Close Reviews

Pros
Everything functioned flawlessly on the first try. I was able to set it up to use my domain name email. I imported all my contacts from Gmail. I could add customizations that would make it easy to keep track of my clients. The search function knocked my socks off! I couldn't remember the name of a certain funding agency. Just by entering the client's name, it gave me the funding agency. Close.io was created for people trying to make an initial sale. I keep my clients three or four years and they often need a break from therapy for a few months. It was easy for me to give clients a status, such as "paused" or "completed goals". I was able to collect leads from my Wordpress website using Planso Forms. These create a new lead in Close.io. The options to add a phone line and bulk email surprised me. I haven't seen this in any other CRMs. I can create email templates and send out messages to groups of people using my domain name email. The messages are plain text, which is just right for smart phones. I tried out the phone function on my computer. I have been using Magic Jack, and getting complaints from clients about MJ. The Close.io phone line is from Twilio and is much clearer. By installing the app on my phone, I can have a second phone number on my cell and I don't have to give clients my personal number.

Cons
I'm in Canada. I wish the price wasn't so high, especially with the exchange rate. As an online therapy provider, I also have to pay for a telepractice platform and an online scheduler. If Close.io offered integration with Verishow and Accuity Scheduling, they would be able to offer a complete virtual office for online therapists, tutors, and coaches.

Rating breakdown

Pros
I love the automated email sequences to help with my outbound prospecting efforts. This enables me to 'set it and forget it" to ensure proper follow up is happening with prospects.

Cons
I don't like that you can't map specific email chains to specific opportunities. Furthermore, you can't upload files which is a real drawback and support suggested I just link to google shared drives.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
Great if you have the patience and developments resources to help you customize everything. API is good, but for most non-enterprise organizations, who has time to be messing with APIs? Built in VoIP is a nice feature, but do your math and make sure the price is worth it.

Cons
- Searching for data is near impossible. Can't filter for anything logically without getting into "raw queries," so you better be half an engineer if you want to search for anything. - Reporting is a joke. The reporting tools might as well not exist. Be prepared to ask developers to leverage the API and sync into some other tool. - No matter what they may sell you, it's a CRM best used with small sales teams. It's not for account management or companies that expect anyone without an engineering degree to figure out how to analyze the data inside of it.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 3/10

Pros
The email auto-tracking is by far the the tool of close.io. The fact you can create a lead and it automatically brings all of the history of emails you exchanged with them gives a lot more insight and visibility into salesman follow-up performance. Also, the call feature; if you have a strong internet connection, and especially if you're a startup and your salespeople is constantly on the run. Support also responds very quickly to feedback, which made a lot easier the switch from our former CRM.

Cons
For our business, it´s very important to do bulk imports. However, the tool does not let you to opt out of duplicating leads, which makes us take longer to "curate" each file we want to import.

Rating breakdown

Pros
Kept all communication and information for a given account/lead visible on one page. Made it very easy to navigate and get an idea of everything surrounding a given lead quickly. - Perfect for high volume telesales - Reporting and lead management was great - Filtering lists made it easy -Phone and text worked great

Cons
The way things were set up, it made it difficult to manage Parent Child orgs for our Enterprise department. Less ability for customization and integrations. - We had a few problems with customer support/account manager getting back to us a few times. (Our account maxed out on calls and we needed to add more several times, but this took a while to flesh out and it completely shut our sales department down a couple times. This happened a few times and we wanted to set things up so it would have added time to our account before we ran out. This should have been addressed so it did not happen and never was.)

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
- Built-in call and email integration. - Flexible and powerful API w/ great documentation. - Dynamic lead lists (called "Smart Views") powered through search. - Native Mac and WIndows apps. - Responsive support team. - Custom fields

Cons
- Costly for budget conscious teams. (But not less expensive than Salesforce and like platforms) - No native mobile apps yet. (Not recommended for outside sales teams)

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
The features that helped us the most: -real-time integration with gmail. We send and receive all our email through the app. Besides being more convenient it also keeps all correspondence logged in an easy to reference way. -recorded calls - all calls and voice-mails are automatically listed right along with notes and emails. This is incredibly useful with longer sales cycles. We are able to go back and actually hear what the customer said on the call two months ago. So much better than just notes, especially if there is every a disagreement. - Support is amazing. Always very responsive and timely and walked us through our limited implementation issues, (see below). Additionally, they are always improving the app, so about the time I suggest an option I'd like to see it is already slated to be rolled out.

Cons
Not really any cons to speak of, but we had a couple issues at first: - call quality was poor. This was due to trying to use a wireless connection and after switching everyone over to wired, it went away. So while not an app problem, something to consider if you or your team work remotely. -Some merging issues when pulling lead data from our web form. Again, this was not an app problem so much as a developer problem on our end, but it was a headache for a couple days none the less.

