Next-Gen CRM Automation

Steli

Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti, one of the co-founders and the CEO of Close.com. I'm super excited to welcome you to the session. Before Nick and Sam get the show started, I just wanted to personally welcome you and share a couple of words with all of you today.

2025 has been an incredible year for Close. We've grown so much with your help and with your support, and we've been able to make incredible investments, especially in our technology, product, and design team. A lot of you—especially the ones that have been customers with Close for many, many years—have told me that this was one of the most exciting years when it comes to the cadence, the pace, the speed, the velocity at which we've been able to deliver new features, new product, and better experiences for all of you to empower you to kick ass and be successful with your businesses when it comes to selling.

Now, one of the areas that I'm particularly proud of is the automation, integration, and AI side of things. I'm going to be the first to admit that a year ago we weren't maybe at the cutting edge, at the forefront of these areas. But I think over the last 12 months, the narrative inside and outside of Close has started to really shift.

We're really excited and proud about some of the things that we've done, but even more so about what is upcoming in terms of the power of automation and AI that Close is going to offer you and your team moving forward and into 2026.

So today is going to be all about really giving you all an update on the power of Close today, showing you ways to get more value out of Close right away: to automate more, to accomplish more, to—at the end of the day—close more deals and grow your business faster. And we're going to highlight what is upcoming in 2026. What are the big themes? What are the things that you can look for?

Obviously, we are here to answer any and all of your questions, and I want to say personally that you can always reach out to me directly, steli@close.com, with any questions, feedback, critique—anything I can do to ever help you, please let me know. Because I want to give all of you an incredible thank you and shout out.

Thanks for being our customers. We are blessed with some of the greatest companies on earth being our partners and customers. Internally, we consistently tell each other how awesome our customers are and how much we love our customers. Every single time I get to interact with any one of you on a one-on-one basis, I come away from those conversations inspired, enlightened, energized—just overall grateful that we serve such incredible customers.

So with all that out of the way, let me give the mic back to Nick and Sam to take away the webinar.

Sam

Hi everybody. We’ve got Nick coming on stage. Hey, hey Nick.

We are here.

We are here. How did everyone like DJ Nick Persico’s sick new beats, dropped October 22nd, 2025?

Nick

It's all AI. I had nothing to do with it other than just a really nice and clever prompt. But I'll drop it for everybody where all music is consumed after the presentation so you can check it out.

Sam

Cool. That's a sneak preview of Jonas in the after party.

Nick

Yep.

Sam

All right, we will get started here today.

I've seen the classic “Will this recording be available?” Yes, this recording will be available. You'll get it automatically to your emails. Livestorm, our webinar platform, will send you a thank you that contains the replay. Feel free to share it if you'd like.

This will be about 45 minutes here today. We'll try to wrap up in about 40 minutes, and I hope you're all excited to hear about our Workflows updates: the next frontier of CRM automation, some MCP (Model Context Protocol), really good stuff coming out. We've also got some exciting announcements.

Nick will drop some really cool things, and then we're going to have a live Q&A at the end. So ask all of your questions in the chat. I'll go through; feel free to put them in this big chat so that you can see if someone's already asked it. We'll do a live Q&A at the end and we'll only have time for a few questions—but fear not, because we will get to more questions.

We are going to do an after party in Slack. Basically after today's session, here's how you can get help.

Nick, if you want to go to that “Get Help” slide: if you have a Customer Success Manager because of the type of plan that you’re on with Close, you'll get an automatic email from them with their calendar link to book time.

If you don't have a CSM, you can also join our Office Hours. Our CSMs are also going to offer time to anyone in the Office Hours, so feel free to join those. I'll post the links in the chat here in a second.

You can also always reach out to our Support team—shout out to our Support team who's here in the chat monitoring today—support@close.com. You can also chat with them via email afterwards.

And then here's a quick plug for the Close Slack community. Join us; I'll put the link in the chat to join us in a second here. Come join us for an after party. We're going to have a channel “October 22nd Webinar After Party” where Nick is going to come AMA-style. Ask him more questions. If there's any questions that we did not get to from today's webinar, we will answer them there and do a little bit of back and forth chat in Slack.

