Telling Your Team to Post More Won't Work

How do you get your sales team using LinkedIn? You give them one shared system that shows them what to do at every stage, from their profile all the way to the sales call, instead of telling them to post more.

“Be more active on LinkedIn” is the instruction I hear about most often from sales leaders, and it rarely brings in a single enquiry.

Here’s why, and what to do instead.

“Post more” is not a plan

When a sales leader tells me their team isn’t getting anything from LinkedIn, I usually find one of two things going on.

Either nobody is posting at all, because nobody knows what they’re meant to say. Or a few keen people are posting, getting likes from their colleagues, and quietly wondering why none of it turns into meetings.

Both teams have the same problem. They’ve been handed an activity, not a system. Posting is only one part of how LinkedIn brings in business, and on its own it’s the part least likely to bring in a buyer.

LinkedIn is no longer a radio channel

I explain it like this. LinkedIn used to work like a radio channel. You switched it on, and whatever was playing went out to everyone, whether they liked classical music or rock.

Now it’s far more targeted. LinkedIn reads everything on your people’s profiles and everything they post, and it builds a picture of who each person is and what they know. Then it shows their content to the people most likely to care about it.

That’s good news for a sales team. It means a salesperson with a few hundred connections can still reach the right buyers, as long as LinkedIn understands who they help.

It also means a profile that still describes someone’s last job, or says nothing about the problems your company solves, is quietly sending their content to the wrong people.

Each profile is a shop front

Think of each person’s profile as a shop. If a buyer walks past and can’t tell whether the shop sells cupcakes or clothing, they keep walking.

When a buyer looks up one of your salespeople after a first meeting, the profile should tell them straight away what that person does and who they help. If it doesn’t, the buyer leaves with less trust than they arrived with, and your salesperson never finds out it happened.

The system I teach teams: REACH

REACH is the five-stage method I use with sales, marketing and leadership teams. Most teams I meet are only doing one or two of the stages, which is exactly why LinkedIn isn’t bringing them business yet.

1/ Reposition. Each person’s profile is rewritten around the buyer, so the right people land on it and think “this is for me”.

2/ Educate. Your team shares what they know about the problems your buyers face, so buyers trust them before the first call.

3/ Amplify. Your people get in front of buyers where those buyers already spend their time, through thoughtful comments and the right connections, without pitching.

4/ Converse. A comment, a follow or a profile view turns into a real conversation, and that conversation turns into a booked meeting.

5/ Handshake. When the call happens, your team knows how to move from “let me think about it” to a clear next step before the call ends.

Every stage feeds the next one. A clear profile makes your team’s content land with the right people, and that content makes every conversation warmer before it even starts.

Warm beats cold

Most sales teams already know how to send a cold message. LinkedIn rewards something different.

I teach that warm outreach is roughly eight times more effective than cold outreach. When a buyer has already seen your salesperson’s comments and read a post or two, the first message doesn’t feel like a pitch. It feels like the next step in a conversation that has already started.

That’s why I don’t teach teams to send more messages. I teach them to build enough trust beforehand that their messages actually get answered.

Your team doesn’t need to post every day

Leaders often worry that LinkedIn will eat into selling time. It doesn’t need to.

Posts now stay visible for two to three weeks, so around three posts a week on one topic is plenty. Consistency matters far more than volume. A team that shows up steadily, on the topics their buyers care about, will do better than a team that posts every day for a fortnight and then goes quiet.

The rest of the time goes into conversations, which is where the selling happens anyway.

Where to start this week

If you want to see where your team stands, pick one salesperson and look at their profile the way a buyer would. Then ask yourself one question: in 30 seconds, could I tell what this person does and who they help?

If the answer is no, that’s where your team’s LinkedIn work begins. It doesn’t begin with more posts.

I run keynotes, workshops and ongoing training for sales, marketing and leadership teams, built around your buyers and where your people are today. You can see how it works on my keynotes and training page, or book a call and tell me about your team.