If you’re selling to a corporate buyer (B2B), chances are high that the people you want to work with are active on LinkedIn.
Even if the VPs at enterprise companies aren’t posting content often, they’re there – listening, learning, looking for value.
Showing up on the radar of the prospects you most want to work with, via LinkedIn, is what we call Social Selling.
If you’re just getting started, you may not be using any tools yet. You might just be going to linkedin.com, scrolling through your feed, and looking for what might be valuable.
But if you’re looking for an edge over the average seller, consider using one of the tools in this post that we’ve handpicked for you to up your B2B LinkedIn sales game.
What Are Social Selling Tools?
To best understand what social selling tools are and why you might want to use some, let’s first define social selling.
So what is it?
Social selling is a B2B marketing strategy that involves building trust and demonstrating credibility with your prospects by participating alongside them in social media communities. The core aspects of social selling include:
- Creating valuable content that solves your prospects’ problems
- Authority and credibility building through posting and participating in conversations
- Growing your social network (literally, your “Connections”)
- Directly messaging prospects once they’re warm, or engaged with you in some way
- Developing and nurturing a niche community and audience of your own, on LinkedIn
All of this can be time-consuming and laborious, if you’re doing it completely manually. And that’s where social selling tools come into play.
Social Selling Tools Defined
Social selling tools are disruptive technologies that enable sales and marketing professionals to integrate social selling into their everyday routine seamlessly. This allows them to, for example, optimize their interactions with prospects, analyze their performance, come up with more content topics intelligently.
How Social Selling Tools Can Improve Your B2B Sales Efforts
According to LinkedIn, social sellers outsell those who don’t leverage social media by a massive 78%. Now, if there’s a reason to invest in social selling, that’s one compelling one. At RevenueZen, we earn at least 1/3 of our revenue every month from the LinkedIn presence, engagements, and posts written by our team.
But why invest in social selling tools – why not just use linkedin.com natively?
As with every business investment, let’s talk about the benefits in B2B sales terms:
- Scale: When properly implemented, tools can empower sales staff to scale their social selling efforts, generating more leads and sales.
- Analytics: Social selling tools also make collecting data on your interactions with prospects easier (and more scalable). This enables you to understand your audience better and create tailored campaigns. Demand gen leaders, this is for you!
- Reach: Extending your reach on social media platforms requires time and effort. However, with the right social selling tools, you can do this in a fraction of the time and effort.
- Productivity: Social selling tools are a great way to increase your sales team’s productivity. Because they help sales reps connect with prospects more effectively, it speeds up the process of building brand awareness and connecting with the right people at the right time.
- Integration: One of the tools listed, Aware, offers a direct integration of your LinkedIn activity to CRM. That means you can begin to get attribution for how your LinkedIn efforts are translating to meetings, opps, and ARR.
The bottom line: social selling tools help make lead generation on social media much easier – provided you implement them well. They also help you close deals much easier as they play an essential role in helping you become a trusted thought leader.
Our Top 8 Social Selling Tools
Now that you know what social selling is and why you need social selling tools, let’s quickly dive into our main business of the day — the best social selling tools that should be on your radar.
1. AWARE
At the top of this list is our own social selling tool.
Having done a lot of marketing for B2B SaaS brands, founders, and creators, we realized there was a need in the market for a social selling tool designed for B2B revenue teams specifically.
Enter Aware.
This platform was born out of the pain and frustration of struggling with tools that couldn’t pull off the nuanced campaigns we had planned for ourselves and our clients, at least without significant manual effort.
Aware plugs into your LinkedIn profile, and allows you to create custom, dynamic lists of people – Customers, Partners, Target Accounts – whatever you want. Then, you can use it to:
- Engage 5X more per minute than you can by simply scrolling LinkedIn.com
- Ditch your bookmarks and spreadsheets of who you want to follow and engage with
- Prioritize the right people, and comment on their posts, all from one platform
- Nurture your pipeline by keeping in touch with them whenever they post
- Orchestrate social selling across your sales and demand gen team
All of this will help you close more deals on LinkedIn — much faster. Aware is nimble, affordable, and built with the modern SaaS seller, consultant/business owner, and Creator in mind. It’s designed to help you build trust, generate leads, and drive sales quickly.
If you want to take this disruptive social selling tool for a spin, you can sign up for a free trial. After that, paid plans are available.
Learn more here and start a trial today.
2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a set of tools LinkedIn offers sales and marketing professionals. These tools are aimed at helping users find and target the right audience on the platform. They also help you run outreach campaigns directed at your audience’s inbox.
The main feature we love about Sales Navigator is the data it provides. Used well, this can help teams build and run personalized campaigns on LinkedIn.
Essentially, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is one of the best list-building tools on the market. It’s the “base data-set” for all other tools that track what professionals are doing and where they work.
If you want the power of LinkedIn Sales Navigator in your arsenal of tools, it will set you back $79.99/month/user for the base plan, with further upgrades available for enterprise users.
3. LeadDelta
Another top social selling tool you must have on your radar is LeadDelta.
LeadDelta is a powerful LinkedIn tool that helps users effectively and efficiently grow, manage, and engage with their LinkedIn network. Think of it like your CRM for LinkedIn. For example, you can apply different filters to create targeted segments you can reach out to with hyper-personalized offers. You can also add tags and notes, helping you better track your leads. The tool also allows you to view and download CSV files of your network as well as build workflow reminders.
One of the best features we love about LeadDelta is that it ensures that you don’t start off with an empty CRM. As long as you have a LinkedIn account and LeadDelta, you have a pool of leads to work with.
