Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
LinkedIn has evolved beyond a simple networking platform: It's now the largest B2B sales battlefield.
Choosing the right CRM can determine whether you excel in your pipeline or get lost in the crowd. In the battle of Zoho CRM vs Pipedrive, the key question transcends features; it's about which platform provides you with the smartest advantage for cultivating relationships, tracking engagement, and transforming LinkedIn conversations into closed deals.
While Zoho CRM and Pipedrive are both solid options, if you're looking for a CRM specifically designed for LinkedIn workflows, folk CRM often sets a new standard.
Why a CRM for LinkedIn Is Essential in 2025
LinkedIn has become the nerve center of B2B sales. By 2025, nearly every decision-maker you want to connect with will be active there—sharing insights, engaging with peers, and making purchasing decisions in real-time. If your sales strategy isn’t optimized for LinkedIn, you’re missing out on valuable opportunities. A CRM tailored for LinkedIn is no longer just a luxury; it’s the foundation for effective prospecting, relationship-building, and pipeline expansion.
What makes it so effective is its ability to facilitate a multi-touch sales journey. One cold email isn’t enough anymore. With the right CRM, you can effortlessly track, manage, and engage prospects across multiple channels:
- Initiate the conversation on LinkedIn. Connect, comment, and establish familiarity where your buyers are already engaged.
- Follow up through email or calls. Your CRM maintains the context, ensuring each touchpoint feels personalized.
- Nurture relationships progressively. By syncing LinkedIn activity, you’ll know the optimal times to engage and when to close.
In 2025, the successful teams are those that engage prospects where they already spend their time online. LinkedIn is the hub of business interactions. Without a CRM designed to harness its full capabilities, every outreach effort becomes slower, less targeted, and more challenging to scale.
What is Zoho CRM?
Zoho CRM is a versatile cloud-based CRM solution tailored for businesses of any size. Its customizable modules, coupled with an AI-driven assistant, enable you to effectively manage leads, automate workflows, and extract valuable sales insights. With its multichannel communication tools and seamless app integration, Zoho ensures your team remains aligned and productive.
What is Pipedrive?
Pipedrive is a sales-centric CRM designed with visual pipelines and user-friendliness in mind. Its intuitive interface simplifies deal tracking and activity scheduling, while automated workflows and smart contact data integrations ensure a smooth sales process.
Feature comparison of Zoho CRM and Pipedrive
AI Follow-ups
Zoho CRM lacks native LinkedIn profile capture, so if you're sourcing leads from LinkedIn, you'll have to manually enter them into Zoho or utilize a third-party Chrome extension like Leadjet. Unfortunately, there’s no one-click option on LinkedIn to import profile data into your CRM, which hinders prospecting workflows and makes LinkedIn data capture a tedious task. This limitation is particularly evident for sales teams engaging in daily outbound efforts on LinkedIn.
On the other hand, Pipedrive also doesn't provide native LinkedIn profile capture, but it allows for this functionality through third-party tools and extensions. These integrations conveniently extract essential information such as name, company, job title, and profile URL into the contact record. Although it's not a built-in feature, the integration is seamless and serves as an effective workaround for teams conducting high-volume outreach on LinkedIn.
Automated Contact Enrichment
Zoho CRM lacks the capability to automatically enrich contacts with LinkedIn data. While you can integrate LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Zoho, it merely allows you to view profile information within the contact section without syncing or enhancing your CRM records. This means job titles, company details, and LinkedIn URLs are not automatically retrieved. Any enrichment stemming from LinkedIn must be conducted manually or via a third-party tool. Therefore, if LinkedIn is your primary lead source, Zoho will not enhance your records independently.
Similarly, Pipedrive does not automatically enrich contacts with LinkedIn data. Although the Sales Navigator add-on provides access to profile details like job titles and company names, it does not sync this information into your CRM fields. To enrich your records with email addresses, phone numbers, or company details, you'll need to use a separate enrichment tool such as Lusha or Kaspr. This reliance on manual processes can create gaps in the lead qualification workflow, especially for LinkedIn-focused pipelines.
Smart Fields
Zoho CRM lacks native tracking for LinkedIn engagement; any messages you send to leads on LinkedIn won't be logged automatically in the CRM. To keep track of these interactions, you need to manually create a note or activity. Even with Sales Navigator integrated, Zoho doesn't retrieve messaging history or engagement statistics, causing teams to potentially miss crucial parts of the sales conversation unless they are exceptionally diligent with manual updates.
Pipedrive also falls short in this area, as it does not support message templates for LinkedIn. While you can create templates for emails and campaigns within the CRM, they aren't available for LinkedIn DMs. The Sales Navigator add-on does not facilitate message automation or prefilled outreach, meaning representatives must manually copy their messages each time—far from ideal for teams aiming to optimize and scale their LinkedIn prospecting efforts.
