How to export LinkedIn contacts to Salesforce

Salespeople can save up to 15 hours a month by eliminating repetitive admin tasks, giving them more time to prospect targets, build relationships, and make sales. One of the most time-consuming tasks in sales is adding new contacts to your CRM. Many salespeople don’t value it as highly as outreach, or other sales-focused activities, because it doesn’t generate value right away.

There’s a simple way to reduce the time you spend on admin: the Salesforce LinkedIn Integration allows you to add your LinkedIn contacts to Salesforce in one click and will even find their professional, validated email addresses automatically too.

Key highlights:

• Case Study: How Batch reduced prospecting time by two thirds
• How to connect Salesforce to LinkedIn
• How to export email addresses of your LinkedIn contacts to Salesforce
• Top 5 benefits of connecting LinkedIn to Salesforce with Surfe

What is Salesforce CRM?

Salesforce is the biggest and most well-known CRM and is often used by enterprise-level brands to manage relationships with thousands or even millions of customers. It’s a massively powerful tool, but it can be difficult to keep it up to date manually. Luckily, there is a way you can export all your LinkedIn contacts, and conversations, to Salesforce.

Understanding the LinkedIn Salesforce Integration

As a salesperson, most of your day is spent on LinkedIn, doing research, sourcing contacts, and prospecting. It’s crucial that this information is saved and can be accessed quickly and easily. 

By connecting LinkedIn to Salesforce, sales teams can add prospects directly to the CRM, and they can rely on the data as it’s kept up to date thanks to Surfe’s LinkedIn integration.

It will save you time on admin, improve the response rate of your outreach, allow you to close more deals, and highlight you as a champion on your team.

Prospecting: Surfe is a chrome extension designed to make prospecting on LinkedIn easier. Once you’ve got a list of qualified leads, Surfe lets you export it to Salesforce with one click, directly on the LinkedIn tab on your browser, saving you hours of time. 

Enrichment: When prospecting, you might have a list of decision-makers, but no way of knowing how accurate their contact information is. Surfe ensures your CRM has 100% accurate data by using multiple databases to find the right email, and check it’s active so you don’t waste any time.

Outreach: Surfe allows you to insert message templates into LinkedIn messages in one-click, and insight on your sales activities, so the entire sales team can utilize the message templates with the best response rate. 

Surfe also syncs all of your conversations into Salesforce, so you always know where you are in the journey. But if you’re using another tool for your outreach, like OutreachIO, Salesloft, or Gmail, you can add them to your cadences or send an email without even leaving your prospect’s profile.

Insights: Surfe gives you data on the performance across your team such as how many contacts they’ve added to Salesforce, how many enrichments they’ve made, and more, so you can track who’s using your CRM to its full potential. 

There’s no need to change tabs or browsers, no need to grab a notebook, and everything is saved automatically to your CRM. Connecting LinkedIn to Salesforce can give your team around 2 days back per week.

Case study: How Batch reduced prospecting time by two thirds

Batch is a mobile customer engagement platform focused on fostering communication between brands and their clients. They wanted to pivot to account-based marketing and had begun to use Salesforce, but wanted to increase the efficiency of their sales team. 

They realized that manual data entry was massively eating into their sales team’s time each week and was an area that, if removed, could have a big impact on their overall productivity. 

They started using Surfe, not only to update their Salesforce with new contacts straight from LinkedIn, but also to enrich them with additional contact information, cutting down the time it took them to do this manually by two thirds. 

They also used Surfe to sync their messages across platforms, which was vital for their ABM strategy. 

The ROI from Batch using Surfe to add contacts to their Salesforce CRM was:

• Cut prospecting time from 15 minutes to just 5 minutes
• Each sales rep got 2 to 3 hours back each week
• Clean, accurate, reliable data helped Batch move to ABM and improve client relationships

How to connect Salesforce to LinkedIn

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can connect your LinkedIn account to your Salesforce CRM.

Step 1: Sign up for and install Surfe on your Google Chrome browser.

Step 2: Surfe will automatically open LinkedIn for you, click ‘get started’

Step 3: Surfe will ask which CRM you want to connect to. Choose Salesforce. 

Step 4: Return to LinkedIn and grant access to Salesforce. You’re ready to start adding contacts from LinkedIn directly to Salesforce with one click!

How to export email addresses of your LinkedIn contacts to Salesforce

Once you’ve got LinkedIn and Salesforce connected, you can start finding the professional, validated email addresses of your contacts and exporting them to Salesforce in one click without any manual data entry or tab switching.

To find an individual email address, simply head to that LinkedIn profile and hit ‘Add as Contact’. This is going to automatically add the contact to Salesforce, along with all of their contact data, including name, company, position, time in company, etc.

Then, you’ll see a new button appear that says ‘search’. Hit this and watch as the magic happens and we find their email address in seconds.

There’s also a setting we recommend you activate in the Surfe Dashboard that means we’ll automatically search for the email address when you add them to the CRM, without having to click ‘search’. This is also going to allow you to export emails in bulk from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Top 5 benefits of connecting LinkedIn to Salesforce with Surfe

All email databases in one 

Surfe utilizes multiple email finder databases in one, so you get the best of each, improving the probability of you finding the email address you need.

Higher email find rate

Because Surfe has so many databases at its disposal, we have a 93% success rate when it comes to finding email addresses, so you can always find the right decision maker to speak to.

Validated emails 

Once Surfe has found the email address of a new contact, it continually checks the validity of email addresses, you’ll never be left wondering if your email has landed or not.

Export contacts at scale with one click

Once you have a lead list, Surfe lets you export it from LinkedIn straight to your CRM with just one click, saving dozens of hours of manual data entry and jumping between tabs. 

Keep your CRM up to date with contact alerts

Surfe also automatically scans LinkedIn to check if any contacts have changed their place of work, and alerts you if you need to run a check for an updated email address, ensuring you never lose contact with a valuable prospect.

Let’s wrap it up!

Salesforce is one of the biggest and most powerful CRMs out there, but you can’t use it properly if you’re spending all your time on data entry. You can use Surfe to get back dozens of hours a week, thanks to its bulk export function. 

What’s more, your new contacts are automatically enriched, and flagged if they need updating because of role changes. This puts you in a prime position to sell more efficiently than ever before.

FAQs about exporting LinkedIn contacts to Salesforce

Can I use LinkedIn as a CRM?

LinkedIn isn’t a CRM, but it can be a fantastic tool for growing a CRM system, like Salesforce. You can use LinkedIn for prospecting and networking, and find leads who you can then add to your CRM. 

Is Salesforce the best CRM?

Salesforce is one of the largest and most widely-used CRMs on the market. However, it may not be the best fit for smaller businesses. 

What data can I export from LinkedIn to Salesforce?

You can export any information that is readily available on a contact’s LinkedIn profile: name, company, role, linkedin url, etc. However, without a tool like Surfe, you then need to take that data from your export, and manually upload it to Salesforce.

How to export lead lists from LinkedIn Sales Navigator to Salesforce?

With Surfe, you can export lead lists from LinkedIn Sales Navigator directly to Salesforce. You just need to have Surfe installed on your Google Chrome browser, and you can run an email finder at the same time as you’re exporting your contacts into Salesforce.