Category: Social Selling

Most people hear “social selling” and think “how do I squeeze the most leads out of my LinkedIn network.” That’s the exact reason it doesn’t work for them.

Building trust, specifically when it comes to social platforms like LinkedIn, pays off nothing in the short term and can pay off enormously over the years.

Treat it like a relationship, because that’s what it is. You can sleep with someone the first night and have a fine time, but that’s not how anything lasting starts. Lasting starts with respect and the patience to get to know each other. Your prospect isn’t a lead to shove down a fucking funnel. Leads are people and most people aren’t stupid. They can smell it the second you’re only being nice because you want something.

So asking “what’s the ROI of networking” is like asking for the ROI on a first date. So don’t and get these four things right instead.

1. Give more than you ask for

Top of the list, and the one most people underrate. We’re trained to justify our time by what it produced, so giving something away with no immediate return feels weird, but in a connected world that’s the whole strategy.

A coffee with a “less interesting” lead can turn into an introduction to exactly the person you needed. Direct and indirect audiences blur together, and the more you give, the more social capital you build, until one day you launch something or need a door opened and it turns out you’re owed a hundred small favors you never asked for.

The main thing you give away is insights and knowledge. Knowledge used to be power because it was scarce. It isn’t scarce anymore, so hoarding it buys you nothing. Share it, apply it to your specific niche so your specific audience recognises it instantly, and let people find and value you for the substance. Yes, that means you need to create better content and share your experience and thinking publicly. In a world this transparent, it’s how you stand out.

2. Build relationships, not transactions

“Are you the sales tiger we’re looking for?” I always wonder who the hell writes those job ads. If I had to hand part of my sales process to someone, I’d take a calm, useful human over a tiger who bites my clients’ heads off every time.

Anyway that’s my frustration about the sales industry

Social selling runs on long-term relationships. You invest first, and sometimes that means not closing a deal, because the buyer isn’t better off buying right now. Adding value is the only thing that counts, and if you’re not convinced you can, it’s better to wait. Because in a connected world a bad deal travels fast, and so does a good one.

There’s a bonus in this too: when you lead with the relationship, you spend a lot less time haggling over price. People who trust you argue less about your rate.

None of this is news, I know. The reason short-term targets still rule is that the whole economy is built on them. Shareholders want good numbers by the next meeting, the freshly promoted manager wants to show he can double revenue this quarter. It’s also, I’d bet, why family businesses tend to ride out downturns better. They think in years, so they’re steadier.

3. Share real, usable knowledge, openly

Plenty of companies will help you “do content.” Many of them scream for attention with ads and empty posts, and some even get results with it, but that’s not the game I’m playing.

I only share something when it’s relevant and think it’s worth your time. Sharing knowledge is never about volume, always about substance. Better one good post a month than four a week of noise. Think of it like the free samples in a supermarket: you taste the drink, and a chunk of people put a bottle in the cart, and some of those buy it again. Drug dealers apply the same tactic but let’s not go there

Give away a real piece of your expertise now so you can invoice the bigger piece, the training, the project, later.

And even if your network does nothing for you yet, it’s still smart to publish. Search engines and LLM’s reward content that answers the questions people actually ask, so write it down and your audience finds you on their own. Saves you a pile of those fucking annoying cold calls nobody wants to get.

4. Work as a team

“Using” your colleagues sounds cold, so let’s call it what it is: strengthening each other. When you work with people you actually get on with, they’ll usually help you, especially when it costs them two minutes.

In a networked world you can see into each other’s networks. Who knows whom, and how that helps you. LinkedIn even shows you exactly who’s in your colleagues’ network, and a warm introduction beats a cold approach every time. Remember the top of this article: don’t jump on everyone the second you spot them. Get introduced and you at least won’t look like a desperate idiot

I trained many sales reps who do this now as a habit. Every meeting, they pull up their prospects, everyone checks their LinkedIn networks side by side, and figures out who can introduce whom. The prospect gets approached either with genuinely useful knowledge or through someone they already trust. The polished sales pitch is gone, because by the time they talk, the prospect already knows this person at least has a chance to solve their problem.

So by the time they’re ready to buy, they already trust you.