AI-Powered Message & Sequence Generation
Zoho CRM lacks native tracking for LinkedIn engagement, meaning that any messages sent to leads on LinkedIn won't be automatically logged in the CRM. To keep track of these interactions, you'll need to create notes or activities manually. Even when connected to Sales Navigator, Zoho fails to retrieve messaging history or engagement statistics, which can lead to teams losing track of important parts of the sales conversation unless they are meticulous with manual updates.
Similarly, Pipedrive also does not automatically track LinkedIn conversations. Messages sent via DM or InMail won't be recorded in the CRM unless they are added manually. Even with the LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration, Pipedrive only provides access to the contact's profile information, without pulling in any messaging history. As a result, sales managers seeking comprehensive visibility into outreach efforts won't find it through LinkedIn activity in Pipedrive.
Next Best Action
Zoho's Chrome extension is designed primarily for email and Gmail integration, not for LinkedIn. It doesn't function on LinkedIn profiles and lacks any capture or sync features for the platform. To utilize LinkedIn, you'll need to rely on a different plugin or toggle between tabs. This absence of a LinkedIn-compatible Chrome extension makes Zoho less effective for outbound workflows that depend on social selling.
Pipedrive's official Chrome extension focuses on Gmail and does not interface with LinkedIn. You won’t find an overlay while browsing LinkedIn, nor a capture button or messaging support. Nevertheless, the Surfe Chrome extension bridges this gap by allowing representatives to capture and sync LinkedIn data directly into Pipedrive. Although it’s not a native feature, it remains the sole option for accessing LinkedIn functionality straight from your browser with this CRM.
folk CRM: The Premier CRM Alternative for LinkedIn!
folk is the sales assistant every team has been waiting for. Seamlessly integrated, simple, and proactive, this CRM handles repetitive tasks, allowing your reps to concentrate on what truly matters: forging genuine relationships on LinkedIn and beyond. With an impressive 4.5/5 rating on G2, folk stands out as one of the most reliable AI-powered CRMs for lean, ambitious teams.
Tailored specifically for startups, agencies, and sales-focused teams, folk makes leveraging AI practical, efficient, and easy to manage. It accelerates the conversion of LinkedIn connections into qualified opportunities while ensuring your workflow remains effortless.
1. Instant LinkedIn Prospect Capture with the folkX Extension
Prospecting on LinkedIn can be time-consuming, but folk simplifies the process. With the folkX Chrome extension, you can quickly capture leads from LinkedIn or Sales Navigator and add them directly to your CRM with just one click. Whether you're saving a single profile or hundreds from a filtered search, every detail, including names, job titles, companies, and emails, is automatically transferred to your database.
Say goodbye to copy-pasting and juggling multiple spreadsheets. Your entire prospect list is organized in one place, fully synchronized with your workflows, enabling your team to act swiftly and focus on transforming connections into opportunities instead of wasting hours on manual data entry!
2. Smart Data Enrichment and Always-Clean Contact Profiles
Connecting with decision-makers is effective only when you have comprehensive, accurate data. folk eliminates tedious research by automatically enriching your LinkedIn contacts with verified emails, company details, phone numbers, and roles. With a single click, you access everything needed to personalize your outreach and initiate meaningful conversations.
The platform employs intelligent deduplication to maintain a clean, reliable database, even when multiple team members add the same contacts. This means no more time wasted on managing messy spreadsheets or guessing lead ownership; folk keeps your data organized and current, ensuring that every LinkedIn outreach is relevant and impactful.
3. Personalized LinkedIn Outreach with AI-Generated Message Templates
folk revolutionizes your outreach on LinkedIn by providing AI-powered message templates directly in your LinkedIn inbox. When you initiate a conversation, you instantly receive smart suggestions for connection requests, follow-ups, and outreach messages tailored to your prospect’s profile and context.
You can edit, personalize, and send these messages manually, ensuring compliance with LinkedIn’s policies. No risky automation or tedious copy-pasting between tools is needed. Everything happens where the conversation begins, resulting in outreach that is faster, more relevant, and much more natural.
Summary: folk CRM's LinkedIn Features
- Instantly capture leads with the folkX Chrome extension, importing LinkedIn and Sales Navigator profiles in one click, with every detail automatically organized in your CRM.
- Effortlessly enrich contact data by retrieving verified emails, company details, and roles, while maintaining a clean and accurate database through smart deduplication.
- Send smarter LinkedIn messages using AI-powered templates directly within the LinkedIn inbox, enabling you to personalize outreach quickly without relying on risky automation!
Conclusion
In the landscape of LinkedIn CRM solutions, Zoho CRM offers versatility with customizable modules and automation, while Pipedrive shines with its user-friendly visual pipelines. However, both struggle with LinkedIn-specific functionalities such as profile capture and message tracking. In contrast, folk CRM excels as a tailored alternative, providing instant lead capture, smart data enrichment, and AI-generated messaging templates, ensuring a seamless and efficient LinkedIn outreach experience.
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