Close

Close has been great and their customer support is really awesome.

We have a startup focused in ticket sales for events in Mexico. We were looking for in-depth data of our salesmen and to make easier for them to keep track of their clients by client type. We used a CRM (highrise), but the data it gave us was no longer enough to know more about whether the size and type of clients - and opportunities - our sales team were generating was the right kind given our current strategy.

We initially requested a trial by importing a subset of random data of our former CRM but we felt this was not useful, because not all of those imported leads were relevant to us at the moment. When support from close.io gave us the option to extend our trial period, we deleted all of the previous leads and instead started adding new leads into the platform. That's when we notice the main strong point of close.io: by adding our first lead's email, within seconds we had a full history of each email we exchanged in the past. The desktop app works like a charm. Also, when you have a small sales team like ours, it's great to add a lead and check if one of your teammates already make a contact. Finally, it's amazing how easy is to categorize leads, we even use it to keep track of investors, allies and competitors.

The call feature is also a huge breath of fresh air into a follow-up process. The fact you can make calls straight from the app, that those calls get recorded and also get tracked into a lead's history ensures automatic track of almost every kind of interaction with a lead. In our case, although we tried it and it worked great, we won't make use of it because our small office space forces us to do calls by getting outside the office, and given our internet connection is not that solid we will keep making calls the way we are right now and evaluate a full switch later.

In a few words: if you have a small sales team and you want to make them doing more closing and less data insertion into follow-up tools, consider switching to close.io

Close.com BROKE our agreement and KILLED our company.

We partnered with close.com and after long meetings with their sales and customer success teams, we agreed to collaborate after getting a written agreement for our needs and future use of their system.
We built an entire infrastructure supported by their system after working with them for few months and paying them over $20,000 knowing it's an investment and it will be worth the money on the long-range.

We made sure to add in our agreement all of the potential problems and insisted that if there will be any problem - close will contact us for our immediate care and fix, as we want to keep a good relationship with them.

After 4 months, just 2 days after another payment of over $5,000 from us, we received a cold email from the customer success manager, quoting an email of [SENSITIVE CONTENT] saying they won't work with us anymore and suspend our account in 40 days. NON-NEGOTIABLE.
The stated reasons were ones we never heard of before from the close.com team and never knew they could cause any issue (if we've known, we would've taken care of them immediately).
No prior warning, no apology, no discussion, and not even a meeting explaining the situation.
Just a "non-negotiable" cold email.

We spend those months we worked with Close.com HUGE amount of development and employee resources to fit our system to Close's while planning to launch a new product, and just a few days before our launch we received this awful email.

We run an online insurance comparison site in Colombia. We generate leads through our website that we have to close by phone and mail. A sales cycle is in average for around 20 days. Our requirements were:

1. Scalable (Apt for Small and Medium Businesses)
2. B2C focus
3. Lead integration
4. Mail integration
5. Phone integration (including possibility to store calls)
6. Easy to use
7. Reminders
8. Spanish would be a plus
9. Good and fast ROI

I studied 36 different options before making my choice and I demoed 6. My finalists were Pipedrive and Close.io. But I found Close.io being the better one. It's really fast and easy to use and very easy to adapt as we want. So far I'm very happy. The only things so far is that it's a little bit complicated to get a Colombian phone number but that's not Close.io's fault. It's because of the carriers here. The other was the Spanish but it wasn't sch a big problem since you can name many things yourself. It excelled in everything else. It also seems to be easy to export the day we decide to swith to another platform (if we do).

Once you catch the vision for Close.io, it doubles your productivity in sales.