Everyone else is still cold-calling. And cold calls are fucking annoying…

Last year I worked with an IT company whose sales team had split into two camps, and they defended those camps like it was religion. One half lived on cold outreach, firing connection requests at anything with a pulse and a job title. The other half had given up on that and sat back waiting for inbound, which is a strategy the way waiting for rain is in agriculture.

The board had been arguing about it for months to determine the best strategy. Meanwhile the pipeline stayed thin for months too, which should have settled the argument, but sales teams don’t work that way.

The cold callers were burning through lists and getting ignored, because they were reaching people who’d never heard their name. The inbound folks were waiting for a ring or message that never arrived, because nobody hands their business to a company they’ve never heard of.

Two different ways of being a stranger.

What we did instead

We stopped treating it as a choice between the two. The reps started being useful in their prospects’ LinkedIn feeds first. Posting and commenting on the real problems those buyers deal with all day, weeks before anyone mentioned the product. No “great post, thanks for sharing” BS, but the kind of content that makes someone think this person gets my issues.

For a while that was the whole job: be useful in public, in front of the exact people they’d wanted a call from.

Then they called. Same people as they would have cold-called, except now the name on the screen wasn’t a stranger’s. Call it warm outbound: outbound timing, except the prospect already knows who you are when you call.

Same team, same product, same list. The only thing that changed was that people knew who was knocking before they knocked.

Why teams skip the cheapest option

Being useful in public before there’s a deal in sight costs no budget, only patience and giving something away before you’ve earned the right to ask for anything, which is why most skip it.

Being visible and building an online reputation gets treated as marketing’s job, something that happens somewhere else. Yes, commenting eats hours too, but an hour of being useful keeps paying out for months, and an hour of dials is gone by lunch.

From what I’ve seen, the problem is that being useful never shows up on this quarter’s numbers, so it’s the first thing to get cut. There’s no number on the dashboard for the prospect who takes your call in three months because you were useful to them today.

Try putting “I was useful to a stranger in March” in the CRM and see what your sales manager thinks of it.

The grinding feels like work; that’s the trap. Even the rejection feels like effort. But when someone already knows your name and has a rough sense of how you think, the call stops being an interruption and becomes the next step in a conversation they were half in already.

So the fight those two camps were having was the wrong fight.

What matters is the thing underneath.

Do the people you want to sell to know who you are before you show up? Build that, and the pipeline gets cheaper every month, because rented attention expires the day you stop paying, and a name people know keeps working for free.

And no, you don’t need to become an influencer for this. Ten comments a week, in the feeds of the people you want to call, and the only thing a comment has to do is prove you understood the problem.

The cheapest pipeline you’ll ever build runs on people who already know your name before you call. For everything else, you either pay for one cold dial at a time or you sit by a phone that doesn’t ring.

In 2016, I bought a personal development course for €497.

The creator had thousands of followers, huge engagement on every post, comments full of praise. The classic “three bonuses worth €1000” were thrown in.

I thought I was buying from an expert.

Halfway through, I asked a question in the Q&A that went a bit beyond the course material.

I got a vague answer that repeated what was already in the modules. I tried again with a different question. Same thing.

The coach couldn’t answer anything that wasn’t already scripted. That’s when I realised I hadn’t bought expertise or experience. I’d bought good marketing.

The course itself? A patchwork of ideas from other people. Nothing wrong with the content, but nothing original either.

The creator had built a big audience. They hadn’t built deep knowledge. No experience of their own, either.

Being seen isn’t being trusted

I’ve thought about that course a lot lately, because it captures something I see in almost every professional I work with.

They’re told visibility is the goal. Get more followers. Get more leads. Go viral. Be everywhere. So they chase the numbers game.

But being famous and being an authority are not the same thing.

Famous means being seen by many. Authority means being valued by the few who matter.

Social platforms are designed to make you chase the first one. They’re built for dopamine, not decisions. They reward reach and impressions, not relevance and trust.

And if you work in B2B, or you want to grow your career, that’s a problem.

Algorithms don’t sign contracts. Humans do.

You don’t need to be famous to the world. You only need to be the obvious choice in your network when a specific problem comes up.

Not “sort of known.” Not “one of the options.” The first name that comes to mind, before they even start searching.

Some people call it thought leadership. I call it being the obvious choice.

Chasing virality is like trying to be heard in a stadium. You’re competing with everyone and reaching no one in particular.

