Why your best customers are not on LinkedIn
The paradox every founder wrestles with
You post on LinkedIn every day. Tens of thousands of impressions a year. An engagement rate the experts call “good.” Nice replies: great post, interesting, thanks for sharing. And then you count your new clients. Zero.
Here is the paradox: the more visible you become online, the more invisible you are to the people who actually matter. So where are your ideal customers? Not in your feed. They live around the corner. They are friends with your current clients. And they scroll past your post among hundreds of others.
This article is not about using LinkedIn better. It is about a different question: why should you be there at all to win clients? And if the answer is “not necessarily,” what do you do instead?
The LinkedIn illusion: reach is not meaning
LinkedIn promises visibility, and you do reach people. But reach is not a conversation. And a conversation is not a client.
Do the math with me. A thousand connections. Your post reaches sixty people. Three react. One might become a lead. That is a tenth of a percent of your network, and you still have to convert that person.
Then ask yourself the real question: how many of those thousand are truly your ideal client? Ten? And how many of those do you reach with that one post? Maybe one. Maybe zero. That is the illusion. You feel visible, but mostly to people who already know you, do not need your service, or are consultants themselves posting because that is simply what you do. We wrote about it earlier in Beyond the Algorithm.
Proximity: your best customers live nearby
Want a certain CEO to know you, trust you, and eventually call? Then do not hope he sees your post. His feed is full. But do you know who does stand close to him? His accountant. His lawyer. The entrepreneur he had lunch with last week. The client who just closed a fine project with him.
That is his ecosystem. His warm network. And chances are you know someone in it. So why post, instead of sending that accountant a card with a single question: do you know anyone struggling with growth and open to a conversation?
The power of that warm network is not a soft skill. Granovetter showed back in 1973 that weak ties, acquaintances and loose contacts, are often more valuable for new opportunities than your inner circle (Granovetter 1973). Your close network knows what you know. Weak ties open other circles, other chances. But only if you activate them. Not with a post. With a conversation.
Reaching fewer people with more attention wins more clients than reaching more people with less attention.
Five postcards a day
Picture this: every morning you write five handwritten cards. To friends of your best clients. To prospects who fit who you are. No pitch, just a warm, personal invitation to talk things over. No book-here. No link in the comments. Simply one human inviting another.
Why does it work? Because almost no one does it. A card stands out. It stays on the desk, and every time they see it they think: this person made an effort. A post is gone in the feed after three seconds.
Five cards a day is a hundred a month. If ten percent respond, you have ten conversations. If a fifth of those convert, that is two new clients a month. Twenty-four a year. Fifteen minutes each morning, before you open your inbox.
So stop with CTAs that feel like selling. The people who click book-here are rarely your ideal client. They do not want a form, they want a real conversation. Customers are not targets, as we wrote before, and that starts with how you approach them.
In practice
In practice: Stop posting daily. Post something relevant for your ecosystem once a week, without a CTA. Build a list of twenty people who genuinely fit you. Order beautiful cards. Write five tomorrow morning, before you do anything else. Follow up three days later with a short, personal note. And measure differently: count conversations and clients, not likes. Less reach, more proximity, more result.
References
- Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78 (6): 1360–1380.
Series · Beyond Visibility · Add Business
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The eco-network flight plan
In the blog ‘Stop chasing customers’ we covered the why: you orchestrate an ecosystem instead of chasing customers. This is the how. One repeatable flight plan you can run whether you are looking for your first customer or your fiftieth, at home or across the border. Six moves, in order.
Move 1. Sharpen your value proposition
Everything starts with the value your customer ultimately walks away with, not with what you sell. Adner (2017) defines an ecosystem as the alignment structure of the partners who need to work together for a value proposition to come true. Without a sharp proposition there is nothing to align around. So frame it from the customer’s outcome, in one sentence an outsider would understand.
Move 2. Map the ecosystem
Ask yourself who all has to act for that value to land with your customer. Map the actors, their positions, who hands off to whom, and the links between them (Adner 2017). Mark two things: the gaps where nobody makes the handoff, and the gatekeepers who can open a door or hold it shut. That map is your terrain, not your pipeline.
Move 3. Find your anchor node
On that map you look for the one relationship that unlocks the most: a reference customer, a partner, a community or an institution. That is your runway. It is the weak-tie lesson from ‘Stop chasing customers’ in practice: do not pick the easiest node, but the node that introduces you to many others (Granovetter 1973).
Move 4. Enter through credibility, not price
At a new node the first question is rarely ‘what does it cost?’, but ‘can I trust you?’. So lead with proof and a warm introduction, and turn your first win into a visible reference that de-risks the next one. How you build that credibility is covered in the blog ‘Credibility beats price’.
