Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Contact management determines whether a CRM remains effective or devolves into chaos. Freshsales and Clay
Social selling thrives at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool struggles to keep pace with LinkedIn activity, comments, and warm introductions, you not only lose visibility — you also risk losing deals to teams that nurture their relationships more effectively.
folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-driven CRMs. Clarify excels at transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk offers teams a flexible, social-selling-friendly workspace to manage contacts, signals, and pipelines all in one place.
In this comparison, we'll 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 don't originate from 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 can't capture these signals and link them to real individuals and pipelines, your team will be operating in the dark while your competitors cultivate their relationships openly.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to convert those interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, their origins, their interests, and their readiness to buy. Rather than viewing LinkedIn as just a “nice-to-have awareness,” it transforms into a measurable, repeatable action 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-up opportunities
✔️ Track which prospects engage with you through content versus outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging
✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers — not just contacts in a list
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activities, rather than attributing all credit to last-click channels
What is Freshsales?
Freshsales is the sales CRM from Freshworks tailored for small and mid-sized teams seeking a user-friendly interface paired with robust automation. Users can integrate their Gmail or Microsoft 365 accounts, opting for either one-way or two-way sync, ensuring that conversations remain consistent between the mailbox and CRM. With features like templates, bulk email capabilities, and activity timelines, email becomes an integral tool for representatives managing leads and opportunities.
What is Clay?
Clay serves as a data-centric prospecting and enrichment tool that teams frequently utilize alongside their CRMs. It aggregates information from various sources to create highly targeted lead lists and workflows. However, a separate CRM is usually still necessary for managing ongoing relationships and pipelines.
Feature comparison of Freshsales and Clay
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
Freshsales provides seamless integration with Gmail and Outlook, displaying email threads, scheduling tools, and relevant contact information directly in your inbox. After connecting, Freshsales automatically scans incoming emails for recognized contact addresses and logs conversations, allowing you to minimize clutter by selecting which folders to sync.
In contrast, Clay requires manual data entry or enrichment through integrations, lacking the capability to automatically enhance profiles with social data such as titles, bios, or photos.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Freshsales integrates seamlessly with your Gmail or Outlook through native plugins, providing an uninterrupted connection that syncs your emails and calendar events in real time. Incoming messages from recognized leads are displayed within seconds, while any outgoing emails logged in the CRM are instantly reflected in your email thread. Calendar events are updated immediately, ensuring that meetings scheduled in Freshsales appear promptly in your personal calendar.
In contrast, Clay lacks capabilities for social listening, alerts, or real-time interaction tracking, excelling instead in workflow automation and task management.
Social Selling: Which channels?
Freshsales offers a comprehensive Marketing Campaigns module—head to Campaigns > Email to create email blasts or automated Journeys based on user behavior. The platform features user-friendly drag-and-drop templates, dynamic segments, and analytics dashboards that track delivery rates, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. Additionally, built-in retry logic and ISP throttling enhance email deliverability. However, note that more advanced features such as heat-map click analysis and AI-driven send-time optimization necessitate an upgrade to Freshmarketer.
On the other hand, Clay is not tailored for social selling; it emphasizes relationship management through CRM-style outreach rather than social messaging or publishing.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
Freshsales offers a comprehensive Marketing Campaigns module—simply go to Campaigns > Email to design blasts or automated Journeys based on user behaviors. With drag-and-drop templates, dynamic segments, and analytics dashboards, you can easily track delivery rates, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. The built-in retry logic and ISP throttling enhance deliverability. However, keep in mind that more advanced features, such as heat-map click analysis and AI-driven send-time optimization, require an upgrade to Freshmarketer.
Currently, in-browser messaging is not supported in Clay, and you cannot send templated outreach via LinkedIn or other social media platforms.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
With Freshsales, you can enable the 'Track opens and clicks' feature in Settings > Email Settings. This ensures that every email sent through the native plugin captures open events and link clicks in the contact timeline. You can view delivery, open, and click metrics in both the Deal dashboard and the Campaigns module. Keep in mind that open rates depend on image-based pixels; if a recipient blocks images or views links in preview panes, the stats may be underreported.
On the other hand, Clay monitors CRM events and internal activities but does not provide insights into external engagements, such as actions on social media or link clicks.
folk CRM: The Best CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is an innovative social selling CRM that transforms social selling into a streamlined, repeatable workflow. It quickly captures contacts, maintains conversation context, and minimizes manual tasks through automatic enrichment and smart fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Designed for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to centralize leads from various sources, organize them within custom pipelines, and track every interaction in one place. Automatic contact enrichment fills in gaps seamlessly, while deduplication keeps the database tidy. Shared notes and tags facilitate warm introductions and make relationship history accessible to the entire team.
For effective daily social selling, folk ensures consistent execution: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline— all while preserving the human context that leads to successful deals.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Freshsales excels in email integration and automation, making it a solid choice for teams focused on streamlined communication. Clay, while strong in data enrichment, lacks the social features essential for modern selling. Meanwhile, folk stands out as the premier CRM for teams prioritizing email integration, automation, and social selling workflows. It captures contacts swiftly, maintains context, and ensures smooth follow-ups, empowering teams to execute effective LinkedIn-driven outreach with ease. For the best social selling experience, folk is the clear winner.
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