So with that, Nick, I pass it over to you. Nick is a Product Manager here at Close in our Automations and Integrations area. Over to you, Nick—excited to hear what you have for us today.

Nick

Thank you, Sam. And hello everybody. Super pumped to be with all of you today. The chat is buzzing. We are approaching 500 people here live, which is crazy. This is so awesome to see. I'm just over the moon seeing how awesome all of our customers are and how excited everybody is to be with us today.

So let's dive in. What is the reason why we're all here today? I really put it into three goals.

The first one is an FYI: we have so much to share with you. There is a ton that we have shipped recently on the automation and integration side of things. And then there are things that we are working on that will be available very soon—weeks—as well as some things that are further on the horizon that we’re going to tell you about today.

So that's the first goal: getting you up to date with everything that is here and really starting to get the juices flowing in terms of questions that you have for us that you can take back to the team and figure out what you want to implement.

In that view, we really want you to think about, when you see all the tools and the features that you have at your disposal within your Close account, what can you automate for yourself or your team? There is a ton here. What you need to think about is: is there anything that you or your team are doing multiple times a day, multiple times a week—and can any of the tools we're going to cover today help you automate that, so you can save time and focus on talking to your prospects and your customers?

And then third, trying to save you all a little bit of money. There is a ton of surface area that Close covers—from a standard CRM, all the way to all the communication tools, and now we’ve really ramped up the automation and the integrations. So is there an opportunity in your sales and marketing stack to consolidate some vendors, maybe turn off a few apps, save a little money there, and bring it over to Close?

Of course, our team is here to help you do that by giving you the information today, answering some questions, and then after this, be sure to schedule time with our team or reach out to us through the different channels that we talked about earlier.

So that's the goal. Here's what we're gonna cover:

First, I'm gonna go through the latest and greatest with AI and what we're doing here at Close with AI and some of the features that are AI-enabled that you can interact with today.

Then we'll go into Workflows.

Number three is a secret—we're gonna hold that back until we get to it, so stay tuned for that.

And then, like Sam said, we're gonna do a live Q&A to pull all of the most-asked questions. She's working on pulling those questions together, and then we'll answer those. And of course, any of the questions we don't get to—come join us in the after party in Slack. The details are in the chat on how to join that.

So: a lot to cover, we have limited time, let's dive into it.

AI

Where I want to start is with our Close Note Taker functionality. Close Note Taker will record, transcribe, and summarize all the meetings that you have in either Zoom, Meet, or Teams. It's deeply integrated into Close, so all of those recordings and transcriptions and summaries just sync right to the meeting event in Close—assuming that you have your calendar synced.

This has been in beta for a few months and it's been free that entire time. If you haven't tried this yet, I highly encourage you to go and enable this and try this and have the Close Note Taker join one of your next Zoom or Teams meetings and enjoy it for free.

The general release is still a few weeks out—we’re still fine-tuning a few things. The pricing of that once this is available for general release is still being worked on, but I have it on high authority that you all will be pretty happy with how we're going to price this and how this is going to work within Close. Super pumped about this feature and functionality.

We actually shipped something yesterday that I think a lot of you that are using it would be interested in, and that is the ability to share the meeting externally. So now, when Close Note Taker has joined a meeting and you have the summary, the transcription, and the recording, there are three little dots on the meeting. You click it, and you'll be able to share that meeting externally with the other participants or anybody that you want. You'll get a secret share link and you can also stop sharing with that link anytime.

This is great for adding this into recap emails or just referencing with other folks outside of your Close organization or anybody that you're partnering with. That is live in Close Note Taker right now as of yesterday. Go check it out and let us know what you think and please send in your feedback.

Next up is some of the CRM helpful nudges that are leveraging AI under the hood.

First up is Suggested Actions. We shipped this a couple months ago, but the TL;DR on this particular feature is that in your pipeline view you will see the opportunities that need your attention because we detected that the opportunity hasn't been touched in a while—you haven't reached out to the person in a while—and then we're going to suggest the next best move.

