Introducing the LinkedIn hackathon
Getting sales teams to actively post high-quality content consistently on Linked-in can be a challenge. What if you are the type of organisation that has loads of specialists with great things to say who are in non-sales roles? These could be product / technology experts, consultants, scientists, engineers, or more generally specialists with knowledge that your clients’ value.
How best to engage them to become visible to your clients?
For many organisations like this, the number of non-sales roles may well outnumber sales roles by 5 to 1, or even 10 to 1. If they could all be active, think of the reach you can achieve.
Many experienced professionals will have networks on linked-in of 200+. Allowing for 2nd level connections who will see some of the posted content, this represents a huge opportunity.
Enter the Linked-in Hackathon
In 2019 we were working with such a client. A highly specialist engineering consultancy, with around 60 staff and 6 business development roles.
Even if we worked the BD roles to the max, we would only engage 10% of the company in social media. Besides, there were some immensely exciting projects being delivered that deserved to be shouted from the roof tops.
To help this client, we built a team friendly competition, the linked-in hackathon. This was a 6-week organisation wide competition designed to activate everyone to share their expert knowledge on Linked-in.
Team social selling using Linked-in’s ‘Social Selling Index’ (SSI) as the measure
The competition proceeded as follows:
- 90-minute workshops with 10 people in each
- Measure the social selling index of everyone as a baseline (See https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi)
- Basic training on building a credible Linked-in profile, posting and engaging with the network
- Form teams of 5 people
- Calculate the average SSI for each team
- Each team has 6 weeks to help each other boost their SSIs as much as possible
- Winning team had highest increase in average SSI
- Spot prizes for lead generation and excellent content posts
We chose the team approach to make a supportive environment and avoid any over-competitive business development personnel from causing other, more introverted and cautious characters from tuning out.
Each team was not allowed more than one BD role.
Linked-in’s SSI score has been positively correlated with effective social selling, and represents a great free, objective tool that all organisations can use.
The results
Of the 10 teams created, the improvement in SSI was in the range of 10-28% which represents a massive increase in activity across a network of 1000s of relevant professionals and clients. Only one team failed to increase their score, which they explained by having a high initial score (…interesting!)
Most importantly, the CEO noted that not only quantity, but the quality of posting had improved significantly.
On the side lines, we noted that quite a lot of previously ‘silent’ experts, who had great stories to sell were actually telling them and generating interest from potential clients.
Gamification is a well-known approach to incentivising teams to learn and perform. We believe the key to harvesting results is to be sensitive to organisational culture in the design, to avoid an allergic reaction from less competitive individuals.
To explore how you can increase your organisational social selling fitness, contact anderson.hirst@sellinginteractions.com who led this project.
