Episode 327: LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index – Use It to Your Advantage

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

0:00:00 – (Bob Woods): Social selling leaders create 45% more opportunities than peers with lower SSLs. So in other words, social selling leaders, in their minds, are the people who have high SSI scores. So social selling leaders are 51% more likely to reach quota, and 78% of social sellers outsell peers who don’t use social media. Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business.

0:00:33 – (Bob Woods): Join Brynne Tillman, Stan Robinson Junior, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. Enjoy the show. Hey now, and welcome to Making Sales Social Live. Coming to you from the social sales link virtual studios. I’m Bob Woods. Brynne Tillman is off today, but Stan Robinson Junior is here. How you doing, Stan?

0:01:08 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Doing excellent. How you doing, Bob?

0:01:12 – (Bob Woods): Doing well, doing very well, thanks. Appreciate it. So you might have heard that LinkedIn’s social selling index, or SSI as it’s called, has gone away. History archives, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Well, it’s actually pretty strong, and it’s still free for you to check your score. If used correctly, your SSI can really help you to up your game on LinkedIn to start more sales conversations without being salesy.

0:01:45 – (Bob Woods): So before we get into the discussion, if you want to check your SSI, it’s at LinkedIn.com sales slash SSI’s. So that’s really how. It’s a really good way to do it. If you’re watching us live on LinkedIn right now, it is in the chat already. We’re going to put that in show notes for you if you are listening to us delayed on our podcast. So, Stan, what do you think about SSi? There are so many widely available opinions on it from, it’s the greatest thing since life spread to, you know, let’s nuke it from orbit, just to be sure. Where do you, where, where do you find yourself on that, on that spectrum?

0:02:32 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yeah, the SSI debate, I guess I come out on the side of. It’s a nice tool to use to make sure you’re doing all of the activities around social selling, or at least most of them, as defined by LinkedIn and Sales Navigator. So it is a tool in some ways. It can be used for gamification. Cause people in sales in particular tend to be competitive. And there is a little leaderboard that I’m sure sales Navigator admins have taken advantage of in terms of getting people to look at where they are in the leaderboard and try to do more.

0:03:12 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I think that that’s one area where sales navigator for team use really, really comes in and into play. And it comes into play well, because back when Brynne and I worked for another company, and we’ve told the story before, there was one company that actually had prizes for the highest SSI scores for each month, and. And that really helped with it. With LinkedIn Sales Navigator and just social selling rollout and reinforcement within the company. As well. And the ones who were really good not only won the prizes, but they also won, you know, one more business because. Because they were using it effectively, which is.

0:04:02 – (Bob Woods): I’m going to use that as a bridge because LinkedIn has put out some numbers here that I’m looking at on my other screen. Social selling leaders get better results. So they have three stats out. And all of this is with the idea that the higher the SSI score, the more effectively that you’re using it. So Social Selling L  eaders create 45% more opportunities than peers with lower SSLs. So, in other words, Social Selling Leaders, in their minds, are the people who have high SSI scores.

0:04:33 – (Bob Woods): So Social Selling Leaders are 51% more likely to reach quota, and 78% of social sellers outsell peers who don’t use social media. Now, that third one I can definitely see happening big time. What do you think of those numbers? How do you think that they correlate with the real world, essentially?

0:04:56 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yeah. Because the key is how they correlate with the real world.

0:05:00 – (Bob Woods): Yeah.

0:05:00 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Because the whole goal, at least for those responsible for revenue development, is to generate more revenue. And, you know, whether your SSI score is higher or lower if you’re generating revenue, that’s the goal. But the. That said, the fact that these four categories that we’ll be talking about encourage you to do a better job at social selling helps. I think the third question, which was about social media, was a little bit broader.

0:05:34 – (Bob Woods): Yeah.

0:05:35 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yeah. Because it applies to those using social selling in general.

0:05:40 – (Bob Woods): Right. Yeah.

0:05:41 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): This is a little bit broader than the categories for the SSL score. But the one thing I want to stress is what you mentioned, Bob, is sales results are what matter, and we’ll, you know, we’ll talk about. Yeah, good SSL score, because some people listening are wondering, okay, what’s good?

0:06:01 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So before I get into that, I do want to mention one criticism that’s out there that I do think is valid to a certain extent. Sometimes the SSI gets criticized for being more of a usage index than a performance index because it assesses just activity as opposed to activity, which I think should obviously be a part of it, but activity plus effectiveness plus quality, I think too. I mean, because you could be putting absolute junk out there. I had to hold myself back because I didn’t want an explicit rating for this episode.

