Salesforce vs Clay

When choosing a CRM platform, businesses often find themselves comparing industry leaders like Salesforce and Clay. Both offer powerful tools to streamline operations, boost customer engagement, and drive sales. However, each caters to different business needs, making the decision crucial. In this blog post, we’ll explore the features, pricing, and benefits of Salesforce and Clay to help you determine which CRM aligns best with your goals. We'll also introduce folk – a popular alternative.

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 Clay?

Clay is a customer relationship management tool designed to help users organize and manage contact information and interactions, with a focus on automation and contact enrichment.

Key features of Clay

• Contact management: The platform allows users to organize and manage contacts by consolidating information in one place. Users can add custom fields, notes, and tags to categorize and track interactions with each contact, making it easier to manage customer relationships.
• Automation: Clay CRM includes automation tools that handle repetitive tasks like contact updates and reminders, helping users streamline their communication and workflow processes.
• Search and filtering: The platform provides advanced search and filtering functionality, allowing users to segment their contact database based on various criteria such as engagement history, tags, or custom fields.
• Real-time updates: The platform provides real-time updates for contact records and tasks, ensuring that users have the latest information on their contacts and projects at all times.

Salesforce vs. Clay: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of two CRM software solutions and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, and contact management.

1. Sales pipeline management

While Salesforce provides a robust and integrated approach to managing sales pipelines, Clay CRM may be more suitable for businesses with simpler needs or those that prefer a lightweight CRM solution without the need for detailed pipeline tracking.
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 feature allows sales teams to monitor and manage their sales processes effectively, offering real-time updates and predictive analytics to enhance decision-making.
Clay CRM does not offer a dedicated pipeline management feature as part of its core functionality. While users can organize contacts and tasks, the platform lacks specific tools for tracking deals or leads through stages in a sales pipeline. This limitation may require users to adopt additional tools or manual processes to achieve similar functionality, potentially complicating workflow management for teams heavily reliant on structured sales processes.

2. Easy of use

Salesforce offers a powerful yet complex interface that may require training for new users. Clay is designed for simplicity, making it easy for small teams to get started quickly without a steep learning curve.

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 to provide real-time updates. Clay also offers a contact enrichment feature that automatically gathers additional information about contacts from various sources. This feature helps users build more comprehensive profiles by pulling in data like job titles, company information, and social links.

4. Outreach

Salesforce's outreach solution is powered by its AI capabilities, particularly through the integration of Einstein AI and their Outreach list that allows users to see cross-sales paths and leads they need to engage with. Clay CRM does not have a dedicated outreach feature specifically designed for managing customer communication, such as email marketing or mass outreach. However, users can track interactions with contacts and set up tasks or reminders for individual follow-ups.

5. Automation

Salesforce offers robust automation features designed to streamline business processes. Its automation capabilities include workflow rules and flow builders, approval processes, and AI automation through Einstein AI. Clay CRM includes automation features that allow users to streamline repetitive tasks, such as updating contact information, sending follow-up reminders, or managing workflow tasks. These automations can be set up to trigger actions based on certain conditions, such as time delays.

6. Integration

Salesforce integrates with a wide range of third-party applications through its AppExchange marketplace, allowing users to connect tools for marketing automation, customer service, analytics, project management, and finance. Popular integrations include platforms like Slack for team collaboration and Mailchimp for email marketing. Clay supports integrations with various third-party tools, allowing users to connect external applications for enhanced functionality.

7. Artificial intelligence

Salesforce CRM integrates AI through its Einstein platform, which enhances decision-making by providing predictive analytics, intelligent recommendations, and automated insights. It helps automate tasks such as lead scoring, opportunity forecasting, and data entry, while also offering natural language processing for customer sentiment analysis. Clay CRM does not currently offer dedicated AI integration.

Price and plans comparison

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

Salesforce prices

Salesforce has a wide range of price plans available depending on your use case. Below is an overview of their sales cloud pricing plan.

• Starter suite: $25/user/month provides basic CRM features for small businesses
• Pro suite: $80/user/month includes advanced tools for growing businesses
• Enterprise plan: $165/user/month offers extensive customization and automation for large companies
• Unlimited plan: $330/user/month provides comprehensive features for large enterprises
• Einstein 1 Sales: $500/user/month provides AI-driven insights and advanced features for large enterprises

Clay  prices

Clay has a free plan for personal use, for up to 1,000 contacts. After that premium plans are as follows on an annual subscription.

• Pro: $10 per user, per month.
• Team: $40 per user, per month.
• Enterprise: Undisclosed.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Salesforce and Clay

Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. There is a reason why folk is a multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system.

Key features

• 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. Clay: What's the Verdict?

Salesforce and Clay each offer unique advantages depending on the size and needs of your organization. Salesforce excels with its comprehensive ecosystem and scalability, making it ideal for large enterprises. On the other hand, Clay provides a more streamlined and cost-effective solution for smaller businesses or those seeking simplicity. For companies that need a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk provides a flexible alternative to these traditional CRM options, blending ease of use with customization. Try folk today, free.