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

Contact management is the key area where a CRM can either remain effective or become overwhelming. HubSpot and Zoho CRM

Social selling thrives in the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool fails to keep pace with LinkedIn activities, comments, and warm introductions, you risk losing not just visibility, but also potential deals to teams that prioritize their relationships.

folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-focused CRMs. Clarify emphasizes transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk offers teams a flexible workspace tailored for social selling, enabling them to track contacts, signals, and their pipeline all in one place.

This comparison 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 don’t begin with a cold email or a demo request; they start with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or even a quiet profile visit. If your CRM cannot capture these signals and associate them with actual people and pipelines, your team will be operating in the dark while competitors cultivate relationships openly.

A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to convert those interactions into structured, actionable insights: identifying who engaged, the source of their engagement, their interests, and how close they are to making a purchase. LinkedIn transitions from being merely a “nice-to-have” for awareness to a measurable, repeatable component of your revenue strategy.

With a social selling CRM, your team can:

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

✔️ Track prospects to see who knows you from content versus outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging

✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers—not just maintain a list of contacts

✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activities instead of attributing all credit to last-click channels

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a comprehensive CRM platform that integrates marketing, sales, and customer service into a single contact database. Its email integration seamlessly connects personal Gmail and Outlook inboxes, allowing representatives to send one-to-one emails, log responses, and initiate sequences directly from the CRM or their inbox. Features like open and click tracking, templates, and shared timelines enhance visibility of email activities across the entire revenue team.

What is Zoho CRM?

Zoho CRM is a versatile and feature-rich platform known for its extensive capabilities and competitive pricing, making it ideal for businesses that require a robust suite for sales, marketing, and support within one ecosystem. However, its interface and configuration options can be overwhelming, particularly for smaller teams.

Feature comparison of HubSpot and Zoho CRM

Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights

HubSpot features seamless two-way email integration with Gmail, Outlook, and any IMAP-compatible provider, enabling you to send one-to-one emails directly from contact records. It also automatically logs every reply in your CRM timeline. Its native scheduler adds meeting events to Google Calendar or Office 365, complete with automatic guest invitations and timeline entries for comprehensive visibility.

Zoho CRM supports enrichment through third-party tools such as Clearbit and Zoho DataPrep, enhancing profiles with details like name, title, company, social handles, and more.

Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts

HubSpot’s email synchronization functions in near real-time with Gmail and Outlook, usually updating within seconds to a minute. After connecting your account, HubSpot establishes a consistent connection through OAuth, continuously pushing and pulling message data to ensure your CRM timeline is always current. The reliability of this system is enhanced by HubSpot’s global cloud infrastructure, which boasts an impressive 99.99% uptime for its core services.

For social alerts and listening, Zoho Social manages these features separately from the CRM core. Users need to link the two systems to receive real-time updates from social platforms.

Social Selling: Which channels?

HubSpot’s Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise offer powerful one-to-one sequences, allowing you to enroll up to 50 contacts simultaneously and send hundreds of personalized emails per user each day. The drag-and-drop sequence builder simplifies template creation, manages delays, and detects replies. Meanwhile, Marketing Hub enhances outreach by scaling to thousands of recipients with features like segmentation, A/B testing, and comprehensive analytics on opens, clicks, and bounces. However, Sales Hub users without the additional Marketing Hub add-on encounter limitations on total sends and basic reporting capabilities.

Zoho enables outreach on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram through Zoho Social, though this functionality operates separately from the main CRM interface.

In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences

HubSpot’s Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise offer powerful one-to-one sequences, allowing you to enroll up to 50 contacts simultaneously and send hundreds of personalized emails daily per user. Its intuitive drag-and-drop sequence builder simplifies template creation, manages delays, and detects replies, while the Marketing Hub enhances your outreach by accommodating thousands of recipients with segmentation, A/B testing, and comprehensive analytics on opens, clicks, and bounces. However, since the most advanced campaign features are exclusive to the Marketing Hub, Sales Hub users without this add-on encounter limitations on total sends and access to more basic reporting.

On the other hand, the Zoho CRM extension lacks support for messaging templates or social sequences, requiring separate management through Zoho Social.

Activity & Engagement Tracking

HubSpot Sales efficiently tracks opens and clicks for every one-to-one email sent from contact records or through the Sales extension. It provides real-time desktop notifications and logs each event on the timeline. Note that click tracking is available only for paid Sales Hub users; free users can only see opens. You can easily view the total clicks per link directly in the email activity feed. For more advanced attribution features, such as multi-variant link analysis across campaigns, you would need to use Marketing Hub, as pure Sales Hub users won't have access to enterprise-level click analytics without an add-on.

On the other hand, Zoho automatically logs email, call, and calendar activities. However, social engagement is only recorded if you integrate Zoho Social.

folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM for Social Selling!

folk CRM is an innovative social selling CRM designed to streamline your social selling efforts into a straightforward and repeatable workflow. It quickly captures contacts, maintains conversation context, and minimizes manual tasks through enrichment and intelligent fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.

Specifically built for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk allows teams to consolidate leads from various sources, arrange them into customized pipelines, and monitor every interaction in a centralized location. Automated contact enrichment fills in the gaps, deduplication keeps your database organized, and shared notes and tags facilitate easy access to warm introductions and relationship histories across the team.

For everyday social selling, folk enables consistent execution: segment your leads, personalize your outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline while preserving the human touch that truly drives deal closures.

👉 Try folk CRM for free

结论

In summary, HubSpot excels with its comprehensive integration and powerful email tracking features, making it ideal for teams that prioritize a full suite of marketing and sales tools. Zoho CRM offers extensive capabilities but can overwhelm smaller teams due to its complexity. In contrast, folk stands out as the best CRM for social selling, specifically designed for LinkedIn-driven outreach. Its streamlined workflows, automatic enrichment, and focused features ensure that your team captures every opportunity, maintains context, and effectively follows up with leads.

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