Social Selling is the Key to Boosting Revenue
ocial Selling is the Key to Boosting Revenue
Remember Henry Ford's famous quote about the Model T, "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black."
Dictating as to what the customer can have, was yesteryear and gone forever!
Way back before the 1990’s a business contacted their customers through research and eventually through their advertising.
The Internet and Web 1.0, the invention of the worldwide web, introduced one-way publishing through websites and blogs.
This empowered our customers to easily initiate contact with our companies, learning about our products and purchasing them without leaving their homes. They had access to our businesses any time during the day rather than strictly during “business hours”.
Our customers now expected access to products and services at their own convenience. This has given birth to the internet search engines and directories that facilitate the customers’ desires to find the information and products they were interested in.
It wasn’t enough!
In the early 2000’s Web 2.0 was created by social media companies like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube, where our online experience, and that of our customers, became interactive.
The beauty of Web 2.0 is the personal experience that it has created for all of us, where things just magically appear based on our wants, needs, and desires.
On these social media platforms, our customers can contribute, share, and access information extensively on the World Wide Web.
Today, market analyses indicate that customers are influenced by social media are four times more likely to spend more on purchases, and that’s over standard advertising.
It is now essential for a business, wanting to grow and compete, to have a strong presence on these social media platforms and to know how to use it to their advantage. What is now important is to stay on track and follow the guidelines of each type of social media branding.
Social selling: directly interacting with customers building relationships via their posts or in messages to create a sense of familiarity or credibility
Social media marketing: actively running sales and promotions via a company’s social media platform i.e., LinkedIn marketing generating leads
Social media advertising: expand your sales and marketing budgets to pay for advertisements on your social media platform of choice.
Even more important for a business today, is to know how it is performing in terms of their social selling impact. To achieve this, you need access to the Social Selling Index, or SSI (https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi ).
LinkedIn first developed the SSI in 2014, focusing on four skill points to assess a company’s social selling strategy:
Establishing a professional brand with a well-managed LinkedIn profile
Finding the right people on the platform
Sharing relevant, conversation-inspiring content
Building and strengthening relationships
Since launching the analysis in 2014, here’s what LinkedIn has discovered:
Social selling leaders get better results.
Social selling leaders create 45 percent more opportunities than peers with lower SSI scores.
Social selling leaders are 51 percent more likely to reach quota.
Social selling is the new key to boosting revenue and growing your business without even focusing on direct purchases.
Let’s look at the LinkedIn Social Selling Index and how to interpret it to improve your results.
LinkedIn Social Selling Index
The LinkedIn Social Selling Index is a “first-of-its-kind measure of a company’s or individual’s adaptation of the four pillars of selling on LinkedIn, based on a scale of 0 to 100”
Each of the four pillars has a maximum score of 25, and the compound score therefor is 100 and is your Social Selling Index. According to LinkedIn it is a tool focused on measuring the LinkedIn user’s social selling skills and execution, and the statistics reveal that as your social selling index rises, so does your sales success.
The LinkedIn SSI score measures your or your company’s performance in four (4) key areas, also known as the LinkedIn Social Selling Index pillars.
The LinkedIn Social Selling Pillars Explained
1. Create a professional brand
LinkedIn looks at the elements that reflect your professional presence on LinkedIn including:
Do you have a complete and professional-looking profile that includes a cover photo?
How many endorsements have you received?
How many LinkedIn Publisher posts have you written?
How many followers did you gain from your articles?
How many page views are your posts generating?
How many overall followers are you gaining?
2. Find the right people
Are you finding the right people and reaching out to relevant people with useful information? It considers the data related to your connections and the acceptance rate of your connection requests.
People searches (on LinkedIn.com or in Sales Navigator)
Lead Builder / Advanced people searches (in Sales Navigator)
Profile views (on LinkedIn.com or in Sales Navigator)
Prospecting profile views (third degree or out of network)
Inbound profile views
Leads saved (in Sales Navigator)
Days active (on LinkedIn.com or in Sales Navigator)
3. Engage with insights
Do you discover and share valuable information to initiate or maintain a relationship? Simply put this measures engagement. It looks at the number of shares, likes, and comments your posts receive. It also looks at the messages you send and their response rate.
Shares (short form posts)
Engagements given and received (likes, comments, reshares)
Engagements received on long-form posts (likes, comments, reshares)
Messages sent + InMail response rate (multiple types)
Groups joined
Accounts saved (in Sales Navigator)
Research views (account page views + homepage scrolls in Sales Navigator)
4. Build strong relationships
The fourth pillar measures how successful you are at expanding your network to reach not only your prospects but also those who can introduce you to prospects. LinkedIn factors in the number of people searches you have conducted, profiles you have viewed and days you have been active.
Connections
VP+ connections
Internal connections (with other co-workers)
Acceptance rate for connection requests sent
