Salesforce vs Close CRM

Salesforce and Close CRM are two CRM platforms designed to streamline customer relationship management, each with a unique focus. Salesforce is a comprehensive, highly customizable CRM built for larger organizations needing advanced tools for sales, marketing, and customer service. Close CRM, on the other hand, is tailored for fast-paced sales teams, offering features like call tracking, email automation, and pipeline management to optimize the sales process. In this blog post, we’ll explore their key features to help you decide which CRM best fits your business needs. Or, if folk might offer a more balanced alternative with user-friendly contact management and customization options.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a robust CRM platform for large enterprises, offering tools for sales, marketing, service, and analytics, with extensive scalability.

Key features of Salesforce

• Comprehensive ecosystem: A unified platform offering CRM, marketing automation, customer service, and custom app development, suitable for the varied needs of large enterprises.
• Customization and scalability: Salesforce is highly customizable and scalable, allowing large organizations to tailor the platform to complex workflows and manage significant growth.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) integration: Salesforce Einstein offers AI-driven analytics and automation, providing insights that help large businesses optimize their strategies.
• Extensive integration capabilities: With Salesforce's AppExchange, large companies can integrate the platform with a wide range of third-party applications, ensuring seamless operation across different business systems.
• Enterprise-grade security and compliance: Salesforce provides robust security measures and compliance features, critical for large organizations handling sensitive customer data.
  

What is Close CRM?

Close CRM is a sales-focused platform designed to eliminate the complexity of traditional CRMs, offering a streamlined and user-friendly experience tailored for small businesses with ambitious growth goals. Known for its intuitive design, Close provides robust features like automation to reduce manual work, built-in communication tools for faster follow-ups, and powerful integrations to fit seamlessly into any tech stack. Whether you’re managing leads, collaborating with a team, or scaling sales efforts, Close is built to save time and help small businesses succeed.

Key features of Close CRM

• Fast setup: Simple and quick to implement, allowing teams to start using the platform without delay.
• Intuitive interface: Easy-to-navigate dashboard tailored for speed and productivity.
• Built-in communication: Integrated calling, email, and SMS tools for seamless interaction with leads and clients.
• Automation tools: Includes workflows, smart views, and task automation to streamline repetitive tasks.
• Powerful reporting: Customizable sales and activity reporting for actionable insights into team performance and revenue trends.
• Team collaboration: Features like shared inboxes and task assignments to keep teams aligned and efficient.
• Secure and scalable: Designed with robust security and scalability for growing businesses.
• Integrations: Offers over 100 native integrations and Zapier compatibility to sync seamlessly with existing tools.

Salesforce vs. Close CRM: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of Salesforce and Close CRM and take a closer look at their sales, outreach and user experience.

1. Sales pipeline management

While Salesforce excels in offering detailed insights and analytics, Close CRM shines with its user-friendly interface and ease of use, making it ideal for smaller teams or those who prefer a more straightforward approach. So ultimately, the choice between Salesforce and Close CRM will depend on the specific needs and preferences of your sales team, whether they prioritize depth of insights or simplicity and speed in managing sales pipelines.
Salesforce's pipeline management feature, known as Pipeline Inspection, provides a comprehensive view of sales opportunities by consolidating key metrics, deal changes, and AI-powered insights into a single interface. This allows sales teams to make informed decisions and prioritize their efforts effectively.
Close CRM's pipeline offers a streamlined, visual approach to managing sales processes, making it easy to track deals from start to finish. The Powerful Pipeline View provides a clear snapshot of all active opportunities, enabling teams to focus on what matters most. With features like drag-and-drop deal management, users can effortlessly update the status of leads.

2. Ease of use

Salesforce, while powerful, can present a steep learning curve due to its extensive features and customization options. In contrast, Close CRM is designed with simplicity in mind, offering an intuitive interface that allows sales teams to quickly navigate and leverage its functionalities without extensive training.

