Close vs folk: Which CRM for agencies wins?

Agencies don’t just need to find the right tools; they need solutions that ensure their pipeline execution remains consistent while delivering exceptional results. When critical prospect context is scattered across emails, calendars, and task lists, opportunities for follow-ups are lost, handoffs falter, and accurate forecasting becomes a challenge. A well-chosen CRM for agencies must accelerate new business while maintaining a thorough account history that supports not only renewals but also upsells and referrals.

In this blog post, we’ll explore two powerful CRM solutions: Close and folk. Close is designed with a focus on high-volume outbound sales, offering seamless integration of calling, email, SMS, and tasks to facilitate effective communication and consistent outreach. On the other hand, folk leverages AI to simplify contact and deal management, making it ideal for agencies handling multiple relationships where information can often become disorganized.

The choice between these tools will ultimately depend on your agency's specific needs, including the complexity of your processes, required customization, and the level of ownership you can commit to setup and ongoing management.

What is Close?

Close is a sales CRM designed specifically for outbound execution, seamlessly integrating calling, email, SMS, and tasks into your daily workflow. It effectively serves agencies focused on high-volume prospecting, appointment setting, or sales development as a core service. Manage your sales pipelines and opportunity statuses to monitor progress, while maintaining a comprehensive communication history on each lead record. With sequences and automations in place, you can ensure consistent outreach and follow-up routines, which is essential for agencies that rely on ongoing outbound activity and rapid iteration.

What is folk?

folk is an AI-driven CRM that streamlines the management of contacts, conversations, and deal context without requiring extensive setup. It is ideal for agencies juggling numerous parallel relationships with clients, partners, and prospects, where information is scattered across emails, calendars, and messaging platforms. Features like contact enrichment and deduplication ensure your records remain usable even when sourced from various locations. With structured pipelines and task management, you can effectively track new business, renewals, and referrals. This makes folk a perfect choice for agencies seeking a CRM solution that promotes coordination and disciplined follow-up without the need for a complex operational stack.

Feature comparison of Close and folk

Multi-pipeline and custom stages

In Close, you can create multiple pipelines, allowing different teams or processes to utilize their own unique pipeline configurations. Each pipeline is customizable with its own name and a distinct set of opportunity statuses, which represent the stage structure. This enables you to separate processes such as new business, renewals, and service delivery tracking into individual pipelines, preventing the sharing of statuses across all processes. You can easily adjust the pipeline structure by modifying the opportunity statuses for the specific pipeline.

Folk allows agencies to design pipelines tailored to various revenue motions, including retainers, projects, partnerships, or hiring. Stages can be customized to align with actual handoffs and qualification criteria, ensuring the pipeline accurately reflects the movement of deals. Having separate pipelines maintains clean reporting by service line and avoids forcing compromises across the entire team. Additionally, updates remain lightweight, allowing the CRM to evolve alongside the agency.

Client and Deal Activity Tracking

With Close, all your calls, emails, SMS, and tasks are integrated into the CRM, allowing them to be associated with the relevant leads and opportunities. Communication is seamlessly managed within the platform, and activity history is readily available on records, enabling teams to review past interactions and plan next steps. This facilitates effective sales tracking by documenting outreach and follow-ups alongside lead and deal records. Meetings and additional touchpoints can also be organized within the same workspace, depending on your configuration.

Folk ensures that relationship context remains linked to the appropriate contact and deal by consolidating communication history and activities into a single timeline. Notes, tasks, reminders, and previous interactions are easily accessible within the team's workspace, minimizing confusion about context during handoffs. This approach enhances agency workflows, allowing multiple team members to engage with the same account throughout sales, onboarding, delivery, and renewals. The aim is to provide quick access to past events, key information, and upcoming actions.

Automation and Workflows

Close enhances sales reporting with dashboards and reports that emphasize pipeline health, activity tracking, lead conversion, and overall sales performance. You can filter reports by date ranges and other criteria, while dashboards can be customized to visualize selected metrics. The reporting framework relies on CRM data, meaning that activity and pipeline insights are contingent upon logged information and the structure of opportunities. Additionally, forecasting and pipeline monitoring are integrated into the reporting layer outlined in Close’s documentation.

Folk streamlines automated follow-ups and internal handoffs through workflow rules and connectors that activate actions based on specific stages or activities. Agencies can standardize repetitive tasks such as assigning owners, creating tasks, sending reminders, or updating fields when a deal progresses. This approach not only minimizes administrative overhead but also ensures consistent execution among team members. Workflows are designed for practicality, allowing automation to enhance speed without introducing unnecessary complexity.

Reporting and Analytics

Close offers comprehensive sales reporting with dashboards and reports that emphasize pipeline health, activity tracking, lead conversion, and overall sales performance. You can filter reports by date ranges and other criteria, while dashboards can be tailored to visualize specific metrics. The reporting system relies on CRM data, meaning that activity and pipeline insights depend on accurate logging and the structure of opportunities. Forecasting and pipeline monitoring are effectively supported through the reporting framework outlined in Close’s documentation.

Folk enhances pipeline visibility, allowing you to track deal progression, assess stage health, and gauge overall momentum, enabling leaders to identify risks early on. Agencies can analyze conversion trends and cycle lengths at a macro level before delving into specific bottlenecks and their causes. This reporting facilitates discussions around forecasting, capacity planning, and performance evaluation by source or service line, ensuring a focus on clarity and informed decision-making rather than overwhelming dashboards.

Integrations and Data Hygiene

Close offers integrations through its API and event-based webhooks, and the help documentation also guides users on connecting external applications via platforms like Zapier or Make using OAuth or API keys. Key data hygiene features include duplicate detection during new lead creation, options to avoid duplicates during imports, and the ability to merge leads when duplicates are found. Import workflows incorporate duplicate checks against both the provided file and existing leads, while merge actions help consolidate records into a designated lead. These functionalities are thoroughly documented in Close's help resources and product update notes.

Folk prioritizes clean records by facilitating enrichment, deduplication, and structured fields, all designed to minimize manual data entry. Integrations link common agency tools, ensuring that contact and activity data remains consistent across all channels. This approach helps combat the typical CRM decay caused by duplicates, outdated information, and missing context, which can undermine reporting accuracy. A cleaner database not only enhances automation reliability but also ensures that the pipeline remains functional as it scales.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while Close excels in facilitating high-volume outbound sales with integrated communication tools and customizable pipelines, it may require more extensive management. Conversely, folk leverages AI to streamline contact and deal management, making it perfect for agencies juggling multiple relationships. With its focus on maintaining organized information and promoting effective follow-ups, folk stands out as the ideal CRM solution, empowering teams to work efficiently without the complexity that often hampers performance.

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