With over 810 million members worldwide, LinkedIn has become an indispensable platform for sales and marketing professionals. An effective LinkedIn strategy revolves around building connections and nurturing leads through personalized outreach and content sharing. To maximize your LinkedIn efforts, you need a CRM that integrates seamlessly with LinkedIn and helps you track your prospects’ engagement across touchpoints.
In this article, we compare some of the most popular CRMs for LinkedIn to help you find the right solution for your business. We evaluate the LinkedIn integration capabilities, ease of use, key features, scalability, and pricing of each platform.
CRM Integration Capabilities with LinkedIn
Here are some of the key LinkedIn integration capabilities to look for in a CRM:
- Importing LinkedIn profiles and contact info into the CRM
- Adding LinkedIn lead gen forms and ad responses into the CRM
- Tracking prospect engagement with your LinkedIn content
- Logging LinkedIn messages and InMail conversations in the CRM
- Adding LinkedIn Notes and targeted status updates to CRM records
- Syncing CRM contacts back to LinkedIn for messaging
- Viewing CRM data alongside LinkedIn profiles
- Triggering workflows and campaigns when prospects engage on LinkedIn
A CRM well-integrated with LinkedIn connects the dots between prospects’ engagement across channels and allows you to deliver personalized, timely outreach. This ultimately results in more conversions and sales.
Ease of Use
CRM software is meant to make life easier for sales and marketing teams. An intuitive user interface and simplicity of workflows are key to user adoption. Here are some ease of use factors to evaluate:
- How intuitive is the interface? Is the navigation clear or complex?
- How much training is required for new users to get up to speed?
- How easy is it to complete common tasks like adding new contacts, logging activities, creating workflows?
- Is the mobile app user-friendly?
- How easy is it to customize fields, views, and reporting as per your needs?
- Does the CRM offer productivity-enhancing tools like drag-and-drop workflows, bulk actions, and keyboard shortcuts?
An easy-to-use CRM results in higher adoption across your sales and marketing teams. Team members can spend less time managing the CRM and more time having meaningful conversations with prospects.
Key Features
Here are some of the must-have features to look for in a LinkedIn-friendly CRM:
- Contact Management: Organize prospects with tags and lists, customize fields to capture LinkedIn engagement.
- Lead Scoring: Automatically track and score leads based on LinkedIn activity and other custom criteria.
- Email Integration: Log emails, track opens/clicks, and sync email activity with CRM records.
- Sales Pipeline Management: Visualize deal stages and project revenue in the pipeline.
- Built-in Dialer: Click-to-call prospects from within the CRM.
- Workflow Automation: Trigger actions when prospects complete forms or view content on LinkedIn.
- Reporting & Dashboards: Gain insights into deal forecasts, rep performance, and campaign ROI.
Prioritize a CRM that goes beyond basic contact management and provides robust sales acceleration, productivity, and analytics capabilities out of the box.
Scalability
As your LinkedIn strategy matures, you will likely accumulate more leads and contacts in your CRM. Planning for scalability will ensure the platform can handle your company’s growth without slowdowns or loss of data. Here are some key considerations:
- Does the CRM easily handle tens of thousands of records without performance issues?
- How easy is it to add more user licenses as your team expands?
- Does the vendor offer different pricing tiers for different business sizes?
- How does the pricing model scale – per user, per record, flat fee?
- Does the platform offer enterprise-grade security, reliability, and 24/7 support?
Choose a CRM that fits your current needs but also provides room to scale smoothly over the next few years.
Pricing
CRM solutions range from free versions to customized enterprise platforms costing thousands of dollars a month. Compare pricing tiers carefully based on your current and future needs. Here are some pricing considerations:
- Free or freemium CRMs may offer basic features but limited integrations, storage, and support.
- Paid CRMs often charge per user license, so evaluate team size needs.
- Check if volume discounts are offered on bulk user licenses.
- Some CRMs charge per record or storage size – assess your database needs.
- If opting for a paid tool, check for a free trial to test drive the platform.
- Evaluate the ROI the CRM is expected to deliver vs. total cost of ownership.
While CRM software represents an investment, the right solution pays for itself many times over in sales productivity and results.
