LinkedIn has become a central hub for B2B selling over the past few years.
Now with over half a billion users, 80 percent of social media B2B leads come from LinkedIn.
While LinkedIn is a powerful tool for driving new business on its own, there are ways that you can supercharge your LinkedIn experience and efforts with additional applications and browser extensions.
In this post, I will share seven of the most useful LinkedIn apps you can use.
1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a Chrome Extension that connects with your Gmail.
Whenever someone emails you, their Linkedin profile pops up in a summary on the right side of your inbox.
An example of what Sales Navigator would show you if we were having an email conversation.
This is very handy for quickly researching inbound leads, new people who have been added to an email chain, etc.
At the click of a button, you can go browse all of their social profiles and get up to speed on their background.
In addition, there is a great trick that you can use to find anyone's email address.
Pricing: Free
2. Elink Pro
Elink Pro is the best-kept secret of any sales person who is serious about Linkedin. Here is how it works:
- You install Elink Pro as a Chrome Extension
- You build a search queue of your target customers
- You click "Play" within Elink Pro
- Over the next few hours, Elink Pro will visit up to 800 profiles of your target buyers
- A decent percentage of those individuals will see you pop up in their "Who's viewed your profile" section
- Several of those will add you as connections, message you or inquire about your services
When I first heard about this tactic, I thought it was too good to be true so I tried it out myself. After six months of running it, I had more leads and connections than I could keep track of. I was able to attribute four new clients directly to this tactic and over $60,000 in revenue for my business.
Elink Pro Pricing: Free trial for five days, then it's $29 monthly for Lite or $49 monthly for Pro.
Check out Keap's Lifecycle Automation Assessment to determine where your business stands among the industry's top performers.
3. Hunter
Hunter is an amazing tool that will find the email address of any profile you are visiting on Linkedin. You simply install the Chrome extension, and you will see a Hunter box pop up on each profile.
Hunter won't succeed every time, but it is one of the most accurate and easy to use email research tools on the market.
In addition, Hunter has a feature to quickly grab an entire list of prospects from a search queue. If you are trying to build an email list of target prospects for an outbound email campaign, then Hunter is a great way to populate that list.
Hunter Pricing: Free; $49/month for Starter; $99/month for Growth; $199/month for Pro; $399/month for Enterprise
4. LeadGibbon
A great alternative to Hunter is LeadGibbon. LeadGibbon is a simple tool that connects directly to Google Sheets. It includes all of the same quality of research and quick grab features that Hunter has, although the Google Sheet's integration makes it very lightweight and easy to use.
Pricing: $15/month for Basic; $45/month for Pro; $95/month for Business
5. Zapier
Zapier is an amazing tool that lets you integrate applications together. It becomes very powerful when you use it to connect a tool like Hunter or LeadGibbon to your CRM or outbound prospecting software.
For example, I set up a Zap between Hunter.io and Pipedrive. Whenever I acquire a lead through Linkedin, I use Hunter to add them to a list that drops them into my Pipedrive funnel along with their Linkedin profile URL.
This simple little setup of Hunter, Zapier, and Pipedrive has enabled me to create my own CRM for my Linkedin prospecting activities.
Pricing: Free to start; $19.99/month for Starter; $49/month for Professional; $299/month for Team; $599/month for Company
6. TextExpander
Do you find yourself typing the same messages over and over to new connections or prospects? With TextExpander you can have all of your standard responses in an instant.
You simply install TextExpander and then create a handful of standard responses and shortcodes. For example:
Shortcode: ntmy
Expanded Text:
"Hey _____,
It was nice to meet you last week, and I look forward to staying in touch.
Jake Jorgovan
I help agencies and consultants win their dream clients"
Every time I type the letters “ntmy” on my computer, it will automatically expand that text to the full message and signature. Then, I simply just change out the name and click send.
This is a great way to save time and speed up your prospecting efforts on Linkedin.
TextExpander Pricing: $3.33/month for Life Hacker; $7.96/month for Team
Jake Jorgovan helps agencies and consulting companies win their dream clients. He runs an outbound marketing company and a service that helps companies generate leads on Linkedin. He also blogs regularly at Jake-Jorgovan.com.
