13 LinkedIn Tools For Sales & Marketing to Bring Your Business to the Next Level

A curated list of LinkedIn tools sorted by use

We’ve pulled together the LinkedIn tools and technologies you’ll need as a sales team to find and contact the right people for your business. There are various ways you can utilize a tremendous source like LinkedIn, but we’ve boiled it down to your top 2 use cases: Prospecting and Networking.

When it comes to a social media platform, the idea is to be, well, social. Interactions on LinkedIn can also vary, but the primary ones include liking or commenting on posts, sharing content (whether from someone else or yourself), participating in relevant groups, and direct messaging.

We’ve tested it all and understand what it takes to get more visibility on LinkedIn! Earning people’s ’brain/screen time’ requires a lot of your own time and planning – including using appropriate images, text, and videos. Automating these activities will help you in answering this question: How can I scale to get more business in less time?

There is a number of tools available for you to start (or improve) using LinkedIn to work smarter instead of harder.

You’ll want to evaluate exactly what you expect to get out of a tool, or what you need it for, before trying anything out.

The time you spend on learning it may not be worth it if you find it’s not useful after all.

Needless to say, if you’re not using LinkedIn for lead generation, you’re evading the eyes of some of your most likely customers.

In fact, it is one of our most privileged prospecting channels at LaGrowthMachine.

And for good reason! We get a 1 in 3 response rate for cold prospecting from some of our campaigns, just from the LinkedIn channel alone!

While you may want to improve your lead generation on LinkedIn, at LaGrowthMachine, we find that multi-channel prospecting works best. So try to see LinkedIn as an integral but still complementary channel to email, for example.

LinkedIn tools for prospecting 

Simply seeking out the people you want to reach out to is a task in itself. It takes a great deal of time to sort through the titles, locations, etc. that matter to you. Use these tools to get you started and make your prospecting process faster and easier.

Prospecting is difficult enough, so we hope these tools prove useful for you!

LaGrowthMachine 

If you’re looking to organize all of the people you want to contact, LaGrowthMachine will provide you with the base setup. There are workflows, contact management, templates, and more that can give you a head start. As it’s based in the cloud, the platform will allow you to view engagement in real-time throughout different channels.

Utilize the power of automation with LaGrowthMachine. Connect your LinkedIn account to the platform and create a series of contact points optimized for your business.

For prospecting, you can utilize this tool to simply ‘view’ people’s profiles that you’d like to connect with. They are able to see who has viewed their profile and check out yours too – so make sure yours is complete and details what you do.

Whatever your sales process, LaGrowthMachine can replicate it so that it is seamless for both you and your prospects. Integrate it with your favorite CRM or other tools you use regularly for simple workflow creation. Contacting them where they’re most responsive and prefer will give you the personal touch they love.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

The LinkedIn tool native to the platform is Sales Navigator. With this, you can search and organize every single person, title, company, etc. that you desire. Sort them by specific lists you want to reach out to such as ‘follow up’ or ‘contact asap’ perhaps. 

To prospect on it, you can manually view each person’s profile, contact them, and view additional information about them. This is a great tool if you’re looking to reach out directly via LinkedIn to as many people as you’d like instead of the 1000 profile visits that LinkedIn limits you with a free account. 

Surfe

Sick of updating your CRM? Say goodbye to manual data entry and hello to Surfe.

Surfe is a chrome extension that connects your CRM with LinkedIn, allowing you to create and enrich contacts, find qualified emails, synchronize LinkedIn conversations, and update deals directly from your prospect’s LinkedIn profile.

Surfe maintains data hygiene so that you can reallocate the time that would have been spent on mundane tasks to the things that really matter.

Source prospects, nurture your leads, and streamline your workflow with confidence knowing that your CRM data is 100% accurate with Surfe, a GDPR-compliant tool.

Phantombuster

With a tool like Phantombuster, you’ll likely need a skilled data engineer to pull and organize the emails you find as it’s a complex system. It’s developer-friendly so you can customize it as well. 

Phantombuster uses “phantoms” to isolate the tasks you want to do. They help you automate things like filtering and liking posts or extracting contact information from social media. Each phantom is one simple task, though, so if you have a lot of automations you want to perform, you’ll need to continue to upgrade for each task.

CaptainData

Using tools like Captain Data, you can collect the information from your leads’ profiles and enter it into your automation platform. This tool will also require a skilled data engineer to pull, import, and organize the data. 

However, they have plenty of connectors to your favorite tools like LinkedIn and its SalesNavigor, Slack, Medium, Google, and many more. While it’s very useful, it’s strictly an information grab/data processor rather than an automation tool to interact with your findings. 

Zopto

This tool is good if you’re looking for a cloud service that sends simple messages to your LinkedIn contacts through Sales Navigator. You’ll be able to import your leads directly from LinkedIn with Zopto and send them simple sequenced messages. 

It will also keep all of your sequences in their dashboard for a single location for your messaging. This may not be for you, however, if you’re looking for a more in-depth sequence that involves multiple channels like emails and Twitter in addition to LinkedIn. 

