Social selling is no longer the future. It’s here.
Social selling is selling through social media platforms rather than cold calling or cold emailing, that simple.
With platforms like LinkedIn being the largest B2B networking place, it’s a no-brainer to use it for sales
And LinkedIn social selling is where SDRs, B2B founders and marketing leads go to ensure a good flow of leads.
It’s not as easy as just going on LinkedIn and just messaging random people though, there’s a couple neat strategies.
That’s why we’ve compiled this blog for you.
We’ll go over
- How to find your LinkedIn Social Selling Index?
- What’s the secret behind LinkedIn SSI’s calculation?
- How to boost your SSI score?
- What are the best ways to actually sell on LinkedIn?
Make sure you stick to the end, since we’ll take a look at one surefire way to streamline your growth on LinkedIn and consistently get leads.
Without further ado, let’s go.
What is the LinkedIn Social Selling Index?
The SSI score is LinkedIn’s metric to tell you how good you’re doing sales-wise.
Basically, it’s a number calculated using four sales aspects ranging from 0 to 100.
LinkedIn calls it:
- Establish your professional brand
- Find the right people
- Engage with insights
- Build relationships
But we’ll go over what these actually mean in the next section. But just know they’re some core fundamentals of sales.
If you’re a marketer or sales lead, then this is a good way to keep track of your campaigns and growth.
An SSI score above 70 generally means you’re doing pretty good on LinkedIn social selling, so keep at it.
But if you’re below that, no worries! I’m here to get your numbers up, both SSI and prospects in your inbox.
Before that, let’s take a look at your own SSI score.
How to find LinkedIn Social Selling Score?
It may not be very obvious where your SSI score is since LinkedIn doesn’t really have a big button for it in the homepage.
I’ll make it simple for you in two steps.
- Go to your LinkedIn page and log in.
- Click here! Or go to https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi
You should see a bunch of graphs and scores, these are where you can analyze your social selling metrics.
The main score, your SSI is the main cumulation of everything but you can also see your rank in your industry and your network.
Bet you thought you’d need Sales Nav or something, nope!
It’s completely free to analyze your LinkedIn social selling score.
You’ve probably noticed the individual scores on four components, let’s see what this means.
How is LinkedIn SSI Calculated?
As I said, there’s four core sales concepts that make up your SSI score.
1. “Establish your professional brand”
To boost this score, you must focus on your actual brand profile and if it’s complete.
- Firstly, check if your LinkedIn profile is complete and optimized.
This means a LinkedIn profile picture, banner, headline, descriptions, experience and so on.
This goes a long way in having a professional first impression if someone clicks on your profile.
- Second, the number of endorsements on your profile.
If you don’t have skills listed, then you can’t really get endorsements so make sure your profile is filled.
Then, you can use some of your strategies to boost endorsements using your network.
- Third, engagement and quality of posts on your profile.
Just using ChatGPT to make some generic posts and spamming your network’s feed is not going to work.
The LinkedIn algorithm will see if your posts are actually good or not.
If you’re making consistent, helpful and insightful posts, you’ll rank good here.
2. “Find the right people”
This is more about your outreach and networking efforts and corresponding results.
- Ensure you’re using LinkedIn Search correctly.
There’s just searching on LinkedIn and there’s also actually using all it’s neat features to get good results.
This includes using the filters, boolean search and there’s even ways to bypass its limits. 😉
- Are you viewing profiles on LinkedIn?
This is a sign that you’re always doing outreach, LinkedIn tracks all this stuff.
If you’re consistently visiting people’s profiles, sending out requests, and attempting to grow your network, it’s a boost.
- “Engage with insights”
It’s one thing to do outreach and another to ACTIVELY do outreach.
The LinkedIn algorithm loves engagement and actual consistent activity by your profile.
So don’t just mindlessly scroll your feed or just open LinkedIn to send and accept some connection requests.
Make sure you’re leaving comments, even if theyre short.
Like your network’s posts and endorse their skills and also make some of your own posts.
This makes you an ideal LinkedIn-er.
- Is your account getting engagement?
