Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a specialized software that enterprises use to enhance communication with their consumers and potential clients.

The CRM system helps an organization to strengthen its relationships with the customer along with building streamlined processes.

Ultimately this system assists a company in increasing sales and revenue and enhances profitability by providing customer satisfaction.

You may also use this system to generate leads through LinkedIn Automation or any other platform.

LinkedIn is the largest professional community that connects more than 200 countries and territories across the world. Their official records also state that more than 660 million professionals have registered themselves on this platform.

Besides providing several opportunities to job seekers, LinkedIn is valuable for generating new customers and leads.

Approximately 15% of digital marketers are creating content for LinkedIn.

Let us see which CRM software is more efficient in terms of LinkedIn Automation.

For a complete tutorial on B2B Lead Generation checkout our guide here – https://websiteincome.com/b2b-lead-generation/

Dux-Soup vs. Octopus CRM

Here, we will compare two famous CRM software head to head based on their features, pros and cons, pricing, and efficiency. Let us see which is the better option for B2B lead generation.

Both the software are excellent automation tools that are optimized for Chrome only. You can automate the prospecting funnel on LinkedIn. However, Octopus has an additional feature that allows you to check the status of your performance on LinkedIn.

On the other hand, Dux-Soup includes several unique features like customization and personalized messaging that give this software the edge.

Octopus and Dux-Soup CRM seem to be equivalent in developing market funnel, linking campaigns, activity control, and integration. 

Again, Dux-Soup seems to be the better choice based on its main feature, which is automation. Octopus is a great automation tool as well, but when it comes to LinkedIn, Dux-Soup can automate actions more efficiently.

The free version of Octopus has a limit of 10 targets. Whereas the Dux-Soup free version does not have any limit on the targets, but it excludes most of the advanced features.

The premium plans of Octopus start at $99 per month that offers 11 targets. You will need to pay more if you need more targets. They have several premium plans, and its price keeps increasing with the number of targets.

The paid subscription for Dux-Soup is not based on the number of targets. They have only two professional premium plans and turbo. The professional program is priced at $11.25/ month, and the turbo plan costs $41.25/ month. You may like to get the annual subscriptions to save a handsome amount.

Dux-Soup- Our Favorite LinkedIn Automation Tool

You can download Dux-Soup for free, but you will need to pay a monthly or annual fee to use the advanced feature. 

This tool is one of the best performers in the market in terms of lead automation. The Dux-Soup Chrome extension helps you to set lead generation on autopilot.

This mode will automatically perform leads generating tasks such as profile research, inviting candidates, and private messaging to the connected groups.

Please take note that this automation tool is considered a black hat according to LinkedIn terms and policies. If they find you misusing an automation tool or set the parameters too high, you may receive a warning message from their administrator.

However, most people who have used Dux-Soup for leads generation on LinkedIn did not face any problems.

It will take a while for you to get familiar with this software as the learning curve is too steep, especially for the advanced features.

You can quickly download the Dux-Soup extension from their official website. As the plugin is optimized exclusively for Chrome, make sure you are using the Chrome browser and log in with your Google account.

Dux-Soup is enriched with advanced features, unlike other automation tools. The main features of this lead generation software are:

1. Prospecting

Professionals mostly use Dux-Soup for generating qualified leads and establish strong relations with them. It helps you to blend some personal touch with automation. It will need a certain level of expertise for this, but you can try your best as the extension runs on autopilot.

This CRM is used for enhancing and automating search prospects so that it meets specific criteria.

View Profiles, you can use this feature of Dux-Soup to browse listed profiles automatically and capture the available data. Remember that the people will be able to see who viewed their profiles.

It is an engaging way to start attracting prospects to view your profile, which is also available on its free version.

Visit and Connect. This feature is quite similar to the previous one. It is also used to visit prospects automatically.

Also, it also sends that user a connection request that can be customized so that it may seem personal. 

You might also use the Profile Scanner to scan user profiles without notifying them. This feature is valuable as it efficiently gathers information and export it to your CRM.

2. Outreach

Once you are ready with your prospects list and sent the connection requests, the next step is to prepare for follow-ups and segmenting lists. 

Generally, follow-ups and list segmentation are done through tagging.

Dux-Soup has automated tagging that will allow you to visualize your leads’ position in terms of interest, follow-up, and outreach.

