A few years ago, we launched our SaaS app to help online companies discover the right project management tools. We mainly targeted small to medium-sized businesses looking to efficiently manage their teams to boost their productivity, whether their team members collaborated in-office or remotely. Naturally, we had our hopes high and thought business would be booming from day one, but to be quite frank, our dreams weren’t exactly coming true.
We ran ads on Facebook and Instagram, but it was obvious that our marketing strategy wasn’t really worthwhile, since we barely noticed any spike in traffic to our website. Soon, it became evident that we needed to up our marketing game to drive sales fast, because as a startup, our business’ fate depended on it.
That’s when a friend suggested we should promote our business on LinkedIn. As a social network for professionals, LinkedIn is the hotspot for companies and individuals that connect and conduct business online, and that’s exactly who we wanted to target. After a quick research, we discovered that there are a plethora of amazing tools that provide options for marketing, building lists, and capturing leads, among many other activities, specifically designed for LinkedIn.
We decided to immediately try two services that offered automated lead generation for our company’s LinkedIn account, and in just a few weeks, we witnessed mind-blowing results. There was an incredible surge in traffic and we sold as many of our packages in only three weeks as we had sold in the previous three months.
Impressed by the performance of these services, we decided to share our positive experience with everyone who’s eager to take advantage of the many possibilities LinkedIn has to offer.
Why You Should Use a LinkedIn Automation Tool
You’re just one tool away from making boosting your sales on LinkedIn a reality. We’ve had an incredible journey on this social network and discovering the right tools to reap all of LinkedIn’s benefits probably meant the very survival of our company.
Throughout the years, we’ve had the chance to get acquainted with tons of services that automate many marketing techniques while using LinkedIn. We tried and tested tools that did wonders for our sales strategy, but there were also some that were basically useless. That being said, today we feel prepared to present you with a curated list of the 9 best LinkedIn automation tools on the market.
Here, you’ll have the chance to discover tools that are great for building lists, organizing contacts, generating leads, gathering data intelligence, and for the overall management of sales funnels. Each of the tools featured in this list is fully automated, meaning they’re great for scheduling tasks, saving time, and minimizing mundane activities. They can all help you improve your decision making in your marketing approach to reach the ultimate goal – an increase in revenue.
Without further ado, let’s dive into each tool and see what they’re great for.
1. LeadFuze – The Best Overall Prospecting Tool for Business Leads
LeadFuze is a trusted business companion to our marketing team, so it earned our endorsement as a top recommendation in the prospecting niche. It’s a great option for any type of business, but we personally recommend this for B2B companies as it skillfully locates qualified prospects.
Pros:
Boasting more than 720 million users, LinkedIn can be an amazing source of leads, but the number often poses a challenge to many sales professionals. In that regard, LeadFuze can be a godsend, as it allows you to quickly create lists and target users with an amazing search feature.
With LeadFuze, there’s no need to manually input every lead into your lists – the tool will do the job for you.
Its search engine is quite advanced, enabling you to segment different options with filters like demographics, industry, location, budget, keywords, etc. You can select the roles that you want to target and limit the number of prospects that you want coming through your funnel.
LeadFuze provides the necessary contact information of every generated lead, so you can effectively get down to the sales segment. Then, the tool can help you create personalized emails that you can send to your leads automatically, as well as any necessary follow-ups.
On top of everything, the service seamlessly integrates with many CRM solutions, such as G Suite, Zapier, Salesforce, etc. for a smooth flow when it comes to customer interaction.
Cons:
The only downside to LeadFuze is that it can be a bit confusing to navigate. However, they’re constantly working on improving their interface and have a resourceful training center to help you get properly familiar with the software.
Pricing:
LeadFuze comes with a free trial that offers you 25 free leads. It’s a great option to sample the product. If you find it useful, you can opt in for the “Starter” plan that costs $132.3/month and includes 500 lead credits per month, or the “Scaling” plan that costs $447.3/month and includes 2500 lead credits per month. If you think you’ll need more lead credits, you can always contact LeadFuze and they’ll put together a custom plan for you.
2. Expandi – The Safest LinkedIn Automation Tool
If you’re on the lookout for a 24/7 service that automates all of your marketing efforts, then you might find Expandi very useful. The service is especially suitable for agency owners, growth-hackers, and entrepreneurs who manage multiple LinkedIn accounts, as it makes switching between accounts super easy.
Pros:
Expandi is the safest tool on the market because it dedicates a unique IP address for each user and gradually increases the daily connections cap. This way it ensures LinkedIn doesn’t detect any suspicious activity, so your account is safe from being blacklisted.
The service is extremely easy to set up and includes a smart inbox and chat that allow you to filter through your messages, making sure you never miss a conversation. If you already have a list of generated leads, you can import it to Expandi and work from there, gather valuable data, and learn from it using the campaign metrics with key insights that Expandi provides.
Expandi is also great at advanced targeting – you can extract profiles of people who engage on a certain LinkedIn post and contact them in just a few simple steps. Featuring automated AI to interact with your prospects with delayed responses, it adds an organic and human-like touch to the whole UE.
