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Contact management determines whether a CRM remains effective or becomes overwhelming noise. Streak and HighLevel
Social selling thrives in the intersection of your CRM and your network. When your tool can't keep pace with LinkedIn activity, comments, and warm introductions, you not only lose visibility but also risk losing deals to teams that maintain closer connections to their relationships.
folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-oriented CRMs. Clarify excels at converting unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk provides teams with a flexible, social-selling-friendly workspace to manage contacts, signals, and pipeline all in one location.
In this comparison, we will explore how each CRM facilitates authentic 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 transactions don’t initiate with a cold email or a demo request; they typically start with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or a subtle profile visit. If your CRM can't capture these signals and link them to real people and pipelines, your team is operating blind while your competitors cultivate relationships right before your eyes.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to transform these interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, where they originated, what their interests are, and their proximity to making a purchase. Rather than viewing LinkedIn as merely a 'nice-to-have awareness,' it becomes a measurable, repeatable action within your revenue strategy.
With a social selling CRM, your team can:
✔️ Identify buying signals from likes, comments, and profile visits and convert them into follow-ups
✔️ Track which prospects recognize you from content versus outbound efforts and tailor your messaging accordingly
✔️ Map relationships among accounts, champions, and influencers—rather than just maintaining a list of contacts
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity, rather than attributing all credit to last-click channels
What is Streak?
Streak is a user-friendly CRM integrated directly within Gmail, transforming your inbox into a collaborative pipeline for sales, support, and account management. With Streak, there's no need to toggle between tabs; users can manage deals, track progress, and collaborate on conversations seamlessly from their familiar Gmail interface. Email serves as the foundation of the platform, enhanced with real-time tracking and pipeline views that overlay your existing Gmail threads.
What is HighLevel?
HighLevel is an all-inclusive marketing and sales platform primarily designed for agencies. It consolidates funnels, email, SMS, automation, and CRM into a unified environment that agencies can either resell or manage for their clients. While its extensive features are impressive, the interface and initial setup can be a bit daunting.
Feature comparison of Streak and HighLevel
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
Streak seamlessly integrates within Gmail, transforming your inbox into a comprehensive CRM without the need for additional windows or applications. Every email you send or receive is automatically recorded in the appropriate pipeline and shared within your team’s workspace, providing you with an up-to-date timeline on each deal without the hassle of manual bcc’ing.
In contrast, HighLevel does not enhance contact profiles using social media; it depends instead on form captures, manual entries, or API-based integrations.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Streak’s email synchronization occurs in real time, seamlessly integrated within Gmail’s infrastructure. The moment you send or receive an email, Streak instantly logs it to the relevant pipeline, ensuring your team has immediate access to the most current activity. With virtually no lag or queuing, messages and thread updates are reflected instantly in both your inbox and Streak’s interface. By connecting directly to Gmail, you also enjoy the benefits of Google’s exceptional uptime and reliability.
In contrast, HighLevel lacks a social listening feature, and its real-time alerts are restricted to email/SMS replies or incoming form messages.
Social Selling: Which channels?
Streak’s Mail Merge tool, integrated directly within Gmail, enables you to send personalized mass emails to hundreds of recipients in under two minutes—no need for CSV imports or third-party applications. You can effortlessly insert custom variables (such as first name, company, and deal data) from your pipelines, schedule automatic follow-up sequences on the same thread, and even conduct A/B tests on subject lines to enhance reply rates. Each sent message and follow-up is automatically logged in your Streak timeline, ensuring you maintain visibility on who has opened, clicked, or replied. However, Streak’s campaign features do fall short in terms of advanced analytics dashboards, meaning you won’t receive detailed reports on unsubscribes or bounce handling unless you integrate another tool.
HighLevel supports inbound and outbound messaging through WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram DM, but it does not extend support to LinkedIn or Twitter.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
Streak’s Mail Merge tool is integrated directly within Gmail, allowing you to send personalized mass emails to hundreds of recipients in less than two minutes—no need for CSV imports or third-party applications. You can easily insert custom variables (such as first name, company, and deal data) from your pipelines, schedule automatic follow-up sequences in the same thread, and even run A/B tests on subject lines to enhance reply rates. Each sent message and follow-up is logged seamlessly in your Streak timeline, ensuring you maintain visibility on who has opened, clicked, or replied. However, Streak’s campaign features fall short when it comes to advanced analytics dashboards, meaning you won't receive detailed reports on unsubscribes or bounce handling unless you integrate another tool.
While sequences can be used via SMS and email, they are not supported on social platforms, and in-browser automation or messaging templates are also unavailable.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
Streak integrates a discreet tracking pixel and link tracker directly into Gmail, providing real-time 'eye' icons that indicate when an email is opened or a link is clicked within a thread. By hovering over the green eye, you can view timestamps, locations, and click data for each link without having to leave your inbox. Since it operates solely on Gmail's API, there's minimal setup required and you receive immediate feedback; however, aggregated campaign dashboards or multi-link heat-mapping features are not available beyond individual message views.
HighLevel monitors emails, SMS, calls, and web chats, but it does not track social post interactions or profile activities.
folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is a cutting-edge CRM designed specifically for social selling, transforming the process into a streamlined, repeatable workflow. It quickly captures contacts, keeps conversation context readily available, and minimizes manual tasks through enrichment and intelligent fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Tailored for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk empowers teams to centralize leads from various sources, organize them in customized pipelines, and track every interaction in one unified space. Automatic contact enrichment fills in gaps, while deduplication maintains a clean database; shared notes and tags facilitate warm introductions and easy access to relationship histories across the team.
For effective daily social selling, folk enhances execution consistency: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through a pipeline, all while preserving the human context that ultimately secures deals.
Conclusion
In summary, Streak excels in email integration within Gmail, providing a seamless user experience for managing conversations and deals. HighLevel offers a comprehensive marketing suite ideal for agencies but may overwhelm users with its complex setup. While both tools have their strengths, folk stands out as the ultimate CRM for social selling. It simplifies contact management, automates follow-ups, and captures vital engagement signals, ensuring your team consistently nurtures relationships and drives deals. Choose folk for an efficient, email-centric approach to modern sales.
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