Transcription
71% of decision makers involved in your deals will never speak to a salesperson on your team. They don't take cold calls. They don't respond to emails. And they don't accept their LinkedIn connection requests.
But 95% of these so-called hidden buyers say that if your company consistently puts out good thought leadership content that they will be more responsive to your sales team's outreach. And in this YouTube video, I'm going to show you three types of content that will build trust at scale with your ideal audience, including those hidden buyers that can potentially block your deals. And so, by the end of this video, you will know exactly what to post on LinkedIn, how often, and also what 99% of people are doing wrong on LinkedIn so that you can avoid those mistakes.
First of all, let me tell you why this even matters. In 2025, LinkedIn did a study with over 2,000 executive buyers. It's called the 2025 thought leadership report. And one of the most interesting findings from this report was that 40% of B2B sales deals stall. Not because of pricing, not because of the product, but because there's an internal misalignment in the buying committee. There are simply often times people inside your prospect's company that are not on board with a certain purchase decision. You've never spoken to them. They've never showed up to any of the meetings in the sales cycle. Sometimes you don't even know who they are or what their name is, but they are quietly blocking your deal from the inside. The study calls them the so-called hidden buyers. And here's the thing, you cannot reach out to them with traditional sales outreach, but you can influence them through consistent thought leadership content on LinkedIn.
So, let me break down the three types of content that you need in your LinkedIn strategy.
Number one, top of funnel content. The goal of top of funnel content is very simple. Build visibility with your ideal buyers. And here's what most people get wrong about LinkedIn. The algorithm does not like company content, product content, or any promotional marketing content, but it loves personal content. Personal stories, career lessons, any relatable stories is what the algorithm eats up. That's why at least 40% of your content mix on LinkedIn should be top of funnel.
Some of the best performing top of funnel posts on LinkedIn follow these content themes. AI and how it impacts the workplace. Burnout and work life balance, fair compensation and employee incentives, layoffs, what good leadership looks like, remote work and management best practices. These are real life topics that most people care about.
Let me give you three examples from my own content. I wrote a post about how I grew up thinking I'm never going to get married and then I changed my mind. I wrote another post about how I moved from Ireland to Spain 4 and 1/2 years ago and how living in Spain has completely changed my view on parenting. And I wrote another post in which I admitted that I am not perfect. I drink alcohol sometimes. I doom scroll on LinkedIn from time to time. I don't always have the perfect nighttime routine. And that's okay because being consistent 80% of the time beats perfection any day.
What you notice here that these posts have nothing to do with B2B sales. They're not about my product or my services. They're not about my company. But here's what's crazy. That post about moving to Spain generated almost 1,300 visits to my LinkedIn profile page. And from that one post alone, I added 150 new connections with potential buyers on LinkedIn that I can start messaging. Top of funnel content builds your audience on LinkedIn and your LinkedIn audience is your pipeline.
The second type of content is middle of the funnel content. If top of funnel made you visible, middle of funnel makes you credible. This is where you demonstrate your niche expertise to your ideal prospects. This is what separates you from 99% of the other sales professionals out there. Middle of funnel content should be tactical and immediately applicable. Your prospects should learn something from you. They should finish reading your post and think, "Okay, I can use that today."
The best source of ideas for middle of funnel content is the conversations that you are having with your customers every day. Every single week, I have an automated call task running that analyzes the call transcripts from the prior week to extract 5 to 10 ideas for new LinkedIn posts. These are real problems and real conversations that I have with real customers.
Let me tell you about my personal three best performing middle of funnel posts so far in 2026. The first post was a contrarian take on how Claude just killed manual prospecting but the fact that at the same time the company Entropic who built Claude is hiring SDRs like crazy. The point of this post was that AI is not replacing SDRs, but it's changing the SDR role fundamentally. The second post was about an inbound lead that I got from a 12 billion revenue company that's globally known in the e-commerce space. What's crazy is that there is no competitor in the deal. My champion in the deal is a former coworker from Salesforce. The entire decision-making committee is also former Salesforce employees. As an account executive back in the day, I would have killed for a lead like that. And now I get leads like this all the time because I invested the last six years building an audience on LinkedIn. The third post was about one of my favorite principles in sales, the 80/20 rule. And in this post, I give seven very specific examples how you can use the 80/20 rule to get 80% of your results with only 20% of the effort.
What all three posts have in common is they're not about me, they're not about my company, and they're also not about my product or services. They're simply genuinely useful advice for the people that I want to work with.
The third type of LinkedIn content is bottom of funnel content. And here's the irony. This is what 99% of people who post on LinkedIn do all the time. Bottom of funnel content is promotional. The goal is to generate leads, names, email addresses, phone numbers. But here's why bottom of funnel content doesn't work for most people. If you have not built your visibility with top of funnel content, nobody's going to see it. And if you haven't built trust and authority with middle of funnel content, nobody's going to care. What they're seeing is just another ad.
But if you follow the 40/40/20 rule, which means 40% of your content mix should be top of funnel, 40% should be middle of funnel, and only 20% of your LinkedIn content should be bottom of funnel. So that 80% of your content is giving. You add value and only 20% of your content is asking for something in return.
Let me give you two examples of bottom of funnel posts that I've recently done that did pretty well. First, I made a post in which I show how I use Claude on my iPhone to pull a list of 50 ideal prospects to cold call that day using Apollo.io. And the second post was a carousel, so a document, a pitch deck that I created using gamma.ai AI to present a new VP of sales advisory offer that I'm currently launching.
There is an art to doing bottom of funnel content that doesn't make it feel promotional or even like marketing. The best bottom of funnel content looks the same as top of funnel or middle of funnel, but it builds that bridge to a call to action for the for your audience in a very elegant and organic way.
All right, so let me wrap this one up. If you want to influence the hidden buyers that are secretly blocking your deals, you cannot wait for them to show up in a meeting. You have to earn their trust before the sales cycle even starts. Start with top of funnel. Let your audience get to know you. Continue with middle of funnel. Build your credibility with potential buyers. And then finally, use bottom of funnel content to convert them. 40/40/20. That's the framework.
If you found this video helpful, please drop a like and leave me a comment below with any questions that you may have. I personally respond to all of my comments here on YouTube. And also make sure to subscribe so that you don't miss out on any of my next videos. And if you are interested in working together with me to help you build and scale a high-performing sales team, check the description below and make sure to get in touch. I'll see you in the next one. Take care.