LinkedIn Tools For B2B Prospecting And Lead Generation

B2B prospecting requires strategy. With high tickets and long sales cycles, you need to optimize the sales process.

Therefore, the best solution is to invest in lead qualification.

Check out a step by step to prospect new customers and succeed in sales. You will read about:

What Is B2B Prospecting
What Does Linkedin Have To Do With It?
The Importance of Linkedin for B2B Businesses
How Do You Successfully Use LinkedIn For B2B Prospecting?
15 Tools To Improve Your Prospecting And Lead Generation Using LinkedIn
+5 Strategies For Generating Qualified Leads On LinkedIn

What Is B2B Prospecting?

B2B prospecting is an essential process for companies to be successful in sales.

The objective is to generate business opportunities with great potential for closing so that the salespeople take the commercial approach.

It’s undoubtedly the moment in the sales process that involves the largest number of activities and that demands the most effort.

In summary, during prospecting you need to:

Generate lists of leads, with contacts (email, phone, social media) and initial information such as name, company, position and others that are relevant to the business;
Get in touch with the lead and have an initial conversation;
Qualify the lead, identify if it fits the desired profile and if it is at the time of purchase;
Schedule a meeting with the seller.

And depending on the characteristics of the business – product / service, average ticket, market, needs, etc. – it can be more or less complex.

That’s because B2B prospecting is very different from prospecting end consumers.

When selling from company to company, finding the customers who really fit the profile of those who are successful with the solution is crucial.

In addition, trust, relationship and loyalty weigh much more on the results of the business.

This is because losing a single customer can represent a revenue gap.

And winning new ones is not that easy.

Because of the higher tickets and the complexity of the negotiations, selling to companies is more work and more expensive.

And it’s in prospecting that everything starts: it’s in this stage that opportunities are generated.

Like everything else, it is important that this process is well structured.

However, today there are tools and platforms that dramatically increase the possibilities – if used correctly.

We’ll show you how LinkedIn and some LinkedIn tools can be extremely useful for your prospecting and lead generation strategies.

Also read: Essentials B2B Lead Generation Tips

What Does Linkedin Have To Do With B2B Lead Generation and Prospecting?

With trust playing an increasingly important role in shaping brand awareness and consumer loyalty, today’s marketers are in a unique position to build meaningful relationships with customers.

Today, the typical buyer consumes 7 to 10 pieces of content before making their choice about what and where to consume a product / service.

And when it comes to B2B purchasing decisions, which are naturally more complex, interested parties also seek expert opinions.

That said, it’s important to note that LinkedIn has more than 610 million professionals, including 2.8 million decision makers and 260,000 top management executives.

All these members storing their skills, online CV’s, professional personalities and working history in one almighty database.

To build trust with this audience, you must first develop a strong understanding of the interests, opportunities and challenges they face.

The wealth of B2B buyer data available on LinkedIn helps this understanding.

So, sales and marketing professionals use LinkedIn by leveraging the information available to reach potential customers with relevant content.

This is a formula for B2B lead generation strategies.

That’s because, as a social media, LinkedIn has three features that set it apart from other channels – making it a B2B lead generation platform:

Professional data: job title, level of experience, industry and location;
Business context: users come to LinkedIn to research business-related topics and advance their careers, creating a receptive mindset for B2B messages;
Products in the news feed: ads running on LinkedIn appear alongside content in users’ news feeds, offering an integrated experience.

Through LinkedIn you can collect professional demographic data to segment leads by job title, company, industry, level of experience.

The Importance of Linkedin for B2B Businesses

Maybe the main question is –

How Linkedin became such an amazing tool for prospecting and close sales?

You must know how LinkedIn has become an unbelievably effective hub for business development and recruitment.

A place where businesses and professionals are working to build credibility and interest.

It’s also an invaluable source for discovering powerful industry information and also for direct sales prospecting and lead generation purposes.