You can give engagement to others, but you need some of it for yourself too.
This is a little bit more difficult though, since it needs your effort.
Make quality posts, share it with your network and also with prospects, asking them for their thoughts.
You can also ask for endorsements and return the favor.
This is a great way to grow your network with people in your industry and stay up to date.
If you go to your profile, head to “My Network” and scroll down, you’ll see some recommended groups and events to join.
Get started here and you’ll already see your score going up.
- InMails getting responses?
If your outreach strategy includes InMails (which it should), then you know that a response means refund on InMail credits.
So if you’re sending quality InMails, you’ll get responses (and money back).
On top of that, it’ll boost your score too.
- “Build relationships”
This is basically a test of your network strength and quality. It answers the question, “Is your outreach working?”
- How many connections and followers do you have?
This is a pretty straightforward way to see the size of your network that is public on your profile too.
Only way to get this number is by boosting your outreach and exploiting LinkedIn limits.
- Do you have business leaders and influencers in your connections?
Have you heard about 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree in LinkedIn?
When you connect with big LinkedIn influencers, your 2nd degree connections go up by a lot.
This is a great way to start expanding your network and boost your prospect count.
You probably have a good idea on the core building blocks of your SSI score now.
But I’ll still help you with some key strategies to get that number higher up.
How to increase your LinkedIn Social Selling Index?
Once you know what it’s calculated from, it’s easier to know what to do to boost it.
This is how you beat the algorithm.
- Optimize your LinkedIn Profile
A first impression matters and on LinkedIn, that lies in your profile.
Beyond that, even the LinkedIn algorithm ranks profiles differently according to their completeness.
They’re not going to rank some account with no banner and headline over a 100% filled profile.
So make sure you hit all the checkpoints for a great LinkedIn profile.
We’ll give you a hand! SalesRobot provides free tools to speed up this process, like
- LinkedIn headline generator to get some quick and professional headlines relevant to yourself.
- LinkedIn summary generator to quickly introduce yourself to anyone just having a glance at your profile.
- LinkedIn post generator to add seme good value to your profile and also provide chances for engagement.
- Make informative posts
Going more about posts, you should understand that using content is a great way to establish your brand on LinkedIn.
This can be long-form articles, quick videos or just a little guide to help people out.
It proves your expertise in the industry and also helps others within your network and beyond.
A profile with some great posts is automatically a credible person on LinkedIn.
- Take advantage of endorsements!
You know what’s another great way to show credibility? Someone saying, “this guy is good”
LinkedIn’s got that inbuilt as a feature! A simple button to endorse people at the bottom of their profile.
LinkedIn endorsements are an amazing way to show credibility.
It shows that you know what you’re doing.
It’s also a great conversation starter if you go and endorse their skills, prompting them to return the favor.
- Use LinkedIn Search to the full potential
By taking advantage of advanced search filters, you can narrow down the ideal target audience.
There’s a lot of options in the most basic LinkedIn Search.
You can select locations, job roles, companies etc. and quickly speed your process up.
If you want to take it up a notch, try LinkedIn Sales Navigator for much more advanced filters.
Sales Nav provides 30+ filters and a bunch of additional features like Spotlights and Intent, check it out if you’re serious about sales.
- Stay active on LinkedIn
Being an idle profile hurts your ranking in the algorithm, you won’t show up on people’s searches and your posts won't reach wide.
That’s why you have to actually interact with the LinkedIn network, it’s a social platform after all.
This means liking, commenting, posting, endorsing and messaging people on LinkedIn regularly.
It takes up time, but the algorithm values it a lot.
If you’re a startup founder, manager of a sales team or a marketing head, you might not have much time to scroll your feed engaging with everything.
That’s why the market has tons of amazing automation tools to make this that much easier.
One such great tool is SalesRobot which automates all LinkedIn actions, even sending follow-ups and birthday wishes.
- Join LinkedIn Groups
When you’re in a LinkedIn Group, you’re put with other people in your same industry.
You can also connect with people from these groups and grow your network.
It’s pretty easy, just scroll down on your LinkedIn “My Network” page to see some relevant groups,
Similarly, joining LinkedIn Events is also a fantastic way to get some insights into your industry and get valuable connections.
