If you’re here, you might be in the market for a new CRM. (Or maybe you’re just hate-scrolling ours because you want to prove to your boss why you should still use Salesforce.) Either way, welcome to Close.
We could use this time to walk you through all the ways we would make your life better. Faster workflows, less tab-hopping, reps who feel comfortable inside the CRM, pipeline visibility that doesn’t suck…well, you get it.
But maybe it’s simpler to go the opposite route. Like a scientist trying to prove their hypothesis wrong, let’s look at five honest reasons Close might not be right for you.
Reason #1: You’re Looking for a Free CRM
We’re not free. Sorry, not sorry. We’re also not fabulously, Rolex-y, Rolls-Royce-ily expensive. Sorry on that count, too.
We offer a fast, premium product. While nothing premium in life is going to be free, we like to tow the line between absolutely wrecking your sales budget and offering you a quick, effective upgrade from the free spreadsheets you’ve been relying on.
Our goal is to help you start closing deals today (in the biz, we call this “making money”). We think that with CRMs, you tend to get what you pay for: free is cheap, but it’s also opening yourself to all sorts of headaches. High-priced is fancy, but it can also be unwieldy and impractical.
The happy medium is the value and practicality of signing up for $9/month solo plan or a $35/seat/month essentials bundle. You won’t wonder how you’ll afford it all, but you’ll also feel confident in the features: real-time calling, automated follow-ups, easy rep tracking, and automated closing sequences. These are all things that can start making you money today—and definitely fast enough to pay for the software many times over.
But hey. If you prefer the Rolex, we won’t tell you how to spend your money.
Reason #2: You Want a Bloated, Do-It-All-Poorly Platform
Close is not a do-it-all platform. It’s not promising to run your CRM in addition to your billing, your project management, your birthday and anniversary reminders, and your office coffee orders.
Close doesn’t want to do everything for you. We want to help your team sell specifically.
While the bloated platforms may look great in procurement meetings, I’ve never met a sales rep who loves them. The more these solutions do, the slower sales reps get. They start avoiding the system because it’s easier to respond to prospects if they work one-on-one.
And that’s no way for a sales rep to live.
We’re clear on what we do and who we help. If we don’t help you, we won’t try to sell you on it. We want salespeople to think: “Hey, this is exactly what I need to close deals today.”
That means features designed with your sales pipelines in mind:
- Clear views of the entire pipeline with a single source of sales truth
- One workspace for every conversation across multiple channels, like calls and emails
- Automating busywork like follow-ups and email reminders so reps can focus on big-brain activities
- Easily import your existing data from a CSV or paste Excel so you can be up and running on day one
So if you are looking for that bloated Frankenstein platform that’s using “AI-powered this-and-that” to become the everything tool, you will be disappointed.
As Sam Wild, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Close, recently put it:
“[Some people] pursue an all-in-one CRM thinking it’ll be lightweight, fast, simple, everything in one place. They want to move faster. They end up in a slow, groggy tool where some of the functions are great, and others are twice as slow as they were before. And they’re kind of…miserable.”
Reason #3: You Don’t Actually Want to Sell
We see it all the time. Teams hide behind their content marketing, hoping inbound demo requests or outbound email blasts will do all the hard work of actual selling for them. Or worse, they bog down their day in CRM busywork, overanalyzing pipeline stages as an excuse not to pick up the phone and talk to a prospect.
Close is built for people who just nodded and said: “Yep, that’s a mistake.” Because there are sales teams out there who still sell like humans. Close is for teams that believe workflows support the conversations.
That’s not to say we can’t help with the busywork. Automated sequences, call queues, multichannel touchpoints—they’re all easy in Close.
But your sales playbook shouldn’t be about the busywork. It shouldn’t be weekly meetings about whether a “half-call” counts as a “full call” in your sales pipeline.
We help reps get more done, which means they’re reaching out more naturally, more consistently, and addressing customers’ pain points more precisely.
If your instinct isn’t to make sales, but to micromanage, Close is going to feel like the wrong solution.
You’ll either love how much Close simplifies your day so you can do more sales…or you’ll wonder why Close isn’t doing the sales for you. Hopefully, you’re more of the former.
Reason #4: You’re a Giant Enterprise with 1,000 Reps
To be clear: we’re not anti-enterprise. But you don’t need the budget of Apple to run a successful sales team, either.
Is your org chart so large that it has a scroll bar? Does your onboarding process include dozens of in-person seminars? If so, your sales cycle will look very different from a ten-person sales team using CRM to scale their outreach. And we have nothing against Salesforce, either. Maybe it’s right for you. Maybe Close isn’t built for a team of your size.
“If you’re willing to compromise on some depth and experience in many functions,” Sam said. “Which, if you are, go off, queen. Enjoy HubSpot! It’s truly great for many people. [But] I talk to a lot of customers who describe Close as a huge weight lifted off their shoulders when they switch.”
We’re a better fit for lean teams that need to move now. You’re not waiting for the next fiscal year if you're a team like that. You’re not thinking about 10-year plans and calendars that you can show the shareholders. You’re trying to connect your prospects to your CRM—right now.
That’s the advantage of working a bit leaner with Close. You can import your data in minutes, not weeks. You can even copy and paste your existing pipeline from Excel, upload a CSV, and get your pipeline running smoothly before the next sales meeting even starts. (Not that you have to have too many of those.)
An 18-month rollout makes sense for companies of a certain size. But not all companies are Big and Tall. A lot of companies get their advantage from their mobility, their human touch, their capacity to do a lot with a little.
That’s why Close isn’t all about complicated onboarding processes. We certainly won’t ask for a committee of 10 to approve any changes to your CRM.
So if your company’s vibe is “agile,” Close is likely a fit. Agile is a good way to describe how sales teams feel when they can use our streamlined workflows with minimal onboarding.
If, on the other hand, your typical CRM Request for Proposal is 47 pages long, you may find that we’re not the size of the Apple marketing budget. No hard feelings?
Here’s a quick snapshot of who Close is for—and who might want to look elsewhere:
Reason #5: You Think a Tool Will Fix a Broken Mindset
Tools are great. We made a powerful one ourselves. But as much as we’d like to hope it were, Close isn’t magic.
Our workflows can help you handle more sales behind the scenes, sure. But if your reps don’t have the discipline to follow up with inbound connections, don’t know how to talk to people, or aren’t willing to pick up the phone, there’s no amount of sales skills you can download from your CRM.
A CRM is just a supplement to the good habits you have in place.
And yes, Close can help you build those habits with less friction. But don’t expect us to rescue you from those habits.
Our best customers are those who aren’t expecting a CRM to rescue them. They’re already doing the right things. Maybe they have some basic workflows and know how to follow up with customers. Maybe they’ve got a clear sense of their ideal customer profile and need some help segmenting them properly.
That’s what Close does. We streamline your workflow, organize your pipeline, automate your follow-ups, and give you the visibility to supervise it all with ease.
But the effort? The energy?
Well, let’s put it this way: Batteries not included.
We’re Not For Everyone, But We Might Be For You
Close is a tool. It’s not a silver bullet. But if you’re serious about sales (and you want a CRM that can help you move quickly, onboard efficiently, and build helpful workflows), we’re confident it’s the solution you’ve been looking for.
Want to try it out? You can test Close for free for 14 days.
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