That is only possible because LinkedIn is, actually, a social media focused on increasing professional relationships by networking and job opportunities – either with B2C and B2B audiences.

Most businesses that are getting success within are following 3 basic practices: have focus on building and nurturing relationships, demonstration through leadership and are led by data-driven efficiency.

It’s claimed that on average, a user will spend 17 minutes a month browsing and connecting on LinkedIn and 25 million profiles are accessed every single day.

In addition, the scenario is that if you have 50 connections, and each one is also connected with another 50 people, it means that your profile will be available for 2500 connections – at least.

Consequently this increases your chances of generating leads on LinkedIn.

Therefore, including LinkedIn in your digital marketing strategy can bring very positive results.

How Do You Successfully Use LinkedIn For B2B Prospecting?

You must understand, at first, that prospecting is just part of the sales cycle.

It takes time to create a trust, a relationship and then finally offer a product or service to your prospects.

We are living the Age of The Customer, according to LinkedIn itself.

And that is because nowadays customers have complete control over the cycle until closing a sale with your business.

Also read: How To Deliver A Great B2B Customer Experience

Where the seller had control over the crucial information for making a decision, the customer can now access this type of information with 1 click away.

Salespeople need to closely monitor the evolution of leads until they are prepared for a sales approach.

Some LinkedIn Tools provide various account options and business solutions to suit your own professional social networking requirements.

But first, as any process, there are some questions that you should ask yourself before starting a prospect:

Who is your ICP?
What are your goals?
What is your communication tone?
What is the current situation of your team?
Can the process be automated?

You should start by taking a look at your sales team to understand what the team’s real needs are in the given context.

Are they in need of more leads to work?
Are you having trouble building the sales pipeline?
Have a hard time connecting with relevant potential customers?
Or, is the system so full of leads that they are having a hard time finding the most qualified ones?
Are they frustrated with the delay in closing deals?

The best possible starting point for better lead generation is to understand the problem you are trying to solve with it.

You may end up dealing with two different scenarios:

1. Your sales team has a lot of free time. Therefore, if they are having difficulties in obtaining traction in the market, then it is necessary to work to increase the volume and flow of leads.

2. Your sales representatives are wasting time on leads that lead nowhere. In this case, it’s time to focus more on the quality of those leads.

If there are bottlenecks in the conversion funnel and the conversion rate for leads to revenue, this could also shape your lead generation priorities.

Now, with that information analyzed, you can create a plan for successful approaches.

To increase results at prospecting on this social media, you need to get to the right person, at the right moment, with the right communication.

Linkedin itself said that the three most important techniques to a successful prospect strategy are:

Creating a strong professional brand;
Asking insightful questions;
Building trusted relationships.

I must tell you that spending time connecting and networking with professionals, companies and communities in LinkedIn, as well as creating valuable content, is the gateway to build trustiness and consistency.

Chances are that you are much more likely to receive a response from an InMail than from a generic Email with generic content, for example.

It takes time and effort to get better results.

So, there are some Linkedin tools that could help you to get the job done with efficiency.

However, access to features across the LinkedIn tools are restricted depending on your chosen package.

There are many advanced tools, extensions and plug-ins which allow you to maximise the potential of LinkedIn beyond its basic form for communication, marketing, prospecting, lead generation, sales development and productivity.

Many are free, others combine better with the paid subscriptions (or require one separately) and some are frowned upon by LinkedIn as an organisation.

However, third party tools are not illegal, just often have a shorter life-span than other lead generation and prospecting software you might be using.

Therefore it’s at your own discretion to explore and utilise each tool as you see relevant.

Whe are going to present you 20 best LinkedIn tools to improve your Prospecting and Lead Generation.

15 Tools To Improve Your Prospecting And Lead Generation Using LinkedIn

The thing about LinkedIn is that many people still make the big mistake of thinking that the platform, one of the largest in the world, is only for those who are looking for a new job or want to hire.

As we said here, this social media goes far beyond that.

In fact, this is one of the best sales channels you can use, especially if your segment is B2B.

