Close CRM vs Zoho CRM: Which CRM is the best for social selling?

Contact management is the point where a CRM either remains effective or becomes overwhelming. Close CRM and Zoho CRM.

Social selling thrives at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool fails to keep pace with LinkedIn activities, comments, and warm introductions, you don’t just lose visibility — you risk losing deals to teams that maintain stronger connections.

Folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-driven CRMs. Clarify specializes in transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while Folk offers teams a versatile, social-selling-friendly workspace to manage 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?

Most B2B deals begin not with cold emails or demo requests, but with LinkedIn comments, reposts, direct messages, or even quiet profile visits. If your CRM can’t capture these signals and connect them to real people and pipelines, your team is operating without visibility while your competitors are forging relationships right in front of you.

A social selling CRM consolidates these interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, where they originated, what interests them, and how close they are to making a purchase. Rather than viewing LinkedIn as merely a “nice-to-have awareness,” it becomes a measurable, repeatable process within your revenue strategy.

With a social selling CRM, your team can:

✔️ Identify buying signals from likes, comments, and profile views and convert them into follow-ups

✔️ Track which prospects are familiar with your content versus those reached through outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging

✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers, rather than just listing contacts

✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity, rather than attributing all credit to last-click channels

What is Close CRM?

Close CRM is a sales platform designed for high-velocity inside sales teams, integrating calling, SMS, and email into a seamless experience. The built-in two-way email sync allows representatives to send, receive, and track messages directly within Close, automatically linking each conversation to the appropriate contact and opportunity. Features like bulk emails, sequences, and performance reporting transform email from an isolated inbox into a structured outreach channel.

What is Zoho CRM?

Zoho CRM is a versatile platform recognized for its extensive features and competitive pricing, making it ideal for businesses seeking a comprehensive toolkit for sales, marketing, and support within a unified ecosystem. However, its interface and configuration options can feel overwhelming, especially for smaller teams.

Feature comparison of Close CRM and Zoho CRM

Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights

Integrating email with Close is a breeze: simply connect your Gmail or Outlook account, authenticate using OAuth, and every message from a matched contact seamlessly appears in Close’s timeline. Although Close doesn’t directly sync calendar events, you can easily link meetings back to the CRM through Zapier or Google Calendar integration, ensuring your schedule remains in sync with your sales pipeline.

Zoho CRM enhances its capabilities with third-party tools like Clearbit and Zoho DataPrep for profile enrichment, which includes details such as name, title, company, social media handles, and more.

Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts

Close's email integration allows for instant two-way syncing through OAuth-based connections to Gmail and Outlook. When a contact emails you, Close logs it immediately—no need for polling intervals or manual BCC. Outbound emails sent from Close show up in your email provider in real time, and the same applies for incoming messages. For calendar events, you can link a Google Calendar via Zapier for automatic updates; however, these triggers run every few minutes based on your Zapier plan.

Social alerts and listening are managed by Zoho Social, not the core CRM. To receive real-time updates from social platforms, users need to connect the two systems.

Social Selling: Which channels?

Close doesn't provide a traditional mail merge interface, but it enables you to create multi-step drip campaigns through its Workflows engine, seamlessly integrating email, calls, and SMS in one sequence. You can enroll leads, customize messages using templates, and allow Close to automatically send steps at your preferred pace, while it logs every interaction in a centralized Inbox. However, Close does not include a visual campaign builder or comprehensive email-campaign analytics, meaning you won't have access to open-rate trends or A/B testing insights within the interface.

Zoho, on the other hand, facilitates outreach on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram through Zoho Social, although this feature is separate from the main CRM interface.

In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences

While Close doesn't provide a traditional mail merge interface, it enables the creation of multi-step drip campaigns through its Workflows engine, allowing you to integrate email, calls, and SMS into a single sequence. You can enroll leads, customize messages using templates, and let Close automatically dispatch steps at your preferred pace, all while tracking every interaction in its unified Inbox. However, it's worth noting that Close lacks a visual campaign builder and detailed email campaign analytics, meaning you won't have access to open-rate trends or A/B testing insights in the user interface.

The Zoho CRM extension does not include support for messaging templates or social sequences, necessitating that outreach be managed separately through Zoho Social.

Activity & Engagement Tracking

Close automatically tracks email opens from its unified Inbox, displaying open counts and timestamps beneath each message.

Zoho natively logs email, call, and calendar activities, while social engagement is recorded only when Zoho Social is integrated.

folk CRM: The Best CRM for Social Selling!

folk CRM is an innovative social selling CRM designed to streamline your selling efforts into a seamless workflow. It quickly captures contacts, keeps conversation context front and center, and minimizes manual tasks through automatic enrichment and smart fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.

Tailored for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to consolidate leads from various sources, organize them into customized pipelines, and monitor every interaction in one centralized location. Automatic contact enrichment fills in missing information, deduplication maintains a clean database, and shared notes and tags facilitate warm introductions and track relationship history effortlessly across the team.

For effective daily social selling, folk enables consistent execution: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline while preserving the human touch that ultimately seals the deals.

👉 Try folk CRM for free

Schlussfolgerung

In summary, Close CRM excels in integrating calling and email for high-velocity sales, while Zoho CRM offers a comprehensive toolkit for larger teams despite its complexity. However, for teams focused on email integration, automation, and leveraging social selling through LinkedIn, folk stands out as the optimal choice. With its seamless workflow, automatic contact enrichment, and a centralized approach to managing relationships, folk ensures that teams can maintain context and execute follow-ups effectively, making social selling both streamlined and successful.

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