When it's time to get serious with social selling, certain tools stand above the rest and offer unparalleled value to sales reps and teams seeking to maximize social selling.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
The premium sales package from LinkedIn is necessary to unlock to power that LinkedIn offers beginning with the navigator. Using saved searches is necessary to keep track of prospects and potential prospects that much your criteria. The ability to send InMails is great too since the open and response rates are astronomical compared to email. The advanced searched functionality is another crucial feature that allows you to get surgical with your searches and save valuable time by finding the people you really need.
HootSuite Pro or Enterprise (for teams)
The ultimate social media aggregator and platform. This is my personal social selling command center which allows me to listen, publish, and schedule messages across all of my social networks from one place. I set up all of my Twitter lists here and LinkedIn groups and have a superhuman ability to listen and engage in one view.
Nimble
Nimble helps me get a 360 degree view of people. When I enter them into the system, Nimble finds they're social networks and displays pertinent information about them along with aggregating their recent activity and recent posts. It currently offers a very robust set of contact relationship management functions that will really help you build, maintain, and organize your contacts social life into one spot. It also offers quite good crm capabilities.
KiteDesk
This is an awesome new platform that really empowers social selling. Once you install KiteDesk, it adds some sales magic to the websites you visit. It connects to your crm and let's you know key information about anybody in your system as you encounter them on the web. If you're in LinkedIn, HootSuite, or wherever, KiteDesk will recognize a contact and give you immediate access to important crm and pipeline information.
Little Bird
This is by far the best influencer discovery tool available to help identify peer validated people and connect with them around key topics. I use it to generate a ranked list of hundreds of peer-validated influencers on Twitter and then connect and extend my relationship with them on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+ and elsewhere.
Nigel Edleshain also shares some necessary and great sales tools:
YesWare/Hubspot Signals/Tout
YesWare is a fantastic email tracking system that works int he Google ecosystem as well as Outlook and connects directly to your crm automatically logging activities and calendar events. Teams can share and collaborate with templates and also provides a pretty robust set of analytics around the success of emails.
Insideview/data.com
These tools are necessary for vital information like retrieving key contact information in an efficient way, as well as to understand information about the business like size, type, revenue,and in the case of Insideview you can find executive changes, new releases and other trigger events.
Marketo/Hubspot/Leadlander
Everyone needs a good and effective way to generate inbounds leads and provide a seamless flow of marketing qualified leads to the sales team.
Do you have any other social selling tools you would recommend to sales teams?