To achieve concrete business results on LinkedIn, you need at least two elements:

A wide and active network of contacts (the famous networking);
Authority in the market segment in which it operates.

Under these two pillars it’s possible to build real relationships that generate business opportunities or even approach possible customers and partners and, thus, start negotiations with them.

So if you are serious about this channel within your business process, or intend to start investing heavily in it, you will need good tools.

Check here 15 essential LinkedIn tools for your Digital Marketing and Sales Strategy.

eLink Pro
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Linked Helper
Discover.ly
Crystal Knows
Attach
LeadFuze
SalesLoft Prospector
Salestools
SocialPilot
Datanyze
ProTop
Guru
Rapportive
IFTTT

1. E-Link Pro

eLink Pro takes your LinkedIn profile and uses it as a marketing and advertising tool to spread visibility and awareness.

The e-Link Pro dashboard provides a clean overview of all activity, helping you to build a network and there is access to all of the profiles which you have engaged with.

It is a concept for top of funnel marketing and extended exposure which revolves around the logic that by visiting a person’s LinkedIn profile, your profile will receive a view back in-turn.

You can manually schedule or automate a prospect list with LinkedIn’s advanced search tool and target extremely specifically by keyword, industry, company size and job title to identify exactly who you want to engage with.

Although look-back rates may vary, from here you can optimize your own profile and outline a journey for the targeted individual to digest – and get interested in – your info.

Chances are that these visitors will end up going to your website, where they will interact with the optimized resources and also be identified by a visitor tracking website tool.

There is an option within the dashboard to export the profiles, so even if they cannot become a connection, you have a further opportunity to make contact using the data.

2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

If your goal is to use LinkedIn to increase sales, this tool is the best way to start.

Sales Navigator is offered by LinkedIn and its goal is to uniquely connect buyers and sellers.

Among the many useful functions of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, the most important are:

Sales insights to help you make all decisions correctly;
The use of an advanced algorithm to find prospects that have the best fit with your market;
Tools for building relationships, allowing you to continuously approach the ultimate goal of making a sale.

The more time you spend using this tool, the greater your confidence that it will give you the results you need.

3. Linked Helper

Although this is more of a service than a tool, Linked Helper goes beyond the concept of creating initial awareness and allows you to generate leads directly from LinkedIn with a wide range of automated features.

By automatically inviting prospects to connect based on the criteria in your targeted search, you will grow your connections at a rapid rate.

Just remember to connect with professionals in your areas of interest and even target audience.

Additional relevant connections gives you a platform for more engagements on posts and content you share with your social community.

Further to this, you can send automated follow-up messages to members who accept your connection, allowing you to extend the possibility of converting a profile visitor into a lead.

It is ideal for any sales person who enjoys the interactive nature of LinkedIn and takes an interest in growing their personal brand.

4. Discover.Ly

This is a very interesting chrome extension which can be really valuable.

Discover.ly enables you to gather further information quickly when using LinkedIn, and saves time.

Once you are on a person’s LinkedIn profile with relevance to you – with the extension activated – a green icon will appear to indicate extended information on that person including Twitter data and Facebook mutual friends.

This can speed up the process of whether they are beneficial for purpose or not.

5. CrystalKnows

A communication coaching tool which analyses the personality of a social profile to then give insight of how to approach them in your email or message.

It may even indicate what way is the most effective to make the contact.

Using a behavioural framework, Crystalknows will provide real-time suggestions and a similarity score allowing you to know to what extent you need to change your writing style.

Keyword and draft email suggestions also appear and will aid your communication structure to achieve better results.

6. Attach

Attach is a simple but useful tool which you can use on LinkedIn when sending InMail to improve your response knowledge.

The tool will give you great insight into your email’s journey once sent.

It will Include notification of when it’s been opened, time spent reading and how they then use it.

It can provide great data for the progression of your email and messaging campaign in knowing what works well and what has less success for improving your sales results.

