Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Contact management determines whether a CRM remains effective or devolves into chaos. Folk CRM and Freshsales exemplify this.
Social selling thrives at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool fails to keep pace with LinkedIn interactions, comments, and warm introductions, you not only lose visibility but also miss out on deals to teams that maintain closer connections.
Folk and Clarify are positioned as modern, relationship-centric CRMs. Clarify specializes in converting unstructured interactions into organized records, while Folk offers teams a versatile, social-selling-oriented workspace to manage contacts, signals, and pipelines all in one place.
In this comparison, we'll explore how each CRM facilitates genuine social selling workflows, helping you determine which one aligns best with your team's approach to building and nurturing relationships.
Why is a social selling CRM essential in 2026?
Most B2B deals begin not with a cold email or demo request, but rather with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or a subtle profile visit. If your CRM can't capture these signals and link them to actual people and pipelines, your team is effectively navigating in the dark while your competitors forge visible relationships.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to translate these interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, their origins, their interests, and their proximity to making a purchase. Rather than viewing LinkedIn as merely an added bonus, it transforms into a quantifiable, repeatable function within your revenue engine.
With a social selling CRM, your team can:
✔️ Identify buying signals from likes, comments, and profile visits and turn them into follow-ups
✔️ Differentiate which prospects are familiar with you through content versus outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging
✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers, rather than merely contacts in a list
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity, ensuring recognition is not limited to last-click channels
What is folk CRM?
folk CRM is a sleek, modern CRM designed 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 directly in the inbox for swift updates. Users can send personalized sequences, monitor engagement, and relate every interaction to contacts, companies, and deals.
What is Freshsales?
Freshsales, a CRM from Freshworks, consolidates contacts, deals, email, telephony, and basic automation into one platform. It caters to sales teams seeking a multi-channel solution without requiring full enterprise capabilities. Depending on the plan, configuration and feature complexity may vary and could necessitate some setup time.
Feature comparison of folk CRM and Freshsales
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
folk CRM offers a seamless one-click setup for Gmail and Outlook—simply authenticate, and every incoming or outgoing email is automatically associated with the correct contact or deal record. Its integrated scheduler adds events directly to Google or Microsoft calendars and syncs with folk’s task list, creating a unified timeline of emails and meetings. You can send personalized bulk sequences, track opens and clicks, and utilize folk’s CRM inbox for replies without the hassle of switching tabs. This native experience reduces context-switching and ensures your team stays aligned on every conversation. folk CRM stands out as one of the top CRMs for Email Integration!
On the other hand, Freshsales lacks native enrichment for social profiles, requiring users to manually update contacts or rely on third-party tools like Clearbit or Lusha for this functionality.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
folk CRM utilizes a direct OAuth connection for Gmail and Outlook, ensuring seamless synchronization. Emails are automatically logged to the appropriate contact or deal as soon as they are sent or received, eliminating any manual processes. Meetings arranged through folk’s native scheduler are instantly reflected in both your calendar and the CRM timeline. Behind the scenes, folk employs push-notification webhooks from Google and Microsoft, reducing latency and ensuring that every interaction appears within seconds.
In contrast, Freshsales lacks social listening and engagement tracking features, concentrating solely on email, SMS, and phone channels.
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, and any opens and replies sync back instantly to each contact’s timeline. With detailed performance reports, you can refine your subject lines and content for maximum engagement—all natively, with no add-ons needed!
Freshsales facilitates multichannel outreach through email, phone, and SMS; however, it lacks support for native interactions or monitoring on social platforms.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
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. Opens and replies sync instantly with each contact’s timeline, while detailed performance reports help you refine subject lines and content for maximum engagement—all without needing add-ons!
In contrast, Freshsales lacks support for in-context messaging and social automation, restricting all sequences to internal channels such as email or calls.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
folk CRM automatically incorporates open- and click-tracking pixels into all outbound emails, providing real-time metrics on contact timelines and campaign dashboards. While you can disable tracking across the entire workspace to boost deliverability, keeping it enabled offers consolidated reports, link-level CTR data, and detailed engagement histories for each contact—all without needing any external add-ons.
In Freshsales, activity tracking encompasses emails, calls, meetings, and SMS, but does not include social engagement; no social signals are associated with contact records.
Conclusion
In conclusion, both Folk and Freshsales offer valuable CRM features tailored for different needs. Freshsales provides a multi-channel platform, ideal for teams focused on email and phone interactions. However, if your strategy emphasizes email integration, automation, and social selling, folk stands out as the superior choice. With its seamless integration with Gmail and Outlook, personalized email sequences, and real-time engagement tracking, folk equips teams with the tools necessary to thrive in today's social selling landscape.
Start your 14-day free trial or book a demo today.
Discover folk CRM
Like the sales assistant your team never had
