LinkedIn is a social networking site designed specifically for the business world. The aim of the site is to enable registered members to build a professional network.
More than 600 million experts are registered on LinkedIn to advance their careers and business. The key factor that distinguishes LinkedIn from other social networks is that it is focused on building strategic business relationships. This does not depend on the number of contacts, but rather on what quality they are. With more than 500 Connections, LinkedIn no longer displays your number of contacts. It’s about quality, not quantity.
A LinkedIn member’s profile page highlights your education, career, and skills. The profile page also includes professional network newsfeeds and a limited number of customizable modules. LinkedIn basic membership is free. The members of the LinkedIn network are referred to as “connections”.
LinkedIn for Business enables you to connect with existing customers and expand your market value with word-of-mouth propaganda. Instead of simply increasing the number of followers and connections, you should use LinkedIn marketing tools to unlock new growth opportunities. LinkedIn supports businesses in many ways, so you need to figure out exactly what benefits you want to take from your LinkedIn business efforts. For example, are you trying to build a customer network for the online sale of products? Do you want to establish yourself as a thought leader? Or would you like to recruit top talent?
LinkedIn can encourage the sale of your products. [easy-tweet tweet=”Social Selling nutzt soziale Medien, um Verkaufsaussichten zu generieren, sich mit ihnen zu verbinden und sie zu verstehen.” user=”MirkoPeters8″ url=”https://bit.ly/2Zxd7zb” template=”user”] It is therefore a modern way to build valuable relationships with potential customers.
What is the LinkedIn Social Sales Index
The LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) shows how effectively a person has established himself as a professional brand. In short, you can tell if a person is connected to the right people; whether it exchanges with experts and whether it is active in the network.
Social selling is still quite a new concept in the B2B world. It aims to use social media to build and promote online relationships with interested parties on social media. The focus of social selling is to generate trustworthy contacts by putting the needs of customers before their own, which in this case would mean the completion of a sale.
Before evaluating LinkedIn’s social selling index, it was difficult to measure the success of an individual social-selling strategy in a consistent way. LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index delivers a unique value that is updated daily, allowing it to identify its strengths and weaknesses.
LinkedIn SSI – What is measured in the Social Sales Index ?
What does the LinkedIn SSI score actually mean? The LinkedIn SSI score is mainly measured by the following four points. We have broken down each evaluation component to explain it as easily and intelligibly as possible for you.
1.) Building a personal brand
It is extremely important that you optimize your Linkedin profile with a view to customers and customers. Check whether you publish relevant articles that appeal to professionals in your industry. This content can be either from trusted sources or from one of your blog or LinkedIn Pulse posts that you write using the Publish an Article feature. It is a good thing to establish yourself as a thought leader.
2.) Finding the right customers/industryexperts
LinkedIn offers sophisticated search tools to help you find the ideal customer and industry expert. This includes regularly expanding your network and building valuable relationships. For example, LinkedIn’s analytics tool can be used to curate a reader-focused marketing strategy to reach potential customers and increase revenue.
3.) Dealing with insights
Dealing with insights (articles, posts, videos, appointments) is a great way to find similar people from your own industry as well as in the industry of your ideal customer. By joining relevant and active groups, expertise can be shared without any sales focus. It is also advisable to become an active member of these groups in order to get in touch with your future customers. Insights (insights) are primarily a feature of LinkedIn premium accounts, so it’s unlikely to get a high score if you’re not willing to pay for it. Apart from the active use of insights, you can increase your score by looking at content (commenting, sharing) that publishes your connections.
4.) Building relationships
Obviously, a lot of people want to build relationships with the top executive within companies that you want as a customer. But it’s important not to discriminate against other employees within the company, because according to LinkedIn, 73 percent of B2B buyers prefer sales professionals who have been recruited by someone they know. The percentage rises to 87 percent if they were introduced by someone from their professional network.
The Importance of LinkedIn SSI Results
LinkedIn claims that users with a higher SSI score are more successful at achieving their sales goals than users with a low SSI score. For example, highly active LinkedIn users get 45 percent more opportunities than others.
The result does not guarantee an increase in sales success, but it establishes a strong link between specific and targeted network activities, an increase in opportunities and potential prospects.
How to Optimize LinkedIn Profile for the Social Selling Index
Create a buyer-centric profile
Other LinkedIn users use the network to find people they can trust and want to work with. They look at their profile and judge whether they can imagine building a business relationship. As a seller, you should send messages to your entire profile to show you how to help your customers. Share knowledge that is valuable to them and make it clear that you are a trusted and helpful resource. As a salesperson, do not write on your CV how much money you have contributed to your company, but what benefits have arisen for your customers.
Optimization of photo, heading and summary
Your photo should be professional, i.e. no selfies, no group photo, beach photos or school pictures from 20 years ago are taboo. It is not necessarily obligatory to wear a suit in the picture, but one should appear trusting and authentic – like someone to whom a prospective buyer can entrust his business.
The title should not be used as a heading. Instead, it is best to answer these two questions: Who are you helping and how do you want to help? Your profile visitors usually only look around briefly on your LinkedIn profile, so formulate it as tightly and pointedly as possible.
