You Don't Have to Become an Influencer to Win on LinkedIn

5 modes of LinkedIn for GTM, and how to pick the one that fits your goals and your bandwidth right now

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You’ll walk out with an action plan you can execute over the summer, so your September launch (or whenever you’re shipping) actually lands. If you run a team or work agency-side, this is the alignment unlock: a joint session to pressure-test the ideas you co-created and get them defined well enough to ship. We’ll go deep on prioritization and roadmapping - and yes, MCPs, but Rory’s there to stop me if I start to AI-geek-out too much. Plenty of Q&A too.

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Dear GTM Strategist,

This week, I was in Vienna working with a $10M ARR SaaS company that counts FIFA, Google, and Ferrari among its customers. They have 9,000 customers; they are now laser-focused on enterprise, and when I presented the following chart to the team and asked the founder whether he was active on LinkedIn, he looked at me as if someone told me that I needed to lose 10 lbs before summer.

And I get it. Founders have 99 problems, and LinkedIn content is just one of them.

But from all the “let’s do LinkedIn” attempts, I have consistently seen the best results when the commitment came from the top down. Every time a lone marketer tries to motivate their colleagues to post more by offering a chance to win an Amazon gift card, the effort is doomed before it starts - the enthusiasm dies even faster than the budget.

The real question is this: how do you benefit (positive ROI) from content production, aka demand generation, without making it your primary job, your weekends, or the chore in your day?

That is what this post is about. Not another “How I gained 100K followers.” It is a fair take on what works vs what you are willing to put in - and sometimes, that hasn’t have to be much.

LinkedIn is not all-in or nothing. It is a spectrum.

You don’t have to choose between screen-sucking on LinkedIn five hours a day and writing the whole thing off as a scam. To help you navigate, I created 5 modes for using LinkedIn for GTM demand gen. Pick the one that best matches your GTM goals and capacity.

This edition will be especially useful if you are trying to build a personal brand and generate leads on LinkedIn. In this post, we’ll unwrap:

• The one sanity check to run before you spend a single hour on LinkedIn

• The five modes of LinkedIn for GTM, from a polished profile to a media machine, each with what it is, who it’s for, and what it takes

And summer ☀️ is the perfect time to do just that.

But first, a sanity check

Should you even do it?

Just answer one question honestly: is your ICP actually on LinkedIn?

I get a lot of backlash here, especially from technical teams. “But our audience is on X.” “Everyone’s on Reddit now.” Maybe.

In my experience, LinkedIn is where the money is for B2B tech companies.

And 66% of participants in my State of B2B GTM survey said the same.

Please check by asking them - see where your ICP actually is active. Just because they are not posting on LinkedIn does not mean they are not there.

The second trap is more subtle, and fatal for the success of the operation.

People obsess over the input instead of the outcome.

They see an influencer they like posting 10 times a week and take that as a proven recipe for success on LinkedIn. Then they:

1. Pump up a bunch of low-quality AI-generated fluff that does not work, and conclude that LinkedIn does not work whatsoever;

2. Fall into a depression that they are not “good enough” because they cannot keep the pace and abandon the mission.

Setting objectives is a strong motivator and a mission-critical ingredient in measurable GTM motions, but you can reach 200K followers or 1 million impressions - and still have an empty pipeline.

The ONLY objective that most people really care about is:

“I want LinkedIn to attract _____ ICP-fit leads from LinkedIn.”

This is money. Followers and leads are at best leading metrics.

It surely helps to look credible on LinkedIn (bigger profiles, higher engagement) - but at best these are leading metrics.

So how will you get the right leads?

Sometimes all you need is a sharp profile and a well-thought-out outbound campaign.

Other times, it requires a full-fledged content engine with multiple LinkedIn profiles (people) on board.

Based on winning patterns in my client portfolio, I structured 5 LinkedIn modes to generate demand on LinkedIn. They all work, and you don’t have to do them all.

Mode 1: Indexed

What it is: A profile that does its job the moment someone Googles your name (or asks ChatGPT). Something good comes up, you look legit, and you are well positioned for the keywords you want to be found for. Even if you solely rely on outbound, ICPs will likely check out your LinkedIn profile.

Who it’s for: Everyone, but especially the C-level at smaller companies and anyone who will land in someone’s inbox as a seller. This is the absolute must for squeezing new business out of LinkedIn - consider it to be your landing page.

What it takes: Start with a profile makeover, and you can do this easily with Claude. Find a few profiles you admire, ask Claude to analyze them, then adapt the winning patterns to your own context and roles. While you are there, add a few industry-relevant keywords, because being properly indexed by the search engines helps more than people expect. People are drawn to brands and to numbers, and they decide in <5 seconds whether your profile is worth their attention. Treat it like a conversion optimization project.

How to make it shine: make the most of your LinkedIn visual inventory (background photo, featured section & images under job experience). A human design adds credibility, and I think that still counts for something. (Call me old-fashioned.) You can just start with some Canva/Figma templates.

Treat the “Featured” section like prime real estate: highlight a few of your best posts, or more importantly, the links you want to drive demand toward. Keep your profile open and make it stupidly easy to contact you.