Recently we added the ability to surface when an opportunity needs attention via Workflows. So you can trigger a workflow when an opportunity needs attention and either automatically mark it Lost, or create a task for the assigned person to follow up—whatever you want to do. That is available for you in Workflows today with Suggested Actions. This is available on the Growth and Scale plans.

Next up is AI Enrich.

There's a lot here and I'm actually going to demonstrate this with Workflows in a little bit, so we’ll cover a lot of that detail when that comes up. The short summary here is that we've made it possible for you to prompt and hit an LLM. We’re doing a little magic “secret sauce” under the hood to make it work with your Close data and deciding when we need to look at the context of the lead and data in Close versus searching the web.

We orchestrate this under the hood so you don't have to worry about it. All you have to do is, on any particular field, give us the guidance on how you want that field filled out. Then you can trigger that field to get filled out either manually in bulk, or automatically via Workflows using our Update Lead step that we recently released (and that we’ll talk about a little later). So that's AI Enrich.

Next up—and last in the AI quick section here—is our MCP server.

What you see on the screen here is an example using n8n. This is an example chatbot using the Close MCP server so you can build your own chatbot that uses the large language model of your choice and interact with our MCP server.

Some of you might be wondering, “What in the heck is an MCP server? What is MCP?” I have a very crude, simple diagram here on the screen that explains what this is. I’m not going to go into super detail, but the gist of it is that in our industry—in the software industry—we at Close want our customers to be able to have the large language models, the chat clients, access Close in a safe, secure way. And we want to do it in a way where we don't have to build it for every single client.

We want to have the same set of tools that work in ChatGPT and Claude and n8n or any other client that you have. So having one single standard to build on allows it to work in any of these clients.

That's all technical stuff under the hood. What really matters to you—most of you that are not developers—is that you can connect Close to basically any of the chatbot or MCP clients that are popular. That includes ChatGPT, Claude, n8n, Cursor, VS Code if you're more technical—all these work. We have really great help docs that explain how to connect each one.

We’re also one of the only MCP servers in the CRM world that I’ve seen so far that supports writing and deleting data. So you can actually instruct the LLM (if you give it permission) to create templates for you, delete old email templates or inactive workflows or things like that. We’ll show you some examples of it shortly, but that’s the gist of what you can do with it.

A note: this connector works with ChatGPT, but it's using ChatGPT’s custom connector setup. We are waiting, frankly, for OpenAI and ChatGPT to open up their app store they announced last week. Once they do that, our MCP servers are already ready to go—that's how it's going to be powered under the hood. We'll get our app submitted so you'll be able to use it day one when those apps become available.

For today, right now, if you have the appropriate ChatGPT plan, you can go in, create a custom connector, and use the MCP server directly with ChatGPT. I will note for a lot of you that there is still limited support for MCP within the OpenAI world—they made a lot of announcements last week, but they're still working on it.

What I would advise, actually, if you want to test out our MCP server today and get really good results: go check out Claude. Claude.ai is Anthropic's ChatGPT competitor. We use it here internally at Close, and we’ve found that it works really well. It’s very stable and predictable.

To help demonstrate some of the things that you can do with it, we made a little video, so I'm gonna go ahead and play that video for you right now to show you how this works.

Nick (video narration)

Now that Close's official MCP server has arrived, you can give Claude access to Close using connectors. Once connected, Claude will have access to dozens of tools and can help you handle virtually any task.

In this video, I'm gonna show you four things that you can take off your plate today and give to Claude. Let's hop in.

To give Claude access to Close, click “Add connectors” and find the Close connector. Follow the prompts to give Claude secure access to the Close organization of your choice, including three different permission types: Read data, Delete data, and Write data. The permissions you include are your choice, but keep in mind, excluding certain permissions will limit what Claude is allowed to do.

Now that Claude has access to Close, here are four different ways you can use Claude to save hours of your time each day.

First up is reporting. You can ask Claude to generate any type of custom report you'd like. For example, I want to generate a pie chart that shows the percentage of calls by call disposition over the last 30 days. Claude gets to work by finding all of the call disposition types, pulls all the call activities, and then writes a Python script to create an interactive pie chart visualization.

We've all had that manager that wants reports to be a certain way. Now you can make them very happy without spending an entire day in Excel or Google Sheets.