Pricing starts at $16.66 billed annually. Very affordable,
4. ShieldApp
Another must-know social selling tool every B2B brand must know is ShieldApp.
ShieldApp is a powerful data and analytics tool built specifically for creators on LinkedIn. It’s perfect for helping your team better optimize their engagement on LinkedIn as it gives insights into:
- Content metrics
- Network statistics
- Audience demographics
- Speed and traction metrics
In a nutshell, ShieldApp helps you know when best to post and the best type of content to post. This allows you to drive better quality leads with less effort.
Shield is not necessarily a tool for social selling, but rather for personal profile content analytics – which is one part of the content marketing piece of social selling.
Plans start at a mere $6/month.
5. Buffer
Buffer is one tool that makes it on almost every list of the best social media marketing tools. And that for that very good reasons.
Buffer makes social content posting a breeze as it makes it easy for users to plan their content and automate when to post it. It also comes with a powerful analytics dashboard that gives detailed insights into your content’s performance. This will help you optimize your content and overall social selling strategy.
You’ll also love that Buffer has a built-in landing page builder, making it easy to supercharge your lead generation strategy on social media.
Buffer has both paid and free plans. Once you’ve exceeded the limits of the free plan, paid plans start at $5/month/social channel.
6. Taplio
Taplio is a game-changing AI-powered social selling tool built for creators, entrepreneurs, and sales teams.
Taplio helps you drive more business on LinkedIn by just spending 10 minutes a day on the platform. It Taplio comes with a writing assistant that helps you create, schedule, and publish high-performing content. The tool goes through over 2 million high-performing posts and pulls out common factors that can help yours perform well.
Other notable features we like about Taplio include:
- The email address finder (which allows you to download email addresses in a CSV)
- Bulk direct messaging
- Powerful analytics dashboard
With Taplio, you can plan, execute, and manage yoKeep in mind, however, that when you use AI to generate content, you’re not really tapping into the power of thought leadership – you’re just hacking your way to engagement. As with any automated content tool, use its suggestions as a guide or inspiration, not as a complete content writing solution.
Taplio has a 7-day free trial that comes with all the features. Then, if you’re happy with the tool, you can continue using it for $39-71/month.
7. Vidyard
Video is one of the most consumed content formats on the internet. That’s why you need a social selling tool like Vidyard in your sales and marketing toolbox.
Vidyard is a video creation tool that makes it easy for individuals and businesses to create videos for social media. The best part is the personalization capabilities that enable you to create videos for your posts or DMs.
Apart from personalization, Vidyard also makes it easy to track and monitor video interactions. You also get notifications when someone engages with your video.
Add to all this the seamless integration with most popular CRMs, and you’ve got a social selling tool that makes it easy to track the ROI of your video marketing on social media.
Pricing starts at $15/month and goes to $1250/month for enterprise-level plans. Don’t worry: you can take the tool for a free spin using the free plan or get a 14-day free trial of the bottom tier plans.
8. Discover.ly
The key to winning with social selling is driving engagement through your posts. This is exactly what Discover.ly helps you do.
Discover.ly is a Chrome extension that allows you to discover similarities between your prospect’s social media profiles. It also scans their pages and pulls up shared connections, and shows you content they’ve shared that’s similar to yours. This helps you find common ground that makes it easier to create personalized outreach campaigns.
Another advantage of Discover.ly is that it gives you insights into content your prospects are most likely to engage with.
Of course, one of the best features of Discover.ly is that it’s 100% free — for now.
How To Get The Most Out Of These
Social selling tools are great, when they’re implemented properly and not considered a substitute for an actual strategy. However, you need to know how to use them the right way to get the results you’re looking for. Here are a few tips for doing just that:
Don’t Be Spammy
Spammy content has one main hallmark — it doesn’t consider the recipients. Tools like Aware are great at helping you know exactly what your audience needs, ensuring that your comments, connections, and outreach messages are relevant.
Be Relevant
You must give your target audience relevant information for your social selling strategy. Social selling tools enable you to do this as they help you create personalized campaigns that sell. Take the personalized videos you can make with Vidyard as an example – you can look at a thoughtful post written by an executive at a company you’re trying to sell into, infer what benefits they might get from working with you, and record a video for them in their DMs that explains exactly that, in a human way.
Be Human
People prefer to buy from other people, not bots.
Just because you’re using social selling tools doesn’t mean your interactions should be robotic. Quite the opposite. Take part in conversations and engage with other accounts. Build relationships with your prospects, so that when you prospect to them, it’s far from the first time they’re hearing of you!
Build Trust and Credibility, Not Just a List of Prospects
One of the biggest mistakes sales reps make is chasing after activity targets. This can lead to wrongly using social selling tools as an avenue for just automating more outreach with less effort. Using them this way will result in you missing the most important component of social selling — building trust and credibility. Without this, all your social selling efforts will go to waste, and you’ll burn bridges in the process by annoying your best leads.
Social selling is not a magic bullet that will magically result in an uptick in sales. For it to work, you have to follow social selling best practices.
Social Selling Tools: Every Sales and Marketing Team Needs Them
Social selling is the way to go if you want to grow your B2B business and improve your sales pipeline. With almost everyone using social media personally and professionally, LinkedIn should be an invaluable part of every B2B brand’s marketing and sales strategy.
And, yes: tools can help you scale your efforts. But more importantly, they’ll also help improve your team’s productivity, and hopefully guide you to using a better strategy as you use them. As a result, you’ll be better able to book and close more deals.
Want to up your social selling game this year?
Then get Aware, and improve your pipeline growth in the next 30 days.
