Smart people use smart tools to achieve greatness. It’s hard to be maniacally focused on your goals when you’re juggling 37 different tools, email accounts, social media profiles, and to do lists scattered throughout your phone, inbox, and refrigerator sticky notes.
The other problem is that most of the tools being thrown at you today to help you make money, organize your business, or get things done are woefully incomplete or clunky.
They add more work to your daily routine, which is frustrating and unhelpful.
Over the last few years, I have used all the popular CRM tools in my different businesses — Salesforce, OnePageCRM, Nimble, Contactually, and Hubspot CRM. As a nerd, I get deep into these tools. I try everything. Click all the buttons. And then leave frustrated (and sometimes enraged).
Over the last year, I have been using Cloze as the core of my business. I can tell you that it is the best sales platform I have used in the last decade. I’m not exaggerating. And here are a few surprising reasons why.
DISCLAIMER: I wasn’t paid to write this, and you can’t pay me to write about your tool. I pay full price for Cloze and email their senior leadership (like you can) when I want a new feature.
- It is better than Gmail and Outlook for managing daily email — Cloze combines all of your accounts into one unified inbox, regardless of platform. You can archive, create new, or reply just by using keyboard shortcuts.
- It logs your cell phone calls, so you know when you talked last — You connect your mobile provider (e.g. Verizon, T-Mobile, etc…) and Cloze automatically connects your calls to your contacts. No data entry required. You just call — and Cloze reminds you of when you did it.
- It combines multiple contact profiles into a single record — You get one view of all your contacts from email, social media, and phone. Cloze will use the information you give it (email and phone numbers) to add social profiles and bio data.
- It provides sales-centric social media management — Cloze organizes your social feeds by who matters to you, not by who you talked with last. You can reply and schedule posts like you would with a fancy platform like Hootsuite.
- It delivers proactive reminders — Cloze automatically reminds you to stay in-touch with important people. You can add special follow-up requirements for certain types of people (e.g. prospects, existing customers, partners, vendors, etc…) or just use Cloze’s built in AI to do the work for you. Cloze also tracks email opens and reminds you if a reply email was not received.
- It is one place for everything in business — Cloze brings together all your different calendars, Evernote, call history, Slack notes, projects, to-dos, contact enrichment, RingCentral data, and anything you can add via API. And there are no limits on email accounts or contacts.
- It shows the full deal picture — It makes it incredibly easy share the complete view of project and deal activity with the right people automatically – no data entry required. Emails and notes and last call data are all a part of the record, which means your team is tripping over each other to get things done.
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It scrapes contact data from your emails — Cloze analyzes email signatures in emails you receive and lets you know when the sender’s contact information has changed, so you always have the latest info. You’ll be asked if you want to update the contact record, so you always have the choice whether to enhance your database or not.
- It is the easiest mail merge on the planet– It allows you to send a personalized email to multiple contacts at once — as many as 50 at a time. Each person will receive their own email delivered through your email account, just as if you sent each of them a separate, regular email. And, with open tracking, you’ll know who read the email or clicked a link. It’s “dummy proof.”
- It allows you to create and share email templates — Cloze makes it a single swipe to reconfirm meetings, reach out to contacts or follow-up on a next-step. And you can customize the built-in templates and create your own to consistently deliver a powerful sales message. Imagine combining templates with mail merge. It’s a great time-saver.
- It sends you a morning briefing — Before you start your day, Cloze sends you a morning briefing that outlines all the things you’ve got to get done for the day, emails and posts that you haven’t seen and might want to take a look at – as well as a snapshot of what you’ve accomplished in the last week. You can turn it off too if being overly productive becomes a problem for you.
- It allows you to schedule email to send later — You can draft an email and schedule Cloze to send it at a later date or time. Write it at night. Send it first thing in the morning.
- It helps you coordinate follow-up — As a team, you can use Cloze to track who’s responsible for contacts, projects, deals, next steps, and to-dos. You can easily add people to the group or move them out, assign tasks, and leave notes for everyone involved.
- It lets you search in “sales speak” — You can search for contacts the way you think – “VPs in the Big Apple,” “marketers at IBM,” “customers in Boston.” Makes it incredibly easy to track down that “one guy” you know you’ve needed to speak with.
- It is priced at an incredibly fair $13.33 per user per month — In spite of you what you have read thus far, awesomeness doesn’t need to break the bank. Most tools are at least $100 per user per month. That makes Cloze an absolute steal.
If it sounds like the tool for you, give it a whirl. Then get back to focusing on your plan for world domination.
By the way, we call this a CRM, but really it’s just a smarter address book. And that, in my opinion, is really what a great CRM should be all about — people.
Whatever you do, don’t assume that all technology is a waste of your time. Products like Cloze can help you deliver more value, stay in touch with the right people, and make more money.
Right now, I think it’s the best thing going.
