If you’re looking for ways to bolster your sales, look no further! This guide will help you leverage the power of automation. We’ve listed the most incredible, advanced tools that can completely transform your sales game!
What is LinkedIn Automation and Why Do You Need It in 2023?
LinkedIn Automation is the most powerful concept in recent years — it’s a chance to reach your sales goals much faster while saving costs on lead generation specialists. LinkedIn automation is an absolutely legal, safe way to grow your LinkedIn network faster, without the need to hire additional specialists. The tool will do it for you. Let’s go through the whole process — how do you make a tool generate leads for you on autopilot?
First of all, a LinkedIn automation tool — what is that? It’s a special software designed to accomplish all those tasks that sales specialists have, however, in an automated way. You build your outreach campaign from scratch, just dragging and dropping the pieces of the campaign to make it a whole, inside of the tool, then you provide the audience who will receive your messages, and start your campaign. What happened next — the automation tool starts sending messages from your sequence to those recipients from the list you’ve provided. It sends messages on autopilot — connection message, follow-up. It can even like and endorse people’s skills on LinkedIn instead of you. The tool does everything, completely eliminating human work.
So, what’s required from you? Compile your message! And that’s it. The greatest part of automation tools is that they provide you with actionable insights – which campaign worked best, and which campaign should be slightly redesigned – whether in targeting (changing the audience), or in the messages themselves.
Crazy! I know. That’s how I now generate 20 demos completely on autopilot. I just start my campaign using a LinkedIn automation tool. After a while, I visit my Inbox – that’s also a built-in feature in such a tool and see who texted me back. Those leads I can take and work with. Amazing!
Also, what I love the most about these tools is that they’re constantly splitting out new and new functionalities which makes you a winner on LinkedIn! Like people’s posts or endorse their skills, text your network, scrape contact data, and so on and so forth. Plenty of ways to set up automated prospecting or just simply a connection campaign that will build your network for you, — that’s the most beautiful part of using an automation tool. They’re never out of new features! You’re up-to-date all the time, staying in tune with technologies. When any update comes from LinkedIn or whatever – you are always the first to learn about it. But let’s take a closer look at those tools. In this article, I’ve gathered together my most favourite LinkedIn automation tools, with their pros and cons. It will be useful for those who have never come across such a tool. I believe these tools are the best on the market, and the best option for 2023.
1. Closely — the Best Automation + B2B Contact Data Provider
Closely is surely the winner in this chart because it’s one of the most comprehensive automation tools. Their onboarding is top-notch, you’ll be surprised how easy it is to start your work. Closely is able to impress any sales team! It has designed some features that other tools have no clue about. Inbox with CRM — an absolute state-of-the-art feature. Just imagine turning your LinkedIn into a CRM. That’s what Closely does — they let you simplify your workflow, here and there, and thus, increase efficiency. Unlock productivity. Since this tool can replace a whole lead gen specialist, it lets you concentrate on very important tasks, like communicating with potential customers, and writing powerful messages.
Closely comes with a very nice add-on — it’s a LinkedIn scraping extension. It is capable of opening any contact data on anyone’s LinkedIn profile. Closely is also a B2B contact database — you can search for emails, phone numbers, company-related information, and other insights that can help you sell better.
What is of even greater importance for me is that this tool lets you personalize your messages — you have to provide a CSV file with your contacts’ names, surnames and other data that you consider valuable and that you think should be used to make your messages sound more personalised, referring to the recipient. So, you can basically write your message, while the tool will insert the data from your document into the message so it sounds tailored to each unique recipient. That’s a super-advanced technology, I love how my messages sound, how they’re designed, and I love the outcome. I just open my Inbox and …there are 5,10, 15 leads waiting for me. I can assign tags in my Inbox, which means I’ll be able to sort my contacts as in CRM later. An incredibly powerful and work-speeding tool that I recommend to try to anyone who’s up to transforming their LinkedIn prospecting.
Here is how my dashboard looks like in Closely — will all the campaigns that are currently on.
Closely will cost you $50/ month with the ability to sync several LinkedIn accounts with Closely account. It comes with a free trial and gives you 50 credits for Lead Finder — the database where you can look up emails and phone numbers of your prospects.
