Day: June 18, 2021

How to Use LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index Like a Pro

LinkedIn is a perennially underrated social media platform. It’s not always easy to quantify how effective you are on the platform though. Enter LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index.

This handy metric tells you exactly how effective you are as a social seller while highlighting how you can improve. In this article, I’ll cover everything you need to know about the tool, how to use it properly, and how to improve your score. 

What Is LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index?

Launched in 2014, LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI) measures how effective you are at social selling on the platform.

LinkedIn uses four factors to calculate your SSI:

  • establishing a personal brand
  • finding the right people
  • engaging with insights
  • building relationships

Each factor is worth 25 points. Complete them all, and you’ll get a perfect score.

There are several reasons to aim for a high Social Selling Index. For starters, a high score increases your reach on the platform. Even if the LinkedIn algorithm doesn’t directly take your SSI into account when determining the reach of posts, all of the individual factors that go into calculating your SSI help you reach a wider audience.

A high SSI can also result in more connection requests and more people following you—which establishes you as a thought leader in your industry and makes it easier to connect with decision-makers.

LinkedIn provides data to back up some of these claims. According to their Social Selling Index page, leading social sellers create 45 percent more opportunities than lower social sellers and are 51 percent more likely to reach quota. In addition, 78 percent of them outsell peers who don’t use social media.

How to Find Your LinkedIn SSI Score

It’s simple to find your SSI on LinkedIn. If you’re already logged into LinkedIn, follow the link below to see your score.

Find your Social Selling Index.

You can also access your SSI through Sales Navigator by navigating to Admin and clicking User Reporting.

LinkedIn's Social selling index dashboard

Key dashboard information to pay attention to includes:

  • your SSI score
  • the score for each of the four components
  • how your SSI compares to your industry
  • how it compares to your network

We’ll discuss what each of these metrics means in detail next.

LinkedIn Social Selling Index Metrics

As I mentioned above, LinkedIn uses four factors to calculate Social Selling Index: establishing a personal brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships.

But what do each of those metrics actually mean?

LinkedIn Social Selling Index Metrics

Here’s what you need to know.

Establishing a Personal Brand

For this metric, LinkedIn looks at how complete your profile is and the quality of the content you post on the platform. Do you have a cover photo, a complete job history, and recommendations? How many posts are you creating, and how many views and comments are those posts receiving?

Finding the Right People

This metric is heavily focused on Sales Navigator, making it tricky for free users to get a good score. LinkedIn wants you to use its tools to find the right people, reach out to them successfully, and create systems and automation to make the process smoother.

Engaging With Insights

Are you sharing popular content? If not, then you probably won’t score too highly in this metric. The more content you share and the more views, likes, and comments it receives, the better you’ll score.

Building Relationships

The final metric is all about network management. It’s a measure of how often and successfully you reach out to people.

How to Use LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index

Exactly how useful is LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index beyond being a vanity metric? It’s a fair question.

Some people, like Andrew O’Hearn, don’t see much value in the tool. He believes SSI is a way for LinkedIn to push Sales Navigator.

Do we really want to reinforce the ‘keyboard commando’ proclivities of some LinkedIn users who don’t often test their online assumptions in the real (face-to-face) business-related networking communities?

I think there are quite a few things you can do with SSI, however. Here are a few reasons to pay attention to LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index.

Measure Your Personal Brand

Checking your SSI is a great way to understand the strength of your personal brand and take actionable steps to improve it. After all, what gets measured gets managed, and you may not realize just how far you are behind your peers until it’s pointed out.

Because every improvement results in an increased score, SSI also provides a way to gamify the process, making you much more likely to actually do it.

Identify Areas for Improvement

You may think you’re slaying LinkedIn, but perhaps you’re not making enough new connections or posting enough valuable content. Either way, your SSI can easily highlight areas to improve.

Use It as a Benchmark

Perhaps the best use for your SSI is as a benchmarking tool. The tool automatically compares your profile to other people in your industry and your network, so a quick glance will show you where you currently stand.

You can also use your personal score to track improvements and growth as a social seller. This is exactly what Microsoft did with their sales reps. When they first onboarded users onto Sales Navigator, their median SSI was 48. After a few months of training and activity, their average SSI score increased to 56.

The impact of that increase was telling. Those with higher SSIs saw a 37-percent increase in opportunities, and every 10-point increase saw 4.3 more opportunities.

How to Improve Your SSI

It doesn’t matter what your SSI score is, there’s bound to be something you can do to improve it. Below I’ve listed five of the best strategies to improve your SSI and increase your effectiveness on the platform.

Fill out Your LinkedIn Profile Completely

The first and easiest thing you should do to improve your Social Selling Index is to completely fill out your profile. There’s a lot to do here, so here are some jumping off points to get you started.

