Social Media Sales Tools

Everyone thinks social selling is just posting on LinkedIn. My take is that's the completely wrong way to think about it. It's actually a 3-part system and most teams only do 1/3 of it. I used to do only 1/3 too, so it's all good. Here's what every sales team needs to do to win in social selling in 2025 and beyond: 1. Intent - Know who's actually interested Without proper buyer intent, you're spraying and praying like it's 2015. Use tools like Pocus, Common Room, Sales Nav to map intent signals so every seller wakes up knowing exactly who to target. And I mean TRUE intent that layers multiple signals that predict buying behavior. But here's the thing.. most tools fail because of terrible adoption. Start with 3-4 pilot reps. Let them master it first. Get results. Then roll out. You'll look like a hero when it actually works. 2. Outbound - Multi-touch + human approach A client went from 90% email-only to true multi-channel and started booking meetings across LinkedIn, phone, and email. The main mindset shift that we created was treating LinkedIn as a hub that makes everything else better. Social selling isn't just LinkedIn posts and random selfies. It's being social everywhere. • Making calls to the right people • Meeting people in person (URL to IRL). • Building in depth real relationships As a leader, have your reps send 5 LinkedIn videos daily. Even without direct responses those prospects remember that video. They'll reply to your email, visit your website and might remember your face when they pick up when you call. That one LinkedIn touch lifts response rates across ALL channels. 3. Content - Be a Curator not a Creator Not every rep needs to create content. Yep, I said it. They need to be a curator not a creator. How you implement that is creating your own Sales Team Six. 6 sellers who curate content out of 100 reps. Those 6 posting consistently is infinitely better than forcing 100 reps to post garbage. Find relevant industry content then have reps share their perspective on what they learned about it. That's it. The magic happens when all three work together: Intent tells you who to target. Outbound gets you in front of them. Content keeps you top of mind. Without intent? You're guessing. Without outbound? You're hoping. Without content? You're forgettable. This is where outbound is headed. Not more automation. Not fancier tools. Just intent + outbound + content working together. P.S. Which of these three are you most excited to implement?

Last week I spoke with an enterprise AE at F100 company who closed over $5M in 2023 (3x his quota). The surprising part? He generated 90% from Linkedin. Here’s what the enterprise social selling playbook looks like: 1. Community: Successful sales reps are constantly enhancing their community on Linkedin. They invite key prospects, customers and other stakeholders to their network. As an AE or Exec, it helps to stay in the same domain over time so you can engage with the same community but across different employers. The compounding effect of your network is exponential. 2. Content: Engage frequently with your community. Stay ahead of the curve and ensure your content reflects that. Not all content has to be original and unique. Most Linkedin users are looking to consume content that will help them be better at their job today. Share best practices, success stories and recommendations. If you stay in the same domain, the quality of your content will grow as you build trust within your community. 3. Signals: Get a good understanding of the triggers and signals that impact demand in your target segment. Use these signals to focus your attention on select individuals as they become active. 4. Offer Help: Be mindful of any request for assistance within your community. If you are going to stay in the same domain for long, expect your community to do the same. Offer to assist even if it does not directly help your business. Chances are these interactions will lead to deep relationships in the long run. 5. LinkedinOps: This is often an ignored part of social selling. For the same reason that Inbound leads perform so well (because they are warm), somebody that visited your profile also has a relatively high probability to respond in the first 24hr. It’s the job of LinkedinOps to run all active engagers through an ICP filter and then follow up on good fit candidates. 6. Outreach: I have seen some successful reps use personalization tools to find the right messaging or conversation opener for Linkedin outreach. It makes sense to do an outreach with the good-fit engaged audience within 24-48 hrs of the engagement. Don’t hesitate to ask for referrals. 7. Tracking: Track engagements and metrics. Score and rank your audience every week for good fit top engagers. Your top engagers are the ones who will likely take your call. Your LinkedinOps can help you with analytics. 8. Convert: Know when and how to move your conversation outside Linkedin. Linkedin is great for capturing demand signals or for generating trust. Look for the right moment to share a calendar link or an email to move the conversation to a different platform. TAKEAWAY: Your buyers are already on Linkedin. With a little discipline and LinkedinOps, you can close revenues while enhancing your brand and handling objections at scale. I've been helping GTM teams for 15+ years. Never before have they had access to such a powerful platform. Take advantage.

