LinkedIn Reach Is Down. Here’s What To Do About It.
Social selling to the rescue - make every interaction count
For this post, I spent 35 hours and dug deep because the LinkedIn content creation game (inbound) is one of the most complex and longest ways to create your pipeline.
While others encourage you to build content systems, experiment with different formats, publish at certain times and post 100 comments a day - I say this:
“Do less. Do it better.”
In the GTM stage, you don’t have 20+ hours a week to spare on LinkedIn. You have limited resources. Everything you do must count.
You need to book those demos and sell more.
You need to squeeze the most out of everything you do.
In this post, you will learn:
How to declutter your GTM using the ICP lens
Why the content-first LinkedIn playbook is getting harder
What defines the new age of social selling
Two ways to tap leads that wouldn’t otherwise contact you this quarter
Instead of brooding over why the organic reach is ½ from last year and mindlessly scrolling through LinkedIn to find new viral posts to copy, let’s do something outrageous.
Let’s proactively reach out to people to start business conversations. Pivot your inbound GTM motion from reactive to proactive.
Declutter your GTM, regain focus in 2025
You want to do so much in your early GTM stage - organize a webinar, sponsor a conference and collaborate with that new hot influencer in your space. And ads, yes, you want to run ads 🤯- the FOMO is real. But:
You can do anything, but you can't do everything.
-David Allen
In 2025, I’ve decided to live by the rule of radical focus.
I am serving my ICP in channels relevant to them.
Last year was more about experimentation to build one scalable and predictable GTM motion. This year is about developing a synergistic 2-3 GTM-motion approach to help me scale beyond product-market fit.
Every day is a test for me. To keep my focus, I must say “yes” to something and “no” to something else.
To gauge the importance of tasks, I have to keep asking myself:
Is this mission-critical 🎯?
Get good at things.
Do the critical mass of reps.
I am not trying to Marie Kondo my way into your head (Haiku is not my favorite poetry format anyway). Suppose you had 1-5 people on your marketing team who you sent chasing 30 different “personas” across 5 different GTM Motions - what do you think will happen?
Disappointment and a waste of resources.
So focus 🎯 - and one of the best ways to do this is to double down on your ICP - ideal customer profile (or ECP-early customer profile if you are pre-product-market fit).
Be mean about this.
You have my permission to say NO more often.
An opportunity could be outside your ICP bucket. You could be focused on your mission-critical goals, such as closing 500 customers this quarter.
In such a situation, to all those conference and roundtable invites, investment pitches (if you’re not raising right now), content collaboration ideas, and podcast invites (Except Lenny. If he invites, you must go), just say a big…
Right now, these are distractions, not new opportunities.
The only thing that will help you is to sell more, and often, in B2B, your touchpoints are on LinkedIn. So, you should be posting more, right?
OLD WAY: Create content for everyone and hope to generate more leads
I sympathize with people who started inbound marketing in 2024/2025.
The reach is so much lower than it used to be.
Whenever you share something promotional, the algorithm slashes impressions.
Standing out is difficult in the flood of AI-generated content.
Using the old LinkedIn playbook, it’s still possible to cut through the noise and build a strong personal brand. But it consumes more resources than before.
It follows the AIDA model:
Attention (In some variations, Awareness)
Interest
Desire (In some variations, Decision)
Action
The old playbook works like this: You know only 3% of your market is ready to buy now, and you need to help more people on their buyer journey to reach that number. So, create more content for different funnel stages using blogs, case studies and LinkedIn posts.
My concern with the old playbook is this: “How do you deliver the content and to whom?”
Why would you spray a random piece of content on your top channel (say, LinkedIn profile) and annoy 10,000 people who are not even interested? All this just to find the 3%. It's quite wasteful.
Even if you’re sold on the “content creation game” as a long-term GTM strategy, you know it’s difficult to scale with moving targets. It fails to produce a predictable and seizable pipeline. It can take forever to build.
For instance, last week, someone who followed me in 2021 bought my services for the first time. I was happy, but I can’t afford to build a business with a 4-year sales cycle. I am not selling aeroplanes here. 🫢
So I told my clients starting inbound in 2025 this:
“Don’t lean heavily into LinkedIn content creation before having a social selling strategy. You need to sell - you don’t need to become an influencer.”
NEW WAY: Social selling - Find hidden leads and start the sales conversation before getting inbound inquiries
Most of my market may not be ready to buy now, and I can produce some content to educate them. But what’s the point of meeting leads that don’t qualify?
There must be a better way to target the right people at the right time.
So here is a crazy idea: Let’s proactively talk to them.
Let’s track them using behavioral patterns and start the conversation.
Welcome to the universe of social selling!
Social selling is about using social media (LinkedIn) to connect with prospects, and build trust and nurture relationships with them.
It's not about hard selling—it's about sharing value, engaging authentically, and turning connections into loyal customers.
Cheesy, right? 🧀
Let’s get real:
Do not wait for leads to come to you.
As soon as an ICP-fit lead shows signs of buying intent, reach out to them.