  • add a profile picture
  • fill out your job title
  • add a helpful, keyword-rich summary
  • add your education and skills
  • request recommendations from colleagues and clients
  • add examples of your work in the featured section

You’ll be amazed at how much your SSI score can jump just by filling out your profile properly. Be careful, though. You don’t want to include so much information that your profile becomes unreadable.

Whenever you are adding information to your profile, always ask yourself whether people would find it useful.

Connect With the Right People on LinkedIn

You need a big network to succeed on LinkedIn. Remember, while quantity is important, so is its quality. That means you shouldn’t send invites to random people. Instead, you take the time to find the right people.

That means people who:

  • you know personally
  • are thought leaders in your sector
  • work in your sector generally
  • are people you buy from or sell to

The more cohesion in your network, the stronger it will be.

Use LinkedIn’s advanced search functionality to find the right people to connect with. Some of the features are only available for premium accounts, but even free users can leverage filters to find relevant people to connect with and improve their SSI.

You can also find related connections under “My Network” > “People you may know.”

Post Quality Content Targeted for LinkedIn Users

One of the easiest ways to improve your SSI categories is to post quality content. This will improve your personal brand, build relationships, and engage with other users.

Quality content can come in the form of LinkedIn posts, or you can try more advanced tactics.

Engage With Your Network and Beyond

Having a big network is important, but so is engaging with them. You need to be in regular contact with a good chunk of your network to show the algorithm you’re committed to building long-term relationships.

Don’t just spam a load of people with connection requests. Aim high and start to follow thought leaders in your industry. Engage with their content thoughtfully and try to strike up a conversation. Make sure you’re responding to everyone who comments on your posts, too.

Conversations are becoming more important than ever on the platform. LinkedIn reports a 43 percent year-over-year growth in conversations during Q3 of 2021. The more engaged you are, the higher your SSI score will be, and the more conversations you’ll end up having.

Use Sales Navigator

One of the reasons LinkedIn pushes the SSI is to encourage adoption of Sales Navigator. In fact, it’s impossible to get close to 100 without using the paid-for subscription. If you already are a Sales Navigator user, you’ll want to leverage as many of the tools’ functions as possible.

In particular, use the saved search feature to automate finding relevant people to connect with.

Social Selling Index FAQs

What is a good LinkedIn SSI score?

A good LinkedIn SSI score is 70+. Between 40 and 70 can be considered okay, while under 40 is poor.

How do I find my SSI Score?

Simply follow this link to visit the SSI page on LinkedIn.

How important is the SSI score?

A good SSI score can help boost your influence on the platform and make sure you are doing all the things you need to do to become a good social seller.

How often will my SSI update?

LinkedIn updates the Social Selling Index once a day.

How is the Social Selling Index calculated?

LinkedIn uses four categories to calculate Social Selling Index: establishing a personal brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships. Each category is worth 25 points.

Social Selling Index Conclusion

LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index shows how effectively you’re using the platform. Given the importance of social selling in many B2B industries, that kind of insight is crucial. It’s also a way to see how you compare to your industry rivals and find areas for improvement.

With a little more time spent crafting your profile, growing your network, and engaging with peers on the platform, you can send your SSI soaring. That can mean substantially more leads and sales. So, get out there and start making LinkedIn work harder for you.

What’s your best SSI metric?

Business Revenue Financing

If You Have Unpredictable Business Income, Business Revenue Financing Could be the Solution You’ve Been Searching For

It is very easy to have a business with unpredictable income – especially when you have a startup venture. But business revenue financing can help you to smooth out the gaps in your cash flow.

Is Your Business Income Unpredictable?

This is the case for most businesses – you’re not alone. Unless you sell on a subscription basis, sales will go up and down. But in the meantime, you still have to pay for rent and equipment. And you absolutely must make payroll.

What is Business Revenue Financing?

It’s also called royalty-based financing. This is a way to raise capital from investors who get a percentage of the enterprise’s ongoing gross revenues, in exchange for money invested. In a revenue-based financing investment, investors get a regular share of business income until a predetermined amount is paid. Often, this predetermined amount is a multiple of the principal investment. It is usually between three to five times the original amount invested.

The business must make regular payments to pay down an investor’s principal. But this method of financing is different from debt financing. For one thing, interest is not paid on an outstanding balance. And there are no fixed payments. Payments to investors directly relate to how well a particular business is doing. If sales dry up, the investor gets a lower royalty payment.

Demolish your funding problems with 27 killer ways to get cash for your business.

What About Equity Financing?

It’s also different from equity financing. The investor does not have direct ownership in the business. Hence revenue-based financing is often felt to be a hybrid, between debt financing and equity financing.

