The Complete LinkedIn SSI Score Guide

As a LinkedIn user, have you wondered how to find your LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) and what levers you could pull to increase your LinkedIn SSI score?

Wonder no more… The secret sauce is all right here on how to upgrade your sales process and create a perfect 100 out of 100 LinkedIn Social Selling Index score!

A lot has changed over the last few years and with the rise of remote selling in 2020, social selling training is at an all-time high. This has ushered in an era for sales prospecting tools such as LinkedIn and their premium social selling platform, LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Whether you’re looking to use LinkedIn as a B2B prospecting tool or even need to increase your sales pipeline, you can’t run a successful 21st-century B2B sales business without LinkedIn — and an SSI score is a great indicator sales professionals can’t overlook.

For that reason, we’ve put together how to increase your SSI Score, how to use a high score to your advantage, how an SSI Score affects any prospecting technique, and how are top sales leaders utilizing LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

We’ve got a lot to cover so sit tight.

What is the LinkedIn SSI?

Whether you use LinkedIn or Sales Navigator as sales prospecting tools, we can’t emphasize enough the importance of being a social seller.

LinkedIn is the preferred sales prospecting tool for sales pros and leaders are steering away from traditional emails, cold calling, and outreach campaigns in favor of social selling.

Before we dive into the juicy stuff, I’d like to briefly go over what an SSI Score is and why it is a great indicator of B2B prospecting, lead generation, and outbound sales.

In February of 2016, LinkedIn released the ability for users to see how well the platform rated their social selling skills. LinkedIn itself would give a valuable assessment of where you are and how you rank up with competitors.

LinkedIn SSI Score Measures

For sales leaders, business owners, social media folk, and influencers, a social selling score is a point system from 0-100 where 100 is the model score we all aspire to reach, and zero means you have a long way to go to become a social selling trailblazer. But don’t sweat it, having an SSI Score of zero doesn’t mean you can’t take small strides to improve your social selling efforts.

Keyword Rich LinkedIn Profiles

For the first few years after its inception, LinkedIn was used mostly as an online resume. A platform with a similar UI to Facebook where employers would seek out their next employee and where aspiring employees would look as professional as possible. Fast forward to 2021 and LinkedIn is widely used as a social selling platform.

A LinkedIn profile in addition to adding important items such as a personalized banner, engaging LinkedIn headline, and professional LinkedIn photo, needs to also contain the keywords you want your potential customer to find you for. This is a critical part of using LinkedIn as a B2B sales prospecting tool.

Sales prospecting has become imperative for sustained sales success and it is through keyword-centric content found in your LinkedIn profile that your qualified prospect will determine whether or not engaging with you will be worth their time.

What Is A Good LinkedIn Social Selling Index Score?

As far as modern sales intelligence, your LinkedIn SSI score is a fantastic indicator. It tells you how well you’ve developed your brand, connected with b2b buyers, established relationships, and engaged with insights. It is through best practices of those four points combined that you will reach social selling nirvana.

So what LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index score do you want? With all organizations that Vengreso trains, we encourage leadership to manage every sales rep to a minimum score value of 80 out of 100 total possible points. Why? Well, the graphic below illustrates how a salesperson does with a higher SSI Score of over 70 vs under 30.

According to LinkedIn, sellers create 45% more opportunities than peers with a lower SSI, and they are 51% more likely to achieve quota. LinkedIn also states that 78% of social sellers outsell peers who don’t use social media.

Unfortunately, in our State of Digital Selling with LinkedIn report, we found that only 5% of respondents had a LinkedIn SSI of 80 or higher. That’s the same number of respondents who didn’t even know their SSI!

This might not affect outreach or outbound prospecting strategies directly, but the higher the score, the easier to show leadership that target accounts are being engaged and that your sales team’s social selling skills are where they need to be.

Based on the above, we have no choice but to work to boost your LinkedIn Social Selling Index score. The benefit of having this metric available is that now you have the ability to manage your score and respond with action.

You can see how different types of activities impact your LinkedIn score.  If it’s going in the wrong direction, make adjustments from what doesn’t work to what does! If LinkedIn is correct that SSI Leaders are 51% more likely to achieve quota than SSI Laggards, then you should at least check your score every week to see where you can improve. If LinkedIn notices, your sales prospects eventually will too.

How to Increase Your SSI on LinkedIn

The fastest way to improve your score is by knowing how LinkedIn calculates it.  There are four parts to the score. The SSI is calculated using the following 4 elements within your LinkedIn account:

1. LinkedIn Personal Brand

Establish your professional brand by completing your profile with the customer in mind. Become a thought leader by publishing meaningful posts. Here are some LinkedIn SSI tips:

• Upload a background banner. While LinkedIn can’t evaluate if it is a good one or not, your buyers can. Uploading just any banner isn’t enough; make sure it is branded and professional.
• Include a professional picture that is up-close and in which you are making eye contact with your profile visitor.
• Customize your Headline to be more than your title and company. Vengreso recommends that it include whom you help and how you help them.
• Complete your Featured section from a client-centric viewpoint. Don’t focus on your resume; instead, take this opportunity to add value. Be sure to add your contact information so you can be easily reached, as well.
• Fill in your job description not only with what you do, but also the experience your clients get when they work with you and your company.
• Add rich media to your Featured and Experience sections, including videos, PDFs, and other collateral that will bring value to your reader.
• Complete your Contact Information, including your professional email address and 3 website links.

2. LinkedIn Connections

Find the right people on LinkedIn. Identify better potential prospects in less time using efficient search and research tools.

• Perform a LinkedIn Boolean search for targeted stakeholders
• View profiles of both your current and 2nd-degree connections and beyond

3. Engagement with your Network

Engage with insights. Discover and share conversation-worthy updates so can start building relationships.

• Share content in the newsfeed and in groups
• Like, comment, and share other people’s content
• Create original posts
• Use an InMail with LinkedIn Premium
• Respond to your notifications

4. Relationships

Build trusted relationships and strengthen your network by connecting and establishing trust with decision-makers through the right sales messaging.

• Send connection requests to new people through a personal message
• Send welcome messages to your new connections
• Engage in your connections’ activity

Your SSI score is a simple way to measure your engagement on LinkedIn. We recommend that our clients record a baseline and check it on a consistent basis, either weekly or monthly, to track improvement over time.

How to See Your LinkedIn SSI Score

You’re probably asking “What’s my SSI”? You can just click on this SSI LinkedIn URL here and away you go!

What do you learn?

• Your actual LinkedIn SSI score
• Your score in each of the four 25-point areas that make up a total of 100
• You also learn how you are ranked against your “Industry” and within your “Network”
• Your score can change daily

Here is how your SSI will display:

Lastly, having access to your SSI is pretty cool. But don’t become so consumed in the score that you forget what is most important, that is, creating more conversations with the right people!

Gone are the days where you needed personalized emails to every single person in your sales funnel in order to engage and convert. With a sales engagement tool such as LinkedIn, any salesperson can harness the power of thousands of prospects a few clicks away.

Leaders: How can your teams do more with LinkedIn?

Watch this interview I did with my friend and Co-founder Kurt Shaver as we discuss how to implement LinkedIn Profile Makeovers for your sales team at scale. If you’re a Linkedin member, I think you will find it very helpful!

Also, get here the all-inclusive guide to Linkedin recruiter, a great resource for hiring managers looking to utilize LinkedIn for their recruitment process.

Lastly, learn how to increase your sales conversations with our LinkedIn Training program! And if you don’t know where to start improving your LinkedIn Profile, check out our FREE guide, by clicking below.