Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Effective contact management is crucial for ensuring a CRM remains functional rather than becoming a source of confusion. Zoho CRM and Attio both play a role in this.
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 only losing visibility but also missing out on deals to teams that maintain closer ties with their relationships.
folk and Clarify position themselves as modern, relationship-oriented CRMs. Clarify emphasizes the transformation of 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.
This comparison will explore how each CRM facilitates genuine social selling workflows, helping you determine which one aligns best with your team's approach to fostering and nurturing relationships.
Why is a social selling CRM essential in 2026?
Most B2B deals don’t initiate with a cold email or demo request; they begin with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or a quiet profile visit. If your CRM is unable to capture these signals and link them to real individuals and pipelines, your team operates in the dark while competitors cultivate relationships openly.
A social selling CRM provides a unified platform to convert these interactions into structured, actionable insights: identifying who engaged, their origins, their interests, and their proximity to making a purchase. Instead of viewing LinkedIn as merely a “nice-to-have awareness,” it becomes a tangible, repeatable process within your revenue engine.
With a social selling CRM, your team can:
✔️ Identify buying signals from likes, comments, and profile views, converting them into follow-ups
✔️ Track which prospects discovered you through content versus outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging
✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers—not just maintain a list of contacts
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity, rather than attributing all credit to last-click channels
What is Zoho CRM?
Zoho CRM is a versatile, all-in-one CRM designed for businesses seeking extensive customization and a comprehensive app ecosystem. Its email integration accommodates Zoho Mail, Gmail, Outlook, and other IMAP providers, allowing teams to send, receive, and archive correspondence directly within the CRM. With shared inbox views, fundamental tracking, and automation, email interactions seamlessly integrate into a broader omnichannel engagement strategy.
What is Attio?
Attio is a flexible, data-model-first CRM that empowers teams to create custom objects, views, and workflows. It's ideally suited for companies that desire complete control over their relationship and pipeline structures. However, this flexibility comes with a more complex setup and learning experience compared to more structured CRMs.
Feature comparison of Zoho CRM and Attio
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
With Zoho’s Email Insights add-on, you can seamlessly sync Gmail, Outlook, or any IMAP provider directly into Zoho CRM, ensuring that messages and attachments are automatically logged against the appropriate records. You have the flexibility to select which folders to sync, filtering out irrelevant threads while capturing every email that could drive opportunities. Additionally, Zoho Calendar syncs seamlessly in both directions with Google, Office 365, or iCal, allowing meeting invites and updates to flow smoothly into your personal calendar and CRM timeline.
Attio enhances your contacts automatically by retrieving details such as company name, title, social media profiles, and company logos through integrations like Clearbit and Dun & Bradstreet. This keeps your lead database current with minimal manual effort.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Zoho’s Email Insights add-on establishes a continuous connection to your mail provider via IMAP IDLE or OAuth, ensuring that messages sync in almost real time. Expect emails to appear on the CRM timeline within seconds of receipt, complete with attachments and metadata. Additionally, two-way calendar synchronization occurs instantly for Google Calendar, Office 365, and iCal, with Zoho’s retry logic effectively managing any temporary disruptions.
In contrast, Attio lacks real-time alerts and social activity tracking. Its primary focus is on email, contact data, and workflow management, rather than providing live engagement signals.
Social Selling: Which channels?
Zoho CRM’s Mass Email tool allows users to send up to 1,000 emails daily, featuring customizable templates and merge tags for enhanced personalization. For more extensive campaigns, Zoho Campaigns integrates smoothly, providing advanced segmentation, a user-friendly drag-and-drop design, and detailed analytics on delivery rates, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. However, since Zoho Campaigns operates as a separate product, managing billing and user permissions across both systems may introduce additional administrative challenges.
Attio primarily facilitates outreach through email and Gmail workflows but lacks native support for direct messaging or social media posting.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
Zoho CRM’s Mass Email tool allows users to send up to 1,000 emails daily, utilizing customizable templates and merge tags for enhanced personalization. For larger campaigns, Zoho Campaigns offers seamless integration, featuring advanced segmentation, a drag-and-drop design interface, and comprehensive analytics on delivery rates, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. However, since Zoho Campaigns operates as a separate product, managing billing and user permissions across both systems can introduce additional administrative complexity.
In contrast, Attio does not support in-context messaging or templated outreach; communication is conducted through Gmail or integrations rather than natively within the browser.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
Zoho CRM's Email Insights automatically monitor email opens when sent via Gmail or Outlook connectors. For comprehensive click-through data, you can activate link-click tracking through the ZeptoMail integration. Without ZeptoMail, CRM users only receive open data, while full click analytics necessitate a separate transactional email product, which involves additional costs and configuration.
Attio keeps track of email interactions, call logs, and contact history within the CRM, but it does not monitor social media activity or engagement metrics.
folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is an innovative social selling CRM that streamlines social selling into a straightforward, repeatable workflow. It quickly captures contacts, maintains conversation context, and minimizes manual tasks through enrichment and intelligent fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Designed for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to centralize leads from various sources, organize them in customized pipelines, and monitor every interaction in a single platform. Automated contact enrichment fills in missing information, deduplication keeps the database tidy, and shared notes and tags facilitate warm introductions and easy access to relationship history across the team.
For effective social selling every day, folk promotes consistent execution by allowing users to segment leads, tailor outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline while retaining the personal touch that ultimately secures deals.
Conclusion
In conclusion, while Zoho CRM offers robust email integration and extensive customization for diverse business needs, and Attio provides flexibility in data modeling for teams seeking control, both have limitations in social selling capabilities. folk stands out as the premier choice for teams that rely on email integration, automation, and sequencing. With its streamlined workflows and intelligent features, folk enables users to capture leads efficiently, maintain relationship context, and execute social selling strategies with ease, making it the go-to CRM for modern sales teams.
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