How Do You Stack Up On LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index?

If you work in sales, you already know the importance of quantifying your efforts. In fact, you’re probably well accustomed to scorecards, benchmarks, and KPIs. Each can provide clarity around where your strengths and weaknesses lie—an essential part of improving.

Now, I want to introduce you to one more tool to add to your performance metric toolset. Enter, LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI), a proprietary LinkedIn tool that's having its 10th birthday this year! Whether you've never heard of it until now or this article is serving as a great reminder to go check your score: The SSI is designed to help you measure how you’re resonating on LinkedIn. Why should you care? It quantifies a dimension of sales success, social selling, that’s otherwise very “squishy.” 

Let’s review a few quick tips to help you understand the SSI, locate your score, and improve your performance.
 

What it is:  

The term ”social selling” refers to the relational aspect of selling, including sales conversations and other forms of authentic communication with prospects. LinkedIn’s SSI, has four primary components: 

1. Establish your professional brand

2. Find the right people 

3. Engage with insights 

4. Build relationships 

Each of these four areas can earn a score of up to 25 points, summing to a total possible score of 100. Usually, you’ll find that one or two areas are stronger than the others.
 

Where to find it: 

If you pay for a LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription, you’ve likely already noticed the SSI on your main dashboard. Even if you don’t have a premium membership, you can actually still access your score by signing into your LinkedIn account and following this link. Your personal SSI report will show a breakdown of how you rank in each category and provide comparisons both to your network and to your industry.
 

How to improve it: 

If your score seems low at first glance, don’t fret. Luckily, there is so much you can do to improve it. I actually created a resource to help you improve each of the four dimensions of your score: 

1. Establish your professional brand
2. Find the right people
3. Engage with insights
4. Build relationships

Focusing on one area for one month at a time so that you’re not trying to change your behavior and habits across several areas all at once. 

Whether you consider yourself a salesperson or not, we’re all selling something. Consider the numbers behind the SSI to be the push you need to take strides toward better results.

If the "Establish your professional brand" quadrant is suffering and you're ready to do something about it, check out The Profile Transformer, it's a done-for-you LinkedIn transformation that takes care of all the heavy lifting!