Top 100 Social Sales Tools to Celebrate My 100th @LinkedInPulse Post

LinkedIn is the greatest tool sales professionals have available today, but it isn’t all encompassing. There are so many other tools that bring significant value to social selling.

Now, 100 @LinkedInPulse posts in, I wanted to celebrate by sharing a list I have been cultivating for years…my top 100 social sales tools. Many I use (marked *), others came from suggestions by my mentors and influencers, and some I saw demos or witnessed the power they possess by watching others succeed. Each tool listed has been vetted as valuable resources for business development and sales professionals and could just be the “thing” that can help you succeed even more with your social sales efforts.

Have other tools that should be added to the list? Please feel free to share them in comments!

CLICK TO TWEET THIS LIST (#10)

1. *Nimble – a social CRM that answers every social seller’s prayers. Nimble is available via Chrome app to everywhere you go on the web. When you are on Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Gmail etc, and you come across a prospect that you’d like to follow-up with, save it in Nimble quickly with one quick click. And, no matter what platform you find that prospect, in a non-obtrusive mini dashboard, you can see what that prospect is talking about across all their social platforms. Nimble’s unparalleled ability to aggregate insights about your contacts makes building rapport easier than ever before.
2. *Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox. When used with Nimble, it just maybe the most powerful one two punch available to anyone in business development.
3. *TimeTrade – without a doubt the best investment I have ever made for my prospecting efforts. TimeTrade syncs with my calendar, allows me to set parameters and gives me a link to share. I rarely ever miss an opportunity now, my prospect calls and sales have doubled, and my life is so much easier!
4. *Text Expander – a keyboard shortcut app that stores your email and LinkedIn templates that can cut your online communication time by 80% – that means more time to do other productive activities.
5. *Mobile Phone Keyboard Shortcuts is a great way to store your message templates for both social and email and add a short code that will bring up the message anywhere you need it. Big time saver.
6. *Constant Contact is my email of choice. It is not only easy to use and has the best customer service around, but the ability to see who is opening and clicking through is amazing for prospecting. In addition, the wordpress plugin makes it so simple to have a visitor opt-in to a video or eBook and have them go right into an auto-responder campaign. This is a tool I can’t live with out.
7. *HootSuite – my social manager of choice and used for listening, scheduling and engaging easily people based on my keywords and customized newsfeed(s).
8. Buffer – schedules and shares posts to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google + throughout the day, at the optimal times.
9. CoSchedule is a lightweight WordPress plugin that allows you to easily plan, schedule and strategically promote your blog content to social media channels.
10. Crowdbooster offers a set of no-nonsense social media analytics with suggestions and resources to boost your online engagement. The platform provides at-a-glance analytics, recommendations for engagement and timing, audience insights and content scheduling to optimize delivery.
11. *Click to Tweet is an amazing way to get your followers and readers to tweet exactly what you’d like them to tweet because you are giving give them a link and it auto-populates your predetermined message with hashtags and all! Remember to add your @handle so you are notified every time someone shares!
12. *Godaddy – I am addicted to URLs and I by them all the time. How do I use it for social sales? I buy a clever URL and then redirect it i.e..LinkedInbook.info | LinkedInSession.com |ScheduleaCallwithBrynne.com | TweetSSL.info (love to use URLs in conjunctions with click-to-tweet)
13. ViralHeat is social media management tool for savvy B2B marketing. It allows you to merge social data with sales and marketing numbers to identify and engage with more prospects, qualify and quantify better leads and build stronger relationships with social media actions.
14. TweetDeck – Powerful Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and engagement. (owned by Twitter)
15. SocialBro better target and engage with their audience on Twitter through insigts. It provides tools to browse your community and identify key influencers, determine when the best time to tweet is, track engagement and analyze your competitors.
16. Movenote for Sales will allow you to share your favorite content from whatever source you want, and record video alongside to it with your computer, tablet or smartphone.
17. *Fiverr.com – a great way to get inexpensive graphics, intros and outros for videos and many other services as low as $5.50.
18. Canva tool that allows you to create customized designer templates for your social branding.
19. *Dux-Soup allows you to export names and contact information from any google or LinkedIn list (it has some other profile viewing options that I don’t use, read your LinkedIn user agreement before you use any outside app)
20. *Social Cloud Suite aggregates great content, helps you share it on a schedule – but it has one major advantage – you can add your customized popover ad on every post you share (even your competition’s site)
21. *Asana is a project management tool that keeps your team on track and on time. Conversations and tasks are in one place, so everything is actionable and transparent.
