Salesforce vs Clay

Time to upgrade your approach to outreach? Salesforce and Clay stand out as two well known solutions, each offering distinct advantages tailored to different business needs. Salesforce is renowned for its comprehensive suite of tools designed for large enterprises, providing robust scalability and customization options. While Clay caters to businesses focused on outreach efficiency with its user-friendly interface and streamlined features. In this blog post, we'll explore the key differences between these two CRM giants, examining their features, pricing, and benefits to help you determine which is the right fit for your organization. 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 an outreach and lead generation tool designed to help businesses streamline prospecting and customer outreach. It automates data enrichment by gathering information from multiple sources, such as LinkedIn and other social platforms, to build detailed contact profiles. Clay enables users to create targeted lists, personalize outreach efforts, and manage communication workflows, focusing on improving efficiency in lead generation and outreach campaigns.

Key features of Clay

• Automated data enrichment: Clay pulls data from multiple sources, such as LinkedIn and public databases, to build comprehensive profiles on prospects, reducing the need for manual data entry.
• Prospecting and list building: Users can create targeted lists of leads by filtering and segmenting prospects based on specific criteria like location, industry, or role.
• Personalized outreach: Clay enables tailored outreach by allowing users to customize messages and emails based on the enriched profile data of each lead.
• Email sequencing: Users can set up automated email sequences for follow-ups, ensuring consistent communication without manual scheduling.
• Template management: The platform offers tools for creating and saving message templates, which helps maintain consistency in outreach efforts.
• LinkedIn integration: Clay connects with LinkedIn, allowing users to gather data directly from profiles and track LinkedIn interactions as part of their outreach strategy.

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

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 efficiently track progress, identify potential roadblocks, and prioritize deals that are most likely to close.
Clay doesn't have a pipeline dashboard per se, but it allows you to connect with your inbound lead form and then creates a dashboard based off this data. This flexibility can be beneficial for businesses looking for a more tailored approach to managing their sales processes. While Salesforce offers a robust, out-of-the-box solution with its advanced analytics and AI capabilities, Clay provides a more customizable experience that can adapt to specific business needs.
Ultimately, the choice between Salesforce and Clay will depend on the specific requirements and preferences of your sales team, as well as the level of customization and insight you are looking to achieve in your sales pipeline management.

2. Ease of use

Salesforce's interface can be complex due to its extensive features, requiring a learning curve. Clay is user-friendly for data enrichment and outreach but lacks the in-depth contact management and deal tracking found in traditional CRMs.

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’s enrichment feature automatically gathers detailed lead information from various sources, creating comprehensive contact profiles that can be integrated with your existing CRM.

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’s outreach feature is its main focus and is designed for efficient prospecting and personalized communication, enabling targeted lists and automated, customized emails.

5. Automation

Salesforce offers robust automation features designed to streamline business processes, including workflow rules, flow builders, and AI automation through Einstein AI. Clay’s automation focuses on simplifying outreach tasks with automated workflows for email sequencing and follow-up reminders, though it lacks advanced multichannel engagement options.

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, and more. Popular integrations include Slack and Mailchimp. Clay offers integrations with various CRMs, email marketing platforms, and data sources, allowing users to sync enriched contact profiles and streamline outreach workflows across tools.

7. Artificial Intelligence

Salesforce CRM integrates AI through its Einstein platform, offering predictive analytics, intelligent recommendations, and automated insights. Clay's AI integration is research-focused, using Claygent for automating research tasks like SOC-II compliance checks.

Price and plans comparison

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

Salesforce prices

Salesforce provides a few plans that are feature rich and based on your company size. Their sales cloud subscription is 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.

Clay prices

Besides a free plan, Clay has a few premium plans to choose from depending on the features you need, credits, and number of people/company searches you want to make. Below is a high level overview of their annual subscription.

• Starter: Starting from $134 per month for 24k credits per year.
• Explorer: Starting from $314 per month, for 120k credits per year.
• Pro: Starting from $720 per month, for 600k credits per year.
• Enterprise: Price undisclosed. Custom credits option.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Salesforce and Clay

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. folk has become a firm favourite in the market thanks to its ability to support multiple business functions including sales, marketing, recruitment, fundraising activities and more.

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. Clay: What's the verdict?

Between Salesforce and Clay, it's clear that both have their own unique advantages. Salesforce stands out for its comprehensive features and scalability, making it ideal for large enterprises with complex needs. On the other hand, Clay offers a more streamlined and cost-effective option for smaller businesses seeking simplicity and efficiency. However, 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.