10 best LinkedIn sales automation tools
Streamline your daily workflow with the best LinkedIn sales automation tools.
Gone are the days of the cold call.
It’s all about digital marketing in 2021, and it’s essential for sales reps to get onboard. In order to prospect quickly, generate leads, and best utilize systems such as LinkedIn (which all lead to more sales and a higher ROI), you’ll need a little help from automation tools.
But let’s back things up. Why is using LinkedIn such an essential marketing strategy in the first place? Social media in general is helpful when it comes to brand awareness, but for prospecting and B2B lead generation, LinkedIn is one of the most useful platforms, as you can see history and information about a potential client’s company, job title, and more.
LinkedIn claims that according to marketers, they’re the number one platform for lead generation. And it’s probably true — the platform serves over 700 million business professionals in over 200 different countries. LinkedIn connections are an ideal way to gain new clients that fit your company’s profile.
It sounds nice and easy, right? Hop on LinkedIn, connect with like-minded business professionals, and generate those leads into your sales funnel.
There’s just one small issue. Manually searching for leads on LinkedIn is tedious and time consuming, as is copying over prospects’ data into your CRM or an Excel sheet in order to contact them.
This where sales automation tools and LinkedIn lead generation come in. There’s no doubt that salespeople are busy — too busy, in fact, to manually search for the right leads, connect with them, and save their personal information and data.
Automation tools can assist with targeting the right audience of LinkedIn users that would want to buy your product, and help salespeople avoid the tedious copying and pasting of email addresses or data. These tools can also send connection requests, messages, and help source potential customers.
And it seems that the tools salespeople use highly correlate along with their sales performance. According to a sales report by LinkedIn, top salespeople are 24% more likely to attribute their sales performance to sales technology. And 82% of top salespeople cite sales tools as critical or essential to their ability to close deals. These tools include productivity apps, social selling tools, sales intelligence tools and by a landslide, email tracking and sales automation tools.
But with so many sales automation tools out there, how do you even begin to choose what fits your needs best? Certain tools are best for CRM integration, while others are excellent for finding the right prospects or making new connections. Think about what your pain points are as a company, and what would best benefit you and your team. What is it that you want out of your sales automation tool? Figuring that out will help you pick just the right tool for your company’s needs.
We pulled a list of our nine best LinkedIn automation tools that we find the most useful in order to help. Evaluate each, and find the one that best suits your company or sales situation.
Before we dig in, it’s worth noting that you should be sensitive to the fact that LinkedIn may not like some of these tools, which in some cases, circumvent their privacy settings. So, use them with caution and good intentions so your account doesn’t get banned or flagged.
Our top picks for the best LinkedIn sales automation tools
1. Expandi
Expandi considers themselves the “world’s safest software” for LinkedIn automation, as they work seamlessly with LinkedIn in ways that mimic human behavior to avoid any flagging or banning. The service helps automate, yet personalize messages so that your response rate is higher.
With Expandi, you can automate almost everything on LinkedIn: like sending up to 100 invites and 100 messages per day, creating campaigns, choosing your target audience, getting metrics, and connecting the service with your CRM (and Zapier). It even does things like scrape information from commenters on targeted influencers’ posts, or find LinkedIn info and emails for members of Facebook and Twitter groups relevant to your brand.
The service has just one pricing plan option at $99 per month, but you do get a free seven-day trial to test it out first.
2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Why not navigate LinkedIn with their very own Sales Navigator tool? With different plans like Professional, Team, and Enterprise, you can find the one that’s just right fit for your brand or company.
The service helps you not only find the right people on LinkedIn, with advanced and unlimited searches and lead recommendations, but also integrates with your sales tools, like outlook or SNAP. You can also see exactly who has viewed your profile in the last 90 days.
The more advanced subscriptions include benefits like CRM sync and integration, administrative reporting tools, and employee data integration.
In general, this product is best for teams wanting to target the right buyers, understand key insights, and engage with prospects.
3. LeadiQ
According to LeadiQ, prospecting should be “fun and easy.” This particular sales automation tool seems to be most praised for their dashboard, which provides sales reps and managers with a clear and concise snapshot of prospects, sales, and more.
The Chrome extension integrates seamlessly with the aforementioned LinkedIn Sales Navigator or your regular LinkedIn account to capture quality leads and export them to your favorite sales enrichment systems. You can choose from three different plan options: Starter (for teams of three or less), Pro (for teams of seven or less), or Enterprise (for 20 users or less). Just note that with the Starter and Pro packs, you’ll only end up with 250 or 500 verified emails (as well as 25 or 50 mobile phone numbers), so there is a limit.
It’s worth noting that this service is one of the more expensive options on the list: the seven-person Pro pack starts at more than $10,000 per year — and this doesn’t include a subscription to a LinkedIn premium account or Sales Navigator service, which you’d have to purchase at an additional price.
4. Zoominfo
Zoominfo is a cloud-based platform and business contact database that offers sellers sales intelligence and prospecting tools to help them find potential customers.
The database is apt for helping salespeople with territory planning, prospecting, targeted outreach plans, and lead scoring. It comes with many filters which can help users select and reach out the perfect prospect or candidate.
The platform’s data is constantly updating to reflect accuracy, whether a company hires new employees, opens a new location, or launches new products. The data syncs with CRMs so that nothing gets lost.
Zoominfo may work best for users or companies with a very specific customer target that may otherwise be difficult to track down.
