Let’s be honest. As a rep, LinkedIn is the first place you go to when you start your workday, and probably the last place you visit before clocking out for the day. And for good reason. LinkedIn is the El Dorado for good-quality prospects.
But if you’ve been spending hours and hours of your precious Monday scouring hundreds of search results and sending prospects connection requests individually, you’re not going to hit that quarterly quota this time.
How much of your time are you willing to give up to do menial tasks?
Sending 50 connection requests, adding personal notes, dropping 30 messages to connections take up at least half of your day.
You could automate a lot of these tasks to save time. View profiles, send LinkedIn messages or InMails to multiple prospects at the speed of light. Maybe not that fast but you get the drift.
Save up to 5+ hours a day, and your work stamina by using a LinkedIn automation tool. So you can do more outreach in less time, and focus on tasks that matter.
Read on to find out how a LinkedIn sales automation tool can be a gamechanger in the way you prospect.
What Is a LinkedIn Automation Tool?
A LinkedIn automation tool is software that you can use to automate your prospecting and outreach on LinkedIn. With a LinkedIn automation tool, you can:
- Prospect cold leads and import their contact information directly into your CRM or CSV or Google sheets, automatically.
- View prospect’s profiles, send them InMails or messages automatically from your CRM or your sales engagement software with a single click.
Three different types of tools that help you do the above:
- LinkedIn prospecting tools collect prospect data from LinkedIn.
- LinkedIn automation tools fully automate all of your LinkedIn outreach activities using a spray and pray approach.
- Multichannel outreach tools offer semi-automation. This will allow you to not just outreach via email, call, and LinkedIn, but also do it in a much safer and more personalized way. Keep reading to know why this decision is vital to your outbound strategy.
What Tasks Can You Automate Using LinkedIn Automation Tools?
The market is saturated with a wide assortment of 'LinkedIn automation tools'. The truth is people use it for different reasons. Maybe you need to automate the process of getting prospect details, or maybe you want to automate reaching out to prospects or if you’re a marketer, you might want to schedule posts or engage with them.
So, to ease your decision-making process, we took the liberty of bucketing these LinkedIn automation tools into three categories based on their stand-out feature.
Which LinkedIn Automation Tool Is Best Suited to Your Needs?
LinkedIn Prospecting Tool
If you’ve just embarked on your business journey and are looking for a tool to help you get contacts, choose a prospecting tool.
If you’ve just started your business and are looking for a tool to help you get contacts, choose a prospecting tool. Tools in this category will help you collect prospect details from LinkedIn and import them into your CRM or Google sheet or CSV. You’ll get information about the job role, industry, employee size, contact, and other crucial details about your target audience.
LinkedIn Automation Tool
Now, if you want to adopt a spray and pray approach to hack your way to the top, you can choose to put your outreach on autopilot using full automation tools. View profiles, send InMails, messages, or connection requests at scale, automatically.
All kinds of engagement on LinkedIn are just a click away whether you’re doing outreach from your CRM, Gmail, or your browser. But there’s a catch. If you use these tools aggressively, you run the risk of putting your LinkedIn profile under the network’s microscope.
Multichannel Outreach Tool
If you’re a sales rep looking to boost your outreach in a systematic and strategic manner, these tools are a must-have in your sales tech stack. You get to reach out at scale via multiple channels: email, call, and LinkedIn, at scale but in a more personalized way. The best part is that since these tools offer semi-automation you can rest assured that your LinkedIn profile is safe.
With a multichannel outreach tool, you can
- Import prospect details from LinkedIn to your CRM
- View profiles, send connection requests, InMails, or messages
- Get all of LinkedIn engagement data in your sales engagement platform or CRM.
22 LinkedIn Automation Tools That Will Maximize Your Productivity
Multichannel Outreach Tools
1. Klenty
Klenty is a sales engagement platform that helps sales teams book more meetings by scaling their outbound outreach. With Klenty, you can send personalized, one-to-one cold emails at scale, make cold calls as part of sales sequences, schedule follow-ups, track the open, click, and reply rates, and reach out via LinkedIn. Klenty has native integrations with Hubspot, Pipedrive, Zoho, and Salesforce.
With Klenty’s LinkedIn plug-in, you can add LinkedIn tasks to your sales sequences and automate:
- Viewing LinkedIn profiles
- Sending personalized LinkedIn messages and InMails at scale
- Sending personalized connection requests to prospects
And take your LinkedIn conversations back to your CRM.
Price: Starts at $50 per user per month
Find out how Klenty helps you automate your LinkedIn outreach safely here.
2. Salesloft
Having integrated with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Salesloft allows you to connect the power of LinkedIn’s sales solution to your sales engagement software to streamline your outreach on LinkedIn. Salesloft integrates with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and SAP Cloud for Customer.
