Product Updates

Call Recording for Professional Plan Users

Close has long had automatic call recording available to users on the Business plan, but until now, it was not available on the Professional plan. With this update, we've made call recording available to everyone on the Professional plan. To enable it, simply turn it on in the phone settings pop-over. Users on the Professional plan can make unlimited call recordings and have access to recordings for seven days.

Task, Opportunity & Phone Number Reassignment

When a salesperson leaves your team, it's important to make sure their work doesn't fall through the cracks. Now, it's simple to reassign tasks, opportunities and phone numbers when someone leaves.

Improved Reporting & Pipeline Sharing

Sharing a report or pipeline has gotten easier! Every time you change a filter, sort direction, or anything else that affects the information being displayed, the URL will update. Either copy the URL in your browser or click the Share button to copy the new URL and share with your colleagues, add to a report, or link from a dashboard.

Call Coaching

Call Coaching in Close allows users with the correct permissions to Listen, Whisper, or Barge on sales calls. Listening to a call lets the Coach hear what is being said by both sides, but doesn't allow the Coach to talk. Whispering lets the Coach talk to the salesperson without being heard by the other call participant, and Barge lets the Coach talk to both the salesperson and the other party on the call.

To find a call to join, just visit the Team Management or Groups page in Settings to see who is on a call and to join it.

Call Coaching is available today for all users on the Business plan.

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Microsoft 365 Integration

Microsoft 365 accounts can now natively be integrated as Connected Accounts, improving security and lowering friction for connecting new accounts. The new connected account type supports both syncing and sending email.

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Email Send As

Email Send As lets you define a list of other Close users who can send email on your behalf, or for whom you can send email. Let your sales manager send as any salesperson, or let your copywriter send as the director of marketing. Only users you explicitly allow to send as you will have that permission.

Custom Activities

Custom Activities are a powerful way to expand the information you can track on a lead. Create new types of Custom Activities to track important lifecycle events for your leads, like delivering a demo, sending a contract, or signing a deal, or use them to store information from third-party tools like tracking when a support ticket is created or closed, when a chat is initiated on your marketing site, or when an account is created in your back office system.

Search for leads with exactly the custom activity data you need and create Smart Views to reach out to your most relevant leads exactly when you want to, and use the Activity Filters on lead pages to see just the information you need.

Groups

As your team grows, your needs change. Whether you're looking at Activity reports by region or searching for Leads last emailed by your Support team, it's helpful to group your team members. With Groups in Close, you can quickly and easily filter a report by job function, or see how your Pipeline looks by region.

Since users can belong to more than one group, you can have an EMEA group, an AE group, and a Sales Management group with exactly the right people in each of them. Groups are available today on the Business plan.

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New Team Management

Whether you've got a team of five or a team of 500, team management is critical. With the new team management page, you can see at a glance which features are enabled for your team, who's online, and the contact information for each user.

Close on Your Desktop

A while back, we changed our name from Close.io to Close. Today, our desktop app is updated to match.

May Roundup

The team spent part of May building on our existing features, from the Custom Fields to SMS.

• Custom Fields now support descriptions. Descriptions can be added to both Lead and Contact Custom Fields while creating/editing, and are visible on the lead page sidebar for each.
• Expanded SMS to more countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Israel, Puerto Rico, and South Africa).
• Previously, an incoming call to an empty group number would be dropped immediately. Now, we handle forwarding and voicemail recording properly. We also notify all the active users in the organization about the missed call or voicemail.
• Previously, an incoming SMS to an empty group number would be logged on the relevant Lead(s), but it wouldn't notify anybody. Now, it notifies all the active users in the organization.
  

Activity Deep Links‍

Have you ever wanted to share a link to an email thread with a colleague, or link to a call in an email with your team? Well, we certainly have, so we made it possible! 🎉

• The date time field on each activity is now a link, which can be used to copy the URL to a single activity.
• Clicking this link takes you to the Single Activity view, and changes the URL to make sharing simple.
  

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April Roundup

While we launched our new Onboarding and Contact Custom Fields in April, that's not all we were doing.

• Manually editing the “to” field in an email activity now properly updates the contact on that email (when expanding email template variables and filtering activities by contact).
• Fixed a bug with our Zoom integration so that Zoom Web Client links are now correctly seen as Zoom meetings.
• When editing an Opportunity, hitting cmd/ctrl-enter now submits the form as expected.
• When transferring a call, transferrer info is no longer missing from the Call Bar.
• Transferring a call to a Group Number no longer drops the call.
• Fixed a bug that caused a small number of Exports to fail.
• Fixed a bug that caused issues for imports that mapped a Contact Custom Field with a period in its name.
• We now check if user has active SMTP when sending Bulk Email or Email Sequences
• We released new versions of the desktop app that: improved the spellchecking, adds taskbar highlighting on Windows when there are incoming calls, and allows users to open closeio:// links from within the Windows application.
  

April Onboarding Improvements

Whether you're signing up for a new organization in Close or inviting a new user into your existing organization, the experience has been improved with our new Onboarding.

• When you connect an email account, we now show Suggested Leads to get you up and running faster with your existing sales leads.
• Connecting your GSuite account is faster than ever, but you can still connect any email account in a few clicks.

Contact Custom Fields

Close has long offered the ability to customize the information you store on your leads, letting you store things like Company Size, Contract Renewal date and Industry that help your sales team make more informed decisions. Close now offers you the same ability to customize the information you store on each Contact, as well.

Whether you want to track who the decision maker is in each Lead or add a Skype username, you can now add the custom fields that your team needs. Custom fields on Contacts support the same types of custom fields you're familiar with on Leads, including choices, date, user, and API only (useful for integrating with 3rd party systems).

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March Roundup

We had a busy March tackling issues big and small to make things run a bit more smoothly.

• Tooltips got a cleanup and no longer get cutoff on the page.
• Fixed an issue with Zaps running more than once for the same event in Close.
• All of our select menus are now updated to use the same style.
• The Opportunity edit view on the Lead page matches the experience on the Pipeline view (yay for consistency!).
• Improved handling of imports on the Starter plan when users reach the Custom Field limit.
  

Zoom Integration

With the Zoom integration for Close, you can seamlessly capture and review Zoom cloud recordings from a lead page. After connecting your Calendar, get notified of upcoming Zoom meetings and join with one click. When the meeting is over, you can view and save Zoom Cloud recordings from the Meeting activity on the lead.

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Task due times in "New task assigned to you" emails now display in your timezone

When someone assigns you a task in Close, the notification email now displays the task's due time in your own timezone instead of in UTC.

Inline Editing of Opportunities in Pipeline View

With this release, you can now edit opportunities inline, directly within the pipeline view itself, making updates easier and faster.

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Meeting Sync

Meeting Sync makes it simple to connect your Google Calendar and automatically track the meetings you have with leads, and it works just like email sync in Close today. Just go to Settings→Connected Accounts and enable Calendar Syncing for any of your Google accounts. Once a calendar is connected, any meetings you schedule will appear on the leads they’re booked with. Changes to the calendar event will update the synced meetings automatically. You can also search for leads with Meetings scheduled, and when you're ready, you can report on the meetings you've had, too.

While you're using Close, you'll be reminded of upcoming meetings by the Reminder bar, which lets you jump into a call or to the lead with just a click.

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