BLOG

12 Valuable Metrics For Measuring Social Selling Success

Amar Sheth
Amar Sheth

12 Valuable Metrics for Measuring Social Selling SuccessAs Social Selling grows and enters the sales process of organizations, the most natural questions that emerge pertain to metrics. Sales is used to measuring everything and social is no different.

In this post, we begin to dissect and detail some of the nuances you should start to review as you aim to infuse social media into your overall sales cadence.

Special note for sales leaders: pipeline and revenue are being measured (that’s the good news) however there are metrics that need to be measured far before this occurs. Follow the prescriptive process below to understand how learning impacts sales goals.

Without further ado, let’s jump in and begin to look at these in detail.

Leading Indicators

Leading indicators describe your learning behaviour regardless of how you decide to learn Social Selling (eg. self-teaching, on demand videos, workshops, etc.). Depending on the learning tools and resources that you decide to use, metrics will change. Take a look at some of the elements that can be tracked and measured.

Are you focused on these yet?

1. Time Spent On Educational Content: The more time you spend on Social Selling educational content, the more likely you will implement that knowledge.

2. Course Videos Completed: If you choose to learn via on demand courses or blended learning, the completion of course videos helps indicate that you’re engaging with the educational content and meeting objectives.

3. Quizzes Completed: Tests, quizzes and exams provide a great overview of your learning thus far. It’s a great measurement of how well you’re doing in the program and demonstrates your ability to recollect the information you learned.

4. Learning Grades: Similar to a GPA or your grades in school, this metric helps define your success after completing your training program. Those who excelled in school with the better grades – the more likely they were to excel in the workplace.

5. Learning Behavior Index: This successfully provides predictive analytics into which of your learners will generate revenue socially.

Current Indicators

Once Social Selling knowledge has been acquired, it’s time for measuring social activity. Current indicators track day to day Social Selling activity outcomes. This creates accountability for sales professionals who share daily content, start conversations, nurture and prospect on social channels.

Not only can you use Twitter and LinkedIn’s native analytics features, but you can also incorporate data from more advanced tools such as Hootsuite, Buffer, or SproutSocial.

6. Number of New Twitter Followers: This shows how actively engaged you are on Twitter and how engaged your followers are. Think of Twitter as a great networking platform to follow people and gain intelligence.

7. Number of New LinkedIn Connections: By tracking the number of connections in your network, you can ultimately track how influential you are in shaping your buyer’s journey. While some favor a large LinkedIn network and others endorse a “quality” network, the reality is you need both.

8. Total network growth: As your build new followers on twitter and new connections on LinkedIn, your network will simultaneously grow.

Lagging Indicators

Lagging indicators shows data that attributes your leads to Social Selling. You can use your existing CRM to leverage this information such as new leads, accounts and opportunities based on social activity. You can easily use our free eBook titled The ROI of Social Selling to build this scenario yourself.

If done correctly by your CRM Administrator/Sales Operations Analyst, you can successfully build dashboards to measure the impact of:

9. New SQLs from Social

10. New Opportunities from Social

11. Closed deals from Social

12. Total revenue (monthly, quarterly, yearly) from Social

The Bottom Line

The indicators you can use to measure Social Selling are not hard to implement. If you’ve already started a program at your company, use these ideas to help build your own measurements framework.

Breaking down indicators into their logical areas makes sense – you can measure learning and effectively determine what impact participants will have on building networks and growing overall pipeline and revenue.

Let me know your thoughts on these steps. Are you doing any of this today? Tweet me @AmarSheth or connect with me on LinkedIn to let me know your thoughts.

{{cta(‘ec55a9f6-f4e1-449d-870d-899a003e60a8’)}}

Follow Us

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Get our latest blogs direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Subscribe to receive more sales insights, analysis, and perspectives from Sales For Life.

The Ultimate Guide to Social Selling