With the software, you can set up the following LinkedIn Sales Navigator steps to your sales cadences:
- Research prospects on LinkedIn by getting updates of their latest LinkedIn activities
- Get introduced to prospects through a mutual connection
- Send LinkedIn invitations to connect or message prospects as part of your sales sequence steps
Price: Hidden & complex pricing.
Sign up for Klenty to see how it's a better outreach alternative to Salesloft.
3. Hubspot
Use LinkedIn data to your advantage from inside Hubspot’s sales software, Sales Hub. This kind of social selling model was made possible because of Hubspot’s integration with LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator. Although you cannot import contacts from LinkedIn using this integration it can ease your life in some other ways.
Features:
- Access LinkedIn profiles of your contacts inside Hubspot
- You can view LinkedIn data for contacts and for companies, this is mainly to help you find new leads, and personalize your outreach
- Send InMails & messages from within the software
Cons:
- LinkedIn integration is available only with the professional and enterprise model.
- InMail conversations will not be saved to the contact’s engagement timeline.
Price: ‘Professional’ plan costs $450 per month with a minimum of 5 users
4. Outreach
Outreach integrates with LinkedIn Sales Navigator to give you a spread of information in your sales engagement platform so you can personalize your outreach easier, faster, and at scale.
Features:
- View work history of leads on LinkedIn
- See mutual connections with leads
- Check out their latest activities on LinkedIn
- Execute LinkedIn actions from inside the platform like send InMail
- Interact with a lead’s post or send a connection request
All the tasks can be done without leaving Outreach.
Price: Hidden and complex pricing.
Here is why Klenty is a better alternative to Outreach.
5. Salesforce
Salesforce when integrated with LinkedIn Sales Navigator packs a mean punch. With it, you can view all your LinkedIn outreach data right in your CRM. It is currently only available with Salesforce's Small Business CRM, though. Because of the native integration, reps can access their prospect engagement data in both their CRM and LinkedIn Sales Navigator accounts. The integration is available only for the Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited, Developer, or Performance edition of Salesforce.
Similar to the other integrations in this list, you can:
- Target the right prospects using advanced filters
- Personalize your outreach further with access to prospects’ LinkedIn profiles from your CRM
- Automatically log all outreach data like LinkedIn communication and notes in your CRM
Price: Professional plan starts at $75 per user, per month
6. InsideSales
LinkedIn Sales Navigator integrates with InsideSales.com playbooks to add LinkedIn tasks to your sales sequences to enrich your outbound outreach. Its CRM integrations include Salesforce, SAP, and Microsoft.
Features:
- View event updates of your prospect on LinkedIn
- Get recommendations of those who are similar to your prospects
- Send InMails or messages on LinkedIn from your sales sequence
Price: Hidden pricing.
7. Reply.io
Reply is a sales engagement tool that helps you scale your sales efforts through multichannel outreach and automation of laborious tasks. It integrates with Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Pipedrive, Copper CRM, Close.io, and Hubspot. Reply goes one step beyond and provides a prospecting tool: an extension to find business email addresses on LinkedIn or Sales Navigator.
What else?
- Add the emails found via the extension automatically to your sales sequences
- Execute automated outreach on LinkedIn:
- Send invitations to connect
- View profiles
- Send messages
- Automates messages with dynamic placeholders that can be personalized
- Add LinkedIn tasks to your sales sequences
Price: $70 per month, minimum 3 users
Find out why Klenty is a better alternative to Reply here.
8. Groove
Groove's deep integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to empower your daily workflows with LinkedIn data. Groove has a LinkedIn ‘omnibar’ to help you do research, reach out and track prospect activity so you never have to toggle between windows. Groove, a sales engagement platform, is built specifically for Salesforce CRM.
Features:
- Add LinkedIn connection requests and InMails to your sales sequences or “Groove Flows”
- Reps can A/B test and identify which message works best for LinkedIn
- Access LinkedIn data from a Groove Omnibar while you do your outreach to personalize your messaging
- Track your prospects’ engagement in LinkedIn through the “Flow” steps
- Do research on LinkedIn prospects by viewing their profile updates, and activity
Price: Contact Groove for pricing.
9. Mixmax
Mixmax is a sales engagement platform that allows you to outreach from Gmail. And now you can do LinkedIn outreach as well from Gmail with Mixmax.
Features:
- Send InMails and invitations requests right from Gmail
- Schedule LinkedIn tasks
- View your prospect’s information on LinkedIn while drafting the email
Price: Starts at free cost. Growth plan is $49
Outgrowing the generic Gmail plugin? Check out why Klenty is a better, more powerful outreach alternative to Mixmax.
