Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Contact management determines whether a CRM is effective or becomes mere noise. HubSpot and Nimble
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 not only lose visibility — you also risk losing deals to teams that better maintain their relationships.
Folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-first CRMs. Clarify emphasizes transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while Folk provides teams with a flexible, social-selling-friendly environment to monitor contacts, signals, and pipelines all in one location.
In this comparison, we will explore how each CRM supports 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 transactions begin not with a cold email or a demo request, but rather with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or a subtle profile visit. If your CRM cannot capture these signals and link them to actual people and pipelines, your team is navigating blind while your competitors cultivate relationships in plain view.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to transform these interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, the source of engagement, their interests, and their proximity to making a purchase. LinkedIn shifts from being just “nice-to-have awareness” to 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, converting them into follow-up opportunities
✔️ Differentiate between prospects who recognize you from content versus outbound efforts and tailor your messaging accordingly
✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers — not just contacts on a list
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social interactions rather than solely attributing credit to last-click channels
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot is a comprehensive CRM platform that consolidates marketing, sales, and customer service into a unified contact database. Its email integration allows users to connect their personal Gmail and Outlook accounts, enabling representatives to send personalized emails, log responses, and initiate sequences directly from the CRM or their inbox. With features like open and click tracking, templates, and shared timelines, email interactions are visible to the entire revenue team.
What is Nimble?
Nimble is a streamlined, socially-oriented CRM that gathers context from both email and social networks. It's particularly beneficial for relationship-focused sellers who spend considerable time in their inboxes and on social media. While it offers simplicity compared to larger suites, it may lack the depth needed for intricate pipelines or multi-team operations.
Feature comparison of HubSpot and Nimble
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
HubSpot provides smooth two-way email integration with Gmail, Outlook, and any IMAP-compatible service, allowing you to send personalized emails directly from contact records while automatically logging every response in your CRM timeline. Its built-in scheduler seamlessly adds meeting events to Google Calendar or Office 365, including automatic guest invitations and timeline updates for complete transparency.
Nimble enhances your contacts by pulling publicly available social profile information (such as photos, bios, jobs, etc.) from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and email signatures.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
HubSpot’s email synchronization works in near real-time with Gmail and Outlook, typically updating changes within seconds to a minute. After connecting your account, HubSpot maintains a continuous connection via OAuth, consistently pushing and pulling message data to ensure your CRM timeline is always current. This reliability is further enhanced by HubSpot’s global cloud infrastructure, which offers an impressive 99.99% uptime for its core services.
In contrast, Nimble lacks real-time alerts and social listening features. Instead, it prioritizes enriching contact profiles over tracking live interactions.
Social Selling: Which channels?
HubSpot’s Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise offer powerful one-to-one sequences, enabling you to enroll up to 50 contacts simultaneously and send hundreds of personalized emails per user each day. The intuitive drag-and-drop sequence builder simplifies template creation, manages delays, and detects replies, while Marketing Hub caters to larger audiences with features like segmentation, A/B testing, and comprehensive analytics on opens, clicks, and bounces. However, since the most advanced campaign functionalities reside in Marketing Hub, Sales Hub users without this add-on encounter limitations on total sends and access to more basic reporting.
Nimble captures contacts from LinkedIn and Twitter but does not facilitate outreach through these platforms; its primary focus is on contact management and enrichment.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
HubSpot’s Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise offer powerful one-to-one sequences, enabling you to enroll up to 50 contacts at once and send hundreds of personalized emails daily per user. Its intuitive drag-and-drop sequence builder simplifies template creation, manages delays, and detects replies. Meanwhile, the Marketing Hub enhances your outreach to thousands of recipients through segmentation, A/B testing, and comprehensive analytics on opens, clicks, and bounces. However, since the most advanced campaign features reside in the Marketing Hub, Sales Hub users without this add-on encounter limitations on total sends and access to more basic reporting.
In contrast, Nimble lacks in-browser templated messaging, requiring users to rely on email or external tools for structured outreach.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
HubSpot Sales monitors opens and clicks for every one-to-one email sent from contact records or through the Sales extension, providing real-time desktop notifications and logging each event on the timeline. Note that click tracking requires a paid Sales Hub seat, whereas free users can only see opens. You can easily check the total clicks per link directly in the email activity feed. For advanced attribution, such as multi-variant link analysis across campaigns, you’ll need Marketing Hub; pure Sales Hub users won't have access to enterprise-level click analytics without the add-on.
Nimble records email and call history and provides some enrichment features, but it does not track social engagements such as likes or comments.
folk CRM: The Best CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is an innovative social selling CRM that transforms social engagement into a streamlined, repeatable workflow. It quickly captures contacts, maintains conversation context, and minimizes manual tasks through automatic enrichment and intelligent fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Designed for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to consolidate leads from various sources, arrange them in customized pipelines, and monitor every interaction in one centralized location. Automatic contact enrichment fills information gaps, deduplication keeps the database organized, and shared notes and tags facilitate smooth warm introductions and relationship tracking 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 the pipeline while preserving the human touch that ultimately seals deals.
Conclusion
In conclusion, while HubSpot excels in comprehensive email integration and robust automation features, and Nimble offers a streamlined experience for socially-oriented sellers, folk stands out as the ultimate CRM for teams prioritizing email integration, automation, and sequencing. With its ability to capture and enrich contacts seamlessly, maintain team collaboration, and facilitate consistent social selling, folk ensures no relationship slips through the cracks. For teams ready to elevate their social selling game, folk is the clear choice.
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