0:06:41 – (Bob Woods): But, yeah, I mean, you could, you could be using things well, and yet you’re not getting conversions like we were talking about before, as well as, you know, you’re just putting crap out there. And a high SSL score in and of itself does not guarantee success. You still need to do what we’re about to talk about with the four categories in a much, much better value-driven everything that we talk about all of those ways as well.

0:07:11 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yep, and I should have mentioned that sales navigator users do get an automatic bump in their SSL score.

0:07:20 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, that’s it. Yeah, that’s the other thing. So, let’s talk about scores really quickly. So some say that a score of 70 or higher is great. LinkedIn recommends aiming for a score of 75 or higher to establish yourself as an industry thought leader, as it always puts it. The thing about that, though, is what Stanley said. It’s very difficult if you don’t have LinkedIn SSi to get into the seventies. I’m sorry. LinkedIn sales navigator to get into the seventies and above. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but you’ve got to devote full time to using LinkedIn to get that high of a score. So if you don’t have a sales navigator and you don’t have a 70 or 75 or higher, don’t necessarily sweat it.

0:08:08 – (Bob Woods): 40 to 69 is kind of a general range of being good. Obviously, if you want to be better, you’re, you’re going to want to try to get, you know, basically just get as, as high as you’re able to without breaking your back. And I think that that’s probably the other big thing. I mean, you know, what we do and what we teach and everything is great, but you still got to sell.

0:08:34 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think it’s, it’s really good for, say, sales leaders who are just trying to assess where their different team members are in relation to each other and who needs help with what. So if your SSI score is 25, there’s lots of room for improvement. You can quickly make it move up.

0:08:58 – (Bob Woods): Yep.

0:09:00 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): And, LinkedIn does tell you exactly, more or less what to do with categories, which is very helpful.

0:09:09 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. So that’s a perfect time to get into those four categories now. So as you can imagine they’re scored zero from 25 equaling 100. Establishing a professional brand is that first bucket of 25 points. So this includes, and it’s pretty big on the complete list, completeness of your profile, as well as endorsements that you have, articles that you may be publishing and followers as well. So, when it comes to that, you definitely want to have your profile very complete. So one of the things that you’re going for there is the all-star rating, which is still out there. I thought that they dropped it and I kind of came back. I see sometimes at other times I don’t, depending on profiles and things like that, who knows? But, you definitely want to have every single section in there filled out and filled out with quality too, because this is another area where it’s, performance versus usage.

0:10:16 – (Bob Woods): And you can have, you could literally have access through everything and have an all-star rating. But yeah, you got crap out there. So you have to make sure that you are putting in really quality stuff for your profile. You have to make sure you have endorsements. The two areas that I recommend that you really want to fill out more are the featured section and then also have recommendations both coming in and going out. Those will also influence your, LinkedIn ssL. Stan, what do you think about that?

0:10:48 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): All of that?

0:10:49 – (Bob Woods): Any of that?

0:10:50 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yeah, one. It’s funny, among the metrics in the four categories, I think the profile, at least once you get it up to over 20, is the one that is least likely to change. It’s not going to fluctuate as much as the other ones we’ll talk about.

0:11:08 – (Bob Woods): Right? Yeah.

0:11:09 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): As you were saying, Bob, the biggest thing is to make sure that your profile is, is completely filled out. I was wondering about the all-star rating, too, because, you know, it was kind of helpful for people to kind of, to get a sense of how good their profile actually was.

0:11:25 – (Bob Woods): Right? Yeah. The all-star thing is when it comes to, and it still says this on the platform, so I’ve still got to believe that it’s true. If you get the all-star ranking, for whatever reason, your presence in searches also goes up. LinkedIn probably thinks that this is a truly quality profile when it has all stars on it, so it promotes it more somehow. God knows how. It’s the algorithm, it’s all alchemy at that point anyhow.

0:11:56 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yep, exactly. Now, one other quick note on something you mentioned, Bob, is that they use as a metric articles published, which for me is kind of counterintuitive as far as how it relates to the profile. Now that said, if you’re in sales and you’re, you’re thinking to yourself, oh my gosh, do I have to start publishing articles now? The answer is no.

0:12:18 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:12:19 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): But as it relates to your profile completeness, the answer is yes. You need to make sure that your profile looks good, right?