Note: All the platforms mentioned above that have integrations with Sales Navigator require users to already be subscribed to Sales Navigator's Team or Enteprise versions at an additional cost starting from $108.
LinkedIn Automation Tools
Use these tools to put all of your LinkedIn outreach on autopilot. Visit profiles, send connection requests and messages automatically to hundreds of prospects.
10. We-Connect
We-Connect is a cloud-based automation solution that continues to work in the background even if you’ve not logged into your account. You can set up campaigns to send invitations to prospects and follow up with them automatically, and do a lot more like:
- Save lists of prospects you found on LinkedIn to the platform
- Send InMails to prospects who are not your connections
- Set up campaigns to engage with the prospects you’ve saved in your account
- View profiles
- Invite new connections
- Endorse connections
- Automatically follow prospects
- Keep track of and organize your replies with an interactive inbox
Inside the software, you’ll be able to pull the strings on each campaign by A/B testing messages, prioritizing hot prospects, and following up at timed intervals.
Price: $49 per month per user
Con: Some users have complained about the software being buggy. One user on G2 claimed that their account was suspended for a day.
11. MeetAlfred
MeetAlfred automates outreach campaigns for LinkedIn, Twitter, and email. From a dashboard within the software, you can manage and track how prospects are engaging with you on LinkedIn and follow up exactly at the right time.
Features:
- Campaign manager to run drip campaigns
- A “LinkedIn CRM” that can automate all your outreach from within the software
- View and access all of your LinkedIn connections’ data in a list format
- Use up to 13 filter options to find the right prospect
- Keep track of activities executed for each prospect
- Send personalized messages to first degree connections
- You can also schedule posts to be published on LinkedIn
Price: Starts at $29 per month, billed quarterly
12. Dux-Soup- LinkedIn Automation Tool
Dux-Soup automates all of your LinkedIn outreach so you can grow your lead generation efforts. Dux-Soup offers integrations with Hubspot, Zoho, and Pipedrive CRMs in more advanced plans. Using this chrome extension, you can do the following:
- Find prospects on LinkedIn using advanced filters
- Automate all LinkedIn outreach activities like sending personalized connection requests, messages to connections at timed intervals
- Execute drip campaigns on LinkedIn
- Send InMails automatically
- Organize or view your prospects based on tags, notes, or previous views.
Price: Starter plan is free of cost
Con: Users complained that the extension slows down their LinkedIn, and has a poor user interface. While a very few complained of getting banned from LinkedIn.
13. Phantombuster
Phantombuster is code-free automation and data extraction software that offers bots to carry out tasks on the web. These bots are called ‘Phantoms’ and each has a different task.
You can:
- Export search results using a ‘Phantom’ to a spreadsheet
- Scrape LinkedIn profile details
- Send connection requests to 80 profiles a day
- Send personalized messages to connections
That’s not all, you can find more automations under different ‘Phantoms’.
Price: Starts for free but you only get one ‘Phantom’ slot for 10 minutes. The next plan is $30 per month and you’ll get up to 5 ‘Phantom’ slots.
Con: You only get to use the ‘Phantoms’ only for an hour in the $30 pack.
14. Expandi- LinkedIn Automation Tool
A LinkedIn automation tool with advanced features, Expandi boosts your LinkedIn outreach. It is a cloud-based software that provides dedicated country-based IP addresses to protect your LinkedIn account while you automate the engagement.
Features:
- Personalize your LinkedIn messages at scale using Gifs or images
- Allows users to send 100 invitations and 100 messages per day
- Target the right audience by getting the profile data of those who engaged with an influencer’s post
- Automate sequences for LinkedIn prospects
- Find prospects on LinkedIn and download them in a CSV file
- Keep track of views and replies with campaign metrics
- Smart inbox where you can filter messages according to campaigns
- Manage outreach from multiple LinkedIn accounts
Price: Starts at $99 per month per account
15. Octopus- LinkedIn Automation Tool
Octopus CRM is a LinkedIn automation tool that is packed with advanced features. It is compatible with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and Recruiter Lite and also comes with a throttle for how much outreach you can do in a day. This is an important feature as it acts as an extra blanket of safety.