Outbound can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I generated my first $10M in qualified pipeline at AskElephant before we paid a cent on a sales tool. If I was rebuilding from scratch tomorrow, on the lowest possible budget, this is how I'd do it: Companies & People to Sell To: ~ ($0) LinkedIn. Use the free search functionality and filters to start finding leads. The filters available for free are honestly shockingly good for this. ~ ($0) Job site websites like "startup.jobs" and wellfound have tons of company level filters, and they have contact information for specific people. Job listings are awesome because it has context on tech stack, problems companies are solving. Free signals. ~ ($25-$50) Scout ($25) and Wiza ($49) are both great for getting contact data cheap. Scout is going to be better quality data for individual leads. Wiza has a basic list builder for finding the leads. Channels to Contact Leads: ~($0) LinkedIn. Send messages directly. Create content aimed at your ICP. OP channel tbh. 100% of my team's quota attainment in April came from JUST LinkedIn. ~($60) Symbo. Great dialer. Plugs and makes calls directly from HubSpot, and you can upgrade to do power dialing if you want to. ~($100) FirstTouch. Full service sequencer for email, call, etc. Pulls contacts through HubSpot and moves them into sequences for you. Logs the activities. Includes LinkedIn tasks and drafts messages you can send. Knowing what to say: ~($0) Google docs and your own brain ~($0.99) Notebook and pen and your own brain ~($20) Claude Pro personal subscription ~($89) AskElephant. Gives you visibility into the sales cycle. Including into how your buyers talk about their problems and ideal outcomes. You can build your messaging around your Actual Customer Profile (ACP.) These are the platforms I'd evaluate as I got started. You don't need all of them. In fact, you can build your first $10M or so without paying a cent. Don't shell out $30K for a list builder up front. Start here, build piece by piece. You've got this.

One simple tool we use helps make our LinkedIn Ads become an insight engine for sales. Fibbler. A big part of what we do is finding the correlation between great LinkedIn Ads and pipeline activity, and our main use case for buying Fibbler was that it helps us paint the picture. Especially, in this world of Video/Thought Leader Ads - people consume in-feed and convert their own way so direct-attribution simply doesn’t work. But aside from this attribution use-case of Fibbler - a huge bonus is the ability to send the data as intelligence to feed other motions and help sales understand potential interest. With their webhook, we can now extract company engagement data and distribute that data to platforms that drive complementary workflows - for example Clay to feed your enriched automated workflows or direct to a Google Sheet for more hands on sales reps. Two easy ways we do it are: 1. Direct to sales → Fibbler webhook (engaged companies) → Make/Zapier → Google sheet → Sales team 2. Automated outreach → Fibbler webhook (engaged companies) → Clay table → Enriched roles → Outreach using Instantly.ai / HeyReach.io I rarely take time to promote tools but it’s one tool that has made it so much easier to make your LinkedIn Ads work much harder for you. In a world of overpriced marketing automation tools - it’s a cheap and simple way to truly bring Sales and Marketing together. P.S. This is why I started using Fibbler. If you want to see how LinkedIn Ads influence pipeline and revenue, you can try it free for 30 days at https://lnkd.in/dPTNZM4H

"We have no idea what our reps are doing on LinkedIn. We know it's generating leads, but not HOW it's working. Wonder no more. We're bringing the light to dark social: THE Aware CRM INTEGRATION IS HERE. This will push LinkedIn activities to both Salesforce AND Hubspot: → Direct Messages sent/received → Comments & Reactions sent/received → Connection Requests accepted These show up in CRM as Completed Tasks on the timeline, like any other sales task you might log. There are so many creative use cases for this to generate pipeline: 1. SOCIAL SELLING ATTRIBUTION Generate social selling dashboards straight from Hubspot or Salesforce. See how much activity of each kind that each rep is doing. Correlate social selling systems to rep performance at sourcing and closing pipeline. Analyze what activities in the customer journey are leading to revenue. 2. FOLLOW UP ON LEAD GEN FROM LINKEDIN CONTENT Are your thought leaders getting engagement from prospects, potential partners, entry points into target accounts? Who's following up on those? Are you manually scanning each post for "interesting" leads? Who's getting those into CRM? Now you can just automate this. Add everyone who matches a certain title set, and engages with your company's posts, to an ad campaign or a call campaign, or both. Go nuts. 3. ENABLE TEAM SELLING Do you have certain thought leaders, influencers, SMEs, executives, and others that are doing outbound to target accounts, and need an easy way of tracking this and passing leads to others? Now, get this all logged in CRM to enable your own automations and workflows to take effect. Make it way easier to support your executives with content-led outbound campaigns, so they're doing less admin work. Without needing to give out their LinkedIn credentials internally. WHO CAN USE THIS? This feature is only available on our Teams plan, but we're also offering custom plans for larger teams that only want to use the integration for attribution and aren't ready to operationalize a teamwide commenting and engagement effort. No other platform offers this feature: ❌ Taplio ❌ Shield ❌ AuthoredUp It's offered exclusively from your friends at Aware. Can't wait to see how you use this. Shoot me a DM and we'll get you set up!