Now let's focus on using Claude to help you quickly identify, research, and start selling to new leads in minutes. Let's say that I work for a company that sells managed linen services to fine dining restaurants. We're opening up our service in Chicago, and I've been tasked with starting outreach and booking meetings.

Claude starts by searching for the top fine dining restaurants, and once the top five have been identified, it starts researching contact information. Then once the information has been gathered, Claude will create the leads in Close for me. In less than two minutes, I've got my list of the top five dining restaurants in Chicago loaded into Close, and now I can start making calls to book meetings.

Claude can also help you manage the CRM. In this example, I asked Claude to audit my active opportunities to see which ones I should mark Lost. Claude looked through Close and found five obvious outdated opportunities that I can mark Lost. Instead of going into Close and cleaning things up myself, Claude can just do it for me. Magic.

And last but not least, Claude can help me build an outreach strategy and create Workflows on my behalf. To use the same scenario from earlier, let's say I want to create a sequence that has a mix of different types of communication steps to target those fine dining restaurants in Chicago. I asked Claude to take a first stab and create a Workflow for me in Close, making it super easy for me to make some adjustments and hit “Activate.”

And there we go. That was four quick ways to get Claude and Close working together to help you save hours of your time each week so you can focus on what really matters: talking to prospects and customers. Enjoy.

Nick

Okay. That was a run-through on how you can get the most out of Claude and the integration that you can try out today. I'm sure we'll have some questions about that in the live Q&A and I’m happy to answer them and share our experience as we work and test this out.

This is emerging technology; it's changing every day. We have our top folks on it and we’re improving the MCP server every day. Definitely send in your feedback and I can't wait to hear how you all are going to use Claude and Close.

Now let's go and turn the page over to Workflows. We're gonna go through six new things that have come out in Workflows in the last few weeks. Some of them you may have heard of already, some of them may be new to you, but let's go through them really quick.

First up is the Runs view. This is a place where you can view and manage all of a Workflow’s runs. This helps you troubleshoot and make sure that the Workflow is running the way that you expect it to.

We've added a lot here under the hood. You can look at the individual step details as you see on the screen. You can filter by the particular Workflow run status. If there's a particular run with an error, we even give you a little action menu so you can retry the run, pause the run, resume the run based on the status that it's in.

The Runs view is available now. Definitely go and check that out as you set up your Workflows and make sure things are running smoothly.

Next up is the Create Opportunity step. We added this just a few weeks ago. One of my favorite automations to do—and that I know a lot of you are using—is custom activities. One of my favorite Workflows that I've seen is that when a certain custom activity is created, that triggers a Workflow, and then you can have a Create Opportunity step and reference data from the custom activity and insert that into the opportunity, all in just a few clicks using our new variable menu that you see here on the screen. Definitely check that out and give that a try.

Recently we made some updates to how you interact with call tasks within Close. Before, it was very difficult to figure out what call tasks you had to do right now versus another time based on the communication window of a particular Workflow. We've made this a lot easier.

Now, when you go in your To-Dos, we've added this new filter menu. You click on that and you can show all of your pending tasks as well as configure what the contact's local time is—really giving you a lot more control over which call tasks you see, so you're always reaching out to the folks that you want to at any particular time, regardless of when you're actually in the CRM doing that work.

That's live now. Definitely check that out if you are using Workflows to automate the call tasks that you have to make. A lot more on call tasks coming soon, but for right now, definitely check out this new filter menu.

For those of you that have been using Close for a long time, you'll know that the Workflows functionality you see today has actually evolved from an original feature we had called Sequences. Sequences were basically communication steps—the classic sequence builder that you've seen in many other products. We've evolved into Workflows to make it both communication-based and operational in the same product.

“Run multiple” enables a Workflow to trigger on the same lead, the same contact, the same opportunity multiple times—as many times as it triggers.

For most cases, you won't even have to go and set this up; we're just going to automatically do it in the background. But if you hit the “Recipients & schedule” button on a Workflow, you'll see a modal pop up where you can choose between Run once or Run multiple.

