Everything to Know About the LinkedIn Social Selling Index

In an ever-expanding and competitive field such as B2B sales, it's no longer enough just to understand your customer's pain points and come up with viable solutions - you have to go further.

The most successful salespeople you will meet understand and utilize all the sales enablement tools and technologies at their disposal. Fortunately, processes and strategies are available to aid your success.

Of all the tools at your disposal, this blog post will focus on taking your LinkedIn sales skills one step further.

LinkedIn is the prime social selling platform of the twenty-first century, and when used correctly, it can be a major factor in your success as a salesperson and your business as a whole.

Let's get started!

The LinkedIn Social Selling Score is a metric designed to assess a user's proficiency in social selling on the LinkedIn platform. It provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of a sales professional's social selling efforts, helping them gauge their performance and identify areas for improvement.

The scoring system is between 1 and 100 on LinkedIn and measures your effectiveness at LinkedIn-based sales efforts.

SSI is based on four factors:

1. Establishing Your Professional Brand: This facet evaluates how well you have crafted your LinkedIn profile, ensuring it is complete, engaging, and showcases your expertise. Active sharing of relevant content also contributes to this aspect.
   
   
2. Finding the Right People: The second component focuses on your ability to identify and connect with potential prospects and key decision-makers within your target audience.
   
   
3. Engaging with Insights: This element measures your level of interaction with others on the platform, including sharing valuable industry-related content and actively engaging in discussions.
   
   
4. Building Relationships: The final component assesses your proficiency in nurturing relationships with your connections, including timely responses to messages and staying connected with your network.
   

The scores typically change each day, allowing users to see where they stand and offering opportunities for improvement. You can evaluate how the changes you are making are affecting this score in real-time.

The SSI is a performance indicator specific to LinkedIn. This score, between 1 and 100, is made up of four sub-scores, which LinkedIn refers to as "the four pillars of social selling." As you can guess, they are directly related to the four factors that make up the SSI.

The four pillars expect you to:

• Demonstrate your brand on LinkedIn
  
• Find the right people
  
• Exchange information
  
• Build relationships

They all make sense within the context of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is tied to your professional endeavors and making sure that potential connections or employers see what you can do front and center on your profile and posts is a great way to show yourself off.

Eventually, you want to utilize this to create your professional brand. Creating a professional-looking recognizable brand will attract followers and make your homepage stand out. And the LinkedIn SSI index will notice your efforts.

Establishing a strong professional brand will drive you to find the right people. A good way to find these people is to use LinkedIn Search and Sales Navigator. You can look up people in similar roles, in roles you would like, in your industry, or in the industry you want to move to, and start connecting. If you're too shy at first, you can hit follow and see the content they share before deciding to connect.

The next part dovetails straight from finding people: you want to exchange information. Once you've followed or connected, you want to keep the conversation going. Make yourself visible. While you've built your brand on your profile or homepage and found people relevant to your interests, you now want to start interacting. You can do it by creating engaging and informative posts, replying to and liking posts of others that interest you, and being active.

From doing this, relationship-building comes naturally. And what are sales if not a form of relationship building?

Being active is one thing. Being proactive is something else, and this is where you can stand out. Have a question for that CEO you've been following? Read an article by a VP that caught your eye? Get in touch with them. Send a message and let them know you appreciated what you saw, and learned something valuable from it.

You build trust and confidence in these relationships, and they can come back and help you in the future.

Now that we've discussed what the LinkedIn SSI number is and what factors go into it, it's time to look at the numbers.

There's a maximum score of 100 points, which means each factor is broken down to 25 points each. Like any other test or activity, you should strive for the highest possible total you can achieve.

A high score will increase your reach on the platform, of course, but it will also increase the number of connection requests and followers you receive. But what can you actively do to raise the scores?

Let's take the "find the right people" factor and discuss how you can get all 25 points allotted to that factor. You want to position yourself as a leader in your field since that will attract people to you. For example, writing an article like that could go a long way in earning those points if you're in the business of outbound lead generation. A good idea is to provide abbreviated versions of this as posts and create conversation.

You might be unsure about spending so much time fixating on scores, but it is well worth it. LinkedIn has researched and provided data to support its better social selling claims. People with a high SSI create 45 percent more opportunities than those with lower social selling indexes. Those same high scorers? They are 51 percent more likely to reach their quota. In addition, 78 percent of them outsell other sales professionals who don't use social media.

As such, using the LinkedIn Social Selling Index score is a good way for you to judge, on a daily basis, how you're doing and where you need to improve. It gives you a path forward and actions to take to grow.

LinkedIn makes it very simple and straightforward to locate your SSI score - after all, they want you to improve it.

So, how do I find my LinkedIn social selling index score?

First, you want to log in to your LinkedIn account. Then go to this LinkedIn page. You will get a full dashboard view of the key metrics, including your Social Selling Index score.

