The email came in on a Tuesday in March and it was two sentences long. 'We went with someone else. Thanks for the demo.' It was a cafe group with twelve locations across the north side of Chicago, and we had been talking to them since January. We had done the site visits. We had done a tasting with their head barista, in their flagship store, at seven in the morning. And then, somewhere between a trade show, a dead grinder in Rogers Park and a week where all three of us were out on the road, nobody sent the follow-up to the proposal. Not an email. Not a text. Not a call. That deal did not die because a competitor beat us. It died because we went quiet for two weeks and they assumed we had lost interest.
Who I am
My name is Marek. I am thirty-eight, I live on the northwest side of Chicago, and I sell and service commercial espresso equipment. Cafes, bakeries, a few hotel kitchens, and increasingly office managers who have decided their people deserve better than a pod machine. There are four of us: me, two people who sell, and one technician who keeps everything we have ever installed running. We are not a startup. We are a small business with a van.
Here is the thing about how we sell. Nobody buys a machine from a web page. A deal with us is twenty to forty conversations spread over six weeks: a first call, a text with photos of the counter space, an email with three options, a visit, a quiet month while they talk to their landlord, another call. The business is the conversations. And for years, those conversations lived in three Gmail accounts, two personal phone numbers, a shared spreadsheet, and whatever each of us happened to remember.
The morning we lost the twelve-store deal
We did not lose that deal. We just never called them back.
After that email I spent a morning doing something I do not recommend: reconstructing the history of a lost deal. Nine emails, split across two of our inboxes. A text thread on a colleague's personal phone that I had never seen, in which their operations manager had asked a pricing question and been told 'let me check and get back to you'. Three calls in my phone log with no notes attached, because what was I going to do, type notes on a kerb in the rain. A row in the spreadsheet whose 'next action' column said 'follow up w/ proposal', last edited six weeks earlier.
The worst part was that nobody had been lazy. Everybody had worked hard that quarter. The information simply did not exist in one place where a human being could look at it and say: these people have not heard from us in fourteen days, somebody pick up the phone.
What I tried (and why it failed)
- A better spreadsheet. Colour coding, a 'last contact' column, a 'next action' column. It was accurate for about four days. Nobody updates a spreadsheet from a loading dock between appointments.
- A big, serious CRM with a field for everything. My two salespeople quietly stopped using it inside a month, and they were right to. Logging a call took longer than the call. Dialling a lead meant copying a number out of a record and into a phone.
- Calendar reminders for every single follow-up. Within weeks I had hundreds of them, snoozing became a reflex, and a snoozed reminder tells you nothing about what was actually said on the last call.
- A WhatsApp group where we shouted updates at each other. Fast, friendly, completely unsearchable, and gone the moment somebody changed phones.
The turning point
A friend who runs a small staffing agency listened to the whole sad story over lunch and said something that stuck with me. 'You do not need a database. You need a phone that remembers things.' Then she turned her laptop around and showed me Close, which her four recruiters had been running on for over a year.
I was openly sceptical and I told her so. My experience of CRMs was that they are places where sales information goes to be entered badly and never read. So she opened a lead, clicked once, and the call started inside the browser. When she hung up, the call was already sitting in that lead's timeline with a transcript and a summary, next to the emails and the texts from the same person. No tab switching. No typing up notes afterwards that nobody would ever read.
Close describes itself as 'the sales CRM built for calling, emailing, texting, automation and action', and the order of those words is the whole pitch as far as I am concerned. Calling comes first. For a business like mine the phone is not a feature bolted onto a database. The phone is the job. I started a free trial that week. The signup says no credit card required, which was all I needed to hear to try it on a Saturday.
How I actually use it
The phone lives inside the CRM, not next to it
This is the part that made my team stop resisting. Calling, texting and email all happen from the lead itself, and they all land back on the same timeline. I open a cafe group and I can see, in order, every call, every text, every email, and where they sit in the pipeline. When one of my salespeople calls a prospect from the road, the record updates because the call happened, not because somebody remembered to write it down afterwards.
- For me: when I ask 'where are we with the bakery on Milwaukee Avenue', the answer is on one screen in ten seconds, whether or not the person who last spoke to them is in the room.
- For my team: no data entry tax. The logging is a side effect of doing the work.