By default, if you have a communication step (an email, a call, or an SMS), we're gonna set it to Run once just to protect you in case somebody gets enrolled twice. But if you want them to receive it multiple times, you can change it to Run multiple and you'll be good to go. Just adding more flexibility here on how you want the Workflow to behave when the trigger event occurs.

Next up: call event triggers.

We recently launched Outcomes, which allows you to set a custom disposition on a particular call. So when a call ends, you can say this was the qualifying call, we reached the decision maker, we hit the gatekeeper, we left a voicemail—whatever it is. You can customize it to your sales process and your business.

Now we've exposed those Outcomes via the call event trigger in Workflows. In this screen here, you can trigger with a call activity event. When a call activity is created or updated and the outcome is “Qualified,” you can trigger and then use the data from that call to update a lead, create a task for the person that made the call—whatever you want to do. You’re now able to trigger Workflows off of a call activity.

Last but not least, one of my favorite new pieces of functionality that we've added to Workflows this year is the Update Lead step. Instead of talking about it, I'm just gonna show you how this works. We made another quick video to demonstrate the power of this, so let me go ahead and roll the tape.

Nick (video narration)

By using the new Update Lead action in Workflows, you can automate a lot of the tasks associated with keeping the CRM clean and up to date. Let's check it out.

Here I am in the Workflow builder, and I want to create a new Workflow that triggers when an opportunity is Won. Then I want to use the data from that opportunity to update the lead.

So I'll create a new Opportunity trigger where the status moves to Won. Then I'll use the new Update Lead step and start adding the fields that I want to be updated on the lead when the opportunity triggers.

First, Lead Status, which we've had for a while. I want to move the status to “Customer” because the deal is now won.

Then I also want to update the Lead Owner. Since the opportunity is now won, in this particular sales process, the owner going forward is going to be the person that closed the deal. So what I'll be able to do is use this new variable menu here to insert data from the trigger step to pre-fill the information dynamically into the lead field.

I'll click this, and I'll see all of the applicable fields that I can add dynamically. In this case, from the opportunity, I want the user that is assigned to the opportunity.

Then I want to update this “Customer since” lead custom field that helps us understand how long somebody's been a customer. I want to use the Close date from the opportunity.

Then I have a multi-choice custom field called Products, and I want to use the opportunity custom field that we have called Products and fill that in as well.

As a result of this Workflow, I'll know on the lead who the owner is, how long the customer has been a customer, and the products that they subscribe to—and I can update all of this automatically.

Here I am on a sample lead. I have this opportunity that's currently in the Proposal Accepted state, with a value of 5,000 one-time. I'm the assigned user, and the products that they have are Product A and Product B. I'll hit Save so you can see that opportunity there. Then I'm going to update this to Won. This should trigger the Workflow and—boom—there it is.

I have my Lead Owner filled in, the products, the date of when they became a customer, and the Lead Status has also been changed to “Customer.”

So that's how to use opportunity events to update the lead in Close.

The Update Lead action also supports AI Enrich, so now out of the box in Close you can automate the lead enrichment process without needing any third-party tools—either on the enrichment side or on the automation side. Let me show you how this works.

I'll create a new Workflow with a Lead Event trigger. I want the Workflow to trigger when the Lead Status reaches “Working.” Then I'm going to use the Update Lead step.

The first field I want to add is the Lead Description. Since the Lead Description field (which is a standard field in Close) supports AI Enrich, I can click this little AI Enrich button. When the Workflow triggers and the step processes, we’ll use the AI Enrich service to automatically update the lead on that field.

Let's keep going. I also have an Annual Revenue lead custom field that I've set up with AI Enrich, so I'll select that. I have a Company Size field that I've also set up, so I want AI Enrich to handle that too.

Now back over at my sample lead here, I'm going to move it from Lead Status “Potential” to “Working.” That should trigger the Workflow. Since I'm doing a couple of fields with AI Enrich, it may take a few seconds for all those fields to populate.

A few moments later…

And there you go. After a refresh in a few seconds, you'll see that the Description field is filled in and my two custom fields using AI Enrich are filled in as well. The model will also give you an indication of where it got the information from and how confident it is, just like any other AI Enrich field.

So that's how to use AI Enrich with Update Lead. Really excited to see what you automate.