3. Contact enrichment

Salesforce's contact enrichment feature leverages tools such as the Data Cloud to automatically enhance and update contact records in real-time, drawing from verified data sources like LinkedIn and InsideView, ensuring users have access to the most current and accurate information. Close CRM does not provide its own contact enrichment feature. You can only access this using a third party application, which might incur an additional cost.

4. Outreach

Salesforce's outreach solution is powered by its AI capabilities, particularly through the integration of Einstein AI, enabling users to identify key leads and cross-sales opportunities. Close CRM offers built-in calling, email, and SMS tools for seamless multi-channel outreach, allowing users to engage prospects directly from the platform without external apps.

5. Automation

Salesforce provides robust automation with workflow rules, flow builders, and AI-powered processes through Einstein AI. Close CRM focuses on streamlining sales workflows with custom automations for tasks like lead assignments and follow-ups, using Smart Views to prioritize leads and ensure efficient team operations.

6. Integration

Salesforce integrates with numerous third-party applications via its AppExchange marketplace, connecting tools for marketing, customer service, analytics, and more, including Slack and Mailchimp for enhanced collaboration and marketing efforts. Close CRM offers integrations with various tools to enhance sales workflows and streamline data management.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Salesforce CRM integrates AI through its Einstein platform, offering predictive analytics, intelligent recommendations, and automated insights for enhanced decision-making. Close CRM does not appear to have an AI integration.

Price and plans comparison

Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both Salesforce and Close CRM.

Salesforce prices

Salesforce's sales cloud pricing plans are as follows.

• Starter suite: $25/user/month.
• Pro suite: $80/user/month.
• Enterprise plan: $165/user/month.
• Unlimited plan: $330/user/month.
• Einstein 1 Sales: $500/user/month.

Close CRM prices

Close CRM offers a monthly and annual payment option. The annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Startup: $49/user/month.
• Professional: $99/user/month.
• Enterprise: $139/user/month.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Salesforce and Close CRM

Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. A multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system that can support sales, marketing, recruitment and more. You can also use folk as a solopreneur, small to mid-size team, and large enterprise.

Key features

• Contact management: Bring all your contacts into one place seamlessly, from social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram and X to multiple inboxes including Gmail and Outlook.
• Notes and reminders: Attach notes directly to a contact's profile in folk, and access them on the go. And assign reminders so you know exactly when to follow-up.
• Sales pipeline dashboard: Manage your entire sales cycle and leads with a highly customizable sales pipeline dashboard that can be used in Kanban-board view or listicle.
• Ease of use and customization: Easily customize the pipelines, dashboards, automation, email sequences, so that you can use it across your sales cycle and pipeline management – and other business functions such as recruitment, marketing, and more.
• Social media integration: Import people and companies from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, and X within a click thanks to folk’s Google Chrome extension.
• Contact sync from Gmail and Outlook: Full email sync enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
• Find email addresses in a click: Contact enrichment powered by Apollo, and Dropcontact so you can fill in missing data points with 1-click.
• Email sequences: Send email sequences with reminders if your leads don’t reply to your first emails. It includes an AI integration allowing you to personalize email at scale.

Price and plans

folk has a 14-day free trial. After that, there are affordable monthly or annual subscription plans. The annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Standard: $20 per user, per month.
• Premium: $40 per user, per month.
• Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.

Salesforce vs. Close CRM: What's the Verdict?

It's clear that both Salesforce and Close CRM offer robust solutions tailored to different business sizes and needs. Salesforce excels with its comprehensive ecosystem and scalability for large enterprises, while Close CRM provides a streamlined, sales-focused platform ideal for small businesses aiming for growth. However, for companies seeking a more personalized approach, folk emerges as a flexible alternative, blending ease of use with customization. With its user-friendly interface and affordable pricing, folk is a compelling choice for businesses looking to enhance their CRM experience. Try folk today, free