Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Contact management determines whether a CRM remains effective or devolves into chaos. Close CRM and Nimble.
Social selling thrives in the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool fails 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-oriented CRMs. Clarify specializes in transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk provides teams with a flexible, social-selling-friendly workspace to monitor contacts, signals, and pipelines all in one place.
This comparison will explore how each CRM facilitates genuine social selling workflows, enabling you to 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 a subtle profile visit. If your CRM fails to capture these signals and connect them to real people and pipelines, your team operates in the dark while your competitors openly cultivate relationships.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to transform those interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, where they originated, what interests them, and how close they are to making a purchase. Rather than considering LinkedIn as merely a “nice-to-have awareness” tool, 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 and convert them into follow-ups
✔️ Track which prospects are familiar with you through content versus outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging
✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers—not just maintain a list of contacts
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity instead of attributing all credit to last-click channels
What is Close CRM?
Close CRM is a dynamic sales platform designed for high-velocity inside sales teams, integrating calling, SMS, and email into one cohesive system. With its built-in two-way email sync, representatives can send, receive, and track messages directly within Close, ensuring that each conversation is automatically connected to the appropriate contact and opportunity. Features like bulk emails, sequences, and performance reporting transform email into a structured outreach tool rather than leaving it as a standalone inbox.
What is Nimble?
Nimble is a lightweight, socially-oriented CRM that extracts context from both email and social media networks. It's particularly effective for relationship-driven sellers who frequently engage in their inboxes and on social platforms. While it may lack the complexity of larger suites, it offers an accessible solution for those not requiring extensive features for intricate pipelines or multi-team operations.
Feature comparison of Close CRM and Nimble
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
Integrating your email with Close is incredibly easy: simply connect your Gmail or Outlook account, authenticate via OAuth, and every message from matched contacts will automatically populate in Close’s timeline. Although Close doesn’t natively sync calendar events, you can seamlessly integrate meetings into the CRM using Zapier or Google Calendar, ensuring your schedule is in sync with your sales pipeline.
Nimble enhances your contacts by pulling in publicly available social profile information—such as photos, bios, and job details—from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and email signatures.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Close’s email integration offers instant two-way synchronization by utilizing OAuth-based connections to Gmail and Outlook. When a contact emails you, Close logs it immediately—eliminating the need for manual BCC or polling intervals. Outbound emails sent from Close are reflected in your email provider in real time, and the same applies to incoming messages. For calendar events, you can connect a Google Calendar through Zapier for automatic updates, though keep in mind that those triggers operate every few minutes based on your Zapier plan.
In contrast, Nimble lacks real-time alerts and social listening capabilities. Its primary focus is on enriching contact profiles rather than tracking live interactions.
Social Selling: Which channels?
Close doesn’t provide a traditional mail merge interface; instead, it enables you to create multi-step drip campaigns through its Workflows engine, integrating email, calls, and SMS into one cohesive sequence. You can enroll leads, personalize messages with templates, and let Close automatically dispatch steps at your preferred pace, all while logging every interaction in its unified Inbox. However, it's worth noting that Close lacks a visual campaign builder and comprehensive email campaign analytics, which means you won't find open-rate trends or A/B testing insights within the interface.
Nimble captures information from LinkedIn and Twitter but does not facilitate outreach on these platforms. Its primary function is contact management and enrichment.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
Close does not feature a conventional mail merge interface; instead, it enables the creation of 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 dispatch steps at your preferred cadence, all while recording each interaction in its unified Inbox. However, Close falls short in offering a visual campaign builder and in-depth 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, Nimble lacks in-browser templated messaging, requiring users to rely on email or external tools for structured outreach.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
Close automatically monitors and records the open rates for every email sent from its unified Inbox, displaying both open counts and timestamps beneath each message.
While Nimble tracks email correspondence and call history, along with some data enrichment, it does not log social interactions such as likes or comments.
folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is a cutting-edge social selling CRM that transforms social selling into an organized, repeatable process. It quickly captures contacts, maintains conversation context, and minimizes manual tasks with enrichment and smart fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Designed for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to consolidate leads from various sources, arrange them into custom pipelines, and monitor every interaction in one centralized location. Automatic contact enrichment fills in missing information, deduplication keeps your database tidy, and shared notes and tags facilitate warm introductions and track relationship history seamlessly across the team.
For effective daily social selling, folk promotes consistent execution: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline—all while preserving the human touch that ultimately closes deals.
Conclusion
In summary, Close CRM excels with its seamless email integration and high-velocity sales features, making it ideal for teams focused on direct outreach. Nimble offers a simplified, socially-driven approach to contact management but lacks advanced automation. In contrast, folk stands out as the premier choice for teams prioritizing email integration, automation, and sequencing. By centralizing social selling activities and enhancing relationship management, folk ensures your team remains engaged and organized, maximizing every opportunity for success.
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