Nick

Okay, let's get our slides back up and rolling here.

So that is the latest and greatest with what's new in Workflows. All of you are probably wondering: what's next? What's coming up in Workflows on the horizon? I'm going to tell you about a few new things.

First up, just in time for the holidays: blackout dates.

We're going to make it possible for you to create a calendar of dates on which you want email and SMS messages in Workflows to not be sent. Imagine you have a bunch of Workflows that send emails and SMS messages automatically, but you don't want them to go out during the Christmas holiday or New Year's Day or whatever company vacation that you have. You’ll be able to set those calendars and suppress them.

On any particular Workflow, you're going to have the existing communication settings that control the days of the week and the time window, but now you're also going to be able to append one or many blackout date calendars.

What we suspect is going to happen—and this is how we're going to use it internally at Close—is that we'll have the team calendar (the company annual calendar), and then for people that have their own Workflows with their own communication, they're going to add their own blackout date calendar to it as well. It’ll be able to handle both. A lot of flexibility here.

As you update the calendars, it will automatically update all the Workflows that use those calendars.

This is a screen of configuring and setting up the calendar in your settings. You can add dates and date ranges. You can also set days to recur annually. So for New Year's Day, you just hit one checkbox and then every year on January 1st it will make sure those messages are not sent—they’ll wait for the window to open back up.

We're also going to support bulk assigning. When this feature comes out very soon, I'm sure you will have a bunch of Workflows that you want your blackout dates applied to. You'll be able to select all those Workflows and then add the calendars you want in one step.

This is rolling out into beta very soon. We’re going to work as hard as we can to get this out before the holidays start so you have plenty of time to configure this, so you all can go off on your holidays with peace of mind and not worry about pausing Workflows and resuming them or any of that. Who needs it? Just set up your blackout dates and you're good to go. That's coming out very, very soon.

Next up is the ability to create an email and SMS draft from a Workflow. This has been highly requested.

Now, when you go into an email step or SMS step, you're going to have two options. You either have it send the template automatically, or it will create a draft. For the user that it's assigned to, the email or SMS will show up in their inbox where they can review it, tweak it, and send it out as they see fit. It will also show up on the lead view too because it's just an email draft being created.

This is also going to be available very soon—definitely in the next few weeks we’ll be in beta with it. We are furiously working on it; we're almost done, and we'll be testing it internally very soon. I'm very excited about this. Email is going to come first, and then SMS very quickly after that. We’ll let you know when this is available.

This has been highly requested, and I'm very excited that we were able to deliver this before the end of 2025.

Next up—also highly requested—the ability to Update an Opportunity.

This is coming before the end of the year. Between Update Opportunity, blackout dates, and some other features, I made the personal guarantee to a lot of customers in this room right now that these things are going to be delivered by the end of the year, and I stand by it. The team is definitely going to work super hard to get this out before the end of the year.

The Update Opportunity step will be out soon. We are about to start work on it. Note: this will be limited to start. You're only going to be able to use this on an Opportunity trigger. So when an opportunity event happens, you'll be able to update that same opportunity and also do other steps in that Workflow. We'll start there and then expand it over time with other functionality.

Those are the three things coming out immediately. There are definitely a ton of things coming in 2026, but I really wanted to focus on what is coming out in detail between now and the end of the year. This is what is being worked on.

Things like filter steps, conditionals, webhooks—I’ve seen webhooks in the chat multiple times—are all things that we are actively investigating and working on. I have high confidence that you will see some activity from us on that in 2026. When is still TBD; we're figuring that out. But what you see on the screen here is what you should expect between now and the end of the year. Beta is starting very shortly.

Now, I mentioned at the top that we have a special surprise for you all. We have one more thing to share with you that's new in Close, and the team has been working on this for quite a few months. It is an entirely new surface area for us here at Close, and I couldn't be more proud of the team and what we've delivered in a very short amount of time.

I think it's going to help a lot of you consolidate the plumbing that you have across your sales and marketing stack when it comes to your website. To be direct on what this is: we are going to be launching Forms in Close.

Right from Close you're going to be able to create a form, embed it on your website, and automagically those submissions will be added to the CRM. All the data will be where it needs to be, and you'll also be able to trigger a Workflow when a submission happens.