Chloe does the part we were bad at
Close has an AI teammate called Chloe, and the way the company frames it is 'built for conversations, now Close runs them, end-to-end'. Going by what Close says it does: Chloe contacts new leads instantly, re-engages cold ones automatically, writes and sends follow-ups, qualifies prospects and books meetings, and routes leads to the right rep. That list reads like a point-by-point description of everything we failed to do to the twelve-store cafe group.
- For me: a lead that arrives at nine at night does not sit until I notice it, and a prospect who went dark in February does not quietly stay dark forever.
- For the customer: somebody responds while they still care. We lost that deal to silence, and silence is exactly what automation is good at killing.
The CRM keeps itself up to date
The other half of the pitch on their site is 'your CRM has all the data, now it can act on it', and the features behind that sentence are the ones that changed my week. Calls get transcribed and summarised. Deal stages get updated. Contact fields are enriched from LinkedIn and the web, so I stop typing in job titles. The day's action items are surfaced instead of hunted for, and meeting prep is waiting before a call rather than written up after it.
I want to be precise about why that matters to a four-person company. It is not that the notes are better written than mine. It is that the notes exist at all. My old system had excellent notes for about one deal in five and nothing whatsoever for the rest.
It fits around what we already run
We did not have to rebuild the office around it. Close lists integrations with Gmail, Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, Calendly, Zoom, Twilio, WhatsApp, Zapier and a long list of others, including ChatGPT and Claude. My calendar stayed my calendar. My technician's scheduling did not change. The only thing that moved was where conversations get recorded.
The results that mattered
I am not going to hand you a percentage, because I do not have a clean one and I will not invent one to sell you software. What I can describe honestly is what my weeks look like now. Our Monday meeting is twenty minutes of reading a list instead of an hour of asking each other what happened. Nobody on my team owes me a status report, because the status is already there. And the specific failure that cost us the cafe group, a prospect going two weeks without hearing from anybody, is now something the system notices before I do.
For scale, Close's own homepage says more than 11,500 sales teams use it, that over two billion calls, emails and texts have gone through it, and that it is rated 4.7 on G2. Those are their numbers and you should read them as a company's numbers. Mine is simpler and it is the only one I actually verified: since we moved, we have not gone silent on anyone who was still talking to us.
Isn't letting AI call your leads risky?
This was my real objection and it kept me sitting on the trial for a week. These are relationships. A cafe owner choosing a machine is making a decision they will live with every morning for five years, and I did not want a robot standing between us.
How I settled it: the AI handles the parts where our alternative was nothing at all. First contact at ten at night. The nudge to someone who went quiet in spring. The draft of a follow-up that I then read and send. The site visit, the tasting, the awkward conversation about budget, the handshake, those are mine and they always will be. The honest comparison was never 'a human or an AI'. It was 'an AI that answers in two minutes, or a human who answers in nine days, or in the twelve-store case, never'.
One more thing, in the spirit of not overselling. Close does not publish prices or a trial length on its homepage, so I am not going to quote you either, and nor should anybody else writing about it. Read the pricing page for the current numbers before you plan a budget. And if your business genuinely does not run on conversations, if people buy from you online without ever speaking to a person, this is not your tool. A CRM built around a dialler is wasted on a business that never dials.
The new me
In August a four-location bakery group filled in the form on our site at about eleven at night. By the time I opened my laptop the next morning the first contact had already happened, the conversation was sitting on their record, and one of my salespeople had a prepped call booked for that afternoon. We were standing in their kitchen two days later with a tape measure.
We might still lose that one. People change their minds, landlords say no, budgets move. But there is a new Marek now, and the new one can live with losing a deal to a competitor or to timing. What I could not live with was losing one to my own silence, and then sitting in a kitchen at seven in the morning wondering how a group of twelve stores slipped out of a business that wanted them that badly.
My honest recommendation
If your sales happen on the phone, in text messages and in long email threads, stop trying to document that in a spreadsheet after the fact. Put the conversations and the record in the same place. Close is what I chose because the dialler, the texting and the email are the product rather than an add-on, and because the AI side picks up exactly the work a four-person team never gets around to. Start the free trial, import your oldest neglected lead list first, let it re-engage them, then go and read one call transcript end to end. That transcript is the moment you will know.
A word on how these get written. If you sign up through a link here we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you, and that is what keeps this site going. We have described what Close says it does, and we have deliberately left out numbers we cannot stand behind. If the verdict changes, we will come back and say so right here.
- Marek
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