You are free to decide which tags you want to choose and how to use them. This will offer you or your sales team freedom to act on their will to generate maximum revenue.

3. Automation

The automation features of Dux-Soup are what make the software stand out. You do not have to waste any time and energy on reaching out to prospects manually.

Besides, this software can effectively group your prospects on the basis of their industry, past engagement, and mutual connections.

You can automate the following tasks with Dux-Soup:

• InMail
• Follow Up
• Invitations
• Profile Viewing
• Endorsements
• Sending 1sr degree connections

Moreover, you may also integrate Dux-Soup free version with other automation tools and APIs. However, you will not need to rely on third-party tools if you are subscribed to the Pro version.

4. Customization

Customization is a mere luxury for most of the software, but Dux-Soup customization will allow you to operate under the watchful parameters of LinkedIn.

You are free to customize several automated actions of this software to improve your sales outreach. It has a unique feature that automatically skips a profile if it matches some specific criteria. It will help you to avoid sending multiple invitations to the same prospect.

The extension includes a throttling tab that allows you to fine-tune the speed and behavior of profile visits. For example, you can use this feature to increase or decrease the number of profiles that it visits per hour.

You may also set a limit to the requests that you can send per day, along with profile viewing and direct messages.

5. Customer Support

Dux-Soup customer support was not that great till the last few years. You will be pleased to know that the company is making genuine efforts to address and resolve this issue.

They have released a knowledge base to support their customers who are facing some issues with the software.

If you cannot find a solution in the knowledge base, you can talk to their customer care executives.

The company has introduced live chat support for US and EU business hours and an email support system.

Moreover, you may request a support call where an executive will try to resolve your query directly on the phone. These customer support calls have a time limit of 15 minutes.

6. Pricing

The free version of Dus-Soup can be helpful for you to prepare internal notes and organize LinkedIn profiles.

However, you need to buy the Pro plan of this software to use all the features. The Dux-Soup premium plan offers excellent value for your money. It also includes a turbo plan that offers additional features and tools.

Besides, you may cancel the subscription within 30 days of your purchase. This serves as a warranty for the plan in case you are not satisfied with the service.

The professional plan is priced at $11.25 per user per month. It is suitable for leads generation.

The turbo plan comes at $41.25 per user per month. This plan is the best option to scale up your leads generation system.

Pro User Tip

There are three types of connections on LinkedIn: first, second, and third-degree. People that you have already contacted are considered to be first-degree connections.

Whereas the people on your prospects list, with whom you have not connected yet, are the second-degree connections.

Finally, the potential customers that are not on your network are known as third-degree connections.

This is where Dux-Soup offers you maximum value by automatically sending personalized messages to your second-degree connections.

You will find an option named ‘action’ in the control panel, and you have to click on that to send a connection request. Carefully watch the case-sensitive markers to identify which function they denote to make sure there is no error while sending connection requests.

Octopus – The Trusted LinkedIn Automation Tool

LinkedIn has become a compulsory network for all levels of employees, managers, and business owners. If you are an active user, use this platform for your company’s lead generation.

Octopus is designed to automate the leads generation process that you can efficiently use on LinkedIn.

If you are trying to reach the potential customers manually and send them a dripping message individually, you are probably investing a lot of time into it.

Automation tools are designed to make it easier for you to turn your prospects into warm leads without putting in a lot of effort.

The primary features of the Octopus CRM are:

1. Automation

Octopus can automatically send personalized connection requests to first and second-degree connections.

It also allows sending personalized messages to hundreds of first-degree connections simultaneously.

This software can be used to automatically endorse up to seven skills on LinkedIn profiles of your contacts.

This software can perform basic automation tasks efficiently, like auto-visit thousands of profiles on LinkedIn.

2. Develops Marketing Funnel

Once you are ready with your lead generation funnel, the software allows you to add, remove, and merge features.

The marketing funnel will let you save all the prospect details to your dashboard.

3. Additional Features

Besides the basic automation features, Octopus offers a wide range of additional features to organize your prospects and generate revenue for the business.

The additional features of Octopus include:

• Import and Export data
• Activity control and link campaigns
• Appraising performance and stats
• Integration to other tools like Zapier and Hubspot.

4. Customer Support

Octopus is dedicated to serving its customers with anything they need. They have focused on developing and improving their customer support team over the years.