Being the obvious choice works differently. It’s a room, not a stadium. A room full of the right people, the ones who care about what you know and have the specific problem you’re good at solving.

In that room, you don’t need to shout. You need to be useful.

What this means for you

Take a hard look at your positioning and your content. Ask yourself this:

Does your LinkedIn profile scream “looking for a new job” or “pay attention to my hobby”? Or does it make clear: this is what I know, this is who I help, this is why it matters.

Are you trying to appeal to everyone? Or have you made the hard choice to focus on one audience and position yourself on one, two, maybe three topics?

• Instead of appealing to everyone, you write for the people who matter.
• Instead of surface-level advice that sounds smart, you go deep on the problems you understand.
• Instead of chasing trends, you develop a point of view.

The stuff that scares away the general public is often what pulls in your people. Because it signals you know what you’re talking about. You’ve become the obvious choice.

What’s worked for me is letting go of the endless chase for more. I stopped measuring success in impressions, though some days that’s still hard.

I started measuring it in conversations and replies from people I respect. In opportunities that came from someone saying, “I thought of you because of…”

So if you’re posting and nothing’s happening, if the likes don’t come and the followers don’t grow, if you’re starting to believe you’re not cut out for this, consider this:

Maybe the problem isn’t your content. Maybe you’re optimising for the algorithm instead of the people who matter.

The answer is to become the obvious choice for the few.

It doesn’t matter if you run your own business, sell for someone else, or you’re after a new job. The psychology of selling and persuading is changing fast.

Ten years ago, you could get by with a Twitter account and some smart, informative tweets. Today that barely works, because AI chatbots hand people tailored answers on demand.

But that doesn’t mean content is irrelevant.

So instead of chasing likes, reposts, and comments, build your personal brand as someone people trust. When it’s time to make a real decision, people still want human insight, not a chatbot’s summary.

Six reasons becoming a trusted authority is the best move you can make in 2026 if you want to sell anything.

You put a face on the logo

Big companies feel faceless, cold, interchangeable. Even if you work for a major, trusted brand, people still buy from people they trust.

By building your personal brand and authority on LinkedIn, you give buyers the human face they want to connect with. You become the specific, trustworthy person inside the bigger machine. Your credibility does more than any corporate campaign can on its own. You make the company’s resources feel reachable through a person people trust.

You warm people up automatically

Daniel Priestley taught me that to win a new client, they usually need to spend about 7 hours with you, have 11 touchpoints, and see you in 4 different places. You can’t physically do that with every prospect.

A trusted authority automates it by posting consistent, useful content. Your prospects are reading your ideas and meeting you digitally long before you ever get on a call. By the time you speak, they’re warmed up, familiar with your thinking, already half-sold. That shortens your sales cycle and makes the first conversation a partnership, not a pitch.

You become vital, not optional

An “optional” sales rep follows a script and talks about pricing. Easily replaced. A trusted authority brings something the script can’t: a point of view and a reputation of their own.

By building your own point of view, your audience, and a recognised authority, you become someone the company can’t easily replace. You’re the source of opportunities others can’t reach. That gives you job security and a stronger hand in your career, whatever the market does.

People come to you

Most people spend their days chasing others who don’t know them and don’t want to be sold to. A trusted authority works the other way.

They share their own insights, trends, and fixes for the small problems in their industry. That pulls in pre-qualified people who already value what they know and reach out first. Instead of hunting targets, you curate the questions that show up in your inbox.

You stop looking desperate

When you’re visibly active and respected on LinkedIn, you look confident and successful. You don’t look desperate for a single deal.

People want to work with someone who’s clearly up to something, moving forward, with a steady stream of opportunities. It flips the power in a negotiation. Instead of you needing them, they want in.

You own your audience

Your employer owns the CRM, the product, and the client list. You own your reputation and your connections.

Build yourself into a trusted authority, and your influence, your community, your authority belong to you. That’s real career safety. If you ever move to another company, or start your own thing, your influence and your audience come with you. You control where your career goes.

Becoming a trusted authority is the clearest way out of the sales grind, and the way to build a career that holds up. You stop being a temporary resource and become a long-term partner.

Start today. Share your insights consistently, and turn your LinkedIn profile from a résumé into a platform that builds your authority.

P.S. Who’s a professional you follow because you trust their perspective?