Cons:
Expandi can be a little pricey considering that it doesn’t include all of the features that LeadFuze does. It’s a great alternative, but it’s not enough if used alone, so you might need to complement it with another tool.
Pricing:
Everything Expandi has to offer is included in one plan, priced at $99/month per account.
3. LinkedIn Sales Navigator – LinkedIn’s Own Lead Generation Tool
Sales Navigator is the go-to app for everyone looking to expand their marketing strategy on LinkedIn. It’s included on the social network’s platform and it’s great for every marketer that actively uses LinkedIn to build better connections.
Pros:
Sales Navigator features great tools that go a long way to build better relationships with your leads. That way it can bring you a step closer to closing a deal with each conversation.
Its search algorithm is so advanced that it allows you to easily discover the right companies and prospects that would best respond to what your company offers.
It has a 30-day free trial, so you can easily give it a try – it’s a great place to start generating leads and see where that takes you.
Cons:
Although LinkedIn constantly adds new options to the Sales Navigator, the tool itself still lacks many core features, such as integration with CRM tools like Salesforce and Zapier.
Its paid version is also costly for a tool that’s not that great in streamlining sales processes.
Pricing:
If you’re content with what Sales Navigator has to offer on the LinkedIn Premium free trial, you can go for its paid plan that costs $79.99/month or $64.99/month when billed annually.
4. Linked Helper – The Best Integration with LinkedIn
Designed to best assist your LinkedIn-based marketing and social selling, Linked Helper is a tool that works best with LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator and Recruiter. It perfectly automates their processes and is primarily for those who already use these services and are basically LinkedIn savvies.
Pros:
Linked Helper is a pretty affordable service, considering the myriad of quality features it offers. It was first created to integrate with Chrome, but since that raised some of LinkedIn’s safety concerns, the company revamped it to Linked Helper 2 and now it’s a standalone app featuring its own browser.
It works flawlessly, ensuring to never insert any of its code while operating on LinkedIn, so your automated practices are on a remarkably high safety level.
The service is great for managing your lead funnel because you can export all of your connections into a CSV file and import them in your favorite CRM tool, or use the one that Linked Helper has built-in.
You must also check out its amazing auto-responder. It targets 2nd and 3rd level connections with powerful drip campaigns packed with chain messaging and reply detection.
Cons:
Like many other tools, Linked Helper has its share of bugs that sometimes make the app crash out of nowhere, so you need to check on it from time to time in case you need to restart it.
Linked Helper doesn’t include emojis in its messages format, and since emojis give online conversations a human touch, this is a bit of a downside for us.
Pricing:
Besides its free trial, if you want to use all of the features Linked Helper has to offer, you can opt in for its paid version – the cost depends on how many months you decide to pay for. It’s $15 for one month, $40 for three months, $60 for six months, and $99 for a whole year.
5. Dux-Soup – The Best Beginner LinkedIn Automation Tool
Dux-Soup is a Google Chrome extension that’s extremely simple to install and activate, so you can access it directly when you’re on your LinkedIn account. The tool is suitable for individuals and teams looking for a straightforward solution to get the ball rolling with their LinkedIn marketing efforts.
Pros:
To mimic a real human marketing agent, Dux-Soup allows selecting custom times for performing different activities and scheduling automatic follow-ups for times when you think leads would most likely engage with you.
What’s great about it, is that whenever you visit a profile, you can add your own tags and notes about it in Dux-Soup, which is great for sorting connections in different groups and performing certain actions based on the references you assign for each profile.
On top of everything, the service facilitates safety precautions by implementing fair-use practices when connecting and messaging prospects. They even throw in a live support chat in there.
Cons:
Dux-Soup doesn’t offer advanced outreach and it slows down your Chrome browser, especially while you’re navigating your LinkedIn account.
Pricing:
Starting with a plan that’s free forever and includes everything to get you going, Dux-Soup features two other paid plans – “Professional”, that’s $14.99/month ($11.25/month if billed annually) and “Turbo”, that’s $55/month ($41.25/month if billed annually).
6. Zopto – The Best Cloud-Based Automation Tool
Next on our list is Zopto – a tool most suitable for sales teams and startups that want to excel in their lead generation endeavors and bring in as many qualified prospects from LinkedIn directly into their sales funnels.
Pros:
Zopto is a cloud-based automation platform for launching outreach and drip campaigns on LinkedIn. It features a beautiful dashboard that presents all the necessary statistics and insights from the data it collects beautifully, all in one compact panel.
The service greatly integrates with LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator and provides detailed filters to target prospects, such as location, industry, number of connections, title, company size, etc. After you target your desired audience, Zopto jumps in with features like InMail, Twitter Engagement, Consequential Messaging, and much more, to maximize your campaign’s engagement.
Cons:
Compared to other great tools on the market, Zopto can get a bit pricey with whichever plan you decide to go for, considering you also need to obtain LinkedIn Sales Navigator for optimal performance.
