The Borexino collaboration has recently released the first simultaneous measurement of the interaction rates of pp, 7Be and pep solar neutrinos. This result was made possible by the unprecedented low background of the scintillator during Phase-II, together with new data analysis techniques. We present the data selection strategy of the Borexino solar neutrino analysis: we describe how we select the neutrino-like scintillation events according to event-based cuts which eliminate most of the external and cosmogenic backgrounds. We describe also how the spatial distribution of events and a β+/β− pulse shape discrimination variable are used in a multivariate fit approach to additionally constrain the residual cosmogenic 11C and external backgrounds.