In some ways, business revenue financing is like account receivable financing. With AR financing, a company uses receivables (outstanding invoices or money owed by customers) to get financing. The company gets an amount equal to a reduced value of the receivables pledged. The age of the receivables affects the amount of financing the company gets. See investopedia.com/terms/r/revenuebased-financing.asp.

Because repayment of the loan is based on revenues, the time it takes to repay the loan will fluctuate. The faster revenue grows, the quicker you’ll repay the loan, and vice versa.

The percentage of monthly revenues committed to repayment can be as high as 10%. Monthly payments will fluctuate with revenue highs and lows and will continue until you’ve paid back the loan in full.

The duration of the loan ultimately depends on the success of the business. The faster the business grows, the faster the loan is repaid. The RBF provider sees better returns the faster you pay the loan in full. This is one reason the underwriting process focuses not only on your current revenues, but also on your business’ potential to quickly increase revenues.

Providers will expect you to have a plan to increase your existing business revenue tenfold, as part of the application process.  Since the loan is based on your current revenue stream, lenders will want to see potential growth opportunity for your business.

Investors’ expectation is that the funds that they lend you will be used to start and support planned growth. This is like what venture capitalists would ask for through a fundraising process. See fitsmallbusiness.com/revenue-based-financing.

Which Companies is Business Revenue Financing Best For?

Business revenue financing is perfect for entrepreneurs looking for fast, easy money with little headaches. You can easily get approval for financing as much as $500,000, within 72 hours, based on a simple review of business bank statements.

This program works to help clients get funding, based strictly on cash flow as verifiable per business banks statements. Lenders will not ask for financials, business plans, resumes, or any of the other burdensome document requests that most conventional lenders demand. You can get approval even with bad credit.

One class of businesses which find RBF appealing are those too small to attract venture capital. This also includes businesses which would not normally attract VCs, like mom and pop businesses. VCs are more interested in industry-disrupting businesses.

Businesses can still have solid revenue streams, even if VCs don’t take an interest. Such solid revenue streams can grow and be sustainable for a long time. BRF can be a good fit for companies that fit this mold, because revenue-based lenders make loans based on growth potential. They are not looking for the huge returns that venture capitalists demand.

BRF is great for companies where the ownership wants to retain control. Some businesses will be growing quickly enough to attract the attention of venture capitalists. But the ownership might not like the idea of diluting their equity or giving some degree of control to a venture capitalist. With RBF, you get a loan to repay to the lender. It does not require release of an equity stake in your business, as you would have with funding from a VC.

Demolish your funding problems with 27 killer ways to get cash for your business.

Did You Know that Credit Suite Offers Business Revenue Financing?

Credit Suite works directly with lenders. We work with hundreds of investors and lenders, through several different funding programs. These lenders all offer their own different and unique lending requirements. It can be tough to navigate these alone and know all your options. This is where we help. For more information, go to creditsuite.com/business-loans.

How Do You Qualify for Business Revenue Financing?

This program is one of the easiest, most hassle-free ways you can get business funding. To determine approval, lender will often review 4 – 6 months of bank statements. All the lenders are looking for is consistent deposits. They want to see deposits showing your revenue is $120,000 or more, with $150,000 required for unsecured.

Lenders will also verify that you have been in business one year or more. Lenders are also looking to see that you don’t have a lot of Non-Sufficient Funds (NSFs) showing on your bank statements. They also want to see more than 8 deposits in a month going into your bank account. In essence, all they are looking for is that you manage your bank account responsibly and have a decent number of consistent deposits. If you meet these simple criteria, you can get approval!

Can You Qualify for Business Revenue Financing If You Have Credit Issues Now?

Our revenue financing program is perfect for business owners with credit issues. Lenders are not looking for, nor do they require, good credit to qualify.

You can even get approval with severely challenged personal credit and poor credit scores. You can get approval regardless of personal credit quality, even if you have severe recent derogatory items and collections on your credit report. This is one of the best and easiest business financing programs that you can qualify for, even if you have personal credit problems.

Demolish your funding problems with 27 killer ways to get cash for your business.

Get Fast Funding with Business Revenue Financing

You can get pre-approval for our revenue financing program, within 24 hours. Also, you can get a formal approval, within 72 hours from submitting your application.

Get your money in your bank account, within 7 days or less from applying. Our clients love this program partly due to how easy it is to apply and get approval, and how FAST you get your funds!

You can get money consistently from our Business Revenue Financing Program. Over 80% of our clients come back for even more financing after their initial approvals. Typically within 3 – 6 months of approval, you will get an opportunity to get even more money than you got before. And all you will need for approval for additional funding is a quick review of your last 2 months bank statements.

