How do you compare your social selling to competitors?

Social Selling is about building rapport, providing real value, and developing trust and credibility by being a resource... Understanding that the sales will come when the time is right. While your SSI score can be one KPI to measure, ideally, what truly matters is that you are starting more trust-based conversations with your targeted audience. I rarely compare our outreach and engagement to our competitors. I believe in building a community and supporting one another, as high tides rises all boats.

I've got a few problems with Social Selling Index. Firstly, it is often conflated with content performance (due to some bogus research a while back). Higher SSI ≠ More Post Reach. The second is people using SSI as a catch-up performance indicator. It is designed for sales (clue's in the title!) and it is trying to encourage behaviours that generate and nurture leads. Finally, it's unclear what behaviours lead to high scores, despite the guidance on the page. I wish LinkedIn was more transparent about this. From client experience, it's been really hard to confidently align what you do on the platform (and Sales Navigator) with scores going up and down. That said, if you do things according to high SSI, you'll probably get more sales!

SSI in isolation is interesting, but the real value is found when you correlate SSI to sales performance. Consider and correlate SSI performance against: - average deal size per rep - average deal cycle time per rep - average number of deals in pipe by rep - average overall pipeline value by rep

Keep in mind that while the Social Selling Index is a valuable metric for evaluating your profile development and outreach, it isn’t perfect. It gauges your perceived influence within your network, which can introduce biases toward certain connections or inaccurately reflect your conversion potential. Therefore, while tracking and improving your SSI score, it’s advisable to monitor broader KPIs for a more comprehensive gauge of your success.

Improve your Social Selling Index: - Building a Professional Brand: Make sure your profile is complete with multimedia elements, endorsements and impactful long-form posts - Fostering Strong Relationships: Build connections with VP-level individuals and higher-ups and aim for a high connection request acceptance rate - Finding the Right People: Work on improving prospecting efficacy, conduct advanced lead and account searches, boost inbound and prospective profile views, saved leads and activity duration - Engaging with Insights: share valuable information. Account shares, message activity, response rates, group memberships, saved accounts and search views are all taken into account to determine your score

If you are in a sales role, these can be false KPIs. It isn't how many but who. I'd prefer to have less engagement from more of the right people. Marketing has different KPIs and is looking for a greater reach.

To boost your engagement you should be engaging with others and fostering a true community. Interact with everyone who comments on a post, send a DM to thank people who show up to support you, and ask questions to create a real dialogue in your comments.

One of this issues with this is that some people never ever engage. But that doesn't mean they're not seeing your content and enjoying it. We get many leads in from people who've never publicly reacted/commented, as do our clients.

Engagement rates are an indicator for success but the real value for social selling is in the qualitative detail. Consider: - who is engaging with your post - turn those engagements into a connections - who is commenting and contributing to conversations? - look at content type vs engagement rate vs topic - patterns?

I personally feel both sales and marketing need to focus less on leads and more on demand. One person showing interest is a lead. Several people showing interest from one account shows intent. Focus more on measuring insights and data that lead to intent, where sales and marketing work together to increase intent on accounts showing interest (not leads)

From Marketing's perspective, triggers to conversations is essential, but sales need to use LinkedIn in other ways. Here are three: 1. Identifying whom your clients and CIOs know can lead to introductions and permission to name-drop. Measure, asks for introductions to first conversations to SQL 2. Asking prospects for their perspective on your content or a vote on a poll can lead to engagment. The KPI is: asks to engage in conversations. 3. New connection requests offering to share influencer or resourceful content to their inbox and asking a relevant question. Connection request to acceptance to response to conversation.

h/t to Sarah Goodall for mentioning intent. In my business it is highly-relevant to identify the buying stage before declaring anything a "lead". I define a lead as a person who has a material role and is active (showing intent) in a funded buying process, AND that the buying process is at the right point for my company to influence the outcome. If they are not in a funded buying process they cannot buy anything and, therefore, cannot possibly be a "lead". And if they are already so far into the buying process that they have developed a bias towards a vendor other than my company, they likewise should not be tagged as a lead. Maybe in the second case they could be a "suspect".

Social Selling is about building rapport, providing real value, and developing trust and credibility by being a resource... Understanding that the sales will come when the time is right. Detach from what the prospect is worth to you and attach to what you are worth to your prospect. Treat the person on the other side of the message the same way you would on the other side of the table.

I am not sure Social Selling is a thing. It's really about social relevance. If your content is not relevant, you won't sell anything to that audience.