Why should you care:
The typical reply rate of cold outreach to your ICP is <1%. You can bump this to double digits using social selling.
A word of caution: Don’t pitch your services in the first interaction. First, provide some value they care about.
❌ Thanks for accepting my invite. I see your SEO sucks, wanna have a 15-min meeting next week?
✅ Hi [First Name],
I enjoyed your session at [Event Name]! Your insights on [specific topic] gave me much to think about, particularly [specific example]. I’d love to schedule a quick call to hear more about your approach—would you be open to connecting next week?
Next, I will show you two data-backed ways to implement social selling (video demos inside):
1) Identify ICP-fit prospects on your website and start prospecting them
First, find the hottest leads from your website.
These are already checking out your website but have not bought yet. You can quickly get this data using an analytics tool like Swan and act on it.
Swan is an AI-powered platform for converting anonymous website visitors into qualified leads and targeted LinkedIn outreach, as detailed in the text. It specializes in tools like website deanonymization, AI research, and AI personalization for B2B sales enablement.
I tried Swan, an AI-backed SDR, and its features stood out:
Automated qualification: I didn’t have to wrestle with complex filters and 50 drop-down windows — I could describe my ICP in human terms. Swan only reports on the leads that are relevant to you. You don’t have to research every visitor manually.
Effortless setup: Leads are sent straight to your Slack so you can address them in real time. I got lead details by the contact-level, not just the company-level.
Decision-making insights: Swan is useful for selling complex solutions. Swan's AI agent maps the decision-making teams in your prospects’ companies. You can know who the decision makers and target them with precision.
Personalized outreach: Swan also helps with LinkedIn automation at scale. I regularly reach out to my ICP-fit leads and get over 20 fresh DMs daily. Swan helped me enrich data and send personalized connection requests and DMs.
After I installed Swan on my GTM Strategist website, I was amazed to learn that decision-makers from Mastercard, Novartis, Panasonic, and Nestlé had visited it.
As the next step, I am developing new offers and products based on these insights to capture these warm leads.
Here are the reasons why I loved Swan:
It’s easy to set up and there’s an inflow of leads on Slack that I can start prospecting immediately.
Fascinatingly accurate definition of ICP that you can easily describe like a human
In-depth analysis of Decision Making Committee - if you are selling some more complex solution, multiple decision-makers will have to pitch in. With Swan, you can generate these insights and find the best leads.
Founder Amos is a sales and business development ninja. He offers a white-glove onboarding experience and ensures that your campaign is set up to deliver positive ROI quickly. Their pricing starts at $350 per month, which is less than what you pay for an hour of consultation with a semi-competent SDR who tells you what to do but does not get the work done for this price.
But what if your website barely gets traffic? And you’re investing so much on your LinkedIn only to see <10 ICP-fit leads a week in your inbox.
I found an exciting solution for this. 😇
2) Uncover hidden LinkedIn leads with Waalaxy
Picture this:
You share a post at 11 am on LinkedIn.
It gets 10,000 impressions and 100 likes. But 0 leads.
This is a typical day in the content creation department.
But you need to educate your buyers before selling to them, right?
Well …
LinkedIn gurus are slowly transitioning from the “post more content” narrative to “start social selling.”
They used to tell you to say “Hi” to every new connection and then ask them, “What brought you to my profile?” The other norm is to send out 100 (not more) invites per week to your ICP.
You can automate this and build a system. Let’s see how you can do this with Waalaxy.
With a database of 500M highly qualified leads of +150,0000 users, 1 million campaigns, Waalaxy is on a mission to help you make LinkedIn your #1 acquisition channel by offering:
Streamline Outreach: Automate LinkedIn and email actions, track progress in real-time, and leverage AI writing assistance for personalized communication.
Seamless Data Management: Import, export, and manage leads in a CRM, with tools like Dropcontact for email discovery and CSV integration.
Customizable Workflows: Sync campaigns using webhooks like Zapier and set automatic lead imports based on criteria like profile views.
I love it and my clients love it, too. Waalaxy is available for free and does not require LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
It’s made with love in France 🇫🇷 by an awesome team.
Here is a quick demo of how I automate my connection requests, add connections from competitors and send social selling messages ONLY to my ICP-fit leads to book more meetings.
The pricing starts at $19/month per “social seller”. It’s easy to scale once you see more traction. They offer multiple team options to empower more “social sellers” and scale this motion once it works well. The fun part is that you can start using the forever-free version immediately. It lets you send 80 invitations per month and offers 25 email finder credits. What is not to like?
Remember, such automation tools must aid your engagement efforts on LinkedIn. They are not a replacement for personal interactions. We know LinkedIn can sometimes be harsh. 🧐
And I know what you’ll ask next - what to write to these people?
I compiled 15 social selling scripts - they are included in my ‘100-Step GTM Checklist’ that was tested with 7,500+ busines owners. You’ll also find guides, templates, and videos for pre- to post-launch scaling. Just a few days left for the January discount.
Until next time,
Maja