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May 04, 2018 Fiona Challen

5 Tips to Increase Your Sales Team's LinkedIn Social Selling Index

LinkedIn’s SSI – social selling index – has become synonymous with social selling and the statistics being published by LinkedIn give it real credibility. They report that LinkedIn SSI leaders (with and SSI of over 70) generate 45% more opportunities per quarter and are 51% more likely to exceed their quotas. Pretty impressive stuff.

How is your LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) calculated?

The social selling index gives you a ‘score’, which indicates how well you’re using LinkedIn. There are key elements to your SSI:

  • Establishing your professional brand
  • This is all about being seen as a thought-leader by completing your profile with your customer in mind and then publishing meaningful posts and sharing topic-rich content
  • Finding the right people
  • To do this, you need to use efficient search and research tools to identify better prospects in less time
  • Engaging with insights
  • You can create and grow relationships by discovering and sharing conversation-worthy updates
  • Building relationships
  • This is all about strengthening your network by connecting and establishing trust with decision makers

5 Proven Techniques to Help Your Sales Team Increase Their LinkedIn Social Selling Index

 

Here are our 5 top tips for increasing your sales teams LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI):

Selling has moved from being focused on the immediacy of a pitch to being a slower-burn process involving relationship building and generating conversations with your prospects and customers. Content and engagement are key elements of success when it comes to social selling.

Top Tip #1: Get strategic with your content.

The most successful social sellers are those that use a mix of content and a mix of media to communicate it. You are trying to create a holistic, useful, informative and supportive profile, which becomes a must-visit for your audience. Ad-hoc posting won’t cut it: you need a content strategy with themes that have been researched.

Top Tip #2: Build social selling into your daily schedule.

In order to be able to stay on top of the trends that matter and ensure your content does the same, you need to visit your social platforms regularly. Having daily, habit-forming behaviours such as checking feeds for responses and reactions to your posts will bring social media to the top of your to-do list - all that can be actioned while having a tea or coffee break. Read more about Tribal Impact's Coffee Cup Routine here.

5 Tips to Increase Your Sales Team's LinkedIn Social Selling Index

Top Tip #3: Get personal.

As social media platforms evolve and improve, it’s easier than ever to target your audience with specific content. There are a host of tools to help with this activity, for any budget, from social listening tools such as Flipboard or Google Alerts through to LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator.

Top Tip #4: Consider a business-wide social selling programme.

This is more about embedding behavior change rather than getting everyone on. By investing in LinkedIn Sales Naviagtor at a business level, you will be able to track performance and offer specific coaching to individuals to support their adoption. Support your sales teams with training and enablement that will drive behavior change.

Top Tip #5: Have faith.

Social selling is a whole way of doing business and transformational change like that doesn’t happen overnight. Be patient, be consistent and be thorough. Identifying champions within the organisation – early adopters or those with a natural skill for networking – will help to speed things along.

 

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About Tribal Impact

Tribal Impact is a B2B Social Selling and Employee Branding Agency.

We're a team of social media strategists, trainers, coaches, content creators and data analysts who are passionate about helping our B2B customers develop and scale their social selling and employee advocacy programs.

Learn more about us here.

Published by Fiona Challen May 4, 2018
Fiona Challen