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 significantly higher Social Selling Index score!
A lot has changed over the last few years and with the rise of remote selling. Social selling training is at an all-time high. This has ushered in an era for sales prospecting tools such as social selling leaders 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 it. And your 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 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 sales efforts away from traditional emails, cold calling, and outreach campaigns in favor of social selling.
Before we dive into the juicy stuff, a thought leader like you might like to understand what an SSI Score is and why it is a great indicator of B2B prospecting, lead generation, and outbound sales.
LinkedIn SSI Score Measures
LinkedIn’s social selling index is a point system from 0-100. You want to get to 100 (although realistically, the mid 90s is the highest I have seen).
For sales leaders, business owners, social sellers, social media professionals and influencers, a high social selling score not only makes you a social selling trailblazer, but should help you build relationships and accomplish your sales goals too.
LinkedIn’s SSI is based on:
Four components of your score
- Raise your professional brand score.
- Find better prospects and the right people.
- Engage with insights.
- Build relationships with LinkedIn users.
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. We’ll deep dive on what you can do below.
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Keyword Rich Profiles
In the beginning, the LinkedIn social media platform was used mostly as an online resume. A platform where employers would seek out their next employee and where aspiring employees would look as professional as possible.
Fast-forward to 2023, and it is widely used as a social selling platform where you can share your professional brand, find and connect with prospects, engage with insights, market your product and services while establishing trust and building your business.
Sales prospecting has become imperative for sustained sales success, and it is through keyword-centric and relevant content found in your LinkedIn profile that your qualified prospect will determine whether engaging with you will be worth their time.
What Is a Good Social Selling Index Score?
As far as modern sales intelligence, your LinkedIn SSI score is a fantastic indicator of increased sales success. 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. But I do want to make it clear – these networking activities are an ongoing commitment! One of the key things I’ve learned is if you take a few weeks off your social selling efforts, your good SSI score might plummet! (Darn you, three weeks in Europe!!!)
What Social Selling Index score are you aiming for?
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.
LinkedIn claims that sellers create 45% more sales 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 greater leverage your sellers will have, the better connections in a larger network, and the easier to show leadership that target accounts are being engaged. Is your sales team’s social selling skills where they need to be?
You can see how different types of activities impact your LinkedIn Social Selling Index 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 check LinkedIn’s SSI tool at least once a week to see where you can improve.
If LinkedIn notices, your sales prospects eventually will too.
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How to Increase Your SSI on LinkedIn
The fastest way to improve your score is by knowing how LinkedIn calculates it. As mentioned, there are four parts to the score. The SSI is calculated using the following 4 key elements within your LinkedIn account:
1. LinkedIn Personal Brand
Initiate your digital transformation and establish your professional brand by completing your LinkedIn profile. Here are a few LinkedIn SSI tips to help you stand out as a thought leader with your personal brand:
- Upload a branded and professional background banner.
- Include a zoomed in professional picture in which you are making eye contact with other users on your profile.
- Customize your LinkedIn headline to focus on whom you help and how you help them.
- Complete your Featured section from a client-centric viewpoint. Add media that’s of value!
- Fill in your job description not only with what you do, but also with the experience your clients get when they work with you and your company.
- Complete your Contact Information, including your professional email address and customized website link.
2. LinkedIn Connections
Build strong relationships with the right people on LinkedIn. Identify potential prospects in less time using efficient search and research tools within your professional network.
- 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 post relevant content, including publishing meaningful posts, and share conversation-worthy updates, so you can start engaging with insights and building relationships.
- Like, comment, and share other people’s content.
- Publish meaningful posts.
- Use an InMail with LinkedIn Premium.
- Respond to your notifications.
4. Relationships
Build trusted relationships and strengthen your network by connecting and establishing strong connections and trust with decision-makers through the right sales messaging.
- Send connection requests to new people through a personal message using FlyMSG
- Send welcome messages to your new connections with FlyMSG
- 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 professional brand scores over time.
How to See Your LinkedIn SSI Score
You’re probably asking, “How do I get my score on LinkedIn’s social selling index?” To find your LinkedIn SSI score, 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, while having access to your SSI is pretty cool, don’t become so consumed with the score that you forget what is most important: building connections, creating more conversations and engaging with insights of the right people!
You don’t need to send personalized emails to every single person in your social network in order to build strong connections with your prospective clients. 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?
Decision makers! Watch this interview I did with my friend 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!
More Resources
You are well on your way to becoming a top-notch social seller! But don’t stop there! Here are some more tools to help you transform your social selling efforts.
Get the all-inclusive guide to LinkedIn recruiter here – a great resource for hiring managers looking to utilize it for their recruitment process.
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 here.
