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If you work in sales, you are probably familiar with LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool. Sales Navigator is a paid subscription service that gives sales professionals access to specific tools and features designed to help them find and connect with potential customers.
Sales Navigator offers the Social Selling Index (SSI), a key performance indicator that sales professionals can use to measure the effectiveness of their outreach efforts. The platform reports that sales professionals with a higher SSI create 45% more opportunities than peers with a lower SSI.
Integral to your SSI score is the concept of social selling. Understanding how social selling works can help you boost your SSI score — and improve your sales conversions. In this blog, we’ll break down how LinkedIn creates your SSI measurement, as well as the tactics that you can use to maximize this sales strategy and boost sales.
What is the LinkedIn SSI score and how is it calculated?
LinkedIn’s SSI is a measure that ranks a company or individual’s utilization of LinkedIn as a selling tool. It’s a proxy measurement to show you how effective your sales tactics are: professionals that use LinkedIn as their primary prospecting tool can get better insight into what’s working and where they can improve their performance.
The Social Selling Index is calculated using four factors:
- Data about your professional brand: this includes the completeness of your LinkedIn profile; endorsements you’ve received; articles you’ve published; and the number of followers resulting from your articles
- Data about your relationships: this includes your connections and the acceptance rate of your connection requests
- Data about your engagement on LinkedIn: this includes shares, likes, comments, and reshares; messages sent; response rate; groups you join; and engagement within groups
- Data about your use of LinkedIn to find prospects: including people searches, profile views, and days active
These data points are meant to explain how well you are establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with industry insights, and building relationships on LinkedIn.
You might be wondering: what is a good SSI score? Each factor is worth 25 points. A perfect SSI score, therefore, is 100 points.
What is my SSI score?
Not sure how to find your SSI score? You can access your SSI through Sales Navigator by navigating to Admin and clicking User Reporting. Your dashboard will include not only your SSI score but also your score for each of the four components and how your SSI compares to your industry and network. This gives you a good idea of where you stand and where you could improve your efforts.
Marketing expert Neil Patel reports that “A good LinkedIn SSI score is 70+. Between 40 and 70 can be considered okay, while under 40 is poor.”
Scores are updated every day, so there are plenty of opportunities to continue building your LinkedIn SSI score.
Who can see my SSI score?
LinkedIn will share your SSI score with your team on Sales Navigator as well as with your administrator. Admins have access to a leaderboard of individuals on your team and may also get insights into how your SSI score can be improved.
How can I improve my SSI score?
There are a few things you can do to improve your SSI score.
Start by making sure your LinkedIn profile is filled out completely, including a profile picture, job title, a keyword-rich summary, your educational background and skills, and recommendations from colleagues and clients. It’s also helpful to showcase your work in the “Featured” section.
To succeed on LinkedIn, you need quality network. Connect with people you know personally, thought leaders in your sector, those who work in your industry, and anyone that you buy from or sell to regularly. By using LinkedIn’s advanced search functionality or exploring the “People you may know” option, you can find relevant people to connect with and improve your SSI.
One of the easiest ways to improve your SSI score is to regularly post high-quality content on LinkedIn. You can either create LinkedIn posts or adopt advanced tactics to make your content more engaging. We’ll highlight how Clearview Social can help you with this tactic in a later section.
Finally, make sure you engage with your network and beyond to demonstrate your commitment to building long-term relationships. Instead of spamming people with connection requests, follow industry thought leaders, thoughtfully engage with their content, respond to comments on your posts, and initiate conversations to improve your SSI score.
LinkedIn will often prompt you to take action to improve your SSI score — watch out for those to get more tailored advice and take your SSI scores in the right direction.
What are the best practices for using the LinkedIn SSI score to maximize sales?
Some critics argue that improving your LinkedIn SSI score is really just a measure of how well you’re using the platform. What really matters to most companies is how well you are improving sales. You could be the best salesperson on the team and have a LinkedIn score of zero, which might simply be because you’re using an approach that doesn’t register on LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index.
The strategy behind the Social Selling Index is what’s compelling: social selling is a strategic approach to sales that focuses on building relationships with people before you try to sell them something. And, fortunately, there are many ways to improve social selling on LinkedIn and elsewhere.
Here’s how LinkedIn defines social selling: “Social selling has evolved from just referring to and using social media as we’ve traditionally come to know it. Instead, it encompasses the entire digital ecosystem ranging from social media to the internet to the sales tech stack.”
This definition is helpful because it describes how LinkedIn values your SSI score and how you can improve your selling across social media platforms.
Ultimately, social selling requires professionals to be authentic, consistent, and helpful. Salespeople that become effective with selling through social media can dramatically increase results. For instance, leads developed through employee social marketing convert 7x more frequently than other leads.
Use Clearview Social’s employee advocacy platform to improve your LinkedIn SSI score
Employee advocacy can fuel your social selling strategy. It encourages employees to share thought leadership from your company, which helps increase your brand’s visibility.
Employee advocacy is integral to social selling. It empowers employees to share their knowledge and expertise on social media in order to promote the company’s brand and products or services. In the process, they can use that content to connect with potential customers, build relationships, and drive sales.
When employees are engaged in social selling and employee advocacy, they become brand ambassadors for the company. They can help build trust and credibility with potential customers, and they can also help generate leads and sales.
By implementing a formal employee advocacy program, you can make it easy for your sales team to share the type of content that will continually increase their SSI and excel at social selling.
Implementing an employee advocacy program
Clearview Social’s platform makes it easy to create content for your sales team to share. Create blogs, videos, infographics, e-books, and more to keep your audience wanting more. Teams use Clearview Social to position their sales reps as thought leaders, thereby expanding their networks to drive more reach and get referrals at a lower cost.
Clearview Social’s PeakTime AI automatically posts at the optimal time of day, finding the best times for LinkedIn posts to get the most attention. In just a few clicks, you can send your team an email with approved content they can share on their personal LinkedIn pages in just a few clicks.
And, most importantly, Clearview Social’s Find Out Who tool allows you to see which businesses clicked on the content your company and your employees shared on the platform. This is a critical feature for social selling, allowing you to target your follow-up in real time to the companies most engaged with your brand message.
We found that 45% of salespeople who share content achieve or exceed quotas. An employee advocacy platform like Clearview Social can help your team with that. It’s key to turbocharging your social selling. See your SSI increase when you use the automated features and analytics of Clearview Social. At the end of the day, the SSI is just another data point. What’s most important is the long-term impact that social selling can have on your bottom line. To improve your social selling, sign up for a free demo from Clearview Social today.