Close

We run an online insurance comparison site in Colombia. We generate leads through our website that we have to close by phone and mail. A sales cycle is in average for around 20 days. Our requirements were:

1. Scalable (Apt for Small and Medium Businesses)
2. B2C focus
3. Lead integration
4. Mail integration
5. Phone integration (including possibility to store calls)
6. Easy to use
7. Reminders
8. Spanish would be a plus
9. Good and fast ROI

I studied 36 different options before making my choice and I demoed 6. My finalists were Pipedrive and Close.io. But I found Close.io being the better one. It's really fast and easy to use and very easy to adapt as we want. So far I'm very happy. The only things so far is that it's a little bit complicated to get a Colombian phone number but that's not Close.io's fault. It's because of the carriers here. The other was the Spanish but it wasn't sch a big problem since you can name many things yourself. It excelled in everything else. It also seems to be easy to export the day we decide to swith to another platform (if we do).

Overall, Close.io is a B2B CRM where each client has only a few main contacts and they all go through a specific, well-defined process, regardless of whether or not the deal is closed.

It's a very expensive platform, especially if you want calling features, so keep that in mind. My two cents: you should assess how well Close.io meets your needs before deciding that this is the right CRM (vs. a different CRM or a custom CRM if you're at higher volumes). Once you decide that it's worth exploring, my recommendation is to figure out how much you'll be paying in annual costs vs. a custom CRM implementation.

Close.io pretty much won't prioritize features for you, so if you need anything custom done, I recommend going somewhere else.

Close.com BROKE our agreement and KILLED our company.

We partnered with close.com and after long meetings with their sales and customer success teams, we agreed to collaborate after getting a written agreement for our needs and future use of their system.
We built an entire infrastructure supported by their system after working with them for few months and paying them over $20,000 knowing it's an investment and it will be worth the money on the long-range.

We made sure to add in our agreement all of the potential problems and insisted that if there will be any problem - close will contact us for our immediate care and fix, as we want to keep a good relationship with them.

After 4 months, just 2 days after another payment of over $5,000 from us, we received a cold email from the customer success manager, quoting an email of [SENSITIVE CONTENT] saying they won't work with us anymore and suspend our account in 40 days. NON-NEGOTIABLE.
The stated reasons were ones we never heard of before from the close.com team and never knew they could cause any issue (if we've known, we would've taken care of them immediately).
No prior warning, no apology, no discussion, and not even a meeting explaining the situation.
Just a "non-negotiable" cold email.

We spend those months we worked with Close.com HUGE amount of development and employee resources to fit our system to Close's while planning to launch a new product, and just a few days before our launch we received this awful email.

Once you catch the vision for Close.io, it doubles your productivity in sales.