22. *Sumome – an opt-in wordpress plugin that makes it easy to capture emails of your website visitors and feeds them right into your email campaigns.
23. Snip.ly is a URL link shortener that when clicked offers a customized call-to-action snippet at the bottom.
24. *Join.me – this is a webinar, screen share, screen record program that makes connecting remotely and capturing your meeting via video is simple.
25. *Google Hangout – a great way to meet remotely as you can see the participants, messaging, share screens, video calls and voice calls from any device with Hangouts.
26. Lower Third lets you easily add a graphic banner or overlay anywhere on the screen that makes you look like a TV commentator.
27. AnyMeeting – One tool to satisfy all the meeting needs of your business from a one-on-one video conference to a 200-person webinar.
28. *Free Conference Call – FreeConferenceCall is an online meeting service designed for screen sharing, web conferencing, product demonstrations, webinars and more.
29. ReadyTalk – Want the top of the line webinar software, with an operator to walk you through the process every step of the way? You may pay more, but this services is top notch.
30. *Dragon Dictation for your mobile phone automatically translates voice memos into text, this is great for texting, emails or even blog content.
31. Go-to-Webinar is a professional and easy-to-use service that helps you manage webinar invitations, in-session engagement, reporting and more.
32. Zoom is a great open-source audio editing and recording software program that can be used to create high-quality podcasts. It is available for the Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and BSD platforms. Audacity has a wealth of editing features that allows amplitude envelope editing, multi-track mixing, unlimited undo of copy, cut, and paste, and tempo editing. It is a great tool for post-processing podcasts.
33. MixMeister is a full-featured and versatile program designed to create, assemble, and distribute podcasts. It offers a great interface that is very user-friendly and geared toward first-time podcast creators. The features include a straightforward publish feature that generates XML, HTML, and MP3 files that are download-ready for podcasts. Propaganda provides all the necessary tools and effects to create a podcast from start to finish.
34. PodProducer is a very simple podcast producing program that allows the user to edit the audio and add various effects such as cross fade, voiceovers, and other effects. For users looking for podcast software that doesn’t have a lot of unnecessary bells and whistles that are found in other podcast software but still gets the job done, then PodProducer is the program to use.
35. Insightly – Insightly is a great tool to help small businesses deal with the vital task of managing your leads, contacts, organizations, partners, vendors and suppliers. Using CRM best practices, you can see everything about a lead or a contact — from background, email history and important dates, to any projects or opportunities in which they have participated.
36. InfusionSoft is a sales and marketing automation software that enables you to scale your relationships with customers while maintaining the quality of service that sets you apart. This is the quintessential if/then model. If your contact clicks on a link it will determine what bucket they will go into and what message they will get.
37. Act-On – a marketing automation platform that is powerful with an integrated suite of marketing tools and resources designed for the novice users. Whether you are a solopreneur or an enterprise organization that wants to empower their sales team with social sales, Act-On is the tool that can get you there.
38. HubSpot is an inbound marketing software platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers.
39. *Wistia is video host for businesses to add their videos to the web, track their performance, and find new ways to build and engage with their audiences using online video. It also has a gatekeeper so you can can capture your audience’s emails and stay in front of them.
40. *Periscope is owned by twitter and is a mobile app that lets you live-stream video of your life from your smartphone to anyone in the world.
41. *Meerkat is a rival of Periscope as it has many of the same features, but the significant difference is Meerkat is partnered with Facebook so companies can live stream inside of their company page. It also means you don’t need a twitter account to be invited to the party.
42. *Survey Monkey is a simple way to gather intelligence from your network. Create any type of survey, from simple to sophisticated with our powerful and easy-to-use survey builder.
43. Click Funnels brings you customizable plug and play ways to grow your business through online funnels that generate leads. They help you create landing pages in minutes and have sales funnels that allow you to sell your products and webinars that get people to register for your live or on-demand events, and convert your attendees into buyers!
44. LeadPages takes your great content, create and publish landing page in less than five minutes. It is mighty impressive to have your prospect land on a beautifully branded page that Trade your “Stuff” for their information
45. Instapage allows you to quickly build mobile responsive landing pages with their drag and drop editor.
46. *Google Forms is one of the simplest ways to create client questionnaires and create a simple opt-in that redirects to an eBook or webinar.