Instead of talking about this, I'm actually going to attempt the thing that you're not supposed to do in these types of environments, which is a live demo of the feature. So let's hop in.

Here I am in this Close example organization. Just to prove to you that this is live, I have zero leads in this demo organization. I'm going to go over to Settings and then down into Forms. You'll see that we have this new Forms settings menu. I have my form that I’ve been working on here.

Here's the form builder. You have the ability to add headers, a paragraph—I’ve done that here. You have your fields; this is all typical that you've probably experienced with form builders. But we have the added nuance of mapping these fields to fields in Close.

For instance, if I click on Company Name, you'll see that this is mapped to the Lead Name for this particular field. I also have some ability to overwrite values and work through that.

For this demo, let me add a new field. I'm going to add a dropdown field and call this: “Which betas are you interested in trying?” Then we’ll add options:

• Forms
• Email and SMS drafts in Workflows
• Blackout dates

And of course, some of you want all the betas: “All the betas, all the time.”

We’ll save that and then map this to a field. This is a lead custom field that I created before this so you can see that working. That’s updated.

Now let's give this a go. Hopefully this works—fingers crossed, Sam. If we try to go to our little website here… there it is. It works.

For those of you that want to be adventurous here, go to close.com/betas, fill out this form, and then let's see what comes in.

Let's see who's going to be first to fill out the form.

Oh, we've got two in here. Thank you, Michael Taylor. I appreciate you—thanks for filling that out. All right, we’ve got Rau in here. Peter—thank you for filling this out. Oh, look at all these submissions.

So yeah, automatically created in the CRM. My leads and contacts are here. I'm going to go to Sam's message here. I'm sure he’s going to love a little SBL shout-out. SBL integrates with Close—great partner of ours. We’re also testing out our two MCP servers working together. There's your quick plug, Sam.

Here’s what you see on the lead: I have the URL automatically pulled in, I have what he was interested in with that custom field connection, and then we have a new activity type with Form Submissions, and it's going to automatically add all the fields that were filled out with the submission.

What’s great about this is you don't have to worry about mapping every single field to some field in Close. There are some cases where you want it mapped, and some cases where you just need this data as part of the form submission and don’t need to store it in lead custom fields or contact custom fields. We're going to have that data here for you saved.

You can imagine triggering a Workflow and filtering by any type of submission that somebody does. This will also work in Search: you’ll be able to go to Form Submissions and filter down—“Show me all the form submissions that have X, Y, or Z.” We have 39 people who filled this out. That's really great.

So this is the first public Close form ever used, right here in this webinar. Super pumped about that. Thank you all for your participation and playing with it.

So that’s Forms. Just a quick rundown of what we just talked about:

• You’re going to be able to create forms and embed them anywhere that accepts HTML.
• You can map the form fields to CRM fields directly in Close.
• The leads and contacts will be created automatically.
• On day one, you'll be able to trigger a Workflow when a form is submitted to set up further automations.
• Beta invites will start as early as next week.

Filling out the form is not the only way to get access to the beta. Your Customer Success Manager has you on their radar; they will reach out to you. We’ll have many ways for you to get access, including for those of you that are in the Slack community. Do not worry; you don't need to fill out the form—that was just a demo. But the folks that did fill out the form, we’ll definitely get them on the list.

You'll hear from us soon. You'll get an email from us when Forms has been activated in your account. If you don't see it in a few weeks, just reach out to us and we'll be sure to get you on the list. We're going to roll this out in batches over time.

One last little announcement and then we'll go to Q&A.

Forms is going to be available on all plans. So if you're on the Solo plan or the Scale plan, you have access to Forms—no restrictions. We want you to add your forms wherever you need on your landing pages and your website, and you don't need to worry about which plan you're on. This is going to come standard with Close out of the box. No add-ons or specific plan required—it’s included.

Q&A. Sam, what do we got?

Sam

Oh, we have so much, Nick. I'm a little overwhelmed. Just in the last 30 seconds here I think I got a couple of good themes we can pull on.

