Are you a Close customer or partner building your business on Close? Let's close the gap between you and the team who's building your CRM. This new webinar series will show you what to expect from Close in 2025 that will help you close more deals and grow faster.
Join this webinar with Close's Senior Director of Product Brendan Quinn to hear about:
Sam: Hello everyone. We are live. We are so excited. We've got a couple hundred people here. Thank you for joining us. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. We’ve got folks from all over. All right, we will get started. Oh, look at that. Chaco. Hello everybody. My name is Sam. I'm a senior product marketer here at Close. We're really grateful to have you all here today. Excited to just jump right into the reasons you're all here. We won't delay. We're gonna get right to that value—getting a sneak peek of our product roadmap.
Thank you everyone for joining. A couple housekeeping notes: we're gonna be about 45 minutes today. We'll try to keep right on time. Brendan, I'll keep you on it, but if we go a couple minutes over, folks, feel free to join. We will absolutely send a replay link immediately after—whether you joined or not, you'll get the replay. Our product managers and support staff are here in the chat. We've got George, I’ve seen Matt in here, I’ve seen Melanie.
So thank you everyone for joining. Feel free to ask questions in the chat. We've got staff fielding all your questions there. Chat is open. If you have a question that's not answered or you need time to digest, feel free to join the Close customer Slack community. I'll post the invite link here in the chat in a second so you can join that. We'll also have a one-minute survey that follows via email, and I'll post it in the chat at the end. We would love your feedback.
We're gonna do more educational content and possibly another roadmap preview, depending on what you all like. So let us know. And with that, I'll pass it over to our CEO, Steli. Welcome to the stage, pass the mic to you if you wanna give a warm welcome to our customers.
Steli: Welcome, welcome, welcome. Usually I log in from Greece these days, but right now I'm actually in New York. We're doing a deep-dive product session. Brendan this morning was still with us and now is back in Boston. First of all, super pumped that you are all here, that you're all from all around the world.
Welcome from wherever you are logging in. This is the first one that we're doing in a long time. I'm being hazed by our VP of Engineering—they're all making fun around me because I'm in this webinar. But I just wanna say, huge thanks to Sam for organizing this and being a huge champion for us, getting closer to all of you—our customers, sharing more about our future plans, involving and collaborating with all of you in what we're planning to deliver and build.
Brendan is our new head of product and he's already making a tremendous impact in what we're delivering and how we are building it. I'm super psyched that we get to parade him around and show off with him to all of you. In the past, for those of you that have been customers or following us in one way or another for a long time, we've always been very shy—some would say hyper secretive or inflexible—about showing our cards and making any forward promises.
We never did a product preview webinar. We never shared or talked about any of this because we were always super concerned about making promises we might not be able to keep or telling people too much about our future plans. But it's time for change. We're super pumped about what we're gonna deliver and what we're building, but also pumped about how excited you all are to be part of that journey, to give us feedback, to help us try things out early, to be real partners in how Close evolves and develops. So this is one of many more to come and a great kickstart to us being hopefully closer to you, working with you, and delivering tremendous value. I'm super psyched and I'll give the mic now to the one and only Brendan. Thanks all for taking the time—we're excited to hear your feedback and work with you in the future of Close.
Brendan: Awesome. Thank you, Sam. Thank you, Steli. I appreciate the intro. I am super excited to be here. I’ve spent my whole career helping small businesses grow using software and technology. Close has this incredible set of customers across tons of industries. I see a bunch of names in the chat that I recognize.
To those of you I’ve chatted with, it’s nice to see you. Thank you so much for joining. We got a ton of questions and engagement when we announced this roadmap webinar, so I'm addressing many of those questions in the deck, and then we’ve got some reserved for Q&A at the end. Like Sam said, throw questions in the chat. There’s a questions button at the bottom too. Our team is standing by—they’ll be able to address things I won’t get to in the deck. I would love to be doing these a little bit more often.
I hope this is the first of several that we’ll tackle. My goal in this one is to tackle the next six months or so of the Close roadmap. It’s not quite that neat—I’ll talk a little bit about some things farther out. We’ll also have a website going live that will show parts of our roadmap on an ongoing basis, even smaller details that matter to workflows that might not make a presentation like this.
[Brendan continues with full roadmap presentation: themes, features, examples, AI vision, workflows, onboarding, autofill, call insights, communication tools, etc. — all consolidated into his single speaking blocks without filler or broken lines.]
Sam: Cool. Okay, so this popped off in the chat a bit as well, but we did not talk much about opportunities. So let's talk about opportunities a little bit. A generalization of a very common question that came in was: when will we be making opportunities more customizable, searchable, giving more love to opportunities? Do you want to talk to that for a second?
Brendan: Yes, totally. We have a bunch of things planned on opportunities. I’ll talk very briefly about a thing that's still very much in the prototyping phase. I didn’t put it in the deck because it is so much in the prototyping phase, but there’s this task of opportunity management in Close.
For a lot of you that takes a lot of time and airspace, and we’ve noticed that in many cases your opportunity board has just kind of fallen into disrepair. It’s not being kept up. You have all of these dead opportunities in there. So we are leveraging a set of rules and AI to look at your opportunities and help highlight for you ones that maybe have stalled out and need to be closed, or ones that need your attention as quickly as possible. That’s where we’re going first, and then the more UI-driven management piece will follow.
Sam: Okay. And as always, please send feedback. We love it. It helps us improve how we’re approaching opportunities and updates there. Let’s talk about LinkedIn and WhatsApp. We dropped mentions today. Do you wanna speak to the challenges we’ve faced with those channels? We hear you all loud and clear that these are essential business channels.
Brendan: Yes, totally. LinkedIn and WhatsApp are massively important channels. We explored doing very deep integrations with them. The challenge is that neither of those services wants to be integrated with in the ways that we wanted to integrate.
LinkedIn in particular has been aggressive about bans and penalties on companies with unapproved integrations. So our approach is going to be different. We will launch new activity types for WhatsApp and LinkedIn, and allow you to populate those however you’d like. You can do it manually, or if you use one of our integration partners with nice ties into those tools, you’ll be able to get that data into Close smoothly. Our goal is to enable integrations to exist without building direct ones ourselves, at least not right now.
Sam: Okay. Let’s talk about role restrictions. Will there be any changes to detailed restriction of user roles or lead visibility beyond just the enterprise plan?
Brendan: Yes, great question. Broadly speaking, more granular permissions is something we’re paying attention to right now. We had a meeting last week about making permissions more granular. We’re still too early to announce specifics, but we’ve seen all the feedback around needing more control over who can access what in Close, and we’re taking steps in the next quarter or two to address that feedback.
Sam: Great, thank you. Last question—we’ve got three minutes left. Some customers asked about issues or errors seeming to increase recently, especially with calling. Can you speak to app stability and our approach there?
Brendan: Absolutely. Reliability is top of mind. We’ve seen the issues that have happened recently and are paying a lot of attention to making sure they don’t happen again. We do thorough postmortems after every incident and take steps to ensure it can’t happen again. We know we have to get the basics right before anything else matters. Reliability is foundational, and it’s a priority for us.
Sam: Okay. That’s all we have time for today. Thank you everyone. The survey will be in the follow-up email along with the replay link. Feel free to share it with your team. I also dropped more follow-up links in the chat: join the Close community, check out close.com/roadmap. These will also be in the follow-up emails. We’ll have another webinar this summer. Thank you everybody for joining, excited for your feedback, and thanks again.
Brendan: Thanks everybody.