7. LeadFuze

While the more than 430 million members are seen as one of LinkedIn’s biggest benefits, this also becomes one of the biggest challenges for the sales team.

Without a tool to assist in approaching customers, in the future, you will find yourself in a sea of data with no idea which direction to take.

And that is why LeadFuze has become so popular.

It allows you to quickly create a list of leads through a simple search.

LeadFuze users also have access to contact information, including email and phone, making it easier to start the sales process. The tool also helps to send personalized emails automatically and to continue them.

With the ability to automatically discover all the most important information, this tool can boost your sales strategy.

8. SalesLoft Prospector

If you use multiple sales tools to achieve their goals, SalesLoft should not be left out.

The idea is that you can integrate all of your most important sales tools, ensuring that they all work together, in perfect harmony.

To give you an idea, SalesLoft Prospector presents the integration of the following tools:

DiscoverOrg
Crystal
Owler
InsideView
Datanyze
RingLead
Sigstr

This means that if you use any of these sales tools today, you can use them all within that platform.

9. Saleshub

Another type of lead generation software, Saleshub takes a unique approach, allowing you to download lead lists directly from LinkedIn to Excel.

Once you have your prospect’s list ready, you may want to go further by sending emails to each one.

Salestools strings are a resource that efficiently helps you to personalize disclosure messages.

In addition, you can track your activity as a means of taking your leads through your sales funnel.

If this is your preferred method of tracking leads, then you’ve probably found the right tool.

10. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is a tool that allows you to post on various social media sites, including TikTok, Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook, VK, LinkedIn and Instagram.

This is a growing feature of SocialPilot, designed to add value to your social media.

It is one of the most detailed and easy-to-use LinkedIn tools when it comes to marketing strategies.

For this reason, it’s the only social media platform that focuses on providing reliable and express support to its users, through several channels.

This LinkedIn tool was designed to help teams in efficiency and to increase the reach of their marketing campaigns.

Importantly, SocialPilot is accessible to companies of all sizes and sectors at reasonable prices.

11. Datanyze

This LinkedIn tool allows customers to answer questions such as:

Who dropped their competitor today?
In which page / session your website visitors are leaving your site on?
And which of your customers uses advanced technology?

It is interesting to note that Datanyze is a LinkedIn exploration platform that constantly evaluates the use of technology by millions of sites.

This means that with the help of this tool, you can sell your products and define your marketing strategies based on the technology choices made by your potential customers.

12. ProTop

The purpose of this linkedin tool is to ensure that your profile is among the TOP most visited on the platform.

The help with interaction makes it possible to provide more information and increase the engagement of people in your profile.

This is possible because ProTop automatically visits LinkedIn profiles based on search criteria you define.

In the end, people will visit your profile back out of sheer curiosity.

This is the opportunity for these visitors to learn about your business offers and take an interest in you.

All of this automatically, spending less than 5 minutes a day.

13. Guru

Regardless of working alone or being part of a sales team, you need to work quickly and efficiently.

This is the focus of this LinkedIn Tool.

Here, the prospect is that using LinkedIn to increase your sales means spending a lot of time visiting company pages and profiles.

Only this is just the beginning.

What you do with the information you find is what matters most.

The Guru takes into account the variety of data for each lead and provides several tools for teams to share information.

Prospect competition;
Current customers working in the same segment;
Sales guidelines related to the prospect’s segment.

With Guru, you can discover an incredible number of leads in a short period of time.

14. Rapportive

Rapportive is an app for Gmail that gathers all available information about your contacts on the web and displays it on the email screen as a business card.

With it, you have quick access to all data about the person with whom you are exchanging email.

It works like this:

When you open an email, Rapportive will automatically create a virtual profile of the email sender, containing various information such as name, photo, age, place of residence, and much more.

This process may take some time, but after some time, the contact’s file will be displayed.

In addition to basic information about contacts, Rapportive also adds a series of additional information that can assist in the formation of the person’s business card, such as links that they can add to their profile, such as Twitter, and the latest updates.