This is an exhaustive list of what you can do with this Chrome extension:
- Send list of prospects you’ve found on LinkedIn to Octopus CRM to kickstart campaigns
- Send personalized connection requests, automatically
- Message connections in bulk, automatically
- View profiles at scale, automatically
- Set up sequences for LinkedIn connections and control how you outreach from a dashboard
- Optimize your outreach according to how connections have engaged by viewing metrics
Price: Starts at $6.99 per month
16. Zopto
Zopto is a cloud-based LinkedIn automation tool that can be used for both lead generation and outreach efforts. Here is a breakdown of its features:
- Manage multiple LinkedIn profiles
- Detects time zones of prospects and sends messages accordingly during office hours particular to that time zone
- Have conversations with LinkedIn connections from the app
- Create unlimited campaigns for different segments of audiences and automate messaging, and even A/B test it to find the most effective template
- Metrics dashboard to help you in decision making
Price: Starts at $215 per month
17. Texau
Texau is a code-free data extraction and automation tool. They offer workflows that connect multiple actions to carry out tasks like searching LinkedIn for your prospects and sending them connection requests. Their workflows are called “recipes” while each action is called a “spice”. For example, you can choose the “Get-Sales-Navigator-Search-Endorse-Send-Connection-Request” public recipe to do exactly what’s mentioned in its name - search on Sales Navigator, endorse connections, send connection requests, all automatically. You also have the option to add random delays between actions to mimic human behavior.
There are multiple public recipes to pick whatever kind of engagement you want to do, like this recipe allows you to send drip campaigns to LinkedIn connections, “Send A Drip Campaign To 1st Degree Connections On LinkedIn.”
Tip: You can run multiple automation at the same time.
Price: Starts at $29 per month
18. Dripify- LinkedIn Automation Tool
Dripify puts your entire LinkedIn outreach on complete autopilot. This tool is specifically for those who want to focus solely on LinkedIn outreach.
Features:
- Categorize lead data according to campaigns or view data using filters
- Create drip campaigns to work on your sales funnel
- Analyze LinkedIn campaigns by viewing updates on engagement activities, and recent activities
- Send messages from ‘Smart Inbox’ without leaving the software
Price: Starts at $39 per month
LinkedIn Prospecting Tool
Use these tools to import prospect data from LinkedIn. Get crucial information about your target audience like email addresses, organization name, employee size, industry, and get them in your CRM or Google sheets or CSV file.
Check out the curated list of the best 25+ LinkedIn Prospecting Tools.
19. LinkPort
LinkPort is a Chrome extension that allows you to pull prospect data from LinkedIn to your CRM at lightning speed, in one click. It even maps the contact information from LinkedIn to the custom fields you created in your CRM. LinkPort integrates with Zoho, Hubspot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce.
Features:
- Get prospect information from LinkedIn or Sales Navigator
- Add prospect details directly to your CRM
- No limit to how many contacts you can download
- Automatically detects and removes duplicates
Price: Free
20. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn’s own brainchild for prospecting, Sales Navigator doesn’t really put your prospecting on autopilot but it is your safest bet for prospecting and organizing your leads inside LinkedIn.
Here’s what you can do:
- Search for prospects using advanced filters like geography. You can even look for people who’ve recently changed their jobs
- Organize your leads in one place so you can track them easily
- Get alerts based on your lead’s profile updates
- Send up to 20 InMails
Price: Starts at $79.99 per user per month
21. Aeroleads
Aeroleads is an email finder tool that searches online platforms like LinkedIn, AngelList, and Crunchbase for email addresses. Add this Chrome extension to find prospect details like name, company, profile URL, job title on LinkedIn and add the information to whichever database you’re using - CRM, CSV file - in a single click.
Price: $49 per user per month
22. Lusha
Lusha is a pure prospecting tool. Use this browser extension to find the email addresses and mobile phone numbers of your prospects. You can add the extension to Chrome, Firefox, or Edge browsers.
Features:
- Prospect on social media networks including LinkedIn
- Create bulk lists of contacts inside Lusha
- Save all your prospect data in your CRM
Price: Starts free. The professional plan costs $79 per month for 2 users
Con: Users have raised complaints about poor customer support and the quality of downloaded prospect data.
Key Points To Remember
Automation tools are more than just helping hands for your business. They are often a gamechanger for sales teams that are scaling. But remember to use these LinkedIn automation tools judiciously. Abusing LinkedIn for prospecting or outreach could land you in troubled waters.
In order to stay within the confines of what LinkedIn approves, you can set daily or weekly limits apart from the limitations provided by the tools on:
- How many contacts I can download from LinkedIn
- The number of prospects I can message
- How many connection requests I can send
Don’t shy away now though. Today, LinkedIn connects millions of businesses and customers from across the world, including you and your prospects. So the irrefutable facts remain that
- LinkedIn is the global leader in professional networking
- And B2B sales are forged from strong relationships
So a time-saving way of reaching out on LinkedIn is not just important, it’s a necessity. Get yourself an automation tool, begin building meaningful relationships with multiple prospects, and put more hours back in your day.
Do let us know which tool you’ve chosen or if we’ve missed out on a really cool one.