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Contact management is where a CRM either remains effective or becomes overwhelming. Monday CRM and Clay
Social selling thrives at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool fails to keep pace with LinkedIn activities, comments, and warm introductions, you risk not just losing visibility but also potentially losing deals to teams that maintain closer connections.
folk and Clarify position themselves as modern, relationship-centric CRMs. Clarify excels at transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk provides teams with a flexible, social-selling-friendly workspace to manage contacts, signals, and pipelines all in one location.
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 don't begin with a cold email or a demo request; they often start with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or a discreet profile visit. If your CRM can't capture those signals and link them to real individuals and pipelines, your team risks operating in the dark while competitors foster relationships openly.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to transform these interactions into structured, actionable insights: identifying who engaged, their source, their interests, and their proximity to a purchase decision. Rather than viewing LinkedIn as merely “nice-to-have awareness,” it becomes a measurable and 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
✔️ Differentiate which prospects know 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 attributing all credit to last-click channels
What is Monday CRM?
monday sales CRM is designed on the monday.com work management platform, providing teams with a visual method to manage their pipelines alongside various projects. The Emails & Activities app integrates with Gmail and Outlook, enabling users to send, receive, and log emails directly from the boards while tracking opens and replies seamlessly. With templates and automations, follow-ups are standardized, and lead statuses, tasks, and email histories remain synchronized.
What is Clay?
Clay serves as a data-first prospecting and enrichment tool, often utilized alongside existing CRMs. It aggregates information from various sources to create highly targeted lead lists and workflows, although you may still require a separate CRM to effectively manage ongoing relationships and pipelines.
Feature comparison of Monday CRM and Clay
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
Monday CRM’s Emails & Activities app seamlessly integrates up to six Gmail or Outlook accounts for two-way synchronization, allowing emails sent or received to appear as items on your boards alongside calls and tasks. Although it lacks native in-CRM calendar syncing, you can create simple automations or utilize Monday’s Calendar view to visualize your scheduled events.
In contrast, Clay depends on manual data entry or enrichment through integrations, as it does not automatically enhance profiles with social data such as titles, bios, or photos.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Monday CRM’s Emails & Activities app automatically syncs your inbox every few minutes, polling Gmail and Outlook for new messages to turn into board items. Although this results in a slight delay compared to push-based systems, updates typically show up within two to three minutes. If you require faster updates, you can modify polling intervals or incorporate custom webhooks for sub-minute responsiveness.
On the other hand, Clay does not offer social listening, alerts, or real-time interaction tracking; its primary focus is on workflow automation and task management.
Social Selling: Which channels?
Monday CRM’s Emails & Activities app seamlessly integrates up to six Gmail or Outlook accounts and features a Group Emailing action that enables you to send bulk messages to board items and contact lists. You can also automate follow-ups using monday.com automations or enhance your email marketing efforts by integrating with Mailchimp. However, keep in mind that without Mailchimp or a similar add-on, you will only have access to basic send logs on your boards, lacking comprehensive campaign analytics.
Clay, on the other hand, is not tailored for social selling; it emphasizes managing relationships through CRM-style outreach rather than engaging in social messaging or publishing.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
Monday CRM’s Emails & Activities app allows synchronization of up to six Gmail or Outlook accounts, along with a Group Emailing feature that enables bulk messaging to board items and contact lists. You can streamline follow-ups using monday.com automations or enhance your email marketing efforts by integrating with Mailchimp. However, note that without Mailchimp or a similar add-on, you’ll have limited campaign analytics, relying only on basic send logs on your boards.
Clay does not support in-browser messaging, and you cannot send templated outreach through LinkedIn or other social platforms.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
Monday’s Emails & Activities app records message opens when you send emails directly through the board interface, but it does not automatically track which links are clicked. To obtain click-through rates, you need to embed links with UTM parameters and import the data into your board using automations or by integrating a marketing tool such as Mailchimp.
While Clay monitors CRM events and internal activities, it falls short in providing insights into external engagements, such as social media interactions or link clicks.
folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is a contemporary social selling CRM designed to streamline the social selling process into an efficient, repeatable workflow. It quickly captures contacts, maintains conversation context, and minimizes manual tasks through automatic enrichment and smart fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Specifically built for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to consolidate leads from various sources, organize them in tailored pipelines, and track every interaction seamlessly. Automatic contact enrichment fills in missing details, deduplication keeps your database organized, and shared notes and tags facilitate warm introductions and manage relationship histories across the team.
For daily social selling activities, folk ensures consistent execution: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and navigate opportunities through the pipeline while preserving the human touch that actually closes deals.
Conclusion
In summary, Monday CRM excels with robust email integration and automation, making pipeline management visually engaging, while Clay focuses on data enrichment for targeted lead generation. However, for teams prioritizing email integration, automation, and seamless sequencing, folk stands out as the best alternative. It streamlines the social selling process, captures contacts efficiently, and maintains context across interactions, ensuring that valuable follow-ups and relationship building remain at the forefront of your sales strategy.
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