Marg Close

- Ease of use, especially for sales reps

- Smart views enable quick and easy mini-reports

- Bulk editing of lead (company/account records is extremely fast

- Out-of-the-box reporting, while easy-to-use, offers far too few options for companies that are scaling quickly

- User roles and permissions, although continually evolving, are far too simplistic and do not address many key security concerns

- Something as fundamental as lead ownership is not something that exists natively but rather must be added as a custom field, creating the need for custom-developed solutions (in-house and third-party to make up for the lack of native functionality

Do your due diligence, and don't rush to make the switch. Make sure that you and your team are fully aware of what functionality you could be giving up for the sake of closing deals more quickly. It may not always be worth the additional headaches.

Our company switched to Close.io from an industry-leading established CRM due to problems with integrating it into our existing work processes and systems. Clearly, the biggest benefit that we have seen since implementing Close.io has been an increased rate at which sales reps are working through their case loads and closing deals.

On the other hand, the inherent system limitations within Close.io, due to its simplicity, have caused a considerable number of headaches for the marketing/sales operations team. Not the least of which, there is no automation to speak of natively within Close.io, so we have had to rely on a number of third-party tools as well as our own developers in order to keep the amount of manual data maintenance work at roughly the same level as before we switched to Close.io

I've heard very positive feedback from our sales team, as they have said that the CRM is easy to use and enables them to call and email leads very quickly and easily. There is a power dialer, but this flawed.

I am not a part of the sales team, but rather the sales operations and implementation team. That's important to note.

There are so many basic, fundamental functions that are missing from Close.io. Firstly, there is no function to mark contacts as Do Not Call. Their suggested work around is to delete the phone number or email address if they are DNC. That is a fairly basic function, considering the possibility of reimporting the lead if we somehow come across it through an event. The CSV importer is also flawed. It cannot do checks for existing leads while updating them at the same time, hence creating duplicates. As Close.io operates in an account-based model, the power dialer mentioned previously has problems as well because you can't easily select the contact from the company that you would want to call. The reporting functions are really lacking as other reviewers as mentioned. Don't expect to get any significant data from Close.io.

If you are not planning to scale, this could be a good product since sales people can do their jobs more easily. However, when your number of leads and customers starts growing, this tool makes it incredibly difficult to report on and maintain.

Enables sales people to dial more, but there are so many flaws for implementation and even just maintenance (DNC, duplicates, lead imports that we had to hire an extra person to do the mundane work of cleaning Close.io

Simple layout

Easy to use

Multiple features that support sales (power dialler, smart views

Excellent search features (if used correctly - which isn't always that straight-forward

Zero reporting

No Activity Tracking

Terrible integration with other tools

Custom fields limitations (only work at lead level

Far too many bugs which lead to duplicate and incorrect data

Cannot merge or reassign contacts to new leads

No way to limit view/edit permissions by individual (only by roles

Account based model which completely ignores contact or opportunity ownership

Seriously think about the automation and reporting you require from the tool since it offers next to none. Also consider the tool's integration with the rest of your sales and marketing stack since Close has very poor integration with most other tools and while it has an open API, the data it shares with other tools is in a very convoluted manner (thus making it very difficult for other tools to use that data

Increase sales productivity, simplify sales-marketing integration, automate lead import into Close and automate lead reassignment to sales. So far, sales numbers have seen no increase since the transition to Close while Sales-Marketing integration has significantly worsened. As for automation, we have been unable to automate any part of the lead import and reassignment process

Close.io has really strong base functionality, with good call, email, and lead tracking. The reporting is great for keeping tabs on a small team, and understanding basic activity metrics. Overall the application just works great out of the box, and is organized the way that I needed it to be for my software sales team.

The lack of integrations will ultimately be prohibitive for any team as they scale. There are aspects of Marketing automation, outbound prospecting, profiling, etc. that will be crucial. There aren't existing integrations with Marketo, Hubspot, etc. or Salesloft, insidesales.com, Outreach.io, etc., but the CRM piece itself is really strong.

Managing prospects through a sales cycle. Closing new business and communicating with clients.

- Fast and simple to use, easy to find the right info in few seconds

- E-mail integration, and the activity timeline on a lead in general

- Collaboration: information is available by all the staff, even professional e-mail if wanted

- The API is pretty simple and allows you to connect your own website to Close (for example to integrate leads information obtained through signup form in your public website.

The lack of dashboard and a global activity timeline to track who does what in the day, what I need to do today, etc.

Pricing is a bit high compared to its competitors though.

Close.io is great when working with multiple people in the same organization. E-mail integration is a must in this case. However by caution with the pricing, which is higher than direct competitors like Zoho, maybe Close.io is not the perfect fit for someone dealing essentialy with offline business. Plus, Close.io needs an access to Internet everytime, which can be a problem for commercials moving at clients.

Managing our prospects in order to be able to follow them and close our deals. The collaboration and exchange of information about deals is way simpler thanks to Close.io so we gain time in checking in which state is each deal. However, it really misses a super dashboard with activity of the day/week/month.

We are not using it for client follow-up even though it seems to give tools for that.