Top CRM Platforms for LinkedIn
Based on the above criteria, here are some of the leading CRM options to consider for LinkedIn integration and optimization:
HubSpot
HubSpot CRM is a popular freemium option that offers robust core features and deep LinkedIn integration at no cost for small teams. Key strengths include:
- Seamless synchronization of LinkedIn ad responses and lead gen forms.
- Logging of LinkedIn conversations within Contact Timeline.
- Easy exporting of CRM contacts back to LinkedIn for messaging.
- Views LinkedIn profiles and interactions directly within HubSpot.
- Free version supports 1 million contacts and unlimited users.
HubSpot CRM is great for small companies starting out with LinkedIn lead gen. Limitations of the freemium version include lack of custom objects/fields, email integration, and advanced reporting.
Salesforce
The world’s #1 CRM, Salesforce offers robust LinkedIn capabilities especially for enterprise teams. Key advantages are:
- LinkedIn Lead Gen forms and ads feed directly into Salesforce.
- Social Studio provides insights into LinkedIn content engagement.
- Sales Navigator profiles are visible within Salesforce for context.
- InMail conversations can be logged as Salesforce activities.
- Powerful segmentation, lead scoring, and custom reporting.
With a wide range of pricing tiers, Salesforce can scale with growing teams and data volumes. The extensive configuration options also allow customizing LinkedIn tracking fields.
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Microsoft Dynamics 365 integrates tightly with LinkedIn due to both being owned by Microsoft. Key features include:
- Access to LinkedIn Sales Navigator to view prospect profiles and engagement.
- Importing InMail conversations as CRM activities.
- Triggering workflows when prospects engage with LinkedIn content.
- AI-driven recommendations for next best actions.
- Unified interface across CRM, email, calendar, and other Office apps.
Dynamics 365 also provides excellent security, scalability, and customization capabilities powered by Azure. Pricing starts at $95 per user/month.
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is a robust, affordable CRM for small and mid-sized businesses. Key LinkedIn features include:
- Importing prospect info from LinkedIn to Zoho contacts.
- Two-way sync between Zoho CRM and LinkedIn contacts.
- Logging LinkedIn Messages as activities inside Zoho CRM.
- Triggering automation when prospects complete LinkedIn Lead Gen forms.
- Affordable pricing starts at $12 per user/month billed annually.
Zoho offers robust core CRM capabilities and LinkedIn integration targeted at growing SMBs. Customization options are relatively limited compared to Salesforce or Dynamics.
Insightly
Insightly is a full-featured CRM focused on ease of use and integration capabilities. Key strengths for LinkedIn include:
- Two-way syncing of contacts between Insightly and LinkedIn.
- Easy logging of LinkedIn Messages as activities inside Insightly.
- Triggering workflows based on LinkedIn content views and engagement.
- Integration with email, calendar, and 40+ business apps.
- Intuitive interface focused on user productivity.
Insightly offers a capable free trial tier and paid plans starting at $29 per user/month. Customization options are relatively limited compared to enterprise CRMs.
Key Factors to Consider
With a wide range of CRMs to choose from, focus on these key factors when selecting the right platform for your LinkedIn strategy:
- Your budget and team size
- Degree of integration needed with LinkedIn
- Ease of use for sales reps in the field
- Scalability to support future growth
- Customization to track LinkedIn engagement metrics
- Reporting and analytics capabilities
- Adoption across your organization
- Implementation time and training requirements
The best CRM provides not just a database, but accelerates your team’s productivity and effectiveness through sales automation. Optimize your software selection by aligning to current pain points as well as future objectives.
Conclusion
An effective LinkedIn strategy requires reimagining CRM as a system of engagement – not just a static database. The CRM should connect LinkedIn interactions happening across email, ads, content, and messaging to individual prospect records.
Automated workflows triggered by LinkedIn prospect activity take productivity to the next level. Powerful analytics also providevisibility into engagement metrics and campaign ROI.
While native LinkedIn integrations are improving, best-of-breed CRMs still provide the most seamless bi-directional capabilities. Platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, Dynamics 365, Zoho, and Insightly allow optimizing LinkedIn alongside your sales and marketing stacks.
Evaluate your team’s workflow needs, software budget, and scalability requirements. But the bottom line is that the right CRM software pays for itself many times over by empowering your team to execute an integrated, high-impact LinkedIn strategy.