0:12:28 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, yeah, exactly.

0:12:29 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): But articles, if, if the thought of, you know, writing articles gives you hives or something, don’t have think that you need to do that in order to get a good SSL score.

0:12:41 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, exactly. And, actually, a couple of things there off of what Stan just said. So profile and articles I don’t think are related, but it all comes under establishing a professional brand. And I can see how LinkedIn sees articles as establishing a professional brand, that’s kind of separate from the profile. The other thing about articles, and I’m just going to mention this really quick, is they may not do well within LinkedIn profit.

0:13:08 – (Bob Woods): If LinkedIn was a town or whatever, I’m not sure. But LinkedIn articles do actually do very well in Google searches. So that’s actually a way to bring people who you may not necessarily be talking to in the virtual sense, talking to with air quotes on LinkedIn. But if they come across an article of yours in a Google search, you bring them in and that helps you with your professional brand there because you’re bringing people in from LinkedIn, hopefully, they’ll click through to your profile if it’s complete, especially the way that we teach you, you have a much higher chance of getting us some kind of conversation started with them at that point.

0:13:51 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yep. Yep. Great. That’s a great point because most folks, you don’t get a whole lot of engagement on LinkedIn, or on articles. But as you mentioned, what they can do for Google search and your visibility is important and most people, I’m sure, don’t realize that. So that’s very helpful. Yep.

0:14:11 – (Bob Woods): So the next one, and this is where our good yet pricey friend sales navigator comes in, is finding the right people. So in this category, LinkedIn is looking at how you identify better prospects, in their words, and less time using efficient search and research tools. So in other words, it’s who you’re searching for and then starting the process from there. So this is one category that’s driven more by Sales Navigator because if you have Sales Nav, you’re likely going to be higher because LinkedIn knows that when you do searches on Sales Navigator, you’re doing them much more effectively.

0:14:55 – (Bob Woods): Just because LinkedIn’s just because sales navigators tools are just awesome compared to what’s available on LinkedIn.com, which are pretty good, don’t get me wrong, but Sales Navigator is just heads and tails above, you know, absolutely kicks butt at searching here. So. But even using regular LinkedIn.com searches can help you here too, Stan. So let’s talk a little bit more about searching and, the SSL   and especially just with sales Navigator in general, because you are getting benefits from that.

0:15:31 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yes, you definitely do. Sales Nav has something like 14 more. It’s got many more search filters than LinkedIn, the free version. So you can narrow your searches. You can look for people who are more likely to be active on LinkedIn, which is by using posts within the past 30 days. And there’s really no way to do that on free LinkedIn because one of the best things you can figure out is, okay, if I’m going to take time to find someone to look for content that they’re posting so I can engage with it out of the, I don’t know, what are we up to? Close to a billion. I’ll just say close to a billion.

0:16:21 – (Bob Woods): I think it’s over a billion now. But yeah, it’s an incredibly huge number.

0:16:25 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yeah. So how do I narrow this down? Because your problem with sales navigator search is never going to be finding enough people. It’s going to be, out of the 10,000 search results that I get, how do I narrow it down to the ones that are most of interest to me? The top 100, 200. So the search filters both for leads, which are individuals, and accounts, which are business entities like companies, are more numerous and allow you to be much more targeted.

0:16:57 – (Bob Woods): 100%. 100%. So the next one that we’re going to move to is engaging with insights. So this is the third bucket within the SSI. So this includes actions like sharing, liking, commenting, and resharing messaging. In this category, LinkedIn really encourages you to go above and beyond just posting content, which obviously if you listen to us all the time, we talk about this all the time as well. You build networks not only by connecting but also by sharing, liking, commenting, and resharing messaging.

0:17:31 – (Bob Woods): All of these actions give you great opportunities to bring in new connections that are also of high quality to you. You’re a high quality to them. Win-win. You know, you can really help, help with, you know, potentially starting a sales conversation or help them out with networking or whatever LinkedIn wants you to build, build your network in a high-quality way, and especially if you’re like, liking and commenting and resharing and doing that type of thing with content. If you’re doing it in a value-added way, which we talk about all the time, you’re adding value to what someone else has already done.

