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Contact management is where a CRM either remains effective or devolves into chaos. folk CRM and Clarify
Social selling thrives at 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 stronger relationships.
folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-focused CRMs. Clarify emphasizes transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk offers teams a flexible, social-selling-friendly workspace to monitor contacts, signals, and pipelines all in one location.
In this comparison, we will explore how each CRM facilitates genuine social selling workflows, enabling you to determine which one aligns best with your team's approach to building and nurturing relationships.
Why is a social selling CRM crucial in 2026?
Most B2B deals do not begin with a cold email or a demo request; they often start with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or even a subtle profile visit. If your CRM cannot capture these signals and connect them to real individuals and pipelines, your team is operating in the dark while competitors nurture relationships openly.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to convert these interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, their origins, their interests, and their readiness to buy. Rather than considering LinkedIn as merely a 'nice-to-have awareness,' it transforms into a measurable, repeatable component within your revenue strategy.
With a social selling CRM, your team can:
✔️ Identify buying signals from likes, comments, and profile visits, and convert them into follow-ups
✔️ Track which prospects are familiar with 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 interactions instead of crediting only last-click channels
What is folk CRM?
folk CRM is a modern, lightweight CRM tailored for teams that operate across email, LinkedIn, and spreadsheets, providing a unified workspace. It seamlessly integrates with Gmail and Outlook to automatically log emails and meetings, while its Chrome extension offers a comprehensive CRM sidebar for swift updates right in your inbox. From this sidebar, users can dispatch personalized sequences, monitor engagement, and link every interaction to contacts, companies, and deals.
What is Clarify?
Clarify is a CRM designed to convert emails and meetings into structured, searchable relationship data. It's ideal for teams immersed in their inboxes, offering automatic logging with minimal manual effort. However, if you need advanced pipelines or multi-channel outreach capabilities, you may need additional tools to supplement it.
Feature comparison of folk CRM and Clarify
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
folk CRM offers a seamless one-click setup for Gmail and Outlook—simply authenticate, and every incoming or outgoing email will be automatically linked to the appropriate contact or deal record. Its integrated scheduler directly logs events into Google or Microsoft calendars and syncs them back to folk’s task list, providing you with a cohesive timeline of emails and meetings. You can send personalized bulk sequences, monitor opens and clicks, and utilize folk’s CRM inbox for replies without the need to switch tabs. This intuitive experience reduces context-switching and ensures your team remains aligned on every conversation. folk CRM stands out as one of the best CRMs for Email Integration!
Clarify enhances its LinkedIn integration with an enrichment engine to keep basic profile details current. With the LinkedIn and Chrome Extension integrations, you can create enriched contacts in Clarify while browsing profiles, automatically capturing essential information without the hassle of manual copy-paste.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
folk CRM employs a direct OAuth connection for Gmail and Outlook, ensuring seamless synchronization. Emails are logged instantly to the appropriate contact or deal the moment they are sent or received, eliminating the need for manual entries. Meetings scheduled through folk’s native scheduler are immediately reflected in both your calendar and the CRM timeline. Behind the scenes, folk utilizes push-notification webhooks from Google and Microsoft, which reduces latency and ensures that every interaction appears within seconds.
On the other hand, Clarify does not offer traditional social listening features for tracking brand mentions or comment streams on social media. Instead, its alerts concentrate on CRM activities: pipeline updates, record changes, and various events can be highlighted through integrations such as Slack, Zapier, webhooks, or the Clarify API.
Social Selling: Which channels?
folk CRM's email sequences feature acts as a built-in mail-merge and campaign tool, allowing you to create multi-step sequences with personalized templates and scheduling rules. You can easily enroll contact lists directly from folk's interface. Furthermore, opens and replies sync instantly to each contact's timeline, while comprehensive performance reports enable you to refine subject lines and content for optimal engagement—all without the need for add-ons!
In terms of social selling, Clarify focuses solely on LinkedIn and email, rather than a wide-ranging multi-network approach. With a one-click LinkedIn integration and a Chrome extension, you can quickly add new contacts from LinkedIn to Clarify in just seconds.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
Folk CRM’s email sequences feature acts as an integrated mail-merge and campaign tool, allowing you to create multi-step sequences with personalized templates and scheduling rules. You can easily enroll contact lists directly from folk’s interface, while opens and replies sync instantly to each contact’s timeline. Comprehensive performance reports enable you to refine subject lines and content for optimal engagement, all without the need for add-ons!
Clarify positions its AI as a collaborative assistant for drafting follow-up emails and notes from meetings and email threads, rather than as a comprehensive social sequencing engine.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
folk CRM automatically incorporates open- and click-tracking pixels into all outgoing emails, providing real-time metrics displayed on contact timelines and campaign dashboards. You can disable tracking across the workspace to boost deliverability, but when activated, you gain access to consolidated reports, link-level CTR data, and detailed engagement histories for each contact— all without the need for external add-ons.
Clarify enhances tracking of essential sales activities by synchronizing emails, calendars, and meetings into a unified timeline for every contact, company, and deal. When connected to Gmail or Outlook, relevant messages are logged automatically, eliminating the need for reps to manually enter them into the CRM.
Conclusion
In conclusion, both folk and Clarify offer valuable features for relationship-driven sales. Clarify excels in auto-logging emails and meetings, making it ideal for inbox-focused teams. However, for those prioritizing social selling, folk stands out as the superior choice. With seamless email integration, advanced automation, and flexible sequencing capabilities, folk provides a cohesive workspace that enhances visibility and engagement across channels. For teams that thrive on email interactions and social connectivity, folk is the clear winner.
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