Pro tip: Most of us are stuck with networks from our “previous lives” - our colleague buddies and people that we met at work events may not be the best ICP, so before you even start thinking about content creation, make sure you are adding new ICP relevant people to your network; otherwise, you’ll have a problem with relevant reach. LinkedIn’s algo got better at showing your content to people who are most likely to care about it in the feed, but it also shows it to newer and most engaged connections. Make sure you are adding ICP-relevant people to your network non-stop (more about that in mode 3).

Mode 2: The Opinion Leader

What it is: You have something smart to say, and you actually write comments or post. This is the jump from “findable” to “followed” - or even “respected”

Who it’s for: Whoever’s GTM efforts can benefit from trust and preference, and who can commit real, recurring time (minimum 30 minutes/day). With AI flooding every feed and outbound more saturated than ever, the ability to build genuine preference and trust with your target audience has become a superpower. Some people call it the new moat.

What it takes:

2a) Engaging with other profiles

For value commenting, you’ll first need to identify posts worth commenting on - the easiest thing to get started is just to say “I need to write 10 comments a day and go through my feed” - that will help you put in the reps. Later on, you can either tie your efforts to another LinkedIn profile (content creator, opinion leader, competitor, target client) or build a system to identify relevant topics (content) that you want to pitch in on.

You hit the “bell” at the chosen profiles to get notifications on LinkedIn, but since those are pretty broken, you may be better off putting together a spreadsheet of profiles you’ll comment on, even an agent that will serve you their posts as Slack notifications, for example. I avoid AI-generated commenting like the plague because it makes smart people look really dumb, but I am big on using Wispr Flow for commenting because it is much faster.

Hit the bell button on relevant content creators and opt for all notifications, so you can regularly engage with their content

Once the profile is solid, you can already start doing a little confident inbound through value commenting. Pick a handful of target profiles - customers, relevant influencers, the people whose attention your ICP already pays - and either join the meaningful conversations happening there or get some DMs rolling. Keep a simple spreadsheet of people worth commenting on. You can reverse-engineer it from whoever is already active and commenting in your domain, or just ask your audience who is relevant to them. It is not exactly effortless to build, but it is very doable.

The one hard rule: do not over-automate this. Your comments should be at least semi-decent, because a generic “Great post!” actively makes you look worse. This whole mode, a legit profile plus disciplined commenting, is the absolute minimum to squeeze new business out of LinkedIn and look credible while your outbound is landing.

2b) Posting your own content

The heavy lifting is producing content yourself. You need content pillars, which in plain language, is what you want to be known for. That is usually a blend of your domain knowledge, some industry insight, and trends, and anything involving AI tends to perform especially well right now.

Underneath the pillars, you need your strategic narrative and positioning nailed down, meaning your genuinely unique points of view. You can pull these from an interview you did or do an interview with yourself (just talk to Claude or ChatGPT for some time and ask it to identify your content pillars). Some questions that will help you here are: “what are competitors getting wrong?” and “what is the biggest misconception in our space?” That is enough to produce a strong first batch.

I would not pre-produce a giant vault of content and call it done. Content is a fast back-and-forth game, which is why I stay close to the signals of what is working. I study the subjects and the creators crushing it in engagement and comments right now, then feed the patterns into my own ideas. Call it pattern recognition.

My usual cadence with teams is three to five posts a week, and I would not overthink the clock: LinkedIn posts have a longer lifespan than they used to, so if the content is good, the exact time of day barely moves the needle.

Here is roughly how a week looks for me in this mode:

• 2 to 4 hours of content creation

• Design time, where Claude is genuinely excellent for early mock-ups, then I hand over the brief to my designer

• 1 to 2 hours of commenting (which is where Wispr Flow saves my sanity). A healthy diet is around 10 value comments a day on your target accounts, plus replying to the ones you get.

The signals I trust most for whether a piece is landing are saves and embedded comments; they tell me more than likes ever do.

Then I close the loop: I check analytics, do more of what worked, and hold an 80/20 split - 80% proven patterns, mine or other people’s, and 20% reserved for experiments that might become the next thing that lands.

Mode 3: The GTM Engineer

What it is: You add a few basic agents and automations to the flow so LinkedIn activity turns into a steady stream of new audience and fresh sales opportunities. If “GTM engineering” makes you twitch, cross it out and just think LinkedIn outbound.

Who it’s for: Teams ready to operationalize what Modes 1 and 2 surface, and who want to act on intent instead of waiting around for inbound leads to happen.

What it takes: You operate on signals. A signal is not just someone changing roles in the last 90 days. The richer ones are behavioral: someone engaging with a post on a topic central to you, commenting “send me X” on a lead magnet, or interacting with a specific creator or post inside your orbit. The simplest possible move is to start adding those people to your network. The more advanced mode is to coordinate an entire decision-making unit through multiple touchpoints, which is just ABM, and we have covered that before. Start with whatever adds value at the lowest level of complication, and build from there.

