections into opportunities rather than spending hours on manual data entry!

2. Smart Data Enrichment and Always-Clean Contact Profiles

Connecting with decision-makers becomes effective only when you have complete and accurate data. folk eliminates the hassle of tedious research by automatically enriching your LinkedIn contacts with verified emails, company details, phone numbers, and roles. With a single click, you gain everything necessary to personalize your outreach and initiate meaningful conversations.

The platform employs intelligent deduplication to maintain a clean and reliable database, even when multiple team members add the same contacts. Rather than wasting time managing disorganized spreadsheets or guessing who is responsible for which lead, folk keeps your data organized and up to date, making every LinkedIn outreach relevant and impactful.

3. Personalized LinkedIn Outreach with AI-Generated Message Templates

folk revolutionizes your prospecting approach on LinkedIn by providing AI-powered message templates directly within the LinkedIn inbox. Upon opening a conversation, you instantly receive smart suggestions for connection requests, follow-ups, and outreach messages tailored to your prospect’s profile and context.

You can easily edit and personalize these suggestions before sending them manually, ensuring full compliance with LinkedIn’s policies. There’s no risky automation or time-consuming copy-pasting between tools; everything occurs where the conversation begins, making your outreach faster, more relevant, and significantly more natural.

👉 Try folk CRM for free

Summary: folk CRM's LinkedIn Features

• Capture leads instantly with the folkX Chrome extension, importing LinkedIn and Sales Navigator profiles in one click, with every detail automatically organized in your CRM.
• Effortlessly enrich contact data by retrieving verified emails, company details, and roles, while maintaining a clean and accurate database through intelligent deduplication.
• Send smarter LinkedIn messages using AI-powered templates directly in the LinkedIn inbox, facilitating faster personalization without relying on risky automation!

Conclusion

When evaluating CRM options for LinkedIn, Close CRM excels in inside sales integration and productivity tools, while Clarify offers AI-driven automation for LinkedIn prospecting and intelligent follow-ups. However, for teams seeking a dedicated CRM for LinkedIn workflows, folk CRM stands out as a premier alternative. It streamlines lead capture, enriches contact profiles seamlessly, and provides AI-generated message suggestions within the LinkedIn inbox, enhancing efficiency and relationship-building.

👉🏼 Start your 14-day free trial or book a demo today.