Have you ever heard of social selling? Do you know what it is? How it can help you boost engagement and lead to more sales for your business? If you don’t know what it is or you are looking to learn more about it and how you can put it to use, you have come to the right place. Let’s dive right in.

What is social selling?

If you’re a sales veteran or if you’ve watched any movies or TV, you remember how selling used to take place. A salesperson would have to pick up the phone and cold-call potential customers and leads or even worse, show up at their door with a hope and a prayer that they would make a sale! Today, we are much more lucky in that we can connect with people worldwide with the simple click of a button. These days, statistics show that more than 70 percent of salespeople use social media for selling and relationship-building. Social selling, selling and connecting with people on social media, is the perfect way to connect with other people in your field who have similar interests. You can sell yourself socially as an employee if you’re looking for a job, to build a personal brand or sell services to clients and customers. 

Social selling on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the perfect platform to base your social selling because it’s a professional environment and it was created for people to socially connect while remaining professional. 

LinkedIn social selling tools

Here are out top 10 picks for the best social selling tools on LinkedIn

  1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator: This tool is specifically set up to help you find leads, keep track of who’s doing what and get to know and understand your audience. It offers you contact recommendations and allows you to see insights such as who is visiting your profile which can be a lead.
  2. eLink Pro: This tool helps make connecting with prospects on LinkedIn a whole lot easier. No longer will you need to keep a long list of potential contacts manually. Instead, you will simply input keywords that are relevant to your business and eLink Pro will automatically search for the right matches for you.
  3. Leadfeeder: Leadfeeder is a website traffic tracking tool that collects information about people that are visiting your website. You can link it to your CRM, email marketing and your analytics tools to get the most enhanced data gathering and reporting. This tool can give you some insight into why you are missing the mark when it comes to certain customers, you know the ones who “pop in” but don’t follow through with a sale or engagement. This tool will help you find out exactly what made them “bounce.”
  4. Rapportive: Rapportive makes it extremely convenient for you to see all of the information you need about potential leads, it gathers the information from their LinkedIn profiles and delivers it straight to your Gmail inbox. Rapportive will tell you who they are, where they are and what they do.
  5. Charlie App: We think this one was named after Charlie in Charlie’s Angels but that’s just us! The Charlie App will get you ready for any business meeting by letting you know all of the relevant information that it can find on the internet about the person you are meeting. Before your meeting, Charlie will send you an email with everything that you need to know (Hello, Angels!).
  6. Nimble: Profiles are packed with data. So much so that it would take ions for one salesperson to go through an entire profile in order to find the appropriate bits and pieces. Nimble will save you the trouble by doing the research for you. It will then aggregate the right data and give you insights to move into a more targeted lead generation strategy.
  7. Crystal: Social selling, just like traditional selling, is about personality and meaningful interaction. Crystal leverages that by giving you access to personality profiles that you can then use to target your marketing more precisely. Using Crystal well will help make you a better communicator all around.
  8. Guru: Guru helps you find quality leads and prospects in a fraction of the time frame it would take for you to do specific types of research if you were trying to sift through all of the profiles alone. Guru will grab specific data based on competitive analysis and will offer you guidance on sales based on the information it retrieves.
  9. SalesLoft Prospector: SalesLoft is integrated with a lot of other sales tools which means it has the capacity to integrate different kinds of data across multiple channels which enables you to streamline the workflow and better understand and target your audience. It can also provide you with leads in real-time, information that will be useful for you to engage authentically with them.
  10. IFTTT: IFTTT stands for “if this, then that.” It’s a productivity tool that will allow you to connect your favorite apps and devices. Then you use what the software calls recipes that will trigger specified actions across channels. The recipes are preset and built into the tool but you can also create your own if you are looking for something specific. For example, automatically sharing a Tweet each time you publish a post or import contacts into a database.


Now that you have a better understanding of what social selling is and how it can benefit your business, along with a guide to the 10 best social selling LinkedIn apps, we hope you put the information to use. Try out an app or two, or even all of them until you find which ones work best for you and your bottom line. Good luck!


Francesca Deval

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