- Make a lot of connections!
Remember what I said about great first impressions?
An instant boost to that impression is a high number of connections, since it shows on your profile.
Your network strength is also decided by your connections, so boost those numbers up!
Having a lot of connections also gives credibility to your brand.
I’ve no doubt that following these tips will get your SSI score in the top performers in no time.
Not just that, it will actually help you with selling on LinkedIn, but it’s not yet all that you need.
The important thing is that you actually convert connections to customers.
That takes some additional strategy and tips, but we’ve got a couple of those too.
How to sell on LinkedIn?
Selling on LinkedIn is all about numbers and statistics. There’s ways to skew the odds in your favor though.
First off, the scale of outreach matters and so does quality.
This means you should be reaching out to hundreds of people a week and with personalized and high-response chance messages.
There’s next to no way you can do all of this manually and not burn out.
Enter SalesRobot.
SalesRobot is a LinkedIn + Email automation tool that handles all your cold outreach with hyper-personalized message campaigns.
You can set up message sequences, follow ups, LinkedIn actions, endorsements and even AI powered prospecting features.
Basically speaking, SalesRobot will change the way you approach social selling on LinkedIn.
It can,
- Create the ideal prospect list
- Send out connection requests automatically
- Like, comment, endorse and view profiles.
- Follow-up on messages and pending connections.
- Personalize all messages.
- Draft perfect message templates that actually work
For example, if you’re wondering how easy it is to start reaching out to hundreds of people a week.
I’ll show you the 2-minute process.
- Click on Create Campaign
- The AI powered SalesGPT will help guide you if you’re a first timer
- Just describe your customer profile and pain points.
- Draft an ideal message sequence.
- Import your search URL from Sales Nav or LinkedIn Search
That’s all there is to it!
You can sit back and wait while prospects turn into clients within days with SalesRobot.
If you don’t believe me, you can test out the results for yourself with our 14-day free trial. We don’t ask for credit card or phone numbers.
Conclusion
LinkedIn social selling is basically doing sales on LinkedIn, which is a great idea since it has the largest professional database in the world.
There’s a lot of factors and you can also use LinkedIn’s SSI score to gauge how well you’re doing it.
Your SSI score can be found by going to your SSI page after logging into LinkedIn.
You can boost this score through many ways, primarily
- Through establishing your brand.
- Making sure you’re reaching out to the right people.
- And also engaging with them while staying active on LinkedIn.
- Don’t forget to build meaningful connections, especially with LIONs and LinkedIn influencers
Even if your score is doing good, it’s important that you don’t forget the end goal is to actually land a sale.
This is a numbers game and you can massively help it by using LinkedIn automation tools.
And a fantastic option for hyper-personalized cold outreach with a touch of AI is SalesRobot.
Don’t believe me? Just check out our glowing reviews on G2.
Our 14-day trial should be all you need to decide for yourself! (No credit card or phone numbers needed)
Frequently Asked Questions
- Does LinkedIn InMail go to email?
The InMail will go to their recipients' LinkedIn inbox. They will also get a notification in their email.
- Can you unsend an InMail on LinkedIn?
An InMail cannot be unsent or edited after sending. So make sure you triple-check!
- LinkedIn “You tried to send an InMail without having yet received a reply to your last one.”
LinkedIn does not let you send a follow-up InMail until they respond to your first message.
You also can’t send another InMail if they decline your initial message.
- Can you edit an InMail on LinkedIn?
You cannot edit an InMail after it has been sent.
- Do LinkedIn InMails expire?
Your InMail credits will carry over each month, but there is a limit.
On the day of allocation, any InMails over the account cap will expire. The account cap is four times the recruiter allotment.
- How many free InMails per month?
InMails to Open Profiles take ZERO credits. This means you can send unlimited InMails.
You can use great tools like SalesRobot to take advantage of this feature easily.
- What is a good LinkedIn InMail response rate?
A response rate of 18-25% is great for InMails. They generally have an open rate of 50%+.
.png){kind=small}
