What is Social Selling?

Social selling is about leveraging your social network to find the right prospects, build trusted relationships, and ultimately, achieve your sales goals. This sales technique enables better sales lead generation and sales prospecting process and eliminates the need for cold calling. Building and maintaining relationships is easier within the network that you and your customer trust.

4 Pillars of Social Selling

1. Create a professional brand
Today’s world of B2B buyers are very selective and will only work with vendors they can trust. A strong professional brand shows you are an active participant in your industry. It leads to more inquiries from prospects. It leads to more responses to your communications.

2. Focus on the right prospects
Social selling enables you to find and connect with prospects more effectively than traditional sales. Over 76% of buyers feel ready to have a social media conversation and identifying prospects that meet your established criteria – such as role, function, or industry - with LinkedIn has never been easier.

3. Engage with insights
Position yourself as a subject matter expert by sharing relevant industry content, commenting on news alerts, and building your professional brand. Over 62% of B2B buyers respond to salespersons that connect with relevant insights and opportunities. Salespersons can enhance their thought leadership by staying up-to-date with prospect news, and by identifying new contacts or decision makers when accounts make key hires.

4. Build trusted relationships
Build trust with prospects by sharing your perspectives and helping provide relevant information to common pain points. Have genuine conversations and focus on the needs of the prospect first, selling second.

Measuring Social Selling Success

Equally important to understand what is social selling is the ability to measure it. To help quantify the value of social selling, LinkedIn produced the first-of-its kind social selling measurement – The Social Selling Index (SSI). The Social Selling Index is scored on a scale of 0 – 100 based on your LinkedIn activities relating to the 4 pillars of social selling. In our internal study, we’ve found a strong correlation between achieving sales goals and sales reps with high SSI:

- 45% more sales opportunities
- 51% more likely to hit quota
- 78% of social sellers outsell peers who don't use social media
- 3X more likely to go to club

Check out your social selling index >