5. Linkmatch
Linkmatch works with Xing or LinkedIn, allowing you to save profiles to your CRM system. You’ll immediately be able to see if a contact is already in your CRM, and you can synchronize any new information with your CRM whenever a LinkedIn profile has been updated.
This browser extension makes it easy for users to automate their sales or recruiting workflow, ensuring tedious data entry doesn’t take up a large portion of the workday.
This particular browser extension works with nine different CRM options, and pricing varies depending on which CRM you use. For example, Pipedrive users will only pay $9.99 per month, whereas Hubspot users should expect to fork over $14.99 per month.
6. Prospect.io
Prospect.io is a multichannel sales automation platform that offers sales reps a chance to maximize their sales efforts. It uses a chrome extension and verifier to find and verify potential prospect’s email addresses and contact info, making it easier to make lists of future clients.
Once lists are generated, users can create an automated multi-media contact approach that can send emails, create tasks, and remind you to make calls. You can also manage to-do lists and other tasks within the system.
Prospect.io also helps users track performance with reports and metrics, and see if their prospects have read their emails and clicked on relevant links they’ve sent.
The Essentials plan allows for 250 email finder credits per month, and connects with systems like Slack and Zapier, whereas the Business plan allows for 1000 email finder credits per month and connects with CRM systems such as Salesforce, Pipedrive, Close.io, and HubSpot with two-way data entry.
7. LeadFuze
LeadFuze is all about lead intelligence, helping to create automatic lists that meet your criteria and filters. These lists can then be incorporated into your CRM or other enrichment or marketing tools to create digital campaigns.
The system uses Fuzebot, its A.I. assistant to ensure no double leads are added, and that emails are double-verified for 0% bounce rates. You won’t have to use a list cleaner with LeadFuze. You’ll also be able to focus on cold calls if you’d like, because it finds phone numbers for your targeted leads for maximum functionality. Or, you can get LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook info for a multi-faceted social media approach.
One of the most helpful LeadFuze features is its filtering system, which digs through over 300 million professionals from more than ten million companies. You can get emails for prospects based on all sorts of criteria. For example, you can find companies who have recently announced new partnerships, hired new executives, invested in funds, made important promotions, or use specific technologies, helping you to discover candidates specifically targeted for your products. You can also find candidates with specific skill sets, too. You can even qualify leads based on monthly Adwords spend.
LeadFuze may be the right pick for you if your company is selling a very specific product tailored to a very specific target audience with a detailed set of qualifications/requirements.
8. Leadiro
Leadiro digs through more than 47 million business contacts on over four billion web pages to source your ideal prospects and potential leads.
Once the information is extracted, it goes through verification processes within the company’s raw database to validate all the details. Only contacts with a contact validity score of 95 or higher will save into the Leadiro database.
Users can then access millions of B2B data records and download them to use for email marketing and cold calling campaigns.
Leadiro has four different plans to accommodate all sorts of businesses: a free plan for those just starting out, plus Professional, Business, and Premium plan options too. There’s even a special Enterprise option for companies looking to download more than 50,000 contacts per year.
9. Dux Soup
Dux Soup integrates with LinkedIn to download prospects’ profile data into CSV files, send connection requests and direct messages to contacts, all staying within the website’s safety limits.
You can even set up automated LinkedIn outreach campaigns or drip campaigns, which will send automated messages to your prospects. This will follow up with potential clients, stopping automatically when a potential customer responds to the messaging. Once you have all your prospect’s details, you can upload them to your CRM for easy lead management.
The system offers two pricing plans, Professional, which is more affordable, and Turbo, which takes things a step further with two-way CRM integration and funneling activity from prospects into your KPI dashboard.
10. Klenty
Klenty is a multi-channel sales engagement platform that lets you prioritize high intent buyers and book more meetings with them.
You can send personalized, one-to-one emails at scale, schedule follow-ups, track the open, click, and reply rates, and reach out via LinkedIn.
With Klenty’s LinkedIn plug-in, you can automate sending LinkedIn requests, messages, and InMails to multiple prospects in one click. You can also send personalized responses to prospects using placeholders. The plug-in even feeds all your LinkedIn interactions directly to your CRM system.
How to choose your perfect tool
As you can see, some of the top LinkedIn automation tools or LinkedIn helpers on the market are extremely different from one another. From databases to LinkedIn enrichment to CRM interaction, each tool benefits a specific type of company or user best depending on their needs.
When deciding which sales automation tool is right for you, think about your product, your potential clients, your current lead generation efforts, and your current prospecting methods. What are the pain points your sales team struggles with? What could fix these issues? Then, choose the tool that seems to be just the right fit. And since many of the tools offer trial periods or free options, you can sample them first to see if they end up working for you.
When deciding, remember that salespeople spend 17% of their day entering data and another 17% prospecting and researching leads, whereas just one-third of their day is spent actually talking to prospects. Any sales automation tool that can increase the time spent actually connecting with prospects through personalized messages and decrease the time spent entering data or researching leads is a win.
And don’t forget, if you’d prefer an alternative to sales automation, consider our browser extension, Surfe. You can avoid wasting time with mindless manual data entry and instead, simplify the process with a tool that offers profiling, customization, and personalization, connecting LinkedIn seamlessly with your CRM.
Sign up for Surfe and get your first 14 days free, or book a demo to see how it works.
Our browser extension connects LinkedIn with HubSpot, Salesforce, Copper, Pipedrive, and Salesloft as well as email enrichment tools including Dropcontact, Hunter, Skrapp, and Kendo.