Top 9 LinkedIn Tools to Transform Sales Lead Gen and Help you Close More Deals

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Lusha Data

4 min readFeb 23, 2018

My name is Lusha, and I’m here to spread the word on the latest tools and techniques that can help sales professionals. Today, I’ll be looking at how to get the most from one of the most powerful platforms out there for sales reps: LinkedIn.

Historically, LinkedIn was perceived as a job hunting and recruitment platform. However, it is now the go-to business networking venue and is an extremely effective lead generation tool. With 530 million users, it can be difficult to find information using a basic account, and a number of tools have been introduced to help you find relevant prospects on LinkedIn, get their contact details and craft the winning pitch.

Read on for our top 9 plugins and Chrome extensions that can help make LinkedIn as efficient and effective as possible throughout your entire sales cycle.

Lead Enrichment Tools

1. Crystal

How you communicate with your prospects and leads can make a huge difference to closing a deal. Crystal can help with exactly that. It automatically reviews LinkedIn profiles and provides insight into your target’s personality — the kind of posts they write, the type of posts they engage, and the type of language they use. This info can help you tailor your approach and start to build a relationship with your prospects.

Pricing: The free plan includes a limited number of views per month, $29 a month for unlimited access to personality profiles.

2. Lusha

Lusha is a lead enrichment service based on a database of hundreds of millions of business profiles. I can help you get accurate contact details for LinkedIn profiles, such as work and personal emails, and direct dials.

I provide a Chrome Extension which you can start using in literally a minute. For advanced users and larger organizations, I offer a contact API, Zapier support, and SalesForce integration.

Pricing: Free plan includes five free credits every month. Paid plans start at $29 per month.

3. Discoverly

When operating on LinkedIn, there is only so much information you can get about prospects — they work with other social networks too, and their activity there can provide valuable information. Discoverly is a browser extension that allows users to see what their connections are doing on platforms other than LinkedIn, such as Facebook or Twitter, as well as information from online databases like AngelList and Crunchbase.

Pricing: Free! Just download the Chrome extension.

4. Datanyze Insider

Datanyze analyses websites and tracks information such as what technologies are being used by the website, the revenue and size of the company behind the website, and contact details of employees. The data can be imported into SalesForce and cross-referenced with your existing leads and contacts.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $10 per month for 500 domain lookups and 50 contacts.

Prospecting Tools

5. LeadFuze

Undoubtedly the biggest benefit of LinkedIn is the number of users — but without the help of a prospecting tool you could find yourself drowning in data with no real direction. LeadFuze helps by building a list of targeted leads from a simple LinkedIn search, as well as automatically finding the email addresses, phone numbers and social profiles of your prospects. It also helps you automatically send personalised emails and follow-ups.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $197 per month

6. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a premium LinkedIn account that provides automated lead suggestions, unlimited search results and the ability to contact users through InMail, a functionality that isn’t available on free accounts. It also allows you to create a newsfeed featuring only your prospects — even if they’re not yet a connection — so you can build a rapport with your leads. Finally, if you manage a sales team, Sales Navigator provides the Social Selling Index metric which compares your reps to top performers across the LinkedIn network, allowing you to identify reps who are better or worse at social selling.

Pricing: 30-day trial, paid plans start at $79.99 per month including 20 InMail messages and 1500 saved leads.