Social selling is a massive opportunity in sales. And with technology being as advanced as it is in digital marketing and sales, it’s imperative to stay aware of metrics and monitor activity for opportunities for improvement.

Of course, there are many metrics you can monitor on each social platform. For Twitter alone, there are tweets, replies, mentions, favorites, retweets, and clicks, and messages.

But, you don’t have the time or inclination to monitor these metrics when they only prove your team member is doing SOMETHING, not actually being successful.

Instead, you want numbers that directly impact your end goal, namely, sales.

Sales For Life shares on their blog that 3 metrics are most important for your social selling program: Content Shares, Linkedin SSI, and Network Growth.

These numbers are an ingenious way to identify if a sales rep is on track.

Content shares

The average B2B buyer is regularly doing their own research before entering the sales cycle. By sharing content that will help guide their decision your sales rep is meeting them in their research phase and submitting your company as an option for purchase.

In my own experience, it’s best to add comments to tweets and shares of content. While most people use content titles, a real comment is more likely to grab attention.

Linkedin SSI

The Linkedin Navigator program is incredibly useful for sales and includes an SSI number that indicates how active someone is on Linkedin for sales purposes. Monitor this number to guide your reps in social selling, but keep in mind that an outstanding or deficient number doesn’t necessarily indicate success or failure.

Network Growth

As you know, the more people your reps interact with, the more exposure they are getting. It only makes sense then that their network should continue to grow over time, on all networks.

Additional Metrics and Indicators

While the numbers SalesForLife shares definitely help you keep a broad overview on how well your sales team is doing with social selling, there are many other signals to keep in mind.

Education- As with any digital category, social selling is continually adapting to new tools, strategies, and industry rules. It’s important that reps stay educated on new ideas by reading books and blogs by industry leaders. They should consider taking online courses, going to conferences, and obtaining certifications to improve their craft.

Experiment– In addition to education, reps should experiment with new tactics, platforms for social selling, and tools. Have they tried cold email? Are they active on Snapchat?

Do they participate in Sales groups on Slack? A site that often shares new ways of using social media is Social Media Examiner, while it is angled towards to marketing, it’s a highly useful resource.

Traffic– In addition to all of the metrics available on each platform, one of the best indicators of their influence is traffic. Each rep should be assigned a UTM parameter for their links and given access to measure the traffic they produce.

This will allow them to prepare goals and experiment. It’s important to remind you to have tools in place that bring the UTM parameter into other aspects of the funnel to keep track of their success.

Sales Is The Best Indicator of Success

At the end of the day, you need your social sellers to bring in sales, revenue, closed deals. You’ll have a good idea of how well they are performing by measuring the number of SQLs, and opportunities from sales, a large portion of these should lead to closed deals.

Be sure to use an indicator for social selling in your CRM on closed deals. This enables you to see trends in how well the company is performing across the board in regards to social platforms.

Conclusion

The best way to start social selling and learn how to measure it for your company is to jump in and see what works. These metrics will give you an idea of how teams are performing but you’ll eventually realize that every company will have their own preferences for metrics, tactics, and training. In the meantime, we’re here to help, give us a shout and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.