47. Vimeo is an alternative to YouTube that makes it easy to upload videos, share it and control privacy settings.
48. SproutVideo helps you customize, publish, and track your videos online. With all the security, marketing, and analytical tools you need, your video projects will be a success.
49. Brightcove is a cloud-based solutions for delivering and monetizing video across every connected device.
50. *Powerpoint can be used for many things, but I love to use it to create my own images for twitter and my blog posts. Simple to pull in pictures, add text, group the images, right click and save as a .png.
51. Prezi Create presentations people will remember. Captivate your audience by zooming through your story, visually explain how new ideas relate to each other and use images, videos, and text to enhance your presentation.
52. *Slideshare – is a Web 2.0 based slide hosting service. Users can upload files privately or publicly in the following file formats: PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote or OpenDocument presentations. Slide decks can then be viewed on the site itself, on hand held devices or embedded on other sites.
53. *Box is an online file sharing and personal cloud content management service for businesses and a great way to get a link for a document, spreadsheet, video or other media so you never need to attach a file again.
54. Social Flow  allows you to watch real-time conversation on social media in order to predict the best times for publishing content to capture peak attention from target audiences.
55. PowToon lets you easily create animated videos, which you can then use on your website, YouTube, or share on other social networks.
56. *Discover.ly is a free Chrome extension that provides data about mutual connections on Facebook and recent tweets on Twitter. It does the reverse on Facebook by showing mutual connections on LinkedIn. It also shows other social networks and platforms that the person being researched is on or is using.
57. Zoho SalesIQ is a website visitor tracking platform that allows you to connect and engage with your website visitors in real time.
58. Process Street Include downloadable, step-by-step checklists in your articles and blog posts that offer your audience with easy to follow action steps.
59. *The LinkedIn Connected app for your phone offers opportunities for you to strengthen your existing relationships and stay top of mind. This app reminds you of birthdays, anniversaries and people you know in the news – so you can interact when it matter most to them
60. Anews is an easy-to-use app to help you focus on the latest news in the categories you’re interested in.
61. *BuzzSumo is a content curation tool that tells you which pieces of content are viral and which are duds.
62. *RSS feeds (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. By subscribing to an RSS feed, you will receive updates every time new content is added to the site.
63. *Google Analytics shows you the full customer picture across ads and videos, websites and social tools, tablets and smartphones. That makes it easier to serve your current customers and win new ones.
64. *Feedly is a personal space to organize your blogs and publications and connect to the news, knowledge and ideas that matter to you.
65. *Newsle tells you when your friends & colleagues make the news, we make sure you know. Never miss an article about someone who matters to you.
66. *Tagboard uses hashtags to search for and collect public social media within seconds of being posted to networks like Twitter and Facebook, just to name a few.
67. RocketBolt provides real-time feeds that easily visualizes lead activity, giving sales people the strategic advantage they need to quickly identify valuable sales opportunities.
68. *LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator  for the average business development professional, the ability to save and organize leads, engage with them on a customize newsfeed and have LinkedIn recommend leads that match your criteria, investing $79 a month is a no brainer. And, for enterprise organizations Sales Navigator’s TeamLink is probably the most valuable tool you could invest in as it allows the team insights into who in your company can help them get into opportunities.
69. *Unfollower.com is a application to track manage your twitter and instagram community as well as offers an auto-responder message to new followers.
70. Tweepi is a unique management tool for Twitter that lets you flush unfollowers, cleanup inactive memebers, reciprocate following and follow interesting new tweeps!
71. IFTTT is a powerful Internet automation site that can save you a lot of time managing social media and other tasks through recipes. You can essentially connect any major network or channel together to automate sharing on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more based on any action you desire.
72. Followerwonk – This tool like Twitter Counter to watch the growth of your number of Twitter followers, you may need to analyze your followers more carefully.
73. *Twubs – a place to register a hashtag for trade shows tweet chats and so much more.
74. TweetChat – allows you to organize your tweet chats, add fav pages and engage easily.
75. *Storify – Storify is an easy way to find, collect, and share what people are saying based on keywords, phrases and hastags all over the web.
76. HireVue helps sales hiring managers make better decisions by using digital video and predictive analytics to give you visibility into the sales behaviors that matter – things like attitude, ambition, personality and cultural fit. Reduce territory vacancy by 25%, reduce turnover 29%, and increase the number of top performers on your team by 13%.
