How Good is Your LinkedIn Social Selling INDEX?

January 21, 2016

Today as many as 75% of B2B buyers are embracing social media and using it to make purchase decisions.

Given the fact, marketing and sales professionals can no longer afford to ignore the importance of social selling to meet their quotas.

Having run a number of training events for the last several years, I often come across complaints from sales people that changing customer expectations has made it increasingly difficult to attract the right people and build meaningful and profitable relationships.

Not anymore! Thanks to LinkedIn Social Selling Index, your life is about to become a lot easier in terms of measuring and improving your social selling skills!

featured So as a LinkedIn trainer why do I think the social selling INDEX can be a beneficial tool for sales professionals? Let’s have a look!

Identity – Creating a Professional Brand

Building a strong brand identity on LinkedIn starts withcompleting your profile to an all-star status.

A complete LinkedIn profile adds credibility to your brand but building identity does not end here. To further strengthen your professional brand you need to consistently share high-quality valuable content.

This content must match to what your audience is talking about and describe your brand story.

Networking – Finding the Right People

You cannot connect with everyone nor every connection matters! In fact, when you do so, you don’t know who your potential prospects are and you are left with no other option than to engage in cold-calling!

The result is that you end up tarnishing your online reputation.

Instead, what you can do is find the right people by viewing potential prospects in your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections and frequently check who’s viewed your profile. Additionally you can use LinkedIn Lead Builder and Lead Recommendations to identify new prospects and the possibility to connect with them.

“Social is not a place for a hard sell – it’s a place to build trust and credibility.” – Julio Vishovich

Developing – Building Strong Relationships

Now that you have created a professional brand and found the right people to connect with, it’s time to turn these connections into long-term relationships that are mutually beneficial.

Connecting with senior people at your prospect’s company is more likely to pay off since they are in a decision making position.

Moreover, you can introduce your colleagues to the people in your prospect’s company, paving way for warm introductions and getting to know your clients even better.

Engaging – Engage with Insights

Did you know that 89% of the buyers are less likely to engage with a brand if the products or services offered are not relevant to them!

Relevancy is the key to engagement on social media and LinkedIn is not exception to that!

Most buyers are looking for an answer to a problem or helpful insights that can allow them to boost performance!

As a sales professional you can do this by joining relevant groups and listening to your target audience needs. This can help you give useful insights in crafting relevant content. Moreover, you can become an active member of your LinkedIn community by liking, sharing or commenting to posts and reaching out to prospects through messages and InMails.

X-Factor – Becoming a Social Selling Leader

The beauty of LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index is that it allows you, as an individual or a brand, to monitor how well you performed on each of the above metrics throughout the day. Take a look at mine and you’ll know how!

A higher score indicates that you are not just moving in the right direction when it comes to social selling but you are also more likely to achieve your sales quota as compared to peers with lower social selling index.

Final Thoughts

For sales professionals, B2B selling has come a long way from what it used to be 10 years ago. When you fast-forward to analyse customer expectations of today’s buyers, you realise that old tactics hardly seem to work anymore.

Digital Darwinism is fading out salespeople who fail to adapt to new ways of attracting clients. Today, LinkedIn’s social selling index has become the new measuring rod to compare sales super stars to average performers.

Check your social selling Index score today, map out a strategy to improve and start celebrating success!

Time to get the ball rolling!

Are you a small and medium enterprise seeking to improve your social selling index but don’t know where to start? We can help develop an effective social selling strategy on LinkedIn that will allow your business build a strong online identity, find the right people, engage effectively and foster stronger and meaningful relationships with your prospects!

Take the first step by signing up for my monthly FREE webinar and learn how to generate online leads through LinkedIn:https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/rt/7852169252828920834

Here are some comments from some of the past LinkedIn Training ateendees: