Glossary
What is social selling?
Social selling is using social networks, in B2B almost always LinkedIn, to find, learn about, and build relationships with potential buyers, instead of reaching them cold through email or the phone.
What it actually consists of
Four things, in rough order of value. Watching: knowing when someone changes role, posts about a problem you solve, or joins a company you sell to. Engaging: replying to what they wrote, in a way that would make sense if they read only your reply. Publishing: writing something that gives a stranger a reason to accept the next message. Connecting: the request itself, which works or fails almost entirely on the three above.
What it is not is sending a connection request followed immediately by a pitch. That is cold outreach in a different window, and it has trained an entire profession to be suspicious of new connections.
The Social Selling Index, and what it is worth
LinkedIn publishes a Social Selling Index out of 100, built from four components: establishing a professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insight, and building relationships.
It is a useful diagnostic and a poor target. It measures activity on LinkedIn, which is what LinkedIn can see, and activity is not the same as pipeline. Teams that manage to the number end up posting more and selling the same.
The part that breaks: nothing reaches the CRM
The conversation happens in LinkedIn messages and stays there. Six months later the deal is in the CRM with no history behind it, and whoever picks up the account has no idea how the relationship started.
This is the whole practical problem with social selling in a team setting. The relationship is real, and it is stored in one person browser. When they leave, it leaves.
How social selling works in a CRM
- Profiles captured as contacts. A browser extension that creates the record from the profile, so the person exists in the CRM before the conversation does.
- Messages on the timeline. LinkedIn conversation history against the company record, not only in the inbox of whoever sent it.
- Job-change signals. A contact moving to a new employer is the single strongest warm-outbound trigger there is, and it is invisible unless something watches for it.
- A source that says LinkedIn. Otherwise nobody can tell whether any of this produced revenue, which is how social selling budgets get cut.
How we do it in Lumenbase
Our Capture browser extension pulls a LinkedIn profile into Lumenbase as a contact with its company attached, and conversation history lands on the timeline rather than staying in one person messages. When a tracked contact changes employer, that shows up as a reason to get in touch.