If you face any issue with the Octopus automation tool, you can quickly contact any customer care executives by creating a ticker on their contact us webpage.

5. Pricing

There is a free version available for Octopus CRM that includes many advanced features. But it has a target limit of 10.

If you want to increase your targets, you will need to buy any of their premium plans starting at $99.00 with 11 targets.

Octopus CRM has several packages with different target limits, and you must choose suitable plans according to your limit.

Pro User Tip

The software has restricted the number of messages and connection requests that you can send daily. 

If you are using a free account on LinkedIn, you are allowed to send up to 100 private messages and 50 connection requests per day.

For premium users, the invitation limit is 100, and you can send up to 200 private messages.

Summary

Both Octopus and Dux-Soup are popular automation tools that you can use for leads generation on LinkedIn.

However, considering all the features, prices, and efficiency, Dux-Soup seems to be the better performer.

But you should decide which software is suitable for your needs. 

Checkout our in depth B2B Lead Generation Guide that includes LinkedIn automation – here

Guest post written by Aaron Burton founder of 20XMedia.com, an email  marketing agency that specializes in Klaviyo. 

Receiving articles like the one we did last week from Aaron make the time/effort/energy that goes into creating giant posts like B2B Lead Gen one totally worth it!

After reading the email and then having a quick call we thought his fast success was worth sharing with everyone!

Here is Aarons post discussing how he was able to achieve the results above!

Introduction

About a week ago, I read an article on AuthorityWebsiteincome about landing B2B clients. Little did I know this would be the article that helped our agency land its first client. 

Backstory

I was actually just looking for ways to grow my agencies SEO presence. In my search for Google domination I came across an article called “99+ Dofollow Backlinks List To Boost Traffic [Updated In 2019]”. In that blog post I learned which sites passed link juice. Very powerful resource. 

I then started browsing Jon’s posts & came across an article called “Ultimate How-To-Guide For B2B Lead Generation”. I was shocked at how in depth & organized it was. Did I mention it had gifs? Can’t go wrong with gifs! 

Implementation

After reading the descriptions of the 3 types of caveman models I figured it would be best to go all in. 

I went with the Alpha caveman model. So far I’ve used Hunter.io (free), Mailshake, Zapier (free), Upwork, Nerdydata, & Google sheets (free). Total cost was around $254 so we are $50 away from how much the initial post said it would cost to go all in. At least at the beginning stages.

Building my infinite list

So I knew I wanted to target ecommerce store owners. I used a combination of Nerdydata & a VA to get my initial list of customers. I skipped BuiltWith & Similar Web since I already knew what software my target audience used for their companies. 

Gettin’ Nerdy

Nerdydata really lives up to its reputation. You truly do have unlimited power if you use the tool right. 

It’s $150 per month for 6 exports. You bet I was factoring if it was worth it or not. I figured worse case scenario I lose $150 but have access to tons of potential prospects. You would have to be extremely bad at outreach if you couldn’t close at least 1 person out of tens of thousands of results. 

In the Ultimate B2B Guide they go over how to find contact info from companies who use a certain technology. I had to read that section again because I found out that you can search for just about any keyword. So if I wanted to find beauty companies who use Shopify all I had to do was select Shopify then type in “beauty”.

Formatting problems…

Wish I could tell you it was as simple as downloading the list and uploading it to Mailshake. But with great power comes great responsibility. 

First Problem: A lot of the emails were missing or had dummy email addresses such as [email protected] or emails from popular Shopify apps like [email protected]. 

Second Problem: A handful of companies had more than one email on the same line separated by a comma. 

Third Problem: For some reason the software sometimes pulls Shopify logos. I think this is because NerdyData thinks anything with an “@” sign in the text must be an email. 

Solving the problem with filters & formulas

Before we dive in to the filters, make sure to select everything and go to data -> create filter. Every filter listed below can be accessed the same way. 

Missing emails

Selecting all -> data -> create filter -> filter by the email column -> filter by condition -> is not empty

Dummy emails

Selecting all -> data -> create filter -> filter by the email column -> filter by condition -> text does not contain example

Logos as emails:

Selecting all -> data -> create filter -> filter by the email column -> filter by condition -> custom formula is

=not(regexmatch(F:F, “(?i)png|jpg|gif|jpeg”))

=not(regexmatch(F:F, “(?i)example|username|yourdomain”))

Functions

Multiple emails

Enter this formula to separate the emails: 

=SPLIT(F3, ‘;”)

F3 is referencing the first row of the email column. The semicolon is where Google sheets will make the split. If I had 3 emails separated by a semicolon it would spit out 3 emails in their own row. 

