Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Effective contact management determines whether a CRM remains valuable or devolves into chaos. Zoho CRM and HighLevel.
Social selling thrives at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool falls short in tracking LinkedIn activity, comments, and warm introductions, you risk losing visibility and, ultimately, deals to teams that maintain closer connections with their relationships.
folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-centric CRMs. Clarify emphasizes converting unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk offers teams a flexible, social-selling-friendly workspace to monitor contacts, signals, and pipelines all in one place.
In this comparison, we will 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?
The majority of B2B deals don't commence with a cold email or a demo request; they begin with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or a discreet profile visit. If your CRM cannot capture these signals and connect them to actual people and pipelines, your team will be operating blindly while competitors cultivate relationships right before your eyes.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized hub to convert these interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, their origins, their interests, and their proximity to making a purchase. Rather than viewing LinkedIn as merely a 'nice-to-have awareness,' 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 views, turning them into follow-ups
✔️ Track which prospects are familiar with you from content versus outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging
✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers—not 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?
Zoho CRM is a versatile, all-in-one CRM solution designed for businesses seeking extensive customization and a comprehensive ecosystem of business applications. Its email integration supports Zoho Mail, Gmail, Outlook, and other IMAP providers, enabling teams to send, receive, and archive emails directly within the CRM. With shared inbox views, fundamental tracking, and automation, email activities seamlessly integrate into a broader omnichannel engagement strategy.
What is HighLevel?
HighLevel is an all-in-one platform for marketing and sales, primarily targeting agencies. It combines funnels, email, SMS, automation, and CRM within a single environment that agencies can either resell or manage for their clients. While the range of features is impressive, the interface and initial setup may feel daunting.
Feature comparison of Zoho CRM and HighLevel
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. This feature automatically logs messages and attachments to the appropriate records, allowing you to select which folders to include and keeping irrelevant threads out of your CRM while ensuring you capture every opportunity-driving email. Additionally, Zoho Calendar offers a two-way sync with Google, Office 365, or iCal, allowing meeting invites and updates to flow effortlessly into both your personal calendar and CRM timeline.
In contrast, HighLevel does not enrich contacts from social media; it depends on form captures, manual entry, or API-based integrations.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Zoho’s Email Insights add-on provides a live connection to your email provider via IMAP IDLE or OAuth, ensuring that messages sync in nearly real time. You can anticipate emails appearing in the CRM timeline within seconds of arrival, 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 failures.
In contrast, HighLevel lacks a social listening feature, and its real-time alerts are restricted to email or SMS replies and incoming form messages.
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 larger campaigns, Zoho Campaigns provides seamless integration with advanced segmentation, a drag-and-drop design interface, and detailed analytics on delivery rates, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. However, since Zoho Campaigns is a standalone product, managing billing and user permissions across both systems may introduce additional administrative challenges.
HighLevel enables messaging through WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram DMs for both inbound and outbound communication, but it does not support LinkedIn or Twitter.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
Zoho CRM’s Mass Email tool allows users to send up to 1,000 emails daily, featuring customizable templates and merge tags for personalized communication. For larger campaigns, Zoho Campaigns integrates effortlessly, providing advanced segmentation, a drag-and-drop design interface, and detailed analytics on delivery rates, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. However, since Zoho Campaigns is a separate product, managing billing and user permissions across both systems may introduce additional administrative tasks.
While Sequences can be utilized through SMS and email, they are not available on social media platforms. Additionally, in-browser automation and messaging templates are not supported.
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, enable link-click tracking through the ZeptoMail integration. Without ZeptoMail, CRM users can only see opens; accessing full click analytics necessitates the separate transactional email product, which incurs additional costs and setup steps.
HighLevel monitors emails, SMS, calls, and web chats, but it does not log interactions from social posts or profile activities.
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 tasks with features like enrichment and smart fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Designed for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk allows teams to consolidate leads from various sources, arrange them in customizable pipelines, and monitor every interaction in one centralized location. Automatic contact enrichment fills in gaps, deduplication keeps your database tidy, and shared notes and tags simplify warm introductions and relationship tracking across the team.
For effective daily social selling, folk ensures consistent execution: segment leads, tailor outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline without sacrificing the personal touch that ultimately secures deals.
Conclusion
In summary, Zoho CRM excels in extensive email integration and customization, making it ideal for teams needing a holistic business ecosystem. HighLevel offers a robust all-in-one platform primarily for agencies, though its interface may be challenging for some users. However, for teams focused on email integration, automation, and social selling, folk stands out as the ultimate choice. With its streamlined processes, automatic contact enrichment, and centralized relationship management, folk ensures your social selling efforts translate to tangible results.
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