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Effective contact management is crucial for a CRM to remain functional rather than becoming chaos. Tools like Monday CRM and Freshsales can make a significant difference.
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 risk losing deals to teams that maintain closer connections.
folk and Clarify are positioned as modern, relationship-first CRMs. Clarify specializes in transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk offers teams a flexible workspace conducive to social selling, allowing them to manage contacts, signals, and pipelines seamlessly.
In this comparison, we will explore how each CRM facilitates genuine social selling workflows, enabling you to determine which aligns best with your team’s approach to building and nurturing relationships.
Why is a social selling CRM essential in 2026?
The majority of B2B deals do not originate from cold emails or demo requests; they begin with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or a subtle profile visit. If your CRM cannot capture these signals and associate them with actual people and pipelines, your team operates blindly while competitors forge visible relationships.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to transform these interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, their origin, their interests, and their proximity to making a purchase. Rather than viewing LinkedIn as a mere source of awareness, it becomes a quantifiable, 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 your content versus those reached through outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging
✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers—going beyond just contacts on a list
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity, ensuring that credit is not solely attributed to last-click channels
What is Monday CRM?
monday sales CRM is built on the monday.com work management platform, providing teams a visual way to manage their pipelines alongside project tasks. The Emails & Activities app integrates with Gmail and Outlook, allowing users to send, receive, and log emails directly from their boards while tracking opens and replies in real-time. With templates and automations, follow-ups are standardized, and lead statuses, tasks, and email histories remain in sync.
What is Freshsales?
Freshsales, developed by Freshworks, is a CRM that consolidates contacts, deals, email, telephony, and basic automation into a single platform. It is tailored for sales teams seeking to manage multiple channels without diving into extensive enterprise solutions. The configuration and feature set may differ by plan, and some initial setup time could be needed.
Feature comparison of Monday CRM and Freshsales
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 on your boards alongside calls and tasks. Although it lacks native calendar syncing within the CRM, you can easily create simple automations or utilize Monday’s Calendar view to visualize your scheduled events.
Freshsales, on the other hand, does not provide built-in enrichment for social profiles. Users need to manually update contact information or rely on third-party tools such as Clearbit or Lusha for enrichment.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Monday CRM’s Emails & Activities app automatically syncs your inbox every few minutes, continuously checking Gmail and Outlook for new messages to transform into board items. Although this method may introduce a minor delay compared to push-based systems, updates typically appear within two to three minutes. For those requiring faster updates, you can customize polling intervals or implement webhooks for sub-minute responsiveness.
In contrast, Freshsales does not provide social listening or engagement tracking features, concentrating solely on email, SMS, and phone channels.
Social Selling: Which channels?
Monday CRM’s Emails & Activities app allows you to sync up to six Gmail or Outlook accounts, and includes a Group Emailing feature for sending bulk messages to board items and contact lists. You can automate follow-ups using monday.com automations or integrate with Mailchimp for comprehensive email marketing capabilities. However, remember that without Mailchimp (or a similar service), you’ll lack native campaign analytics beyond basic send logs on your boards.
Freshsales offers multichannel outreach through email, phone, and SMS, but it does not support interactions or monitoring on native social platforms.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
Monday CRM’s Emails & Activities app allows you to synchronize up to six Gmail or Outlook accounts and features a Group Emailing action to send bulk messages to board items and contact lists. You can automate follow-ups using monday.com automations or integrate with Mailchimp for comprehensive email marketing capabilities. However, note that without Mailchimp or a similar add-on, you will only have access to basic send logs on your boards, lacking native campaign analytics.
In contrast, Freshsales does not offer in-context messaging or social automation, as all sequences are confined to internal channels like email or calls.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
The Monday Emails & Activities app tracks message opens when you send emails directly through the board interface; however, it does not inherently monitor which links are clicked. To obtain click-through rates, you need to embed UTM parameters in your links and retrieve the data into your board using automations or by integrating a marketing tool like Mailchimp.
In Freshsales, activity tracking encompasses emails, calls, meetings, and SMS, but it excludes social engagement, meaning that social signals are not associated with contact records.
folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is an innovative social selling solution that transforms social selling into a streamlined, repeatable process. It quickly captures contacts, maintains conversation context, and minimizes manual tasks through enrichment and smart fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Designed specifically for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to centralize leads from diverse sources, organize them in tailored pipelines, and monitor every interaction in one convenient location. Automatic contact enrichment fills in missing information, deduplication keeps the database tidy, and shared notes and tags simplify warm introductions and track relationship history across the team.
For day-to-day social selling, folk ensures consistent execution: segment leads, customize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and progress opportunities through the pipeline—all while preserving the human touch that ultimately seals deals.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Monday CRM excels in visual pipeline management and email integration, ideal for teams looking for project and sales synergy. Freshsales offers a consolidated platform for multi-channel communication, but lacks social engagement features. In contrast, folk stands out as the ultimate CRM for teams focused on email integration, automation, and sequencing, seamlessly capturing social signals and maintaining relationship context. For efficient, human-centered social selling workflows, choosing folk ensures your team remains competitive and organized.
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