Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Contact management is crucial for ensuring a CRM remains effective rather than becoming overwhelming noise. Zoho CRM and Clay illustrate this point well.
Social selling thrives at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool struggles to keep pace with LinkedIn engagement, comments, and warm introductions, you not only lose visibility but also risk losing deals to teams that prioritize their relationships.
Folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-oriented CRMs. Clarify specializes in converting unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk offers teams a versatile, 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 begin not with a cold email or a demo request but rather through a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or a subtle profile visit. If your CRM is unable to capture these signals and connect them to real individuals and pipelines, your team is effectively operating in the dark while competitors cultivate relationships right before your eyes.
A social selling CRM provides a central hub to transform those interactions into structured, actionable insights: identifying who engaged, their origins, interests, and their proximity to making a purchase. Rather than viewing LinkedIn as merely a 'nice-to-have' for awareness, it becomes a quantifiable, repeatable component of your revenue engine.
With a social selling CRM, your team can:
✔️ Recognize buying signals from likes, comments, and profile views and convert them into follow-ups
✔️ Monitor which prospects engage with you through content versus outbound outreach and tailor messaging accordingly
✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers—beyond just a list of contacts
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity rather than attributing all credit to last-click channels
What is Zoho CRM?
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Zoho CRM is a versatile all-in-one CRM solution designed for businesses seeking extensive customization and a wide array of integrated applications. Its email integration accommodates Zoho Mail, Gmail, Outlook, and various IMAP providers, enabling teams to send, receive, and archive emails directly within the CRM. With shared inbox views, fundamental tracking, and automation features, email interactions seamlessly integrate into a comprehensive omnichannel engagement strategy.
What is Clay?
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Clay is a data-driven prospecting and enrichment tool that many teams utilize alongside their CRM systems. It aggregates information from diverse sources to create highly targeted lead lists and workflows. Typically, a separate CRM is still necessary to manage ongoing relationships and sales pipelines.
Feature comparison of Zoho CRM and Clay
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 correct records. You have the flexibility to select which folders to include, allowing you to eliminate irrelevant threads while capturing every email that drives opportunities. Additionally, Zoho Calendar offers two-way syncing with Google, Office 365, or iCal, ensuring that meeting invites and updates are reflected in both your personal calendar and your CRM timeline.
In contrast, Clay requires manual data entry or enrichment through integrations and does not automatically enhance profiles with social data such as titles, bios, or photos.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Zoho’s Email Insights add-on establishes a live connection to your email provider via IMAP IDLE or OAuth, enabling messages to sync in near real-time. As a result, 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 effectively managing any temporary failures.
In contrast, 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?
Zoho CRM’s Mass Email tool allows users to send up to 1,000 emails daily, utilizing customizable templates and merge tags for a personal touch. For more extensive campaigns, Zoho Campaigns offers seamless integration with advanced features like segmentation, drag-and-drop design, and detailed analytics on delivery rates, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. However, as Zoho Campaigns is a separate product, managing billing and user permissions across both platforms may introduce some administrative complexities.
On the other hand, Clay is not tailored for social selling; its primary focus is on relationship management through CRM-style outreach rather than social messaging or content publishing.
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 provides seamless integration, featuring advanced segmentation, an intuitive drag-and-drop design, 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 platforms can introduce additional administrative challenges.
Currently, in-browser messaging is unavailable in Clay, and templated outreach cannot be conducted via LinkedIn or other social media platforms.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
With Zoho CRM, basic Email Insights automatically track email opens when you use Gmail or Outlook connectors. For comprehensive click-through data, you can enable link-click tracking through the ZeptoMail integration. However, without ZeptoMail, CRM users only receive open data; accessing full click analytics necessitates the additional transactional email product, which involves extra costs and setup.
On the other hand, Clay monitors CRM events and internal activities but does not provide insights into external engagements, such as social media interactions or clicks.
folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is a cutting-edge social selling CRM that transforms social selling into a streamlined, repeatable process. It quickly captures contacts, maintains conversation context, and minimizes manual work through enrichment and smart fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Designed for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to centralize leads from various sources, organize them within custom pipelines, and track every touchpoint in a single location. Automatic contact enrichment fills in gaps, deduplication keeps the database clean, and shared notes and tags facilitate warm introductions and a clear relationship history across the team.
For effective daily social selling, folk ensures consistent execution: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline without losing the human touch that seals the deal.
Conclusion
In summary, Zoho CRM excels with its extensive customization and email integration capabilities, making it a robust choice for teams needing comprehensive email tracking. Clay, while valuable for data-driven prospecting, falls short in ongoing relationship management. On the other hand, folk stands out as the premier option for teams focusing on email integration, automation, and sequencing. Its seamless contact management, enriched data, and streamlined workflows ensure that social selling becomes a repeatable, effective process. For true social selling efficiency, folk is your best bet.
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