Top 9 LinkedIn tools to transform sales lead gen and help you close more deals
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 (your prospect’s personal phone numbers.)
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 a SalesForce integration.
Pricing: Free plan includes five free credits every month. Paid plans start at $39 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.
7. SalesLoft Prospector
SalesLoft is an enterprise-grade sales platform, allowing you to manage large-scale contact with sales leads via email and phone. SalesLoft now offers a LinkedIn integration which gives you information from your CRM within a LinkedIn profile, such as news about their organization, connections with whom your sales team is in contact, and recommended leads you should pursue inside the company.
SalesLoft also displays information from LinkedIn — such as connections of your leads, and posts they have recently published — within their sales management platform.
Pricing: Enterprise pricing on request.
Engagement Tools
8. Guru
Guru is a LinkedIn tool that connects information available inside your organization with a LinkedIn profile. For example, it can show a prospect’s competitors, your current customers who are in the same industry, and specific sales guidance related to the prospect’s industry. This helps you combine information on LinkedIn profiles with you inside information, as well as info from the industry, to discover the right leads and personalize your approach.
Pricing: Paid plans start at $5 / User / Month
9. Attach
While LinkedIn InMails allow you to reach out to anyone on LinkedIn, you can’t see if they’ve read your message unless they reply. Attach allows you to link to a document from your InMail messages and track the recipient’s engagement. It tell you what the prospect read, when they read it and for how long they engaged with it. You can use this to decide on your plan of attack and how to follow up.
Pricing: Free plan includes three documents per month. Paid plans start at $10 / User / Month for unlimited documents.
My Advice: Don’t Forget the Basics
LinkedIn is a big step forward from other ways of online prospecting, with the abundance of data it provides about professional users’ backgrounds and connections. Augmenting LinkedIn with tools gives you “super powers” — helping you find the right prospects among millions of possibilities and discovering hidden information about their behavior and the organizations they work for.
My advice is not to get distracted by the wealth of data at your fingertips. Remember your sales instincts — is this the right person? How do you feel about this company? Don’t forget to ask a colleague from that industry if they know this prospect, or how to approach that type of company. Personal information from colleagues or friends can never replace data from tools. And of course — craft your pitch and have the right slide deck ready.
Even in today’s technology-augmented sales department, you must keep the basics at hand. So that when you get on a call with that LinkedIn prospect, you know what to say and how to turn this lead into the next opportunity.
One more thing — Lusha (that’s me) is the quickest and easiest way to get in a conversation with a LinkedIn prospect. Our Chrome Extension gives you up to date emails and direct dial numbers for business profiles in seconds. Try it now for free. ☺
Originally published at https://www.lusha.co.