Rating breakdown

Pros
Automation and their inbox is a huge pro. Their search feature is arguably the best anyone could ask for. We are still discovering search tricks. GREAT ROI! A great help page on the Close.IO site for finding suggestions and troubleshooting.

Cons
We did have a tough time with our firewall when first setting up Close.IO, so make sure to include your Network Admin in the conversation of switching to Close.IO early on in the process. Sometimes getting someone on the phone can be a challenge, but email and scheduling a call have never been a problem.

Rating breakdown

Pros
My favorite thing about Close.io is the ability to add custom fields that help with reporting and overall ease of use. Also being able to call directly from the software and have the calls recorded and task creations are very simple.

Cons
The user interface could use some improvement. The flow of things can sometimes get a little chaotic so creates extra time to learn the system.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Very easy to use with an intuitive interface. Easily create followup sequences and the best feature is the one-click calling SMS. It is just so easy to call ANY Country on your computer. With great audio quality.

Cons
The startup plan is fine, but if you want to use multiple phone numbers and call recording, it is only in the most expensive plan. Also, you cannot see which calls cost how much money, it is hard to track back your charges.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
There are too many to list – If you do cold calls this is a no brainier, you need to buy it today! It support The best apps. Better together. as well which means it hooks into hundreds of other marketing tools also. Their support is second to none, these guys seems to be hustling hard with support, product development and just providing a kick ass experience for their customers. I recommend this product.

Cons
This thing is EXPENSIVE.. but the truth is you get what you pay for and you geta lot. Your paying for the best and it has a price tag which clearly says it’s the best because it’s more than double the cost of other competitive products. The downside is though I have 3 team members and I’m paying close $300 to $400 a month for 3 people that’s crazy considering there are other products that do VoIp with Twillio for less than $10 a user. So I went from paying $50 a month for CRM and $80 for Twillio VoIP($180) to $300 a month. So my prices doubled, which sucked however after using this product it is worth the extra price but if they raise the prices anymore that is just pushing because it really his priced rather high for the market it’s in. Even the enterprise “SForce” CRMs are not as expensive as that (course those CRMssuck compared to this when it comes to cold calling). The problem is I can’t easily scale with it. So I’ll be stuck with a 3 users fora while where if they had it at a lower price point I would buy a license fore very one of my staff but since it’s so expensive I can’t justify it for anyone but my sales people. I think they are missing out on revenue by not having license does not have the VoIP stuff for like $5 a user so my support team could use it without VoIP and be on par with other CRM price points. It’s clear though this is a nitch product for telephone sales teams. SO that being said if you do not do a lot of phone sales then this product is probably overkill for you and there are many others that are more of “client manager”type of product where this bad boy is a pure sales beast and nothing else.. It will help increase your sales without a doubt! In terms of client management and being asingle point for all customer data it does the job but it does not really do that any better than other products out on the market for half its cost. It’s really the phone cold calling stuff is what makes it so awesome so if any other CRM companies ever figure this out and try to clone/copy it they will have some real competition but so far there is nothing like it and I would buy all over again! Also I really never write reviews either so the fact I’m even doing this speaks to much this thing rocks!

Rating breakdown

Pros
We use pipedrive for email marketing and Close.io for cold calling. Our system works like this. Our marketing team use pipedrive to send out email to possible leads and follow up with them and when it results in a successful response from the prospect the sales team collects the phone numbers. Then these prospects with phone numbers have been downloaded to csv and transferred to Close.io CRM for sales team. Then they do all the cold calling with in Close.io CRM. Our department also have access to this CRM to make support calls later on. We can say our sales team's productivity has increased a lot after implementing this CRM. They do not need to manually do the sorting and recording of calls made and everything can be done in settings just one time.

Cons
When importing the prospects from a CSV if there are duplicates in the file, it doesn't detect that and gets added just like an other contact. There are no option to segment the contact in to different categories.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
By far the easiest and most intuitive way to manage relationships that I've come across. If it's a big struggle for you to have a bunch of lists of leads, and with your limited time you struggle to stay on top of each and every one of them, then Close.IO is awesome. It has helped us make sure none fall through the cracks, and does that in a way where I don't have to think about it. It just lets me know. Integration through Zapier also brings it to another level of automating workflows.

