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Audio Transcript:

Here’s your social selling tip of the day for February 21, 2020. I’m Greg Hyer of Linking into Sales.

Social Selling performance is not difficult to measure. The reason why is because we know where to get the data to measure. Today, everything we do in sales is trackable. We can track if a prospect has opened and email and clicked on the case study you attached. We can track how many views that LinkedIn update had. We can track how many minutes you were on the phone with your mom…errr a prospect today. Everything can be tracked, therefore it can be measured.

One challenge we face when it comes to measuring social selling performance is knowing what to measure. What key performance indicators (KPIs) should we be paying attention to? A great place to start would be to look at your business goals. Maybe the business is trying to increase the pipeline fill rate or shorten the sales cycle, grow revenue or improve the profile margin. Having a clear understanding of the business’s goals is paramount.

When you look at your social sales teams, think about how they’re influencing the buyer to buy. What activities did they perform to make that connection and how do they find and connect with more. Here’s a few metrics you can use to get started.

Goal 1: Be Findable
KPI: Percentage of approved social selling profiles
This metric looks at how many sales reps has social profiles that have been optimized and approved to represent your company and brand. Not only is it important for a sales rep to have an optimized profile when doing outbound prospecting, it’s equally important for being discovered.

Goal 2: Grow your Network
KPI: Network Growth Rate
The network growth rate is a measurement of month over month growth of connections across all networks. Network growth is important because it helps the sales rep expand their reach and influence. There have been survey’s from LinkedIn that have shown a direct correlation between network growth and quota attainment. However, the quality over quantity rule applies. If the network growth rate is too large there’s a chance that the sales rep is connecting with poor quality connections.

Goal 3: Identify and Engage with Buying Signals
KPI: Social Signal to Social Lead Rate
Buyers are on various social platforms sending buying signals. Picking up on these signals is usually done with the help of technology but experience is a factor as well. Your social sales rep show know by now how to engage with buying signals. Each one they engage with needs to be recorded. The goal is to turn that engagement into a lead.

There are a number of additional goals and KPIs that a business can use to measure the success of their social selling sales reps. Management needs to make sure that what’s being measured is tied to business goals. Avoid measuring vanity metrics like shares, retweets, and likes. Leave those for Marketing to track.

That does it for this social selling tip of the day. In addition to this daily tip, check out the Social Selling Podcast by Linking into Sales on iTunes, Google Play Music, Stitcher, YouTube and Tunein. You can even ask Alexa to play the Social Selling Podcast by Linking into Sales.

If you want to check out any of my other social selling tips, visit LinkingIntoSales.com/alexa to listen to each tip or read the transcript. And for social selling training on-demand visit SocialSelling.Training.

This is Greg Hyer. Let’s Start Linking into Sales!