Close CRM vs. LinkPoint Connect

Close is my #1 choice for sales teams, both inbound and outbound. The telephony features in Close are exceptional and they lead the Industry in features and innovation. The power dialer increases productivity by cutting down the manual time of physically dialing calls. All calls and interactions including SMS messages are automatically logged to the client's account within the CRM.

Incentivized

LinkPoint is great for people who spend a lot of time working inside outlook. It allows you to update and add records directly from outlook and it has some built-in duplicate prevention which is nice if you don’t have duplicate prevention measures in place. It’s fast and stable. A lot of our users were unable to use SFO due to it crashing outlook.

Incentivized

• You can search for prospects by your activity & notes.
• It helps automate the follow up process.
• It ties cold emailing into a powerful CRM all in one portal.

Incentivized

• Setup is pretty seamless, at least from an end-user point of view. Essentially you open both Outlook and Salesforce, and then click on the LinkPoint Connect button in Outlook. You are then asked to sign in (provide username/password) to Salesforce. That's all--once my login information was accepted it was set up and syncing emails and calendar items from Outlook to Salesforce. Pretty painless!
• Recording/syncing emails to client records is, from my standpoint at least, the core functionality, and LinkPoint does this pretty much flawlessly and with little to no effort or input on my part. This is incredibly important to me as it creates the documentation record I need in Salesforce to provide excellent service to my clients as well as for compliance reasons.
• The LinkPoint interface also makes it very easy and efficient to perform additional actions in Salesforce without ever leaving Outlook. New Salesforce tasks, events, follow up reminders, etc. are all easy to set up from the LinkPoint sidebar directly in Outlook with just a few clicks of the mouse. And, in those cases where you need to go a little deeper there is a link in the sidebar that will open up the client record directly in Salesforce in a single action, bypassing the multi-step process normally required (i.e. open the program, search for the client, select and open the record, etc.). This ease of interaction between the two programs has removed barriers and has helped me be more consistent in fully utilizing what Salesforce has to offer. No longer do I move on to the next item on my to-do list with scribbled note that will hopefully remind me to update Salesforce later, when I have a chance...

Incentivized

• Minor bugs? - Sometime when I'm replying to an account it attempts to send the email as a different user. Thankfully I've only missed it when sending internal emails!

Incentivized

• Installation is a bit tricky for non tech savvy users.
• Ability to sort/filter search results when looking for additional records.
• The ability to mass create multiple contacts/leads from an email would be nice.

Incentivized

Close is a simpler platform to use when it comes to initiating email campaigns and managing leads. It has great visibility on opportunities and can be shared with specified users or can also be kept confidential. Close is not for someone who is very new to tools of its kind.

Incentivized

Close's support team offers a really good service, they are always willing to help with whatever is needed or arises, they investigate everything they need to find a solution and give an answer as quickly as possible, their attitude is better and their optimism really helps in times of stress, they do a great job in record time.

Incentivized

Never had to use the support team, which probably means the product works well!

Incentivized

For a specific sales team, Close performs better sales tracking and email and SMS management, with a fresh and modern interface, making the team's work more comfortable, with a holistic (but not complete) tracking and reporting of the data. Helping to improve the performance of each agent and obtain better results. For all other campaigns we use the predictive dialers mentioned above, Close is better for tracking current customers and for warm leads.

Incentivized

Prior to our move to LinkPoint, we used the Salesforce add-in for Outlook. This required manual syncing of email and calendar items and no easy to use interface between the two programs. It was very cumbersome for me to use, to the point where I quit using it altogether some time ago. I found it far less frustrating to just switch back and forth between Outlook and Salesforce and manually perform the requisite actions, create tasks or other items, enter the required data, etc.

Incentivized

• Has allowed us to have full visibility into our pipeline
• Has allowed us to automate lead entry and follow up, saving us tons of time and helping us to make sure we're not letting people slip through the cracks. This is done through the Zapier integration and new email sequences feature

Incentivized

• It provides transparency into your outbound communication with customers.

Incentivized