Dive Brief:
- LinkedIn this week added a scoring metric called Social Selling Index to its Sales Navigator that allows salespeople to benchmark their performance.
- Social Selling Index measures how salespeople established their professional brand, with whom they’ve networked and built relationships, and engagement with insights that provide a 1 to 100 score.
- Sales Navigator was launched last year to connect buyers with salespeople.
Dive Insight:
LinkedIn has integrated a new metric to its Sales Navigator to benchmark salespeople’s performance and serve as a motivating tool -- Social Selling Index, which LinkedIn introduced widely in August.
Social Selling Index is a 1 to 100 score that takes into account a number of factors that measure performance and effectiveness across four criteria: establish your professional brand, find the right people, engage with insights, and build relationships.
Jeff Birkeland, LinkedIn's head of product for its Sales Solutions unit, wrote in a blog post about the news that the team "spent the last year learning about users’ needs and know that if they’re able to measure their performance, then they are able to set clearer goals. This integration brings an ease of use that not only streamlines the social selling process, but it also simplifies it by delivering actionable information within the product."
The Social Selling Index score is similar to an influence rating, such as Klout and is intended to motive salespeople who use LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator. A recent study found that social selling is positively tied to sales performance and that Sales Navigator users achieve seven times higher pipeline growth and eleven times more revenue growth than salespeople who just use LinkedIn.
"Some of our most engaged Sales Solutions customers such as SAP, Microsoft and the National Basketball Association have been piloting these new enhancements. While it’s early in this process, we’re encouraged by the engagement rates we’re seeing," Birkeland wrote.
In other LinkedIn news, it recently acquired predictive sales and marketing firm Fliptop to improve its Sales Solutions toolset.