Additionally, there’s no option to cancel an ongoing campaign, and if by any chance you make some mistakes while launching a campaign, this can hurt your outreach efforts.
Pricing:
Zopto has three pricing plans: “Personal” – $215/month ($160/month if billed quarterly), “Grow” – $395/month ($316/month if billed quarterly), and “Agency” – $895/month ($715/month if billed quarterly).
7. MeetAlfred – The Easiest Social Selling Automation Tool
Formerly known as Leonard, MeetAlfred is a social selling automation tool for LinkedIn and Gmail. Because of the versatility in its key features, anyone can find this service very useful, from startups and B2B businesses to marketing and sales professionals.
Pros:
Let’s check out all the aspects MeetAlfred shines at:
- Powerful Campaign Management – the tool runs sophisticated messaging sequences even beyond LinkedIn – it supports Twitter and Email too;
- Advanced LinkedIn CRM – obtains detailed information about all of your LinkedIn connections;
- Team Management – efficiently manages all of your marketing team members;
- Integrations – you can include MeetAlfred with your existing workflow for even better results;
- In-Depth Analytics Dashboard – make smarter decisions with actionable insights on your campaign performance;
- Inbuilt Safety Usage Limits – MeetAlfred will ensure your practices are within LinkedIn’s commercial limits.
Cons:
MeetAlfred is a Google Chrome-based plugin and LinkedIn doesn’t like external plugins for security reasons.
On another note, the service supports managing only one LinkedIn account with all their plans. If you want to add more users, you need to pay extra on top of your monthly charge.
Pricing:
MeetAlfred has a free “Basic” option that’s perfect for growing your connections on LinkedIn. There are four other paid plans that all start with a 14-day free trial, and then their cost is $49/month for the “Essential” plan, $89/month for the “Advanced” plan, and $149/month for the “Professional” plan.
8. Crystal – The Best AI LinkedIn Sales Tool
Crystal is such an unconventional tool that we simply couldn’t resist including it on our list. With the help of advanced AI, Crystal can predict a person’s personality based on millions of online data points collected from the user’s profile details and their activity on the social network. They like to brag that even the likes of Google and Amazon used their services, and that speaks volumes about Crystal’s credibility.
Pros:
Crystal takes understanding your clients and customers to another level. When assessing their personalities, you’re presented with a comprehensive list of qualities attributed to each person, so you get a much clearer picture of who you’re dealing with.
And its power doesn’t stop there. Crystal will help you manage your communication skills whenever you decide to contact your prospects. You’ll receive personality-based advice for any meeting, email, or phone call, making communication seem like you’ve known the person for years.
Cons:
The tool is an extension for Google Chrome, and as we mentioned in the MeetAlfred review, that can be a liability for LinkedIn.
Before signing up for a free version, which basically does nothing except revealing a limited number of personalities, you cannot get any information about Crystal’s Premium upgrade, and the lack of transparency is a downside for us.
Pricing:
Besides the option to get started for free, Crystal includes a “Premium” tier for $29/month.
9. UseViral – The Best Social Media Growth Tool
We’re familiar with UseViral’s presence on the market of social media growth services for a long time, but since they included LinkedIn automation recently, we decided to give it a try and we’re happy to say we were positively surprised.
Whether you’re an individual or a company, your profile reveals a lot about you, and if you don’t have enough connections, there’s a big chance many won’t be interested to engage with you. UseViral promises to get you as many followers/connections as you pay for, to boost your credibility and help you reach more prospects.
Pros:
UseViral guarantees a fast delivery of your purchased connections/followers and promises that they’ll remain active in the future.
Reliability and safety are the cornerstones of this service, and its many customer reviews stand proof of that. Additionally, they’ll never ask you to provide any sensitive info.
Cons:
UseViral is not a fully-fledged marketing and sales automation tool. It may get you high-profile LinkedIn connections, but it doesn’t include most of the features the other tools on this list do.
Pricing:
Depending on how many connections or company followers you may need, UseViral pricing options vary from $6 for 100 connections/followers to $799 for 25 000 connections/followers.
Conclusion
Congratulations on making it to the very end of this article! We sincerely hope that we helped you on your quest to discover the top LinkedIn automation tool that best fits your standards.
Social media are the go-to platform in today’s marketing and sales space. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are very popular for advertising, but none come close to LinkedIn in terms of targeting other companies for B2B outreach opportunities.
Our personal recommendation is LeadFuze – an all-in-one automation tool that has a mission to generate as many leads as possible and maximize conversions and revenue. However, go ahead and test any of the other tools in this list, for a first-hand experience of the possibilities they offer.
A note to remember from us: Always ensure that your activities are non-invasive and that you keep all of the safety practices in mind. In the past, we’ve experienced banned accounts because we overstepped LinkedIn’s terms of use, but we’ve also witnessed several tools getting blacklisted by LinkedIn for not following the proper guidelines. So please be mindful and good luck!