Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Effective contact management is the key to ensuring your CRM remains valuable rather than becoming overwhelming noise. Zoho CRM and Nimble exemplify this principle.
Social selling thrives in the intersection of your CRM and professional network. If your tool can't keep pace with LinkedIn interactions, comments, and warm introductions, you not only risk losing visibility but also potential deals to teams that maintain closer ties with their relationships.
Folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-driven CRMs. Clarify specializes in transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while Folk provides teams with a flexible, social-selling-friendly environment to monitor contacts, signals, and their pipeline all in one location.
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 a Social Selling CRM is Essential in 2026?
Most B2B transactions don't commence with a cold email or a demo request; they 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 people and pipelines, your team is navigating blindly while your competitors cultivate relationships right before your eyes.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to convert these interactions into structured, actionable insights: identifying who engaged, where they originated, their interests, and their proximity to making a purchase. Instead of viewing LinkedIn as merely “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, converting them into follow-ups
✔️ Track which prospects recognize 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 designed for businesses seeking extensive customization and a comprehensive app ecosystem. Its email integration seamlessly supports Zoho Mail, Gmail, Outlook, and various IMAP providers, allowing teams to send, receive, and archive emails directly within the CRM. With shared inbox views, basic tracking, and automation features, email interactions contribute to a broader omnichannel engagement strategy.
What is Nimble?
Nimble is a streamlined, socially-driven CRM that gathers insights from both email and social media platforms. It's particularly effective for relationship-focused sellers who frequently engage in their inboxes and on social networks. While it's simpler than larger suites, it may lack the depth required for complex pipelines or multi-team operations.
Feature comparison of Zoho CRM and Nimble
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
Zoho’s Email Insights add-on seamlessly integrates Gmail, Outlook, or any IMAP provider with Zoho CRM, automatically logging messages and attachments to the appropriate records. You can select which folders to sync, ensuring that irrelevant threads are excluded while capturing all vital opportunity-driving emails. Additionally, Zoho Calendar offers two-way synchronization with Google, Office 365, or iCal, allowing meeting invites and updates to flow into both your personal calendar and CRM timeline.
Nimble enhances your contacts by pulling publicly available social profile data (such as photos, bios, jobs, etc.) from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and email signatures.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Zoho’s Email Insights add-on establishes a live connection to your mail provider via IMAP IDLE or OAuth, ensuring that messages sync in near real time. Expect emails to appear in 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 intermittent failures.
In contrast, Nimble does not offer real-time alerts or social listening capabilities; its primary focus is on enriching contact profiles rather than tracking live interactions.
Social Selling: Which channels?
Zoho CRM’s Mass Email tool enables users to send up to 1,000 emails daily, featuring customizable templates and merge tags for personalized outreach. For larger campaigns, Zoho Campaigns integrates smoothly, providing advanced segmentation, a drag-and-drop design interface, and 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 increase administrative complexity.
Nimble facilitates capturing contacts from LinkedIn and Twitter, but it lacks the capability for outreach through these platforms, focusing primarily on contact management and enrichment.
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 more extensive campaigns, Zoho Campaigns offers seamless integration, featuring advanced segmentation, a user-friendly drag-and-drop design, and valuable analytics on delivery, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. However, since Zoho Campaigns is a separate product, managing billing and user permissions across both systems can introduce additional administrative challenges.
In contrast, Nimble does not offer in-browser templated messaging; thus, you need to rely on email or external tools for structured outreach.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
Zoho CRM’s fundamental Email Insights automatically track opens when you send emails using Gmail or Outlook connectors. You can also activate link-click tracking through the ZeptoMail integration to access comprehensive click-through data. However, without ZeptoMail, CRM users will only see open rates; full click analytics necessitate the additional transactional email product, which involves extra costs and setup.
Nimble records email and call history while providing some enrichment features, but it does not monitor social engagements such as likes or comments.
folk CRM: The Best CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is a cutting-edge social selling CRM designed to streamline social selling into a seamless, repeatable workflow. It quickly captures contacts, keeps conversation context accessible, and minimizes manual tasks through enrichment and smart fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Tailored for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to centralize leads from various sources, arrange them in custom pipelines, and monitor every interaction in one location. Automatic contact enrichment fills in missing information, deduplication maintains a tidy database, and shared notes and tags facilitate smooth warm introductions and easy access to relationship history across the team.
For effective daily social selling, folk ensures consistent execution by allowing users to segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through a pipeline while preserving the human touch that is crucial for closing deals.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Zoho CRM excels in email integration and customization, while Nimble offers a streamlined approach to social engagement. However, for teams focused on email integration, automation, and seamless workflows, folk stands out as the optimal choice. With its advanced contact enrichment, centralized lead management, and dynamic pipeline capabilities, folk ensures that social selling becomes a structured and repeatable process. By maintaining context and facilitating timely follow-ups, folk empowers teams to thrive in today’s competitive landscape.
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