Cons
It's missing some features that other CRMs have, especially for the price. Although the 'smart views' (how you segment the contacts into different lists) is really really awesome and VERY powerful, there are some limitations that sound like should be there but are just missing (e.g. having different default columns per 'smart view', which sounds like a given to me since someone cares about different data depending on if the contact is a cold lead, qualified lead, or client). Instead now I have a bunch of columns that some people within my company don't care about but are just confusing to them. Also, you have to get the pro/business to get several features that I initially expected would be part of the main one, e.g. there's not a single report that can draw a graph to visually get at-a-glance info of any kind in the basic version. They also don't post their roadmap openly, so I have no idea what features will be coming. So in this respect it feels slightly like an incomplete product, but as mentioned, worth it for how incredibly well they execute the main function we need it for (effectively managing relationships/lists of contacts for both sales and client relationships).

Rating breakdown

Pros
This is a great tool if you are just bulk burning through new biz leads and have a fast sales cycle. the calling through Close.io is great, call recording great, ability to create custom lists for lead calling also great

Cons
This is not a CRM period! I would only recommend this if you were integrating it with a dedicated CRM system. The notes are chaotic and very difficult to look back through history and find important past conversations. There is no ability to do ANY form of contract management once a customer is closed and there is also no ability to attach anything to the opportunity info. So if you have a relevant presentation or any documentation relevant to a potential sale you best save it in a google drive and make a custom field to stick the link in.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 5/10

Pros
I really like the ease of use and graphical interface. I also love that I'm able to dial straight from the platform and the templating system is fairly easy to use as well.

Cons
Contact and lead management could be slightly improved. Unmerging leads is not possible from what I can understand so be careful not to merge the wrong leads. Also if your working specific verticals, it's nice to be able to port a contact from one lead to another should they have switched companies but that's not a possibility either.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
- Easy to get started - Easy to import leads - Easy to keep track of how everyone at your organization is interacting with the client - Pretty simple, but effective reporting

Cons
- Expensive - Low quality call audio - Low customization - Rigid sales structure set-up

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
I like that you are able to track all forms of communication with a potential business. You can crack phone calls, notes, text messages all in the order that you had the conversation with your business. I also like that you are allowed to send text messages to business if they are hard to get a hold of via phone call.

Cons
I think that they could have better integration with other platforms. Our support team uses fresh desk and fresh chat as their source of emails and chats and with no integration it makes it hard for the support person to see the conversation that goes on between the sale person and the customer without having close.io open.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
Extremely intuitive, clean and smooth. Intelligently designed and sets you and your employees up with a great work flow to stay organized

Cons
The view set ups can take some getting used to (IF, OR, AND) but once you have it figured out your workflow will go so smoothly.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
-Easy for the team to use. -Calling system is great -Fast customer Service. -Call recording is fantastic. -Easy onboarding

Cons
-Reporting is lacking for what we need. We would like to see more detailed reporting. -Company Hierarchy. No way to easily setup parent and child companies - Limited field for opportunities -Smartviews are difficult to use. - Few direct Integrations.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Close is an easy way to keep track of leads and customers alike. We can set tasks, see who is calling, and have visibility to communication the client has had with other people in the company.

Cons
I really don’t have many complaints. One tiny nitpicky thing: the icon in my tool bar continues to bounce even after someone else has answered a call. It can get confusing.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
As a huge fan, I have nothing but great things to say. Some of the biggest wins: -Fast interface -Robust and extremely powerful search tools -Syncs with gmail (IMAP) perfectly. -Ability to set custom SMTP servers for outbound email, while maintaining sync for inbound. -Excellent support team -Custom variables for leads. Allows sales team to get additional key insights -Tasks manager and assignment

Cons
Only one feature that I can currently think of that I'd love to see and that's the ability to add custom fields to contacts within a lead.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Flexible - easily tweaked Not overkill

Cons
No mobile interface - nobody in our company sits at a desk and "does sales"... we are all on the road on jumping meeting to meeting, so it would have been awesome to have an app version or a more user friendly mobile version.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Fast and easy to set up. Great customer service. Transparent costs.

Cons
Maybe I would like it to work better in mobile. But that's mainly for me and not for my sales team. But apart from that I can't fin any cons.

Rating breakdown

Pros
Close.io shines in two ways-- no data entry and the follow up system. No data entry means that it's reading your emails and syncing the CRM with the activity. You can also call through their phone number and it logs your phone calls to the CRM. Follow up system. Following up until you get a No is key to sales success. Close.io builds this in to the CRM so that you see who to follow up everyday and can jus work down the list.

Cons
I don't think of Close.io as having data integration with other services on a first class level. May be wrong, but that's my impression.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Close integrates all of our customer communication into one place to make it really easy to use. Because it integrates with calling and email, most communication gets automatically logged so there isn't that annoying extra step. And because we're already in it while interacting with customers, adding notes is natural. The result is a CRM system that is up to date and gets used.

Cons
I'd like prettier reporting. The reporting screen basically counts and filters to give a table of results. I would love to have this visualize pipelines and allow us to drill down on results in a more visual way.

Rating breakdown