LinkedIn: Social Selling Index Hones Social Selling Skills

LinkedIn officially released its Social Selling Index (SSI) a few weeks ago.  The metric provides a four part dashboard score within Sales Navigator which indicates how well sales reps are using LinkedIn for social selling.  The SSI, like other LinkedIn usage promotion tools, employs gamification techniques to promote increased usage of the service.  There is even a boast link for sharing your SSI.

Members are rated by their ability to

• Establish a Professional Brand
• Find the Right People
• Engage with Insights
• Build Relationships

They are also told how their SSI ranks versus their industry and versus their network.

Each of the sub-topics is scored on a 0 to 25 score so the full SSI value is 0 to 100.  LinkedIn also offers an SSI graph so you can see how your SSI has changed over the past six weeks.

LinkedIn conducted a study with C9 which analyzed two years of sales data across 9,000 sales professionals.  According to the study, social selling “is positively associated with sales performance” and “Sales Navigator users achieve 7x more pipeline growth and 11x more revenue growth than if they used LinkedIn.com only.”

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is one of the eleven vendors I profiled in my just published 2015 Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors.  In the coming weeks, I will provide mini-profiles of each of these vendors in my blog.  I have already published a few:

• Data.com
• DiscoverOrg
• Infofree
• RainKing