2. Waalaxy
I guess Waalaxy is worth trying as well, it’s one of the most advanced tools out there, and they also provide you with a set of powerful features to automate your LinkedIn lead engagement.
The tool provides a set of pre-filled sequences for your outreach, enabling you to choose the one that works best for your current purpose.
Like, you can opt for a simple connection campaign or you can go for multi-step campaign with a few follow-ups, or you can even go multichannel and select the “LinkedIn+Email” campaign type.
Waalaxy also enables you to upload audiences from different sources – you can just drop your CSV file with contacts here and start your campaign, or you can go for a LinkedIn group or event to reach out to some particular, defined group of people.
The only downside of Waalaxy is that it’s a Chrome extension, which means it can be potentially harmful for your LinkedIn account. LinkedIn is very strict around extensions – it can easily detect them and if it’s sure that you’re using one, it can ban you. That’s why I would recommend using it for your second account. Don’t risk your main account with it.
However, if you want to level up your prospecting — there may be a point in testing different solutions. I’m sure Waalaxy is worth trying at least to see how you can build different types of campaigns and measure the results. For a long term, I’d advise you to go for Closely or Expandi, the cloud-based tools.
To unlock all the main features, including CRM synchronization, you’ll have to go for their main package which is $56/month.
3. Expandi
Expandi is one of my favourite tool and there is a reason for that.
First of all, I love that it’s easily integrated with Zapier (that is what Closely lacks). Second of all, it’s truly one of the most solid, trusted and reliable tools on the market. Feature-wise, it’s pretty much Closely alike. However, Closely lacks important integrations, while Expandi integrates with lots of third-party tools.
What I didn’t like about Expandi though is the onboarding process. Gosh! It can take so long to figure out how to sync your LinkedIn account. And the interface seems to be a bit outdated to me. But once you’re through this, you can experiment with campaigns, personalization, etc.
I’ve also heard users talking about being banned on LinkedIn after using Expandi. Well, it didn’t happen to me, fortunately, however, I’d recommend getting in touch with Eхpandi’s support team to find out the safest way to automate your outreach.
Also, Expandi is pure LinkedIn automation, it doesn’t offer any add-ons, like Closely or some other tools. I can pay the same $50 for Closely and get LinkedIn Network Management, Inbox-CRM, plus a B2B contact database that’s the same as Appolo’s in quality, on top of LinkedIn automation!
Before Closely came into play, I used Expandi all along. It’s actually one of the first automation tools and its founders are experts in LinkedIn outreach themselves. I still love learning from them and I’m subscribed to their blog and newsletter.
4. MeetAlfred
MeetAlfred is another amazing option for automating your lead generation on LinkedIn. Just like all the other aforementioned tools, it provides a few options to upload your target audience. You can drop your CSV file with LinkedIn URLs with profiles of your potential buyers, you can go for a LinkedIn search, or paste the link to a LinkedIn event, group or content.
MeetAlfred can be integrated with Zapier which also gives you numerous opportunities to enhance your prospecting. The tool is a cloud-based solution, and I mentioned that cloud-based LinkedIn automation is the best considering your safety — you can set it and rest assure it’s going to be fine, nobody is going to block or restrict your account.
MetAlfred is also a post scheduler, so if you post a lot and need automation to help with that – this tool will be of huge help.
This tool also provides you with a slightly similar CRM function as in Closely – you can assign tags to your LinkedIn connections to make your network manageable. However, it doesn’t have the ability to add notes or a CRM that can be managed through tags.
MeetAlfred’s price options start with $39 a month, which will let you run 3 automated campaigns at the same time.
Conclusion
LinkedIn automation is a true breakthrough, it helps sales teams to save a wealth of time by automating all the routine we’re used to going through: finding people on LinkedIn, saving contact information, writing messages and sending them manually… All these can be easily delegated to an automation tool of your choice.
In this article, I’ve shared my favourite tools that help to automate linkedin outreach. Closely would be my most favourable tool: it’s a very powerful automation solution plus it’s a solid B2B contact data provider – you can look up high-quality contact data of your prospects. I love the add-ons of this tool: the extensions that scrape data from LinkedIn, the Inbox, Network Management and so.on. Closely beats them all!
I hope I’ve helped you with this uneasy choice which is deciding on the right automation tool stack. Stay tuned 🙂