You can get your money in your bank account within 24 hours or less. Our revenue financing program helps you rapidly grow and scale your business. You will have ongoing access to receive more and more funding easily, and very quickly, just when you need it!

What are the Benefits of Business Revenue Financing Through Credit Suite?

Get 24-hour pre-approval. Loan amounts to $500,000; $150,000 for unsecured. Application to funding in 7 days or less. Get approval for additional future funding. Easy bank statement review for approval.

Pay no application fees. Also, get approval with bad credit. There are no collateral requirements. 3 to 36 month financing terms. Get approval for up to 12% of annual revenue.

Business Revenue Financing: Takeaways

Business revenue financing is a means of getting a loan. Investors lend based on your business’s potential to grow and earn. Your business pays the loan back with royalty payments. Royalty payments go up and down based on business revenue. If your business makes less, then you pay back less. BRF investors often get three to five times what they put in.

Business revenue financing works well for businesses too small or conventional to attract VC interest. It’s also good for businesses where there is VC interest, but the ownership wants to retain control. It’s also good for entrepreneurs with poor personal credit. All they need to do is show revenues. Credit Suite offers a business revenue financing program. We help you navigate the complexities of several lenders with varying requirements. Let’s take the next step together.

The post Business Revenue Financing appeared first on Credit Suite.

Follow live: Lightning looking to take control of series in Game 3

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The post Follow live: Lightning looking to take control of series in Game 3 appeared first on Buy It At A Bargain – Deals And Reviews.

Fields buys into Bears' plan to start Dalton at QB

Justin Fields said Thursday that he supports coach Matt Nagy’s plan to have Andy Dalton as the Bears’ starting quarterback for the start of the regular season.

The post Fields buys into Bears' plan to start Dalton at QB appeared first on Buy It At A Bargain – Deals And Reviews.

New comment by tomhopkins in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2021)"

Getro (https://www.getro.com) | Multiple roles | REMOTE | Full-time

Getro is on a mission to become the platform of choice for making and receiving professional introductions by combining technology and empathy.

Our customers include over 400 independent professional networks — like venture capital funds (Union Square Ventures), accelerators (TechStars), membership communities (Women 2.0), government associations (Techleap.nl), universities (University of Toronto), and more.

Our products provide all of the quality of a referral vs hundreds of faceless LinkedIn profiles, with a UX that is built for founders and hiring managers, not recruiters, doing away with all of the emailing, calls, and reminders that usually go into a referral request.

We’re hiring for multiple positions inc.

  * Lead Backend Engineer -- Rails
  * Full Stack Engineer (multiple hires) -- React & Rails
  * Product Manager

Visit https://www.getro.com/about-us#join-our-team for more info and email our CPO at raul@getro.com to apply.

Getro’s secret sauce:

    - Strong financials: $2M+ in revenue, $4M+ in seed financing to grow 
    - 430 paying customers 
    - Experts in the space: Our co-founders have been working together in the recruiting space for the last 10 years
    - Remote-first company, from 2018 (before it was cool) 
    - 16 team members across 7 countries 
    - Techstars 2017 graduates
    - Our values are our north star; check out Getro.org (a network we set up in 2020 to help people get back to work after COVID-19)
    - As a fully remote company, we don't have offices, but we get together virtually and in person for company summits

New comment by mk2021 in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2021)"

Reforge | https://www.reforge.com | Senior Software Engineers + Multiple other roles | REMOTE in US | Full-time

Reforge is reinventing professional education. Our mission is to help people level-up in their careers, and meet like-minded people.

We’re a team of about 50 and we raised a Series A from a16z earlier this year. We were profitable in the Millions completely bootstrapped before taking that round:
https://www.reforge.com/blog/weve-raised-21m-to-grow-reforge https://a16z.com/2021/02/23/investing-in-reforge/

We have always been a remote-first environment, but do have an office in San Francisco if you want to drop by any time…!

Tech Stack:

Ruby on Rails

React, vanilla javascript, webpack

Postgres, redis, memcached

Our engineering team is 6 right now and we’ll be closer to 15-20 by end of year. I’d love to talk to you about it – I manage all recruiting for eng. Email me with HN in the subject line: morgan dot khodayari at reforge dot com!

All positions here: https://www.reforge.com/careers/all

Ecommerce Startup Inventory Financing

How Can Ecommerce Business Startup Inventory Financing Help Your Business? Selling goods online? Then you might need Ecommerce startup business inventory financing. Our World Has Changed – and It’s Gone Even More Online Ecommerce is where it’s at. Not convinced? While there was already a lot of online commerce, in March of 2020, due to … Continue reading Ecommerce Startup Inventory Financing