The summary must be as prominent and appealing as possible. It should show the added value that you or your product offer the customer. It is recommended that you end up with a call to action, and several troublemakers (eye-catching content) should also be added.
Conscious lyrizing the network
In general, your own network should consist of people you really had contact with (personal or virtual).
If an invitation is sent to someone without having met the person before, please send a personal message here and briefly explain why you should both be on each other’s network. Do not start contacting you directly with a sales intention. This can then preferably be sent better in an InMail or e-mail.
Keep the profile public
Publish at least four to six content per day
As a seller, you probably rarely blog or create your own content. You should ask yourself what content should you share? The articles that are of interest to your target audience do not all have to be written by themselves. You can also curate content at any time.
Articles from external sources also give a credible and less self-serving impression. One should try to find a balance between spanning content and sales information. Spend at least 20 to 30 minutes a day searching your own feed for content.
Scan the buyer’s profile before adjusting your own approach
Role-specific basis: What are your responsibilities?
Target-specific basis: What are the goals you want to achieve in your role?
Common basis: What are the similarities with your customer? It is very important to find some kind of connection to yourself, it can be a common connection, a colleague, a hobby or an experience.
You should also try to pick up topics from the Prospect’s LinkedIn profile that you can contact. Check out the feed of content that the user has published recently. Here you can see if he has posted press releases, articles about new leaders, events, or other important news. You can then contact one of his posts via a comment.
Using InMails and Emails
The 5 benefits of LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI) are as follows:
1. The SSI is ideal for determining an underlying. After optimizing your LinkedIn activities, you can see how the score has improved.
2. The SSI is a quantitative indicator of a seller’s capabilities. Team compositions can also be identified: In general, a team consists of beginners, advanced and experienced LinkedIn user stars. In some cases, beginners should be required to complete a LinkedIn Basic program so you can keep up.
3. By averaging all of the team’s SSI scores, you can see the average level of competence of all team members. The higher the SSI average, the faster you can expect good sales.
4. The SSI score motivates to achieve more, the principle is also known as gamification. The SSI scores are republished daily. It’s similar to a motivating driver for more self-improvement, similar to fitness watches, but it’s about business, not athletic success.
5. The SSI is ideal for competitions. Competitions such as “Best Profile” or “Best Networker” have always been held in sales training. By using SSI scores, you can make competitions measurable. Every single one of you in a sales team wants to be at the top of the SSI leaderboard.
Disadvantages of the LinkedIn Social Sales Index
Some drawbacks of the LinkedIn Social Sales Index are:
1. It is claimed that the SSI results are updated daily and that they are based on parameters such as the publication of posts with “attractive content”. However, if you start to focus too intensively on the SSI results, you will be distracted by the actual direction of networking.
2. The daily update of SSI results does not always seem to take into account all interactions. Some users complain that their SSI hasn’t changed for weeks, even though they’ve been very active on LinkedIn. According to their expectations, their ratings should have gone up. But they apparently didn’t.
3. And thirdly, after all, sales agreements count. Social sales are not really what a platform like LinkedIn can measure. This requires another solution in which sales with sales value could be deposited. LinkedIn also changes general data from industry to industry, from country to country, and from network to network.
What should I pay attention to in relation to the LinkedIn SSI score?
In order to answer these questions, it is worth remembering that all four pillars are connected to determine the entire SSI. It is therefore unlikely that even one pillar can be ignored if one is determined to achieve a respectable score of 80 or more.
However, the first pillar – the establishment as a professional brand is by far the most basic. Many LinkedIn users create their profile, personalize their staff, and stop actively using LinkedIn. Permanently successful LinkedIn users must be permanently engaged in all four pillars in order to assert themselves as a pioneer within the LinkedIn community.
Conclusion:
The digital transformation took a 360-degree rotation in the way we communicate with each other, build relationships and, of course, (buy). Companies have had to develop new strategies as technology has made progress and society has changed rapidly as a result.
More recently, the concept of social sales or “social sales” has gained particular importance, which has led to a paradigm shift in traditional sales strategies. It allows to maximize online sales in certain companies, thanks to the optimization of the presence on social networks. The art is to sell via social networks without directly promoting a product.
By using LinkedIn as a social network, people connect with their colleagues and do business. Everything you do on LinkedIn should add value to your network. In the future, the network will think of you and recommend you to others. Through face-to-face conversations with customers and prospects, you can better understand how to build trusting relationships. Diesel-based principles apply offline as well as online.
The evaluation of the Social Selling Index (SSI) is a measure of how your own sales activities are conducted with the LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Clicking on your SSI score takes you to a dashboard that gives a picture of how the social-selling efforts are going and how he’s doing with his LinkedIn network in his own industry. The Sales Navigator tracks the history of social selling activities over time and shows where it performs best and where there are still opportunities for improvement.
LinkedIn users with a higher SSI score are more successful at achieving their sales goals than those with a low SSI score (according to LinkedIn). The Social Selling Index (SSI) is demonstrably important for ranking linkedIn search. This is crucial to after receiving business requests, new job vacancies, or simply expanding your network with the right people. The high SSI score does not guarantee an increase in sales success, but increases the likelihood of achieving the sales targets.
