Social selling is becoming more and more prevalent amongst enterprise sales teams and like all activities, it’s important to track whether or not your team’s efforts are paying off. Social platforms make analytics easy to gather, in fact, it’s so easy that you can quickly find yourself tracking a ton of metrics that don’t even matter. In this post, we are going to go over a list of key metrics that every sales leader should be measuring to determine the success of their team’s social selling activities and which metrics to ignore.
Key Metrics vs Vanity metrics
When tracking social selling metrics, it’s important to clarify the difference between a vanity metric and a key metric. A vanity metric is generally something that makes you feel good about your efforts but doesn’t add any real business value.
An example of a vanity metrics is a Twitter ‘like’. A key metric would be the number of click-throughs or post views.
Here’s why – A user can ‘like’ a post but take no further action. When a user clicks on a link in the post they are actively taking action against that social post. They are then directed to a landing page where the user has the ability to signup or request a demo, providing business value.
Key metrics vary from campaign to campaign and are also different on various social media platforms. For example, a ‘like’ on Facebook is more valuable than a ‘like’ on Twitter, because Facebook ‘likes’ amplify reach meaning that more people will see your post.
Tip: Set a defined action that you want your social selling campaign to drive. This could be amplifying product awareness, creating warm outreach opportunities, driving product trials, or even gated asset downloads. If a social interaction can increase the chances of your defined action taking place it should be tracked.
Must Have Social Selling Metrics
Every organization’s goal will be different for social sales, but there are some metrics that should be tracked by default.
Link Clicks a.k.a Click-Through-Rate (CTR). CTR is a highly valued metric in social selling because it points directly to whether or not your social sales activities are gaining any attention.
Conversations Started. The real goal of social sales is to create a more natural path into a conversation for sales reps. It’s key to track comments on social posts that lead to larger conversations later on in the sales cycle.
Time to Connect. We’ve seen through our own program, quicker time to connection, which leads to more conversations, which leads to more qualified leads. This is a valuable metric for social selling activities on LinkedIn and Xing.
Tip: Encourage your sales reps to look for ways to start conversations on social posts and to respond quickly when a comment is left on a post.
Social Reach. There’s no reason to spend time on social selling activities if you’re not reaching anyone. Most social channels allow you to track how many users your posts reached, overtime you will be able to see a snowball effect with reach, which is where social selling becomes extremely valuable.
Proving Social Sales ROI
At the end of the day, the most valuable metric that you can track is deals closed. This can be extremely difficult to prove with social selling activities. To accomplish this, teams need to make sure that they are marrying their social analytics to the sales metrics in their CRM.
This allows you to really diagnose how successful reps are making deals happen. For Example, rep 1 has increased social engagement (connection requests, InMails, profile views) and that has lead to 25% more SQL’s, or 110% of quota attainment. Since CRMs don’t come with features for tracking social interactions, reps are forced to manually enter this information into the lead profile. This can be a huge time burden for sales teams and slow productivity.
Luckily, there is Colabo – Colabo’s platform can help you capture all social activity, auto-sync it to your CRM for deeper insight into what engagement activities are working for your team. This makes it easy to run reports against the long-term success of your social selling activities.