OctopusCRM

If you’re looking for a tool that’s a simple chrome extension, Octopus may be a good option for you to try. It works similar to Zopto where you can extract information from your LinkedIn contacts and send them messages.

You’ll want to be cautious, however, with how often you use it as it can be detected that you’re using it. If LinkedIn finds out, you run the risk of being banned from the platform completely.

LinkedIn tools to grow your network 

If you’re looking to meet more people for various reasons in various industries, you have a few options that will help you engage with contacts. Remember that networking doesn’t just mean you need others to do something for you. You want to learn about them and how you can help each other.

With this in mind, you’ll be able to grow your network in a genuine way. Not only faster than you would otherwise, but also more memorable to those you do connect with. 

LaGrowthMachine 

If you’re looking for a multi-channel, easy way to stay in front of your prospects and network, check out LaGrowthMachine. You can design your own workflow for contacting them with a smooth process, your own words, and custom timing.

Or, you can use the templates that are ready-made workflows for you to easily activate for your audience across LinkedIn, email, and Twitter. People communicate in different ways on different channels. Customize your way to a blooming network with ease on LaGrowthMachine.

You can use our tool to improve your LinkedIn lead generation. By setting up automated sequences, you are relieved of all your manual sales prospecting actions on the platform.

In this sequence, for example, you can pre-program connection requests, send messages (text AND voice!), and plan for all scenarios in advance!

In essence, you generate cold leads without even realizing it.

Lempod 

If you’re looking for a chrome extension, Lempod and Podawaa are two that you can consider. Lempod’s claim of “10 x LinkedIn Post Views With Likes From Other LinkedIn Content Makers” portrays a more active network on your posts. You can choose, create, or participate in different ‘engagement pods’ where everyone can post simple comments or likes.

Some feel this still works as it produces buzz for their posts. Be aware though, that recently LinkedIn introduced dwell time to fight fake activity. If there are plenty of comments like “such a great post” or “love your content”, these are easy to catch. You’ll want to be cautious using this tool as it may not help your content, and could potentially hurt its reach over time.

Podawaa 

Very similar to Lempod, this chrome extension will allow you to join engagement pods. Podawaa boasts they will get you thousands of comments and/or likes! While Lempod has you search for pods via keywords, Podawaa allows you to focus on target audiences. You can focus your comments and searches on those you actually want to engage with.

The same warning applies here, though. Know that you run the risk of having your posts show up less often instead of more with these applications. Especially as the algorithms grow smarter.

Linda

This tool is a great match if you have LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Linda connects with your LinkedIn to produce easy message automation. Through Sales Navigator, it sets up a campaign for your identified prospects and contacts to build relationships through your inbox.

Linda is capable of sending up to 2,000 messages per day and up to 3 campaigns at once. It also has double verification for security purposes so no one will be able to access your messages. 

LinkedIn tools for social media 

Social Media Marketing is its own world, but you can use some of the best tools in the industry to help your sales as well. You’ll find that the more professional posts you create with these LinkedIn marketing tools, the more interactions and leads you’ll get. 

When you share impressive and relevant images, posts, and videos you’ll engage your desired community. Create content relevant to your audience and you’ll improve your reach (amount of people who see it). LinkedIn’s focus is to help you network, so they’ll also show your posts along with your connections’ reactions to people in your 2nd or 3rd connections.

To be more professional and efficient on LinkedIn, try out these great tools:

Canva 

This tool is widely touted as essentially the ‘new graphic designer’ for your business. Its user-friendly drag-&-drop style makes it easy for anyone to design social media posts. Canva even provides templates for each social media’s exact post sizes as well as designs you can modify.

This tool is a remarkably useful one for those who are not adept in design (which, honestly, is most of us!). They’ve created a way for you to insert any photos you want, create an animated gif, or put a video within an image all with a few clicks. Check it out if you haven’t already.

Feedly 

Have you ever wanted to just go to one place to find everything curated for you on a certain topic? Well if you haven’t yet discovered Feedly’s RSS feed, you’re in for a treat!

You can follow and organize every topic you’d like to read or post about, or reach out to people and get a conversation going. For example, you sell IT software and want to attract the eyes of IT managers, so you set up a feed on new tech gadgets so you can post about them.

Draw the right kind of attention to you and your knowledge about your topic by commenting on someone else’s post as well. As we said, it’s a social network so use it accordingly.

Google Keyword Planner

If you’re in need of figuring out what exactly to post about, keyword research is a tool widely used in the sales and marketing world. There are many great tools you can use, but the Google Keyword Planner is free and easy to use. 

You can research a topic and it will give you all of the Google-searched words and phrases related to it and how many times it was searched in a given time period. This is great for planning out what you might want to talk about with your prospects or posting on social media.

Buffer 

When it comes to planning out your posts, schedulers are a huge time saver. Buffer is a top contender for your planning as it allows you up to 3 accounts for free and is a reliable software. 

You can set up the times you want them to post and on which days for each social media channel you like. Then click and add your post for it to automatically post for you at the time you want (ideally when most of your prospects are on that channel). 

Feel free to give us your best tools in the comments below!