Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Contact management can determine whether a CRM remains effective or becomes overwhelming noise. Close CRM and Clarify.
Social selling thrives at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool fails to keep pace with LinkedIn activities such as 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-first CRMs. Clarify emphasizes transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk provides teams with a flexible, social-selling-friendly workspace that consolidates contacts, signals, and pipelines in one convenient location.
In this comparison, we will explore how each CRM facilitates authentic social selling workflows so you can determine which one aligns best with your team's relationship-building and nurturing strategies.
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 even a casual profile visit. If your CRM cannot capture those signals and link them to actual people and pipelines, your team operates in the dark while your competitors cultivate relationships openly.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to convert those interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, their origin, interests, and proximity to making a purchase. Instead of viewing LinkedIn as merely a “nice-to-have awareness,” it becomes 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, transforming them into follow-ups
✔️ Track which prospects recognize you from content versus outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging
✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers — not just a list of contacts
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity rather than attributing all credit to last-click channels
What is Close CRM?
Close CRM is a sales platform designed for high-velocity inside sales teams, integrating calling, SMS, and email. With its built-in two-way email sync, representatives can send, receive, and track messages right within Close, ensuring that every conversation is automatically associated with the correct contact and opportunity. Features like bulk emails, sequences, and performance reporting transform email into an organized outreach tool rather than just a standalone inbox.
What is Clarify?
Clarify is a CRM tailored to convert emails and meetings into structured, searchable relationship data. It caters to teams who primarily operate from their inbox and prefer automatic logging with minimal manual effort. However, if you need advanced pipelines or multi-channel outreach capabilities, you might want to supplement it with additional tools.
Feature comparison of Close CRM and Clarify
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
Integrating your email with Close is a breeze: simply connect your Gmail or Outlook account, authenticate with OAuth, and all messages from matched contacts will automatically populate in Close’s timeline. Although Close doesn't sync calendar events natively, you can easily bridge your meetings into the CRM using Zapier or Google Calendar integration, ensuring your schedule is in sync with your sales pipeline.
Clarify enhances its LinkedIn integration with an enrichment engine that keeps essential profile details current. By utilizing both LinkedIn and the Chrome Extension, you can create enriched contacts in Clarify while browsing profiles, capturing key information effortlessly without the need for manual copy-pasting.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Close’s email integration enables immediate two-way synchronization through OAuth-based connections with Gmail and Outlook. When a contact emails you, Close records it instantly—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 goes for incoming messages. For calendar events, you can connect a Google Calendar via Zapier for automatic updates, though these triggers operate every few minutes based on your Zapier plan.
Clarify does not offer traditional social listening features for brand mentions or comment streams on social media. Instead, its alerts concentrate on CRM activities: pipeline updates, record changes, and various events can be communicated through integrations such as Slack, Zapier, webhooks, or the Clarify API.
Social Selling: Which channels?
Close doesn't provide a conventional mail merge interface, but it enables you to create multi-step drip campaigns through its Workflows engine, which integrates email, calls, and SMS into a cohesive sequence. You can enroll leads, tailor messages using templates, and allow Close to automatically execute steps at your preferred pace, with all interactions logged 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 interface.
When it comes to social selling, Clarify focuses solely on LinkedIn and email, rather than offering a wide-ranging multi-network approach. Its one-click LinkedIn integration, along with a Chrome extension, allows you to quickly add new contacts from LinkedIn to Clarify in just seconds.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
Close doesn’t provide a traditional mail merge interface; instead, it allows you to create multi-step drip campaigns using its Workflows engine, seamlessly integrating emails, calls, and SMS in one sequence. You can enroll leads, customize messages with templates, and let Close automatically manage the timing of each step while recording every interaction in its unified Inbox. However, it's important to note that Close does not include 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 directly in the UI.
In contrast, Clarify positions its AI as a co-pilot for drafting follow-up emails and notes derived from meetings and email threads, rather than as a comprehensive social sequencing tool.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
Close automatically monitors email opens from its unified Inbox, providing open counts and timestamps for each message.
Clarify consolidates essential sales activities by syncing emails, calendar events, and meetings into a comprehensive timeline for every contact, company, and deal. By connecting Gmail or Outlook, pertinent messages are logged automatically, eliminating the need for reps to manually input them into the CRM.
folk CRM: The Best CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is a cutting-edge social selling CRM that streamlines the social selling process into an efficient, repeatable workflow. It swiftly captures contacts, maintains conversation context, and minimizes manual tasks through automatic enrichment and smart fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Designed specifically for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to centralize leads from various sources, organize them into custom pipelines, and monitor every touchpoint in one convenient place. Automatic contact enrichment addresses gaps, deduplication keeps the database tidy, and shared notes and tags facilitate warm introductions and easy access to relationship histories across the team.
For effective daily social selling, folk fosters consistent execution: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline while preserving the human context that ultimately closes deals.
Conclusion
In summary, while Close CRM excels in seamless email integration and robust performance tracking for high-velocity sales, and Clarify offers efficient email and meeting logging for inbox-centric teams, folk stands out as the optimal choice for teams focused on social selling. With its unique ability to streamline LinkedIn-driven outreach, automate contact enrichment, and maintain essential relationship context, folk ensures consistent and effective follow-ups. For teams prioritizing email integration, automation, and sequencing, folk CRM is undoubtedly the best alternative.
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