77. Sproutsocial Sprout makes it easy for your team to collaborate and publish across multiple social profiles and networks. Plus, Sprout’s detailed analytics help us track our progress to ensure we see return on our global efforts.
78. *Bit.ly takes a very long URL and shorten it, customize it and track how many clicks you get.
79.  Snipurl. For whatever reason you might need your links password protected (sharing online content with clients etc.), with Snipur;, you can shorten your URL, and add a password of your own choice.
80. *Dlvr.it continuously monitor your news feeds and RSS enabled web sites and automatically share new content to your socials.
81. Paper.li – Helps you to aggregate content and share it in a “newsletter” like platform. You can then promote it to the unaware contributors as well as your other networks.
82. Rebel Mouse is a digital publishing platform that functions as a social content aggregator, displaying your posted and shared content in a customizable layout. Rebel Mouse is similar to Paper.li, but with more customization.
83. *LinkedIn Publications is one of the best ways to brand you and your company as the thought leader and subject matter expert in your industry. Not only can you post you content on LinkedIn, but pulse will push it to all of your connections and followers notifications. It may even get picked up @LinkedInPulse with the chance of going viral.
84. Live Journal is blog space with more of a community that affords you your own space, but that also strongly encourages communal interaction.
85. Weebly is a blog based platform that is built around drag-and-drop components, which enable you to quickly create new pages.  You get access to customizable layouts, free themes, and the usual sharing features you’d expect, to spread your posts through social.
86. *Issuu – turns a simple eBook into an interactive magazine.
87. Evernote – Evernote unites writing, collection, discussion, and presentation in a single workspace. Instead of jumping between apps, keep focus in one place and your best work will follow.
88. *Google Drive – Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive. It is also offers realtime collaboration, no more emailing edits and changes to project members.
89. *Grasshopper – run your business using your cell phones! Call me now at 888.775.5262 x 700 or you can press 1 for sales 2 to schedule a class…and all of them go to my cell! But I look and sound bigger.
90. CamCard Lite reads business cards and saves contact information internally or in your phone’s contacts. Not only is the app highly accurate, but it also lets you group contacts, make notes, and search LinkedIn.
91. *Square never worry about receivables again. Take credit cards for your services on the spot and keep your cash flow positive.
92. KiteDesk 2.0 was just released last week. I was one of a handful who were offered an early look. One thing that truly intrigues me about KiteDesk is the simple fact that the technology allows you to find contacts on any web page and, in a single click, import their contact data into the CRM
93. rFactr is one of the only true “social selling” platforms geared solely towards social selling sales teams. This technology is fairly simple to use and is key to getting your sales team to share the right content, at the right time, to the right person with one simple click on a link.
94. WittyParrot is a great solution for salespeople and sales teams. It is also great for marketers and marketing teams. Basically, WittyParrot makes it easier to create, store, and distribute sales- and marketing-related content. Users create “wits”or “combo-wits”that contain content that could be text and/or attached files. Individuals or teams can draw from prepared content to respond quickly to leads, whip a proposal or presentation together from previously built sections, or to follow up more easily with content designed for follow up.
95. Sales Loft build your own unique process for sales development emails, phone calls, and other activity. Cadence will provide “bumper guards” to keep your emailing on track, your phone list completed, and anything else your sales development team needs to get more deals.
96. *GatherContent is every social media manager’s and blog editor’s go to tool. It allows you to create an effective project or editorial calendar that has everything in the same place, and is organized through the same dashboard. This ultra-organized information keeps everyone on the team on the same page.
97. Infogr.am a simple tool to help you make snazzy looking infographics in a matter of minutes.
98. *Mention is an intelligence tool that monitors keywords across various sites. You can ask Mention to track references to your brand name or other specific keywords and phrases, and it will populate a feed with mentions from the web.
99. Share As Image is a text photo overlay tool, simply find an image hit the Chrome extension tool, and you’ll find an assortment of text overlay options to add quotes or your coin your own phrases.
100. *Social Sales Learning ready to monetize LinkedIn? This complete eLearning program ($297) will walk you through how to create a client engaging profile that generates phone calls, strategies to leverage your network and clients for targeted warm introductions and the best ways to share content and develop blogs on LinkedIn that attract your target audience. At the end of this program you will have a playbook so that you know exactly what to do and what to say on a daily basis so you can to monetize LinkedIn. (full disclosure – this is my eLearning  course – but it really is awesome) CLICK to watch 5 Powerful Video Tips on How to Monetize LinkedIn NOW!