Most B2B organisations still treat LinkedIn as a parallel marketing activity. Content is published. Executives post occasionally (quite often via junior members of the comms team). Sales connect and sometimes message. None of it is deliberately tied to what is happening inside live deals.
That is a mistake.
Gartner and CEB research have shown for years that complex B2B purchases are made by buying groups, not individuals, and that confidence, consensus, and risk reduction are as important as product capability. Today, a significant part of that sense making happens on LinkedIn.
When a deal is live, buying group members use LinkedIn to:
Validate who you are
Assess whether your people understand their world
Look for stability and leadership
Seek peer and analyst signals
Quietly reduce perceived risk
Now, they may not be consciously doing this. But they are doing this. LinkedIn is already influencing deals and most teams just are not managing it.
Map LinkedIn to real buying group roles
To make this practical, think about the three roles that almost always shape enterprise decisions.
The economic buyer
Usually a C suite or senior commercial leader. They care about business impact, risk, stability, and whether your leadership looks credible and in control. For them, LinkedIn presence should demonstrate strategic clarity, market understanding, and organisational maturity.
The technical or functional evaluator
Often a CIO, CTO, Head of Ops, or senior practitioner. They look for depth, realism, and whether your people genuinely understand the problem space. Here, subject matter experts sharing practical insight, trade-offs, and lessons learned matter far more than polished marketing messages.
The risk and compliance influencer
Legal, security, procurement, or governance roles. They are looking for trust signals, proof, and reassurance that choosing you will not expose them. Analyst commentary, customer stories, and evidence of process maturity play a big role.
Reality check
If your LinkedIn presence only speaks to one of these groups, you are leaving the others to form their own, often conservative, conclusions.
Create a simple deal support loop
To move from theory to practice, I often recommend teams treat LinkedIn as part of their deal operating rhythm.
A simple model that works in B2B organisations looks like this:
Identify priority live accounts in CRM
Map the buying group and key roles
Agree which internal voices should be visible to each role
Define the themes that reduce risk at this stage of the deal
Coordinate light, authentic visibility and engagement
Review which stakeholders viewed, followed, or engaged
This is not about orchestrated commenting or spammy activity. It is about making sure the right people, with the right credibility, are visible to the right stakeholders at the right time. And in the largest, transformational deals, you should be looking for any marginal gain you can get. From a career perspective, hearing a marketer talk about this stuff could really help the internal perception of them, we’re thinking about marketing from a commercially lense here.
A simple example of LinkedIn supporting one live deal
Imagine a £500k enterprise software deal with a financial services firm. The buying group includes a CIO, a Head of Operations, a Procurement lead, and a Risk Director.
Before first contact
Marketing and sales agree this is a priority account. The CIO and Head of Ops are already connected to your CTO and one of your lead consultants. Over the previous month, both have seen thoughtful posts about regulatory change and operational resilience. When the first outreach email arrives, your company name is not unfamiliar. Response rates are higher because recognition and credibility are already forming.
During evaluation
The technical team is assessing your platform against two competitors. Your subject matter experts are sharing practical perspectives on integration challenges and lessons learned from similar clients. The Head of Ops clicks through to a case study and notices several of your consultants commenting with real implementation insight and its clearly written by them and not the comms team. This quietly reinforces that you have depth, not just marketing polish.
Late stage and risk sign off
Procurement and Risk are now involved. They look at your leadership team on LinkedIn. They see consistent messaging about security, governance, and long-term partnership. They also see analysts and partners engaging with your content. Nothing raises red flags. No grand claims, no hype. Just steady, credible signals. The internal question shifts from “Are they safe” to “Which of the three is the safest?”.
LinkedIn will not close a deal; I’d never go that far. But it can help reduce uncertainty, reinforce confidence, and make every sales conversation a little easier and are useful reasons to follow up for salespeople who want to reinforce a point made in a meeting.
Warm accounts before outreach
Before the first call, familiarity matters. LinkedIn’s own B2B Institute and ABM research from firms like ITSMA (which I have a long history with – I met my wife at one of their conferences!) consistently show that recognition and perceived expertise increase response rates.
This means:
Ensuring target stakeholders are connected to relevant leaders and experts
Making sure your company and people appear in their feed in a useful, non-promotional way
Establishing presence before the first sales interaction
The goal should be to ensure that by the time outreach happens, you are no longer a cold name.
Support evaluation and objection handling
Late-stage objections are rarely about features. They are about giving the buyers confidence that they are ready to finalize their decision.
Is this company stable?
Do they really understand our industry?
Are we taking a personal or professional risk by choosing them?
Will they be a safe long term partner?
LinkedIn content and presence can quietly address these by:
Showing how your leaders think about industry change. I mean truly them not sanitised BS that takes the soul and personality from their views.
Demonstrating how your experts handle complexity
Sharing how clients have navigated challenges with you. REAL anecdotes and stories.
Providing analyst and partner validation
This is narrative reassurance, not sales scripting.
A hard truth
We all know that people by from people. Most B2B deals are lost on confidence, not capability. LinkedIn is now one of the main places that confidence is formed for relatively new professional people in your life, yet it is still treated as a side project. It may not make you like someone but it sure can put you off dealing with them.
What not to do
To use LinkedIn effectively in live deals, it helps to be clear about what actively undermines credibility.
Avoid
Generic thought leadership that says nothing specific
Engagement bait and motivational poster content
Over polished, obviously ghostwritten executive posts
Automated connection and messaging sequences
Product pushing in public threads
Senior buyers can smell inauthenticity and manipulation instantly. It erodes trust rather than builds it. I like to call it Social Influenza.
How sales should use LinkedIn day to day
At an individual level, effective sales use of LinkedIn includes:
Researching stakeholder backgrounds and priorities
Following what matters to them
Sharing relevant insight before and after meetings
Reinforcing key points with credible third party content
Staying visible without being intrusive
The best salespeople already do this. The best organisations support it with training, content, and alignment.
How to evidence impact
You will never be able to claim direct attribution in the same way as paid media. But you can show contribution.
Useful indicators include:
Growth of relationships within target accounts
Profile views and follows from buying group members
Engagement with deal relevant content
Improved reply rates and meeting acceptance
Sales feedback on confidence and preparedness of prospects. And that’s a key one. If they verbally support what marketing
is doing to support their active deals and have been actively involved, there’s half the battle won.
The simple rule to remember
The biggest and best deals are competitive and strategic use of LinkedIn can give your team a very slim edge. At the very least, it can really help insert strategic communication thoughts into the sales team and, if at the very least, they have more relevant and tailored material to call upon and have the talking points front of mind.
Sometimes it’s the little things that could tip deals into your favour.
Call to action
If you want LinkedIn to support live sales deals, stop treating it as a social channel and start treating it as part of your commercial system.
Map buying group roles.
Align visible voices to those roles.
Agree the stories and proof that reduce risk at each stage.
Support sales to use LinkedIn deliberately, not opportunistically.
If you want help turning LinkedIn into a genuine deal support capability rather than a vanity platform, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
