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Effective contact management determines whether a CRM remains functional or devolves into chaos. Zoho CRM and Clarify
Social selling thrives at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool struggles to keep pace with LinkedIn interactions, comments, and warm introductions, you risk losing visibility — and ultimately, deals to competitors who prioritize their relationships.
folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-centric CRMs. Clarify specializes in transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk offers teams a versatile, social-selling-friendly workspace to monitor contacts, signals, and pipelines all in one location.
In this comparison, we’ll explore how each CRM facilitates authentic social selling workflows, helping you determine which one aligns best with your team's relationship-building and nurturing strategies.
Why is a social selling CRM crucial in 2026?
The majority of B2B deals don't begin with a cold email or a demo request; they start with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or even a silent profile visit. If your CRM fails to capture these signals and connect them to real individuals and pipelines, your team risks navigating without direction while competitors cultivate 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 readiness to buy. Instead of viewing LinkedIn as merely a 'nice-to-have awareness,' it evolves into a measurable, repeatable action within your revenue engine.
With a social selling CRM, your team can:
✔️ Identify buying signals from likes, comments, and profile visits, converting them into follow-ups
✔️ Track which prospects recognize you from content versus outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging
✔️ Map relationships among accounts, champions, and influencers — not just list contacts
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activities rather than attributing all credit to last-click channels
What is Zoho CRM?
Zoho CRM is a versatile and comprehensive CRM solution tailored for businesses seeking extensive customization and integration within a broader suite of business applications. Its email integration capabilities support Zoho Mail, Gmail, Outlook, and other IMAP providers, enabling teams to send, receive, and archive emails directly within the CRM. With features like shared inbox views, basic tracking, and automation, email activities seamlessly contribute to a cohesive omnichannel engagement strategy.
What is Clarify?
Clarify is a CRM platform that emphasizes transforming emails and meetings into structured, easily searchable relationship data. It is ideal for teams that frequently engage through their inboxes and seek to automate logging with minimal manual effort. For those requiring advanced pipelines or multi-channel outreach capabilities, complementary tools may be necessary.
Feature comparison of Zoho CRM and Clarify
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
Zoho’s Email Insights add-on enables seamless syncing of 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 from your CRM while capturing every opportunity-driven email. Additionally, Zoho Calendar synchronizes two-way with Google, Office 365, or iCal, allowing meeting invites and updates to flow seamlessly into both your personal calendar and CRM timeline.
Clarify enhances its LinkedIn integration with an enrichment engine to keep essential profile details current. With the LinkedIn and Chrome Extension integrations, you can create enriched contacts in Clarify while browsing profiles, capturing key information effortlessly without the need for manual copy-pasting.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Zoho’s Email Insights add-on establishes a live connection to your email provider through IMAP IDLE or OAuth, ensuring that messages sync in near real time. You can expect emails to appear in the CRM timeline within seconds of receipt, complete with attachments and metadata. Similarly, two-way calendar synchronization occurs instantly for Google Calendar, Office 365, and iCal, with Zoho's retry logic addressing any temporary issues.
However, Clarify does not offer traditional social listening for brand mentions or comment threads on social media platforms. Instead, its alerts concentrate on CRM activities: pipeline updates, record changes, and other relevant events can be communicated through integrations like Slack, Zapier, webhooks, or the Clarify API.
Social Selling: Which channels?
Zoho CRM’s Mass Email tool allows users to send up to 1,000 emails per day, utilizing customizable templates and merge tags for a personalized touch. For more extensive campaigns, Zoho Campaigns integrates effortlessly, providing advanced segmentation, a drag-and-drop design interface, and analytics to track delivery, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. However, since Zoho Campaigns operates as a separate product, managing billing and user permissions across both systems can lead to additional administrative tasks.
When it comes to social selling, Clarify focuses solely on LinkedIn and email, rather than offering a comprehensive multi-network approach. Its one-click LinkedIn integration and Chrome extension enable you to add new contacts from LinkedIn to Clarify in just seconds.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
Zoho CRM’s Mass Email tool allows users to send up to 1,000 emails per day, utilizing customizable templates and merge tags for enhanced personalization. For larger campaigns, Zoho Campaigns integrates effortlessly, providing advanced segmentation, an intuitive 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 platforms can introduce additional administrative tasks.
Clarify positions its AI as a co-pilot for drafting follow-up emails and taking notes from meetings and email threads, rather than functioning as a complete social sequencing engine.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
Zoho CRM’s basic Email Insights automatically track opens when you send emails through Gmail or Outlook connectors. For comprehensive click-through data, you can enable link-click tracking via the ZeptoMail integration. Without ZeptoMail, CRM users only see email opens; full click analytics necessitate the use of a separate transactional email product, which incurs additional costs and configuration steps.
Clarify enhances tracking of essential sales activities by consolidating email, calendar events, and meetings into a unified timeline for each contact, company, and deal. When connected to Gmail or Outlook, pertinent messages are automatically logged, relieving reps from the need to manually enter them into the CRM.
folk CRM: The Best CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is an innovative social selling CRM that transforms social selling into a streamlined, repeatable workflow. It swiftly captures contacts, keeps conversation context readily accessible, and minimizes manual tasks through enrichment and smart fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Designed for LinkedIn-driven outbound efforts, folk empowers teams to centralize leads from various sources, organize them in tailored pipelines, and track every interaction in one convenient location. Automatic contact enrichment fills in gaps, deduplication maintains a tidy database, and shared notes and tags facilitate warm introductions and easy access to relationship history across the team.
For daily social selling activities, folk ensures consistent execution: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline without losing the human touch that ultimately seals deals.
Conclusion
In summary, Zoho CRM excels with extensive email integration and customizable workflows, making it suitable for teams needing broad functionality. Clarify shines in transforming unstructured communications into actionable insights, but may lack comprehensive multi-channel capabilities. However, for teams prioritizing email integration, automation, and an efficient social selling framework, folk stands out as the optimal choice. Its streamlined processes enhance lead management, automate follow-ups, and maintain relationship context, ensuring your social selling efforts are effective and organized.
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