0:18:07 – (Bob Woods): You are going to build your own presence as a thought leader, as the go-to person in your industry, because you are sharing, in addition to what’s already been shared in terms of value and whatever that value is within that content. So engaging with insights is huge, and is probably the number that is the lowest for many people. I know. It’s the lowest for me. That’s only because lately, I’ve been so busy that I really haven’t had the time to engage with insights. My LinkedIn SSL score is definitely showing that. I don’t. I don’t know about yours, Stan, and how you’re doing. 

0:18:47 – (Bob Woods): You’re actually engaging quite a bit, I’ve noticed. So I think that you do better than I do.

0:18:53 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yeah. It hasn’t made a big difference in the SSI score, which is why we caution people, especially once you get over 70, to not sweat a one or two-point drop in your SSL score. Because I’ve actually seen salespeople do that. They’ve got an SSL score of, like, 74, and they say, my SSL score dropped by two points. What do I need to do? And I normally just say, keep prospecting, please don’t sweat. The other thing is, that LinkedIn occasionally changes its algorithms.

0:19:33 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Surprise, surprise. And all of our SSI scores can take a hit at the same time. And I don’t know about you, Bob, but I can’t think of an instance where they changed their algorithm and everyone’s scores went up. It’s always the opposite.

0:19:51 – (Bob Woods): It always goes down. I remember several years ago when. When a bunch of people, probably myself included, back then, because I didn’t look at it then like I. Like, I look at it now, everybody’s, like, went down. And, I mean, like, we’re talking at least a dozen points, if not more, and we’re all like, what the. You know, what just happened? Did it happen to you yet? Did it happen to you? Yeah. Did it happen to you? Yeah. And, I mean, obviously, LinkedIn did.

0:20:20 – (Bob Woods): Did more of its alchemy in the background that it never talks about. And. And, you know, everyone got knocked down, and, of course, it didn’t say anything, because LinkedIn is LinkedIn. And, um, you know, it was just. It was. I mean, it ended up being fine. Obviously, it’s fine if your score goes down a little bit, just like Stan said, the number one thing that you need to do is not worry about your score.

0:20:48 – (Bob Woods): Just relax and keep. And just like the. Was it a t-shirt or whatever that just says, keep doing what you are doing?

0:20:56 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yep. Or once upon a time, there may have been a keep-on truck and t-shirt, but yeah.

0:21:01 – (Bob Woods): Oh, my God, that’s like o o g. Yeah, definitely.

0:21:07 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yeah.

0:21:09 – (Bob Woods): Where we are, we’re showing our age, sir. So the last one is building relationships. So this includes your connections and the acceptance, and acceptance rate of your connection request. So this isn’t just about treating LinkedIn like a baseball card collecting site, which is which. I heard that comparison years and years and years ago, and it’s. It used to be so accurate. It’s not nearly as much now, but still, people do it.

0:21:40 – (Bob Woods): This is about networking effectively. Just keep in mind here that quality is more important than quantity. Focus on identifying and connecting with real people, people who are relevant to your industry, your profession, your clientele, to the network of people with whom you want to connect and share whatever that you share. When it comes to networking, it’s about quality, not quantity.

0:22:09 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yes, absolutely. I don’t want us to sound like the digital version of a broken record. I don’t know what that is. Bob. I need to update that analogy.

0:22:19 – (Bob Woods): That’s just a scratch on a CD, but that’s all now, too. That’s like dropping off in streaming or something like that. Having connection interrupted while you’re streaming a song. That’s the only thing I can come up with.

0:22:32 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yeah, some type of continual loop. But we encourage you to include a note when you invite someone to connect, which normally will result in you and more of your invitations being accepted. In combination with that, engaging with people’s content even before you invite them to connect can help boost your acceptance rate when you do send invitations to people. So those are just a couple of things not to forget about.

0:23:07 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, always, always do that. I don’t care what people say. Oh, I get more if I don’t. It’s like you’re trying to start a. A relationship with just a handshake at that point, not a handshake. And, hey, how are you doing? I mean, at least that, you know, I mean, you have to, you have to add things there. So that’s excellent, Stan. So when it comes to just the SSI overall, for me, it’s actually not about being a scorecard or an index.

0:23:38 – (Bob Woods): It’s really about showing me approximately where I’m doing well and doing, you know, not so well with specifically my LinkedIn usage. In other words, I use it as a coach and I think that that’s what it’s really about. It shows me where I’m doing well. You know, I should continue to do well in those areas, don’t get me wrong. But it’s also showing me, like, where I need to do better. And like I said, right now, my engagement with insights is way down. If, that were a coach, they would, once upon a time, have been yelling at me. Nowadays, I think coaches just gently goad people.

