Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Contact management determines whether a CRM remains functional or devolves into chaos. Close CRM and HighLevel
Social selling thrives at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool is unable to keep pace with LinkedIn activities, comments, and warm introductions, you not only lose visibility but also miss out on deals to teams that maintain stronger relationships.
Folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-centric CRMs. Clarify focuses on transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while Folk provides teams with a flexible workspace conducive to social selling, enabling them to track contacts, signals, and pipelines all in one place.
This comparison will explore how each CRM facilitates genuine social selling workflows, helping you 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 begin not with a cold email or demo request, but with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or even a quiet profile visit. If your CRM can't capture these signals and connect them to real people and pipelines, your team risks operating in the dark while competitors forge relationships in plain sight.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to convert these interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, their source, their interests, and their proximity to making a purchase. Rather than viewing LinkedIn as merely a “nice-to-have” awareness tool, 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, turning them into follow-up opportunities
✔️ 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—not just listing contacts
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity, rather than attributing all success to last-click channels
What is Close CRM?
Close CRM is a dynamic sales platform designed for high-velocity inside sales teams, seamlessly integrating calling, SMS, and email. With its built-in two-way email sync, sales reps can send, receive, and track messages directly within Close, ensuring that every conversation is automatically associated with the appropriate contact and opportunity. The features like bulk emails, sequences, and performance reporting transform email into a structured outreach tool rather than just an isolated inbox.
What is HighLevel?
HighLevel is a comprehensive marketing and sales platform primarily targeted at agencies. It consolidates funnels, email, SMS, automation, and CRM into a single ecosystem that agencies can either resell or manage for their clients. While its extensive capabilities are impressive, the user interface and initial setup may feel daunting.
Feature comparison of Close CRM and HighLevel
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
Integrating your email with Close is incredibly easy: just connect your Gmail or Outlook account, authenticate through OAuth, and every message from a matched contact will automatically show up in Close’s timeline. Although Close doesn’t natively sync calendar events, you can seamlessly integrate meetings back into the CRM using Zapier or Google Calendar, ensuring your schedule is in sync with your sales pipeline.
On the other hand, HighLevel does not enhance contact information through social media; it depends on form captures, manual data entry, or API-based integrations.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Close’s email integration offers instant two-way synchronization by utilizing OAuth-based connections to both Gmail and Outlook. When a contact emails you, Close immediately 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, although these triggers operate every few minutes based on your Zapier plan.
In contrast, HighLevel lacks a social listening feature, and its real-time alerts are limited to email/SMS replies and incoming form messages.
Social Selling: Which channels?
Close may not have a traditional mail merge interface, but it enables 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 with templates, and allow Close to automatically send steps at your preferred pace, all while logging each interaction in its unified Inbox. However, Close does fall short with its lack of a visual campaign builder and comprehensive email campaign analytics, meaning you won’t find open-rate trends or A/B testing insights within the UI.
HighLevel supports messaging through WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram DM for both inbound and outbound communications, although it does not provide support for LinkedIn or Twitter.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
Close doesn't provide a conventional mail merge interface, but it enables the creation of multi-step drip campaigns through its Workflows engine, integrating email, calls, and SMS within a single sequence. You can enroll leads, personalize messages using templates, and allow Close to automatically dispatch each step at your preferred cadence, while every interaction is logged in its unified Inbox. However, Close does not feature a visual campaign builder or comprehensive email campaign analytics, meaning you won't have access to open-rate trends or A/B testing insights within the interface.
While sequences are available for SMS and email, they do not extend to social platforms. Additionally, in-browser automation and messaging templates are not supported.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
Close automatically monitors email opens from its unified Inbox, displaying open counts and timestamps for each message.
HighLevel tracks interactions across emails, SMS, calls, and web chats, but it does not log social media post interactions or profile activities.
folk CRM: The Best CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is an innovative social selling CRM that transforms social selling into a streamlined, repeatable workflow. It quickly captures contacts, maintains conversational context, and minimizes manual tasks through 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 track every interaction all in one place. Automated contact enrichment fills in missing information, deduplication keeps the database tidy, and shared notes and tags facilitate warm introductions and maintain relationship history across the team.
In daily social selling activities, folk ensures consistent execution: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline without sacrificing the human touch that secures deals.
Conclusion
In summary, Close CRM excels in email integration with seamless two-way syncing and a robust outreach platform, making it ideal for high-velocity sales teams. HighLevel offers a comprehensive ecosystem for agencies but may overwhelm users with its complexity. However, for teams prioritizing effective email integration, automation, and seamless sequencing in their social selling efforts, folk stands out as the best choice. Its innovative features streamline workflows and ensure that relationship-building remains at the forefront of your sales strategy.
Start your 14-day free trial or book a demo today.
Discover folk CRM
Like the sales assistant your team never had
