LinkedIn isn’t a sales channel, it’s about building trust

If you’ve ever received one of those cold-sell private messages on LinkedIn, you’d be justified in believing LinkedIn is mostly a lead generation tool. But it’s not quite true. Having the right people in your network to sell to doesn’t equate to sales.

Instead, LinkedIn gets to work much earlier in the buying journey. As Mike explains, buyers move through six stages (Six Sells, really):

• Awareness
• Familiarity
• Trust
• Interest
• Consideration
• Purchase

Most sales teams focus their energy on the final two stages, obsessing over meetings and closing deals. But for CEOs, the focus should be on the first four. When a prospect finally has a business challenge or a reason to buy B2B, they almost always already have a shortlist in their head.

The question is simple: will your company be on it?

The new reality: buyers trust people over companies

If you receive a sales email from someone you’ve never heard of, you’re likely to look them up. You check their LinkedIn profile and they haven’t posted in six months. They have no visible expertise and appear disconnected from the industry.

You’re going to move on.

But if they regularly share insights, comment on trends, speak at events and actively join the conversation, you’re far more likely to trust them.

Relationships matter in adtech. A consistent presence is going to put you front of mind when it’s time to make a buying decision. “Visibility is a kind of superpower,” says Mike. A trustworthy CEO, executive or salesperson with a strong LinkedIn presence is worth twice as much as branded company marketing when it comes to your buyers trusting you.

The market increasingly sees visibility as a trust signal, and when a prospect receives your email, visits your website or hears about your business, LinkedIn is often where they validate their first impression.

Leaders who consistently show up have an advantage long before a sales conversation begins.

So how do you do it? 

Three rules every adtech CEO should follow when posting on LinkedIn:

1. Stop thinking about individual posts, and start building a narrative

One of Mike’s most useful pieces of advice is to stop thinking about each post on its own, and start thinking about themes.

Ask yourself key questions:

• Who are your key audiences and what do they care about?
• What are the three things you want each audience to know about your business?
• What are the beliefs, experiences and opinions that make your perspective unique?

Once those themes are clear, content creation becomes dramatically easier. You can explore different angles of that same core narrative. 

The takeaway: Consistency doesn’t mean repetition, but it does mean embracing a narrative that sells what you’re trying to say.

2. Your personal insights are valuable, as is your tone of voice

Love it or hate it, AI content is here to stay. And whether you’ve used it or not, there’s a lot of it out there. In fact, AI is so rampant that it’s actually getting harder to create content that people believe is authentic.

Especially written content; perfectly structured grammar, inspirational sentences, overused emdashes and polished observations are all in the firing line for scrutiny, because generic AI content is rampant. 

In a wonderful piece on the power of independent writing in the AI era, journalist Jasmine Sun notes how the value of polish is diminishing, and in response the value of personal charisma and tone of voice is going up. Whilst AI can help organise your thoughts, get the ball rolling and accelerate your workflows, it doesn’t (and shouldn’t ever) replace original thought, style or insight. Insights gained from real client conversations, personal lessons learned from product launches and opinions from decades in the industry will always be more valuable.

People don’t just want to see your company updates, either. They want people-first stories. Personal opinions, and unique lessons from your lived experiences.

The takeaway: Your writing itself doesn’t have to be good to make posting worthwhile, it just has to be authentic and authoritative.

3. Use video as the ultimate trust signal

As it stands, video is still difficult to replicate with AI. As audiences view text posts with more scrutiny, video becomes an increasingly valuable way to communicate with your potential buyers and partners.

“It’s the most trusted medium,” Mike says. “With words now, people look at it wondering if ChatGPT did it, whereas with video, we more or less trust that someone showed up.”

It creates familiarity faster than any other format, putting a face to a name and a voice to an opinion. It shows you, your authentic self, better than any other form of content could. Share event takeaways, quick opinions on news or industry trends, conversations with customers, clips from podcasts you’ve appeared on - even a walk and talk around your office.

You don’t need a production team as a CEO to create video content; any smartphone will do.

The takeaway: Leaders should get more comfortable showing up as their authentic selves. Authenticity beats production value every time.

How to turn your LinkedIn profile into a visibility powerhouse

1. Show up as you would in real life - be the same person online that you are at events, meetings and conferences
2. Show up every week - consistency beats intensity, and one thoughtful post a week is infinitely more powerful than a burst of activity followed by months of silence
3. Use video when you can - trustworthy, human content is powerful in the era of generic AI slop
4. Get active and get your people active - when team members are all consistent and visible, it raises the whole company’s profile
5. Stop comparing yourself to your competitors and overthinking the algorithm - there’s more going on behind the scenes with LinkedIn than you could ever imagine, so focus on showing up as yourself first and foremost

The CEOs who win in 2026 won’t be the loudest

Executive visibility isn’t about becoming an influencer - you just want to be recognisable, enough to come to mind and be trustworthy when someone’s looking to buy.

The CEOs who nail LinkedIn this year won’t be the ones posting everyday. They won’t chase every trend or manufacture controversy or clickbait. They’ll share expertise, experiences, opinions and lessons to help their audiences understand who they are, what they stand for and what they can do.

As a final note, LinkedIn visibility takes time. “Is posting AI written content better than posting nothing?” Mike considers. “Probably, because you’re still visible. Even if people think, ‘oh, that's written by AI, I'm not going to read it’, at least your name flashes into their memory for a few seconds as they scroll on by.”

But there’s no quick fix for trust. It isn’t built overnight. But it is built post by post, conversation by conversation, over months and years. With so much AI and automation shaping the adtech industry, those human connections may well be the most valuable competitive advantage of all.

And if you’d rather spend half an hour on your visibility once a month than dedicate a few hours a week, you can always reach out to Mike.