Rapportive allows you to add comments that you consider relevant to that contact’s profile.

In this case, comments will also be available to other users of the application who also communicate with that user.

15. IFTTT

Social networks, cloud storage, weather websites.

There are platforms that do everything on the internet, each with a specific function.

But have you thought about joining the service of each one of them to have complete functions?

This is IFTTT’s proposal: make the internet work for you.

The platform connects, through the internet, different services (apps and devices that you use daily) through commands.

This way, you can have a new, practical and automated experience.

The connection of services based on IoT (Internet of Things) is based on the concept that gives the platform its name: “IF This, Then That”.

This simple premise allows you to do a multitude of things by integrating services connected to the internet.

What Is The Best LinkedIn Tool For Your Business?

LinkedIn tools help you make the most of your presence on the platform and the time you spend on it.

As you can see, there are several LinkedIn tools available to meet the most diverse objectives.

The big step here is to help you understand the LinkedIn tools that best suit your needs.

And for that, it is necessary, as we said before, to understand the business context and its main gaps.

Using these tools to your business’s advantage will help you increase traffic, engagement and improve the effectiveness of your LinkedIn marketing strategies.

Also, keep in mind that to optimize your LinkedIn marketing plan and approach, you need to constantly monitor the performance of your posts and interactions.

Here, LinkedIn analytics tools can help you get the right insights about your campaigns.

+5 Strategies For Generating Qualified Leads On LinkedIn

Finally, to take advantage of LinkedIn’s potential, it is essential to develop a solid strategy.

This is because the tools themselves do not generate the expected final results, it takes organization and planning.

Thus, it is possible to generate more significant opportunities through this corporate channel.

Here are some actions to take.

Create relevant content

No news here. One strategy for increasing social sales potential with LinkedIn is to target practices to the right audience.

After all, the social network provides valuable user profile information for the B2B market.

So, use ICP data to improve your persona definition, better understanding pains, desires and goals.

With this information in hand, create personalized content to ensure the generation of qualified leads.

Develop articles on LinkedIn Pulse

Looking at professional authority and the generation of qualified leads, it’s relevant that both business managers and salespeople create articles on LinkedIn Pulse.

This tool allows the publication of copyrighted content rich and full of information.

Therefore, invest in a quality text, well grounded, with attractive images and videos highlighting the ideas developed.

Participate in groups in the segment you want to prospect

The generation of qualified leads depends on the ability to attract new users constantly and also identify where your potential customers are.

LinkedIn groups offer this possibility.

After all, when joining groups, it is possible to chat with prospects in the industry of your interest.

But how to define which groups to join?

Research the groups: go beyond the best known in the area and value those most relevant to your persona;
Assess the level of engagement in each group: check comments, frequency of posts and other items. The most “full” group is not always the most qualified;
Identify the potential: LinkedIn allows participation in up to 50 groups. However, you will hardly be able to maintain a relevant performance in all of them and it is important to identify those with the greatest sales potential;
Join groups weekly and keep notifications released to receive first-hand information and have a more active and engaged presence.

It’s also an option to create a specific group of the company, engaging customers and leads.

Management is essential for this space to be dynamic and add value to the commercial strategy.

If you have a group of your own, remember that salespeople must develop an appropriate qualified lead generation strategy so as not to miss out on sales opportunities and maintain the relevance of approaches.

Make your profile visible

The previous strategies are already useful to make your LinkedIn profile more visible and increase sales opportunities.

However, other measures can be developed, such as:

Have a complete and interesting profile;
Maintain an attractive design, with cover, photo and personalization of the brand image;
Customize the profile URL;
Include keywords and skills;
Request recommendations;
Create anchor text;
Link the profile with the company page that must be updated and complete.

With these tips, it’s possible to increase the potential customer’s confidence in your profile.

That’s because the qualified lead identifies the skills and experiences needed to solve their problems.

Customize customer prospecting