PS: If you’re planning to skip this step and just have MailShake clean your NerdyData list it’s going to take forever. As a benchmark, cleaning a list of 250 emails takes like 5-7 minutes. So imagine uploading thousands of emails. RIP. 

Virtual Assistant MVP

Something told me not to rely on just NerdyData so I had a VA search ecommerce companies on Linkedin. The process was simple. I sent them a job description. Letting them know exactly what data I wanted.

Here were the requirements: 

Metrics:

• Website Traffic: 20k-800k visitors per month
• Numbers of employees: 1-20
• Revenue: 250k-10M per year

Data To Collect:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email
• Position
• Company Name
• Website

Positions Ranked:

• CEO
• Founder
• Co-Founder
• Partner
• Executive Director
• Director Of sales
• Staff & Operations Manager
• Operations Manager

Rate: $20-$30 per 250 contacts

I tried to include as many decision maker roles as I possibly could without restricting the VA to just the founder and CEO. Anyone who can sign off on hiring a marketing agency is who I want to get in contact with. The VA’s actually did a good job with finding potential candidates. 

These VA’s were already so good at finding emails that I didn’t have to tell them to use tools like Hunter.io. They most likely were already using them or something similar to complete the task.

Mailshake

I remember installing Mailshake and being really excited actually. We do email marketing for ecommerce but never in a B2B setting that’s also automated. 

Their prices are pretty fair. Although if you want to use their list cleaning feature and be able to split test you will have to upgrade to the $59/mo level. 

The numbers

So I actually ended up creating 2 campaigns in Mailshake. This is because I ran into a formatting mismatch between the leads my Upwork VA’s found & the data I formatted from NerdyData.

Stats from the first campaign (Nerdydata):

• 73% open rate
• 2% clicked
• 3% replied
• 30% bounced (forgot to turn on list cleaning)

Stats from the second campaign (Upwork VA):

• 32% open rate
• 1% clicked
• 4% replied
• 3% bounced 

These screenshots are actually new, however we sent about 266 emails total that led to 1 sale. The funny part is our client actually wanted email marketing done for another company they had. So even if you contact the “wrong people” they may have another business that could use your service. 

So which one worked the best? I would say the list the VA’s came up with worked better. Linkedin contacts are more active & usually more long term. While pulling emails from NerdyData doesn’t really guarantee you will find a business that’s been in operation for a while. Mainly because you really have to sort intelligently on NerdyData to get good leads. Also, the high open rate is mainly because it’s customer support job to open emails and respond. 

Tips

1. Use list cleaning. You really don’t want your emails to start bouncing like crazy. Even if you’re using something like G Suite you can easily go to spam if your sending to dead emails.
   
2. Study your target market more thoroughly. Since your spending money finding the lists & sending emails its best to identify who exactly your looking to target. Think about what software your audience uses.
   
3. Make sure you’re formatting is correct in MailShake. Mailshake takes a little getting used to. I had to upload multiple csv files a few times. It’s actually really easy. Every column can basically be used as a personalized token inside Mailshake. Stick to one formatting process so you don’t end up having to create multiple campaigns like I did.
   
4. Warm up your Gmail accounts. It’s best to warm up your G Suite accounts so you can start sending more emails per day in Mailshake. G Suite has a limit of 2,000 emails you can send. You can also buy multiple G Suite accounts to send even more. It can get nuts really quick. I recommend making sure your messaging is correct before you burn thousands of leads. Your company’s reputation is very important.
   
5. When reading big blog posts like the one’s Jon & his team make, always bookmark them in relevant folders. If I wouldn’t have done that, the post would have been lost forever.

Conclusion

To conclude this post I wanted to thank AuthorityWebsiteIncome for putting together such a great post. Your methods definitely made my life a lot easier. Now I have a consistent way to bring in new business. Thanks!

Aaron

Your business needs more b2b lead generation! This post shows you how to get them in incredible step by step detail but with lots of fun GIFs thrown in!