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.

Linkedin is a social platform with over 600 million members storing their skills, online CV’s, professional personalities and working history in one almighty database.

It is 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 with it follows 3 basic practices:

Have a focus on building and nurturing relationships ;

; Demonstration through leadership ;

; And are led by data-driven efficiency.

It is 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.

How do you successfully prospect on LinkedIn?

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.

It was a time when the salesperson had control over the crucial information for the customer to make a decision.

Nowadays the customer can 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.

LinkedIn Tools provides 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 part of the sales process will be automated?

With that, 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 maximize 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, and some are frowned upon by LinkedIn as an organization.

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 is at your own discretion to explore and utilise each tool as you see relevant.

Whe are going to present you 5 best LinkedIn tools to improve your Prospecting and Lead Generation.

Here are 5 tools to improve your prospecting and lead generation using LinkedIn

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 Website Visitor Tracking 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Now it is time to improve your sales by using these linkedin tools

In addition to preparing what is necessary to create relevant connections and nurture relationships on Linkedin, you need to have a clear view of your target audience.

You can perform this activity in many ways, including using “advanced search” to filter professionals by area, job title, company.

Get to know a little more about these people according to their connections, assignments, and professional experiences.

And use that as content to start a good conversation.

The same goes for business search and profiles.

You can also join community groups according to the topic or area that may be of interest to your business and collaborate with its discussions.

The thing is that LinkedIn is the most likely social network to lead generation and sales prospecting.

Also finding professionals that are able to close deals with you – especially business to business.