These steps look easy because they are. As I said, LinkedIn wants you to work on bettering your SSI. It means you're using their platform to create your brand, connect with others, and create opportunities. Everything they offer.

So use the information they provide. Take the extra 60 seconds, find your score, learn from it, and do what you can to improve it. Start tinkering with the factors, and you will see the growth starts.

It will make you stand out above those who don't.

An important thing is not to obsess too much over the LinkedIn SSI. The perfect score of 100 is difficult to achieve, so having realistic goals to work towards is key. It keeps you aware of where to go and what steps to take, but it ensures you do not worry too much. So what is a good social selling index on LinkedIn?

Many salespeople consider an SSI score between 70 and 80 to be very good. If your score is consistently in this range, you will outperform most of your peers and colleagues across all four scoring factors.

How?

Let's say your job is to increase your company's inbound sales leads. Most likely, you use Linkedin every day as a tool to help you do your job. Your prospective customers see you using LinkedIn. They see the four factors at work, even if unaware of them. If you have a high score, these factors translate to a good presence on LinkedIn, making you a more attractive choice than your closest competitors.

So keep that score between 70 and 80, and you'll be in that sweet spot that LinkedIn says is the place to be. You'll close more deals, gain more prospects and leads, and grow your brand with a consistently high SSI score.

All platforms have specific strategies you can use to navigate them to get the most out of them. Instagram's picture-heavy feed relies on finding the right aesthetic for your clientele, for example, and can go a long way in finding them.

LinkedIn is no different.

And the SSI also has best practices attached to it.

Here are a few to get you going.

So what exactly is social selling? It's been mentioned several times, so let's dig in further.

Social selling allows you to zero in on business prospects more personally than your typical cold selling strategies. It focuses on social media, such as LinkedIn, as the main conduit to connect with a prospect. You are building and developing relationships with a network of potential leads.

While it is still a sales technique, you want to understand, nourish, and use the social aspect. Make sure not to burn bridges before they even start by being too focused on the sales side.

The companies you are aiming for will have a presence on social media. Depending on their industry, some may be more niche than your regular LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Ensure you also look at places like Reddit, Pinterest, and Quora.

Generally, companies exist where their buyers are. Depending on your field or industry, you want to be in the same place as both. Study each company and its customers, then create a presence in that space that is wholly your own.

Taking the extra step will go a long way in separating yourself from the crowd. In a B2B selling strategy, you have to know both sides of the equation really well.

Like the first factor of the SSI, you want to create your own independent brand. Don't be shy. Let the world know who you are, what you can offer, and how it may align with what you want to sell.

You want also to allow space for vulnerability here to tell your story. For example, a former ballerina now a SaaS SDR will surely be an interesting story and experience for people to follow.

Jot down a list of these things, then display them across all your social media channels. They don't all have to be as specific as the example here, but we all have something that makes us different or unique. It's time to share it.

Standing out on social media today seems like a daunting task at first. But when you get down to it, you want to stand out to the audience that interests you.

Remember, you want engaged followers and to become known to your peers and prospects alike. Find your niche and work from there. Following those related to this specific niche and seeing what they post is also a good way to get inspiration.

For instance, a salesperson with digital art or design experience may produce fun sales comics to draw attention to themselves.

A good idea is to get familiar with the frequency with which to post on social media across platforms. Generally speaking, you want to aim for one Linkedin post per day, one Instagram, and four or more on Twitter.

Sales and marketing are the peanut butter and jelly of LinkedIn. Although they are different disciplines with different strategies and numbers, those differences have blurred over time. Today's successful salesperson is familiar with marketing principles, tools, and strategies.

Adding content creation to your sales bag of tricks is a good idea. An easy one to start with is blogging since SDRs are usually innate communicators. A sales blog is a great tool you can use. You show that you stay updated on all the relevant sales topics and have first-hand experience. At the same time, you are providing valuable information for your followers, future followers, and prospective clients.

Following these simple and easy "best practices" for LinkedIn's social selling strategy can go a long way. You achieve a high LinkedIn social score, and you will also be much more likely to hit and even surpass your personal sales quotas.

Make sure to learn as much as you can about all the ins and outs. The path created by following LinkedIn social selling best practices for their SSI is a great way to get started. Once you're ready to adopt the suggestions, you'll add them to your everyday work routine. This will make you the best salesperson you can be.

The sales cadence is the ultimate tool in sales - whether you're doing it old school via phone or with influencers on TikTok. If you wield it well, you are sure to have revenue and customers coming in constantly.

You just have to make sure you understand your audience, their interests, what works, and where they are. Then use all of this information to sell to them in the way that appeals most.

With some creativity and insight, you've got this in the bag.

At SalesPipe, we are experts on the sales cadence and would love to help you expand your customer base - get in touch with us to find out more.