Close is built for teams that live on the phone, and its data model reflects that: everything hangs off a Lead. Connecting Anexus takes one API key. The minutes that actually matter are the ones you spend understanding where your captured people land — and how to get them into a Smart View you can dial through.
How Close stores people (read this first)
Most CRMs give you a flat list of contacts and let you attach a company to each one. Close inverts that. The Lead is the container — think of it as the account or the deal you are working — and the people sit inside it as Contacts. Opportunities and Activities (calls, emails, SMS, notes) also attach to the Lead, never directly to a Contact.
Three consequences that will shape everything below:
- A Contact cannot exist on its own in Close. Creating a person always means creating or finding a Lead to put them in.
- The Lead page is where you will normally work — it is what holds the person, along with their Activities and Opportunities. The Smart View you build for your card captures further down this page is a Lead view.
- Deleting a Lead deletes the Contacts nested inside it. No orphan contact is left behind.
What you need before you connect
- A paid Close plan — API access is included on every paid plan.
- The right Close Organization open. An API key belongs to one organization. If you are a member of more than one — an agency workspace and a client workspace, say — switch to the one you want the Leads in before you generate the key.
- An understanding that the key is yours, not the company's. Close attributes anything done with an API key to the user who created it, so you will show up as the person who created every Lead Anexus makes.
Create the API key in Close
In Close, open Settings from your profile avatar in the top-right corner.
Find the API keys area. Close groups it with the developer/API settings, under Your API Keys.
Click + New API Key and name it something you will recognise months from now — "Anexus Connect" works. Copy the key as soon as it appears: it starts with api_ followed by a long random string.
Paste it into Anexus
In Anexus, go to Settings → CRM Integrations, find Close, and click Connect.
Paste the API key and click Save & connect. The card turns green once Close accepts the key.
Already have people in Anexus from before you connected? Click Sync past contacts on the Close card to push them over. New captures flow on their own from here.
What an Anexus contact becomes in Close
Each captured contact produces one Lead with one Contact nested inside it. Field by field, in Close's own object and field names:
| Captured in Anexus | Close object | Close field | What to expect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Company | Lead | name | The Lead is named after the company. If the person left the company blank, their own name is used as the Lead name instead. |
| Full name | Contact | name | The Contact sits inside the Lead, not beside it. Open the Lead to reach the person. |
| Contact | emails[] | Close stores emails as a typed list. Anexus writes the office type. | |
| Phone | Contact | phones[] | Same typed-list shape as email, also written as office. This is the number Close's dialer will call. |
| Job title | Contact | title | Lands on the Contact, so it is visible inline in the Lead's people list. |
One thing a table cannot show: Close hangs Activities — calls, emails, SMS, notes — off the Lead rather than the Contact. So the note Anexus sends recording where a contact came from (an NFC tap, a QR scan, Apple Wallet, a shared link) belongs to the Lead's timeline, not to the person. Open the Lead, not the Contact, to read it.
Opportunities, Lead Statuses and Custom Fields are Close-side concepts. Set them in Close once the Lead exists — that is where the qualifying judgement belongs anyway.
Give your card captures their own Smart View
A Smart View in Close is a saved search that re-runs itself every time you open it — not a frozen list. That makes it the right home for a stream of Leads that arrives on its own while you are out meeting people.
Search your Leads for the ones you want to isolate — filtering on lead creation date is the simplest starting point — then save that search as a Smart View from the search bar and call it something like "From my card".
Because the view is dynamic, tomorrow's tap appears in it without you touching anything. And because Close's calling tools — including the Power Dialer on plans that include it — run off Smart Views, this is the step that turns a pile of captured contacts into an actual call list.
Close-specific things that go wrong
Anexus says the key must start with api_
You pasted something that is not a Close API key — most often a Close password, or a string that was only partly selected. Go back to Settings → Your API Keys and copy the whole value, api_ prefix included.
You are not sure the key still works
Use the Test button on the Close card in Anexus. A deleted key stops authenticating immediately — there is no grace period — so if the test fails, generate a fresh key in Settings → Your API Keys and reconnect.
The connection works, but the Leads are nowhere
Almost always the wrong Close Organization. The key is bound to whichever organization you were in when you generated it, so the Leads are sitting in a workspace you are not looking at. Switch organizations in Close and check there. If it is the wrong one, generate a fresh key from the right organization and reconnect.
Every capture made its own Lead
Expected. Anexus creates one Lead per captured contact, and Close does not merge them by company name on its own. If four people from the same firm tapped your card, you get four Leads, each holding one Contact. Close has its own duplicate-finding and merge tooling — tidy up there, after the fact, rather than expecting it to happen at the door.
Searching for the person returns nothing useful
Searching an email address works. Open the Lead the Contact sits in to see the full picture — that is where the person's Activities and Opportunities are. And if you are searching a company name and nothing appears, remember the Lead may have been named after the person instead, because they left the company field blank.
The number will not dial
Close is a calling CRM, and its dialer needs a number it can actually route — country code and all. The phone number on a captured contact is typed by the person you just met, so a local-format number with no country code can arrive that Close will happily store but not dial cleanly. Fix it on the Contact in Close, or ask for the full number at capture time.
A large "Sync past contacts" push stalls partway
Close rate-limits its API, and a bulk backfill is exactly the shape of traffic that hits the limit. Anything that did not make it stays pending in Anexus and the card shows the reason Close gave. Wait a few minutes and click Sync past contacts again — the retry only picks up what is still outstanding, so nothing is duplicated.
You deleted a Lead and lost the person with it
That is the hierarchy doing what it does: Contacts live inside Leads, so deleting a Lead takes its Contacts with it. If you only meant to drop an empty company shell and keep the person, move or recreate them on another Lead in Close first, then delete.
Turning the connection off
In Anexus, click Disconnect on the Close card. Pushing stops immediately, and the Leads and Contacts already in Close stay exactly where they are.
To cut it off from Close's side too, delete the key in Settings → Your API Keys. Because a Close key is personal to you rather than tied to one app, check that nothing else of yours is using it first — a script, an automation, a tool you set up months ago — since deleting it stops all of them at once.