Your sales tech stack isn’t broken. It’s incomplete. Most sales teams use random tools. They don't consider the entire funnel. Each stage needs specific tools that work together. Not a collection of disconnected software. Here's my complete stack from prospecting to closing: 1. Prospecting Inbound signals:  - Teamfluence™: Catch warm leads on LinkedIn  - RB2B: Website visitor identification Finding prospects/leads: - Apollo: 250M+ prospect database  - Clay: Data orchestration platform  - BuiltWith: Technology-based targeting  - PhantomBuster: Social media scraping - Ocean.io: Lookalike company finder  - Crunchbase: Company intelligence 2. Qualifying Data providers:  Semrush: Competitive intelligence  PitchBook: Financial data  Claygent: AI research assistant Clearbit: Company enrichment Enrichment:  Prospeo.io: Social and email enrichment Clay: Multi-source enrichment 3. Outreach Copywriting:  Twain: Cold outreach optimization  Claude: AI email writing Email providers:  LeadMagic: Budget-friendly option  Icypeas: Highest quality Outreach platforms:  HeyReach.io: Safe LinkedIn automation  Instantly.ai: All-in-one platform for cold email The best sales teams map their entire process first. Then choose tools that integrate seamlessly. Your conversion rates depend on it.

Here is how I would build a sales tech stack from scratch. At ColdIQ, we hear it so often: “With so many tools out there, where do I start?” Think in Categories First: 1. Data Sources & Scraping: - Start simple with LinkedIn Sales Nav to build your lists. (Still the best B2B Data Base) - Use an email finder like Prospeo.io or a waterfall tool like FullEnrich. - As you grow, add tools like Apollo.io for more data and Clay for data enrichment. 2. Sales Triggers & Relevancy: - Begin by finding basic signals (like recent funding or team growth). - At scale, use tools like Common Room to layer multiple signals. 3. Messaging & Personalization: - Early on, a sequencing tool (Instantly.ai) and basic sequences are enough. - Later, add AI-assisted copy tools (Octave, Twain) and video outreach (Sendspark) 4. Email Infrastructure & Multichannel: - Start with a solid DFY email infra solution (Instantly has a great one) and - Move up to multi-channel with lemlist for LinkedIn and Orum 🥇 for cold calling. 5. CRM & Deal Closing: - For very early stages, pick something lightweight like Breakcold to track social selling. - As you grow, move up to HubSpot for the integrations and pipeline management. - Add proposal tools Qwilr and AI note-takers Attention. Budget Tiers: 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗸 (~$300/mo): LinkedIn Sales Nav + Prospeo + Instantly 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗸 (~$1K/mo): Add Apollo, Clay, and a CRM like Breakcold 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗱 (~$1.5K/mo): Introduce multi-channel outreach, automated triggers (RB2B), and refined workflows 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗽𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗲 (~$4-5K/mo): Layer on Common Room for advanced triggers, video personalization (SendSpark), and specialized data tools like Serper If you want the full video, comment “tools” and I will send the video your way 🛠️

Posting and engaging on LinkedIn changed the trajectory of my career. And quite honestly, if you aren't encouraging your employees to post, you're missing out BIG time... Cue this response: "We know, WE KNOW! We know we should be doing more on LinkedIn, but we just can't track it." That changes now. You can now trigger LinkedIn connection requests and DMs directly from HubSpot workflows. No middleware. No app switching. No reps doing it manually. Just real social selling with FirstTouch Here's a quick look at how it works in action: A prospect submits a demo request but they don't schedule a meeting → A HubSpot workflow triggers → FirstTouch checks if you're connected on LinkedIn → If not, a connection request is sent  → If yes, a message is sent on behalf of the contact owner → If there's no response within 3 days, a follow-up message goes out → If the prospect books or responds, the sequence pauses automatically Teams have always defaulted to the channels they can measure, and that's meant email wins by default. All because social selling never had a system around it. FirstTouch changes that. Social outreach now runs inside HubSpot with the same automation and visibility as email. Want to make social selling a reportable channel? Find the integration in the HubSpot marketplace!