When we launched Sales Navigator last year, our goal was to make LinkedIn the most productive social selling platform in the market. We sought to empower anyone in a revenue generating position by offering tools that will allow them to build relationships in a strategic and efficient way.
What we’ve uncovered along the way is that companies big and small are getting on board with social selling and making it a strategic imperative in their sales strategy. Based on our observations from the last year, we’re pleased to present our Social Selling Powerhouse 10 list – a ranking that highlights the most effective social selling brands using LinkedIn in the US.
What is the Social Selling Index (SSI) and which companies make up the SSI Powerhouse 10?
Although companies started to believe that social was becoming a part of the selling process, they didn’t know how to measure whether or not their sales reps were adopting social selling best practices. Because of this, LinkedIn created SSI, an engagement metric that measures how well someone is adopting social selling best practices on the LinkedIn platform. It gives brands visibility into their activities and benchmarks them against their peers and competitors. Some of the companies on the list include Box.net, a content management and collaboration platform, and Zendesk, a customer service platform. These companies truly exemplify what it means to adopt social selling on LinkedIn:
We created this ranking by looking at brands with more than 1,000 employees and at least 100 sales professionals on staff in the US. We then calculated their individual SSI scores and aggregated the data to create the company wide score from 1-100. Lastly, we averaged their monthly scores from January to October 2015 to truly identify who has been consistently displaying social selling behavior throughout the year. These top ten companies truly make the most of the LinkedIn experience by practicing an always-on strategy that is rooted in the four elements of social selling. These elements are:
- Establishing a professional brand
- Finding the right people
- Engaging with insights
- Building relationships
*Each category is equally weighted (25 points) within the SSI score.
We’re committed to making the social selling experience seamless for sales professionals, and that is why we just recently integrated SSI within our flagship product Sales Navigator to allow both individual contributors and managers to measure their social selling journey. This is the beginning of many more opportunities that will help our audience be more productive and successful every time they use our platform.
Congratulations to the United States Social Selling Powerhouse 10! If you’re interested in getting your individual SSI score, click here.
To learn more about the integration of SSI in Sales Navigator, visit this link.
Related articles