Did you know that LinkedIn has more than 562 million users, coming from more than 200 countries worldwide? These numbers make it the world’s largest professional network that connects people from all sorts of business environments and provides them with immense networking possibilities.
With a great number of users and a great lead generation potential, comes a great number of LinkedIn tools that can be used for different marketing and sales purposes.
After Microsoft announced that they’ve acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016, the NBC’s “Late Night” host, Seth Meyers, joked about it by saying: “Microsoft has announced it will buy the professional networking site LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. This also marks the first time anyone has ever accepted a LinkedIn invitation.”
But we assure you – when it comes to lead generation, LinkedIn is certainly no joke.
While you may also want to learn how to use LinkedIn ads to generate sales, if you’re looking for specific LinkedIn tools that can help you generate leads and close sales, keep on reading, you’ve come to the right place.
Top 10 LinkedIn Tools to Help You Generate More Leads
LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms
The Lead Gen Forms is a LinkedIn tool that uses pre-filled forms to collect the highest possible quality leads from your LinkedIn ads. This feature was launched by LinkedIn itself in 2017 as a part of their increased efforts to improve the lead generation experience for marketers using their platform.
The Lead Gen Forms can be used with Sponsored InMail and Sponsored Content campaigns. It enables you to collect quality lead data such as a prospect’s name, email, job title, company, and select other fields that can be found on their LinkedIn profile.
With its tracking feature, you can measure your campaigns’ cost per lead, form fill rate, or the number of leads. According to LinkedIn, the Lead Gen Forms tool has enabled marketers to reduce their average cost per lead by more than 20%.
You can download your leads from the Campaign Manager or even integrate them with some of the most popular marketing automation or CRM tools, such as Zapier, Driftrock, Marketo, Salesforce, Oracle Eloqua, or Microsoft Dynamics 365.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
The sales navigator tool is offered by LinkedIn itself, with a single goal of connecting buyers and sellers in an easy and unique way. It enables you to target the right people and companies, understand the key lead changes, and easily engage with prospects.
Some of the key LinkedIn Sales Navigator features that can be used for lead generation are:
- The advanced algorithm, which finds the prospects best-aligned with what you have to offer.
- Sales insights, to provide you with all the necessary information when making business decisions.
- Relationship-building tools, which allow you to close sales more easily.
You can use the features mentioned above to get the relevant lead recommendations, which will make it much easier to connect with your potential customers and sell them your product or service.
LeadFuze
Its 562 million users at the same time represent LinkedIn’s biggest benefit and the greatest challenge for many professionals using it to generate leads.
If you don’t know which direction to take, you might find yourself overwhelmed by all of the LinkedIn data. This is where LeadFuze comes in. This prospecting LinkedIn tool enables you to quickly generate a list of leads and target the right accounts via a simple search.
Not only does LeadFuze provide you with access to contact information (email and phone number), but it also helps you automate the process of sending personalized emails and follow-ups.
So, what are you waiting for? Ignite the LeadFuze tool and eliminate cold calling now.
eLink Pro
This LinkedIn tool functions on the basis of the idea that if you visit somebody’s profile, they are likely to visit yours as well. As it may take a lot of time to visit hundreds of profiles – it takes even more to visit hundreds of TARGETED profiles.
eLink Pro helps automate this process by visiting up to 800 profiles a day. The major flaw of such an approach is that there is no guarantee that if you visit someone’s profile, they will visit yours, become a connection, and eventually qualify as a lead. A bit of a long shot, but still it may bring you some qualified leads with just a few clicks.
It also has an option to favorite your potential clients’ tweets and inform them that you’ve engaged with them via both LinkedIn and Twitter.
Profile Hopper
A LinkedIn tool similar to eLink Pro, Profile Hopper helps you automate your lead generation and sales prospecting. Just as its name suggests, Profile Hopper hops from one profile to another in order to generate interest.
After that, it shows who has return-visited your profile in order to eliminate cold outreach and make sure you’ve got your hands only on warm leads. All of the obtained data can be easily exported to CSV.
LinkeLead
Another one of LinkedIn tools that helps you automate your lead generation efforts. LinkeLead enables you to create message templates and personalized offers, and then send them automatically, in response to, for example, a connection request. You can also use it to create different newsletter groups and send them your unique offers.
Dux-Soup
If you’re browsing LinkedIn using Google Chrome, you’ll definitely want to try out a nifty little tool called Dux-Soup. Dux-Soup advertises as ‘the ultimate lead generation tool for LinkedIn’.
It’s a LinkedIn tool for keeping track of the profiles you visit. Just browse all the profiles of interest to you and the tool will automatically compile all of them into a .CSV file. It’s perfect for building databases, as it gathers all of the most important information from the profiles you visit, such as their contact number and email, company, location, etc.
The free version is valid for up to one hundred profiles a day. If you need to gather more info on a daily basis, however, you’ll have to switch to the paid version of Dux-Soup.
GetProspect.io
GetProspect is a lead generation tool with email finder. All you have to do is choose your search criteria and this tool will present you with a list of leads along with some relevant information, such as name, email, position, Linkedin URL, website, company name, and more.
Its sleek interface makes it easy to manage the generated leads. Leads can be further grouped into lists and sorted according to several criteria. As GetProspect integrates with several popular apps like Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and GMail, it’s easy to export or import all the data you need. Or you can simply export to an XLS file.
Using GetProspect, Jim Jones from Voyant Consulting has reduced their bounce rate from 13-15% to just 2%.
Crystal
The creators of Crystal have situated themselves ‘at the intersection of psychology, technology, and data science’. The main purpose of this tool is to help people build stronger, more effective, and more enjoyable relationships. It helps you understand yourself, your coworkers, and your customers.
As all people are wired differently, you shouldn’t treat all customers the same.
Crystal is a ‘personality platform’ that provides assessments, coaching tools, and psychometric predictions to improve communication among people working together. Numerous big names, including CNN, Fortune, WSJ, The Guardian and Huffington Post, use Crystal to improve their communication in recruiting, management, sales, and so on.
How does this make Crystal a LinkedIn tool that can help you generate leads?
It can review a person’s LinkedIn profile and give you feedback and insights into their personality. Once you have this information, it’ll be much easier to communicate with that person and approach them the right way, using all the right words.
Discover.ly
As the top professional network, LinkedIn should provide you with all the information you might need, right? Not necessarily. Sometimes, it might be useful to know what your prospects are doing on other social networks, whether you have some mutual friends outside the business world, and so on. This is where a LinkedIn tool called Discoverly comes in. Available as the Chrome browser extension, Discoverly displays information from other social media while browsing LinkedIn.
An Even More Effective Way to Generate Leads
Don’t get me wrong, LinkedIn is great! It really does have an outstanding lead generation potential. But you still need to test out a bunch of different LinkedIn tools until you find the right one for your specific needs, and in some cases, you may need to use several tools combined.
Plus, let’s be honest – everyone uses LinkedIn to generate leads these days. That’s due to its huge network of professionals, which is at the same time its main advantage and its biggest potential drawback. The fact is, it’s often quite difficult to target 100% qualified leads, even with the help of those awesome tools we’ve presented above.
So, how to make sure you generate only highly targeted leads? Two words – online quizzes.
If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The quiz-takers are taking the quiz because they’re already interested in the quiz topic. So, by creating and promoting a niche-specific quiz, you’ll make sure to attract people who are highly likely to convert.
But, don’t take our word for it, try creating your own quiz right now and start generating some serious leads.