0:24:12 – (Bob Woods): But still, it would be the coach telling me, you need to do more engagement. You have to get out there and do this more. If not, you won’t succeed. So that’s how I view Ssi. Stan, do you view it in a similar way.

0:24:28 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Very similar? Very similar. Just. At a glance, you can tell where you need to focus just because of how the scores line up. So it’s a nice, nice little bar chart.

0:24:42 – (Bob Woods): Yeah.

0:24:43 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): And as Bob said, you can say, oh, and for most of us, it is engaged with insights now. Whatever that, whatever that means. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:24:53 – (Bob Woods): It just means that we’re not taking more time to actually engage with insights, which, I mean, and I know this, and yet I still fail at it. And that’s because when you engage with insights on other people’s posts, you are now reaching other people who you normally don’t reach. So it’s almost like you’re talking in front of a new audience. So I think that that is a really good way to think of it. If you need motivation to do that, that should be a pretty big part of your motivation to get out there and do that.

0:25:28 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yep. Yep. Well said.

0:25:31 – (Bob Woods): Yep. So one other quick thing that I want to bring up before we wrap it up, because, my God, this is going long for us. Um, your brand, your, your, your kind of personal brand. We all talk about personal branding nowadays. It’s, it’s like the in thing to talk about, but in my mind, it’s the end thing to talk about because it’s a good thing. You really should have your own personal brand out there. Your own personal brand will go way up as your SSI score increases as well.

0:25:58 – (Bob Woods): And this is huge because as we’ve alluded to before, you want to be seen as the go-to person in your industry or vertical. You’ll have people naturally gravitate towards you when you’re seen as a thought leader. And that’s one of the reasons why you want to engage with other people out there through their own content. And I’m going to bring up a really good example here because it happened to me recently.

0:26:20 – (Bob Woods): If you’re a speaker at a conference, you’re up there, you’re sharing your value. You’re talking about, you’re helping other people. Hopefully, you’re doing it in a very value-added way. What happens afterward? If you’ve done a good job, what happens afterward? You get people coming up to you. They gravitate towards you. They view you as the go-to person in your industry or vertical. You’re viewed as a thought leader.

0:26:46 – (Bob Woods): You need to do the same. Do you need to do the same type of thing? But on LinkedIn?

0:26:52 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yep. Great analogy. It’s always interesting how, the physical world and the digital world, isn’t it, they work the same way.

0:27:03 – (Bob Woods): Isn’t it, though? And I think that that’s one of the reasons why networking has, has taken our virtual networking, I should say, has taken off so much, is because it really is. It really, it’s, it’s not even a mirror. Because mirror sometimes implies opposites. It’s more of a magnifying glass. I’m not sure, I’m not coming up, with the analogy, but it’s basically almost exactly the same, except your audience is much more broad.

0:27:31 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yeah.

0:27:31 – (Bob Woods): Your potential audience. Absolutely. And the audience that’s there, you just got to reach them. So I think with that, use the SSL SSI as a coaching guide to improve where you’re lacking on LinkedIn and not as a scorecard. That is probably the best out of everything that we’ve said. I think that that’s the best piece of advice.

0:27:51 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): What do you totally agree with? Totally agree with that. Sounds good.

0:27:56 – (Bob Woods): So we are going to wrap things up. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Making Sales Social Live. If you’re with us live on LinkedIn or any other social network, we do this every week, so keep an eye out for our live sessions. If you’re listening to us on our podcast, and you haven’t subscribed already, go ahead and hit that subscribe, and follow whatever that little thing is that you need to click to. Access all of our previous shows and be alerted when new ones drop.

0:28:22 – (Bob Woods): Socialsales link.com podcast is the place that you want to go if you want to find out more information. We do two shows weekly, this one and our making sales social interview series, where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business, and many more areas that we truly hope are helpful to you in your busy days, weeks, months, and years. So, Stan, you’re going to do it solo today. When you are out and about, make sure that your sales are social.

0:28:54 – (Bob Woods): Exactly. Thanks, everybody. Have a great day.

0:28:57 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Bye now.

0:28:58 – (Bob Woods): Bye-bye. Don’t miss an episode. Visit socialsaleslink.com podcast. Leave a review down below. Tell us what you think, what you learned, and what you want to hear from us next. Register for free [email protected] you can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. Visit our website, socialsaleslink.com for more information.

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