You kind of already talked about webhooks. Let's address webhooks—it came up a lot. How do you see webhooks? Some are aware of the demand and that we're working on it. Talk to us about how you see webhooks and solutions for that.

Nick

Yeah, it's definitely at the top of the list. It's something we definitely want to address in 2026.

2025 has been really focused on the foundational layer of Workflows and trying to get all of the prerequisites filled in order to support something like webhooks in Workflows. I'm very confident about all of the progress we’ve made so far this year to be in a place where we can address this in 2026.

I can't give any ETA right now, but it is definitely on our radar and toward the top of the list. Hopefully in the new year, when we all get back from the holidays, we'll be able to put an ETA on it, but as of right now, I can't.

We're aware of it. And it’s both types of webhooks:

• Trigger event: something happens somewhere on the internet, and I want that event to be sent to Close to do whatever I want.
• And when an event happens in Close, I want to send a webhook event out.

We’re planning to support both. Maybe not at the same time, but that is definitely on our radar and something we want to do. We know this is a big blocker for a lot of you to turn some of those zaps off and get them into Close. So we are working as fast as we can to make that happen, and I hope to have more details on that soon.

Sam

Yep. Okay, thank you so much.

We also had a lot of questions more toward the beginning about Claude versus ChatGPT for different use cases, paid plans, not-paid plans. I saw our Support team answering questions like: “Is there an upcharge to use these from Close?” or “Do I need a paid plan with Claude and ChatGPT?” Can you speak to that part a little bit? And also: we've definitely had a preference at Close around which LLMs are working the best for us for our own MCP usage.

Nick

For sure. That's a great question, and the answer is: it changes every day.

Anthropic, OpenAI, and others are constantly changing their pricing because they're in such a competitive mode right now. They're all throwing billions and billions of dollars at this. With all of that capex going into the market, it's going to vary wildly day to day.

Today, October 22nd—for the most part—to use connectors and MCP servers, you need some sort of paid plan on the Claude side of things as well as OpenAI. How much access you get is dictated by which plan you have.

One workaround is you can use n8n and use the LLM of your choice. That is purely consumption. n8n may charge you—I think you can create some automations for free—but for very low monthly costs you can set up your own chatbot and have completely API-key usage to either Claude Sonnet or GPT-4.5 or whatever model you want to use to keep costs low.

So that's one workaround if you don't want to pay for the “Plus”-style chat products.

I expect that to change over time as MCP becomes more widespread and more support gets adopted, as well as just competition. Competition is going to force all these folks to make this free at least to try. Hopefully that happens soon.

But for right now, you’ve probably got to be on a paid plan to make that work. You don’t need to worry about it from the Close side—we're including it on any plan. You just have to worry about which client you're going to use.

Sam

Cool. Makes sense, thank you.

Okay, last question, and then we're going to do tons of follow-up in the after party. So please join us in Slack. I'll post the community link here while Nick is answering my last question.

We talked about automatically creating an email draft. Kelly asked: “Is there a way to have Claude look at emails within Close and automatically create an email draft ahead of—or based on—a specific prompt, and then list it in our inbox for review?” Since we happened to cover both using Claude and email drafts for review, do we have plans to have these things come together in some way?

Nick

I can go a step further with this than I was able to with webhooks.

We are going to make it possible in email and SMS steps to reference the trigger data, create a prompt, and then have that email or SMS step create or generate an email draft for you to review, tweak, and send. We will have that in Workflows in the first half of 2026.

I don't know exactly when in that first half; we're still sorting that out. I'm hoping Q1, but that's up in the air—a lot of moving things right now.

Our approach is that in the email and SMS step, you're going to have the option to basically write a prompt. In that prompt you can reference the data from that Workflow and trigger to compose and generate those emails, and it'll show up in your inbox. So yes, we will have it. ETA: first half of 2026.

Sam

Cool.

Okay, a couple minutes over. Thank you, everyone, for joining. That's all I've got. I just posted the Slack after party link. Come join the community—you have to join using that link and then go to “Browse all channels,” and we're going to be in october-22nd-webinar-after-party is where we're gonna be next.

Nick

Thank you all. We'll see you there in the after party. Thanks y’all for joining. Have a great rest of your day.

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