It is 2023, and your sales on all of your different platforms are doing well, but you might just be missing out on one of the biggest sales opportunities and platforms for B2B Marketing. What is that platform, you ask? LinkedIn.
According to research, LinkedIn has found that 76% of buyers are ready to have sales conversations, 62% of B2B customers respond to salespeople, and 50% of B2B buyers turn to LinkedIn as a source when making buying choices.
So is it worth selling on LinkedIn? Well, the survey done by LinkedIn may seem a little biased, so after looking at research that IDC conducted, it was concluded that 75% of buyers look to social media before making a buying decision, 84% of C-suite executives look at social media before making a sales decision, and 65% of B2B buyers said easy-to-consume content is a vital factor when looking at where to buy from.
So, we have established that selling on social media and, more importantly, on LinkedIn is a good idea, but how do you do it?
How do you sell on LinkedIn?
This is where your B2B sales teams should be paying attention. LinkedIn is a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week platform with over 700 million users, so this really is a good place to be selling for your business.
There are so many ways to begin to sell on LinkedIn; when you start selling you should think about doing the following:
- Carrying out market research (who are your competitors, and what do they do?)
- Identifying and researching leads (compiling an ICP-ideal customer profile. It’s a fictitious company/person as a potential customer with all the qualities that would make them the best fit for the solutions you provide).
- Defining your USP – unique selling proposition (or positioning statement). How do you differentiate your brand from competitive solutions on the market?
- Finding companies that fit your ICP.
- Reach out to them with your USP and follow your selling strategies.
These are just some of the simpler ways to start your B2B selling on LinkedIn. Sounds easy, right?
What if someone, or us, tells you that you could make these simple ways to sell a lot simpler for yourself and your business. Well there is. They are called LinkedIn automation tools.
So what are LinkedIn automation tools, and can they help you sell on LinkedIn?
Related: 9 Ideas to Help You Create Your Own Sales Lead Database & Tools You Can Use
What are LinkedIn automation tools?
Putting it briefly, LinkedIn automation tools are the tools and apps that use software to make time-consuming, routine, and everyday tasks into automatic tasks.
LinkedIn automation tools use software to manage, simplify and speed up business processes. The tools help to refine repetitive, time-consuming and simple tasks and can save you time on turning several processes into a single action with a couple of inputs from yourself.
The benefits of the automation of processes can include efficiency and increased productivity by speeding up and leaving the mundane and time-consuming jobs like data scraping to the automation tools and leaving you and or your team the time to work on logic-based tasks. They are also great for helping to speed up meaningful connections for B2B sales and simplifying tasks that rely on decision-making.
As we delve further into automation tools, software bots, sometimes known as a ‘digital workforce,’ can be programmed via recorded workflows. Once these have been programmed, and a process has been built, these clever bots require minimal human input to carry out tasks automatically and easily as part of an integrated human-machine workforce.
The highest level of automation tools that can be used is artificial intelligence automation. The function and use of artificial intelligence mean that the automation tools that are being used can learn from past tasks and lessons to enhance and improve on how to best perform their tasks the next time around.
A good example of this is artificial intelligence-infused chatbots. A chatbot that has been enhanced with artificial intelligence now has the ability to use human-sounding and intellectual language in response to questions by using intelligent language processing. This processing software helps the chatbot to understand the question it has been asked and can therefore give a legible response.
With the different types of LinkedIn automation tools, there are varying levels and degrees that you can choose. With the highest level of artificial intelligence, you can have automated business procedures that allow the tool or application you are using to find other menial tasks that can be better optimized if automated.
Why should I use LinkedIn Automation Tools?
There are so many reasons to use them, the main reason being it saves you your valuable time! Streamline your day and let the automation tools speed up the most time-consuming LinkedIn tasks. This frees up your time that can be invested in more important and result-yielding jobs to help grow your business and work with others.
The automation tools are also great for analyzing performance and suggesting what you should work on to improve your work. All sounding good to you so far? It is about sounds even better when you read our top reasons to use LinkedIn Automation Tools.
