What is Close CRM?
Close CRM is a CRM tool for startups and small businesses.
Launched in 2013 as Close.io, it was originally a by-product of an outsourced sales agency called Elastic Sales. Their focus was on building a CRM that focuses on sales outreach, minimizing manual data entry, and simplifying the UI. As a result, today’s product is quite different from a traditional CRM like Salesforce.
But is Close the right CRM for your business? To find out, our product experts put Close CRM through the Stackfix test process. Here’s our verdict.
Stackfix's Verdict
Pros of Close CRM
Excellent for sales outreach
Best-in-class call functionality
Very quick to get started
Cons of Close CRM
Expensive entry-level pricing
Weak reporting functionality
Limited customizability & integrations
Best for businesses who:
Have small sales teams
And source most leads via cold calls & email
Or have a high-volume inside sales motion
Less good for businesses who:
Have a large or outside sales teams
Or have complex sales processes
Or need advanced CRM reporting
What does Close CRM do?
Close CRM is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool for sales teams in mid-to-large businesses.
Like many CRMs, it enables you to:
- Store, manage, and track customer-related data
- Prospect and reach out to potential buyers
- Manage your pipeline of sales opportunities
- Group, de-duplicate, and enrich contacts
- Create, send, and track email outreach messages
- Build reports and dashboards
Close CRM offers more advanced functionality too, including:
- Custom objects
- Multiple pipelines
- Sales outreach sequences
- Workflow automation
- Phone dialers
There are over 80 integrations with other tools too, including integration platforms like Zapier.
What does Close CRM look like?
Pros of Close CRM
1: Excellent for sales outreach
Close CRM is more comparable to a sales engagement tool than most CRMs. It offers broad functionality for multichannel outreach, on par with tools like Salesloft, Outreach, and Apollo. You can create, send and track calls, SMS, email, and video meetings all from within Close.
Smart views give you a way to filter your leads in the same way across the app. They can be used to organize and prioritize your sales outreach, and to trigger workflow automations.
Close captures all your sales activity and displays it on profile timelines. This makes it easy to keep a clear picture of all your sales outreach.
Close has AI built-in to outreach workflows too, including prospecting for leads, summarizing relationships, and writing assistants for emails. These are provided via a custom chatbot, call assistant, and email rewrite assistant.
2: Best-in-class call functionality.
Close’s phone features deserve their own call out. You can dial straight from your browser and call prospects in over 200 countries. If you can't connect, you can share pre-recorded voicemail messages too.
Standout calling features include:
- Power dialer: As soon as the current call finishes, it dials the next number. This enables reps to efficiently work through a list of contact numbers.
- Predictive dialer: The system can dial multiple numbers at the same time, then route the answered calls to live sales reps. This keeps your reps talking rather than listening to dialing tones.
- Call coaching: Let managers or other reps join a call and silently listen, talk just to the rep, or ‘barge’ in and join the call too.
- Automated transcripts: Close transcribes and summarizes your call for you, so you don’t need to keep making notes.
If your sales team is running a high volume of phone calls, we recommend taking Close for a test drive. This is the benchmark you should be comparing other sales software too.
3: Very quick to get started
Close is very fast to get started. A motivated team can easily get set up inside a 14-day free trial.
Close feels much faster to use than legacy CRMs. For sales reps, it's easy to navigate to where you want to take action. The 3-column layout on desktop means you have most of the information you need in front of you in one screen. If you get stuck, the getting started guides in the help docs are good too, offering both video and text walkthroughs.
The design is dense. Some users might find it a little overwhelming at first. There are some clunky flows, like bulk adding Contacts to lists. But, overall, Close is quick for most reps to learn.
Customer support is very proactive during onboarding. Close offers free migration help when you get started, including data migration. Their team will help you set up your instance, import your data correctly, and train your team—all at no extra cost.
Cons of Close CRM
1: Expensive entry-level pricing
Close’s pricing starts at $49/user/month (with an annual commitment). Although there is a free trial, this entry level price point is more like mid-tier pricing with other CRMs. Per seat pricing continues to rise steeply after that.