Now an all-important disclaimer, because it matters and I would hate for you to learn it the hard way: automation tools are strictly forbidden by LinkedIn. You can get flagged, and LinkedIn is genuinely on a witch hunt for automations. It sometimes reacts to nothing more than the number of profiles you open in a day. Honestly, I know more people who have happily participated in engagement schemes than people who got blocked for automation, but the platform’s tolerance is unpredictable.

If you want to be completely safe, do it manually within sane limits, somewhere around 30 DMs a day and 100 connection requests a week.

But then actually do it, seriously and consistently, or hire a VA to help, because this is the step that converts content into pipeline. (Pure data-scraping tools aka Exa are a different category, where the responsibility tends to sit with the tool rather than with you, but know the rules before you lean on anything.)

Mode 4: House of Personal Brands

What it is: Instead of one profile carrying everything, you activate several that support each other and cover different areas. One strong personal brand is impactful. A coordinated house of them is where it gets genuinely fun.

Who it’s for: Companies where content already has top-down buy-in and several people are willing to be on the journey together. The dividends are huge, but so is the work. It is hard, it requires constant pushing, and the orchestration and design coordination are consuming, especially early on.

Source

What it takes: Start by teaming up with a few colleagues who are on the same content journey as you. Give the group a core brand strategy, the key news, launches, and narratives you will all amplify, and then help each person develop their own pillars and their own genuine point of view. You are not turning anyone into a billboard. These profiles are still real personal networks, and your job as the coordinator is to make every participant look good and keep them excited to take part. That is what makes it a real win-win instead of a chore people quietly abandon.

Attio is one of the companies where I see multiple high-level team members present on LinkedIn, which is especially visible at nicely orchestrated posts around key launch events. I asked Brian Da Silva, Social & Creator Lead at Attio, how they manage that:

“We treat social as an ecosystem, with the brand account at the center and profiles like our founder, our leadership team, and specific launch contributors amplifying around it. Each profile gives a different perspective you’d never get from the brand account, and having that range of content go out together is a big part of our social approach. That’s given us real surface area on LinkedIn, especially for bigger launches. It’s been important to remove as much friction as we can in this process by creating specific guides for the team to deliver content for their channels.”

Two traps to avoid, and both are bombs:

First, never copy-paste links straight from LinkedIn to share internally. The URL carries tracking parameters, and circulating those can flag your content. Strip the tracking portion and share the clean link somewhere else entirely, like WhatsApp or Slack, anywhere your people actually coordinate.

Second, engagement pods. There is a whole world of invite-only “boost each other” schemes out there. If your real goal is to signal to the algorithm that your content is mainly interesting to other founders and ghostwriters running engagement bots, by all means go ahead. It is genuinely not relevant to me, and it is a landmine I would much rather walk around.

Mode 5: Media Machine

What it is: You stop depending on a single platform. I love LinkedIn and have nothing bad to say about the opportunities it has handed me, but it has quirks, the algorithm shifts, and every algo change irritates me a little. That is not a reason to pull back, but you can make sure it’s not the only thing holding up your pipeline.

Who it’s for: Anyone whose demand generation has quietly become reliant on LinkedIn alone. The deeper the dependency, the more urgent the fallback.

What it takes: A real second channel that you can measure. I learned this the hard way. The very first time I got temporarily restricted, I was mid-workshop with a VC from Dubai, people suddenly could not tag me, and my heart almost stopped. It took LinkedIn about 2 days to come back and essentially say, “it is fine, carry on.” I appreciate the platform, but I never want you reliant on one channel for demand.

My best diversification so far is Substack. I have a newsletter list, I promote some of my Substack work on LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is not the sole driver of new subscribers, and that is the point. One honest caveat on the “newsletter for companies” debate: for personal brands, Substack and Beehiiv work great, and plenty of people will tell you to use them for companies too. I think that mostly holds for personal brands. For a company, a good old newsletter really needs to integrate tightly with your CRM, and that is harder to pull off cleanly on Substack or Beehiiv. Not impossible, just harder. The principle that matters most: go wherever you can analytically measure the results and connect them back to your effort.

A few other channels, honestly assessed. A lot of creators I talk to are doubling down on X, even though reach there has gotten weird, and breaking through is hard but not impossible. YouTube is a common and powerful brand-builder, but the production effort is in a different league. And the old Gary Vaynerchuk gospel of “record once, repurpose everywhere” largely breaks in the kinds of fast-moving spaces we work in. When trends shift weekly, you should be harvesting fresh insights to stay valuable and top of mind, not endlessly recycling the same clip into ten formats.

Pick your mode and start

So what will it be?

Find the one that matches your goals and your bandwidth right now, commit to it properly, and stick with it by September. Give it a fair 1-2 months to validate.

Summer is honestly one of the best periods to get your skin in the game or level up your LinkedIn activity. Most of us will have more time and bandwidth to work on what is “important but not urgent”. And reach drops a little so you can train your content muscles before the fall rush hits.

Let me know in the comments which mode you are in, what is working for you, and where you are getting stuck.

And if you are doing something I haven’t covered here, I genuinely want to hear it.

Let’s close some deals on LinkedIn 🤝

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