Top 6 reasons to use LinkedIn Automation Tools:
- It saves you your time. One of the biggest upsides of using these tools is the amount of time you will save, which could be better used doing something more productive and useful. No more will you have to sit there and type out hundreds of personal messages, find all of your company’s leads, send follow-up messages, view other LinkedIn profiles or send connection requests. This will save you your precious hours a week that you can put towards other aspects of your business.
- Make everything personal. With automated tools, you can send personalized messages to everyone you want. Your messages can be personal but on a huge scale. Connect on a higher level with your LinkedIn connections with custom variables and get in touch with a personal touch with your potential leads. Plus, if you use the personal touch with your use of GIFs and images, you have the potential to get a higher response rate.
- They give you an in-depth report on your work. If you are too busy to gather all the data yourself and go through it, automation tools will do the job for you by gathering and analyzing all of your metrics.
- You can run multiple campaigns at once. Be more productive, now you will not have to wait to start targeting a new outreach group before finishing your first one. If you have multiple buyer personas or IPCs, you can run and benefit from multiple outreach campaigns at the same time.
- A/B test your campaigns. Automation tools give you a chance to test to see what works best for your customers quickly. A/B test your personal messages, InMail, message sequences, connection requests, and land subject lines. Once you have tested your campaign, you can see what works and continue progressing from there.
- You can focus on connected profiles. Now that the tasks that take up a lot of your time on LinkedIn are being taken care of, you can spend your time focusing on your connections and potential new customers and partners. The better your connections are, the more sales opportunities that present themselves, and the more you do to progress your business.
So you now know why you should be investing in LinkedIn Automation Tools, but it is now time to find out which one suits you and your business the best. Keep on reading to discover our favorite 3 LinkedIn Automation Tools that will make your business selling life a lot less stress-free.
Top 3 LinkedIn automation tools for 2023
Octopus CRM
At number three on our list, we have Octopus CRM. Octopus CRM is a browser extension-based tool that is meant for LinkedIn only, this can a problem for some, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have some good features.
With Octopus CRM, you can send bulk personalized messages to your contacts and benefit from detailed analytics reports. The benefits of the analytics page are that you can see how many connection requests have been sent and relevant information for your business on the current Social Selling Index.
Because this is a browser extension, it is not the fastest tool to use, which may cause you a bit of annoyance. It also doesn’t benefit from smart sequences or an InMail setup.
PhantomBuster
PhantomBuster is an excellent option to look into if you are not looking for a fully integrated automation tool. It has some great features that include helping you find new sales leads from LinkedIn, from emails and other sources.
PhantomBuster is an excellent add-on to outreach tools and lets you save scraped data in JSON and CSV file formats, meaning that you can upload to each of your multiple campaigns and use it to your advantage when looking to boost your sales.
It also offers a mail enrichment feature which allows you to find email addresses from multiple sources and send bulk emails to all of them. Be careful though as this could result in a lot of bounce-backs from fake emails or fake profiles.
Closely
And at number one, we have Closely. With Closely, you can grow your network on autopilot, bring a new perspective to your LinkedIn network, work quickly, personalize your campaigns with their linkedin data export tool, find new B2B sales opportunities through conversations and send personalised messages in LinkedIn on a large scale.
In our opinion, closely will be the best LinkedIn automation tool to use in 2023 because of its ease of use, its huge database of contacts, not just on LinkedIn but also on emails, and its handy features.
Find new leads in a simple click with Closely and bring along your B2B sales top game, send personalized messages to all of your leads and grow your business and boost your B2B sales. Manage your network with their network intelligence features and enrich, grow and expand your business to find new leads, connect with more members and finalise on more sales.
With all of these features, you can streamline your business and make your life easier when it comes to connecting with your linked profiles and selling to them.
So there we have it. How to sell on LinkedIn, why it can help your business, the benefits of LinkedIn automation tools and our top 3 LinkedIn automation tools for 2023. It is now up to you to choose whether to invest in these tools and to help grow your business and B2B sales.