However, Close is more like a “CRM + sales engagement” together. All plans do include calls, SMS, and email sequences. These are features that are typically limited to higher tiers within other CRMs, so it is hard to make like-for-like comparisons.
If you do compare CRMs like-for-like, the entry-level price for Close is one of the cheapest options. The cheapest plans for products that have the same functionality are only a few dollars cheaper per user per month.
2: Weak reporting functionality
Close CRM’s reporting leaves a lot to be desired. The tiled activity reports and opportunity funnel view is okay. The charts and filters are clear. But, the use cases here feel more suitable for dashboards than digging into sales performance.
It is hard to join data up for analysis. For instance, you can’t easily see which outreach sequences drove the most opportunities. Email reports only show opens and responses. One workaround might be to build a filtered smart view, then tab through them all. That feels like a very unsatisfying experience.
You can build custom graphs in Explorer. These enable you to plot line and bar charts from all your data in Close. It feels very barebones—not like it is from a product that has been available for over a decade. Frustratingly, Explorer is only available on the Enterprise plan (from $139/user/month). That’s a steep price for limited reporting functionality. If you need better reporting, you may be better off exporting data from Close to explore elsewhere.
We’re not surprised that Fivetran (a data extraction tool) is one of the most popular integrations for Close. It’s too hard to drill into sales performance data in the native reporting. But pushing small business buyers towards other paid tools feels like a poor workaround.
3: Limited customizability & integrations
Close is not as sophisticated as other CRMs. There are three main objects:
- Leads (as companies)
- Contacts (as people)
- Opportunities (as deals)
If you’re familiar with other CRMs like Salesforce, it’s a little confusing to see Leads represented as companies instead of as people. If you choose Close, keep this in mind when migrating your data over.
Custom objects are supported, but currently in beta.You can add references to other objects, plus search and filter all your records. It isn’t clear if you can run reporting on custom objects yet through any of their native reporting tools.
Close offers 89 integrations live, but several key categories are missing. For example, there are no integrations for customer support tools like Zendesk and Intercom, or email marketing tools like Mailchimp and Marketo. Most of the available integrations are sales-specific, such as call recording and calendar scheduling. There are several data integration tools available, including Zapier, Segment, and Fivetran.
Close feels much more like a tool for a sales team to manage their outreach. As you grow, you may need to migrate from Close to a more traditional CRM ‘platform’ like HubSpot. That way, you can unify all your customer data across many teams like marketing, support, and sales.
Best for
- Businesses with small to mid sized sales teams (3-30 people). Bigger teams might need more complex reporting, territory management, and user permissions.
- Or inside sales teams with high lead volume. The automation and outreach features are a great fit for these sales environments.
- Or sales teams with a high-volume of cold calls. Close’s calling features are best-in-class.
Less good for
- Have a large or outside sales teams. Close’s feature sets aren’t designed for these types of teams.
- Or have complex sales processes. Close doesn’t have native functionality or integrations to support this.
- Or need advanced CRM reporting. Data and reporting is not a strength of Close.
Bottom line
Our verdict: We gave Close CRM 6/10 (June 2024).
Close is opinionated sales software. You will probably love it or hate it. The focus features are solid, particularly the calling and “all-in-one” outreach features. We’d suggest thinking of Close as a “sales engagement tool with a CRM backend” instead of a CRM. That’s why the entry-level pricing is so much higher than alternatives.
We’re not convinced Close is a long-term solution for every business. If your sales team is successful, you’ll likely outgrow Close due to its limited data and reporting functionality. Newer CRMs like Attio offer significantly more flexibility here. We’d love to see Close rethink their reporting and data flexibility to keep up here.
If you’re running a high volume inside sales team, then Close could be a great CRM. In particular, if your sales team relies heavily on calls, you should consider signing up for a trial to see how well it works for your team.
But, don’t buy Close just yet…
There is no perfect CRM tool. Every software buying decision is a trade-off decision.
If you’re interested in Close, then we’ve found two other highly-rated CRMs that could be a better fit for your business. Both of these CRMs review well for ease of use and rich functionality.
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