Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Effective contact management is crucial for a CRM to remain useful rather than becoming overwhelming noise. Zoho CRM and Brevo exemplify this challenge.
Social selling thrives in the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tools can’t keep pace with LinkedIn activities, comments, and warm introductions, you not only lose visibility but also risk losing deals to teams that maintain stronger connections.
folk and Clarify both 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 will explore how each CRM facilitates genuine social selling workflows, enabling you to determine which tool aligns best with your team's approach to building and nurturing relationships.
Why is a social selling CRM essential in 2026?
Most B2B deals rarely initiate with a cold email or a demo request; instead, they often begin with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or a quiet profile visit. If your CRM fails to capture these signals and link them to real individuals and pipelines, your team risks operating in the dark while competitors cultivate relationships openly.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized hub to convert these interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, their sources, their interests, and their proximity to making a purchase. Rather than viewing LinkedIn as merely a 'nice-to-have' awareness tool, it transforms into a measurable, repeatable process within your revenue engine.
With a social selling CRM, your team can:
✔️ Identify buying signals from likes, comments, and profile visits and convert them into follow-ups.
✔️ Distinguish which prospects recognize you from content versus outbound efforts and tailor your messaging accordingly.
✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers—not just maintain a list of contacts.
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity rather than solely attributing success to last-click channels.
What is Zoho CRM?
Zoho CRM is a versatile, all-in-one CRM solution designed for businesses seeking extensive customization and a comprehensive ecosystem of business applications. With robust email integration that includes Zoho Mail, Gmail, Outlook, and various IMAP providers, teams can effortlessly send, receive, and archive emails directly within the CRM. The platform offers shared inbox views, fundamental tracking, and automation, allowing email interactions to seamlessly integrate into a broader omnichannel engagement strategy.
What is Brevo?
Brevo, previously known as Sendinblue, focuses primarily on email, SMS, and marketing automation, with integrated CRM functionalities. This platform appeals to businesses that emphasize campaigns and customer engagement over intricate sales processes. While the CRM features are adequate for basic requirements, they lack the sophistication found in dedicated sales CRMs.
Feature comparison of Zoho CRM and Brevo
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, automatically logging messages and attachments to the appropriate records. You have the flexibility to select which folders to include, ensuring that irrelevant threads are excluded while capturing every email that drives opportunities. Additionally, Zoho Calendar offers two-way syncing with Google, Office 365, or iCal, enabling meeting invites and updates to flow effortlessly into both your personal calendar and CRM timeline.
In contrast, Brevo does not provide profile enrichment from social media. Its contact data is mainly gathered through forms or email interactions.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Zoho’s Email Insights add-on keeps a live connection to your mail provider via IMAP IDLE or OAuth, ensuring messages sync in near real time. You can expect emails to appear in the CRM timeline just seconds after receipt, with attachments and metadata preserved. Additionally, two-way calendar synchronization occurs instantly for Google Calendar, Office 365, and iCal, while Zoho’s retry logic effectively manages any temporary failures.
On the other hand, Brevo does not provide social listening or alerts, as its tools are primarily designed for email, SMS, and transactional marketing.
Social Selling: Which channels?
With Zoho CRM’s Mass Email tool, you can send up to 1,000 emails daily per user, utilizing customizable templates and merge tags for a personalized touch. For larger campaigns, Zoho Campaigns offers seamless integration, featuring advanced segmentation, a user-friendly drag-and-drop design, and detailed analytics on delivery, 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.
On the other hand, Brevo primarily focuses on email and SMS, lacking social selling capabilities or integration within its product suite.
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 a personalized touch. For larger campaigns, Zoho Campaigns provides seamless integration, featuring advanced segmentation, a user-friendly drag-and-drop design, and analytics tracking delivery, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. However, since Zoho Campaigns is a separate product, managing billing and user permissions across both platforms can increase administrative workload.
On the other hand, Brevo lacks support for templated messaging or browser-based sequences, limiting campaigns to email and SMS only.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
Zoho CRM’s basic Email Insights automatically track email opens when you send messages through Gmail or Outlook connectors. For comprehensive click-through data, you can enable link-click tracking via the ZeptoMail integration. Without ZeptoMail, users can only view email opens, while full click analytics necessitate the additional transactional email product, which entails extra costs and configuration steps.
Engagement tracking encompasses email opens, clicks, and SMS delivery rates; however, it does not track social activity within contact history.
folk CRM: The Best CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is a cutting-edge social sales tool designed to streamline your social selling workflow. It quickly captures contacts, keeps conversation context close, and minimizes manual tasks through smart fields and enrichment, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Tailored for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to consolidate leads from various sources, organize them in customizable pipelines, and track every interaction in one centralized location. Automatic contact enrichment fills in missing information, deduplication keeps your database tidy, and shared notes and tags facilitate warm introductions and easy access to relationship histories across the team.
To support daily social selling, folk ensures consistent execution: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and progress opportunities through your pipeline—all while maintaining the human touch that secures deals.
Conclusion
In summary, Zoho CRM offers versatile email integration and robust customization for teams that require extensive features, while Brevo excels in email and SMS marketing automation but lacks depth in CRM capabilities. However, folk stands out as the optimal choice for teams that prioritize email integration, automation, and seamless sequencing. With its focus on social selling, automatic contact enrichment, and streamlined workflows, folk ensures that your team can capture every interaction and maintain momentum in the sales process effectively.
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