Move 5. Orchestrate the flywheel
Now you move from deals to dynamics. Dhanaraj and Parkhe (2006) describe how a hub steers a network it does not own, through three levers: keep knowledge moving between the members, make sure everyone wins a fair share, and keep the network stable enough to trust. Reward the connectors who send your business along. A network that wins when you win scales your growth for you.
Move 6. From effectual to causal, deliberately
In the beginning you improvise with what you have. But as patterns repeat, you systematize: qualify, document what works, add people and channels. Keep the founder or the senior relationship holder as the credible person out front while you do it. You build a system without losing the human touch that closes the deal.
The flight plan in brief
1. Sharp value proposition · 2. Map the ecosystem · 3. Anchor node · 4. Enter through credibility · 5. Orchestrate the flywheel · 6. Effectual to causal
A network that wins when you win scales your growth for you.
In practice: pick one market or one big opportunity. Run the flight plan on paper: write your value proposition in one sentence, draw the map, circle your anchor node, and decide what proof you bring in at that node. The rest of the moves follow on their own once that first node says yes.
References
- Adner, Ron. 2017. “Ecosystem as Structure: An Actionable Construct for Strategy.” Journal of Management 43 (1): 39–58.
- Dhanaraj, Charles, and Arvind Parkhe. 2006. “Orchestrating Innovation Networks.” Academy of Management Review 31 (3): 659–669.
- Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78 (6): 1360–1380.
Series · From first customer to ecosystem · Add Business
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Where do you fish: upstream or downstream?
Ahti Levaho, a sales leader at Eltel Finland, once asked me a question I could never quite shake: ‘Marc, where are you fishing? Upstream or downstream?’. In an earlier piece I wrote that the client now comes to the table already knowing, on equal footing, and that as a result value now emerges only in the conversation. That immediately raises a harder question. If the conversation is so decisive, how do you even get to it with a new contact? The answer is not: send more. It is: choose more carefully where and how you cast the line.
Downstream is crowded, and usually too late
Downstream is where most salespeople stand. That is where tenders are published, where leads come in and where campaigns wait for results. The water is wide and calm, and everyone is standing in it. You fight on price, on speed, at the last minute. And here it connects to the previous blog. As early as 2012, Adamson, Dixon and Toman showed that B2B buyers work through most of their buying process before they ever speak to a salesperson (Adamson, Dixon and Toman 2012); Gartner later calculated that a buyer spends barely seventeen percent of the journey with suppliers (Gartner 2019). By the time that buyer has written out the request, the information asymmetry has already vanished entirely and the shortlist has already been drawn up in their head. In ninety-five percent of the deals that were won, the winner was on that list on day one (6sense 2025). Downstream you no longer have a conversation. You have a comparison. And in a comparison you are, as I wrote before, just another data point.
Upstream is where the conversation is still possible
Upstream it is different. There the plans are still in motion, there the right people are still thinking things through, and there is room for a real conversation, long before there is a tender. That is not romance, it is strategy. Narver, Slater and MacLachlan (2004) showed that a proactive market orientation, in which you help shape latent needs before the client articulates them, predicts new success better than merely reacting to what the market already asks for. Upstream is exactly that: you are there while the need is still forming, not once it has already been written out. So do not fish harder. Choose better where you cast the line.
Calling more is not a strategy
The reflex with a thin pipeline is volume. More emails, more calls, more campaigns. It feels productive: opening a list of two hundred names and hitting send has the texture of work. But mostly it multiplies noise, and noise is precisely what the client runs into everywhere already. The upstream approach rests on three convictions that run directly counter to this.
Scarcity creates attention. Someone who senses they were deliberately chosen, rather than selected in bulk, responds differently. It is the scarcity principle that Cialdini (1984) described, applied to your first contact. The physical world lies fallow. Now that inboxes have become pure noise, a handwritten letter stands out: neuroscientific research shows that physical mail is processed with less cognitive effort and remembered better than email (Canada Post 2015). Personalization is the highest lever. Tailoring your message to how someone really thinks and decides is the most valuable thing you can do before you send anything.
A bit of network science helps with the selection. Granovetter (1973) showed that it is not your strongest but your weak ties that open new doors. Burt (1992) refined this: the real value lies in bridging ‘structural holes’, the gaps between groups that do not yet know each other, because that is exactly where you find non-redundant information and new opportunities. The ideal prospect therefore sits in the sweet spot: roughly five to fifteen shared connections. Too few and you are invisible; too many and you no longer bring any new information. A warm introduction through a shared connection is always the strongest upstream move.
The 1-2-3 method: five choices per week, three steps
In practice this translates into a single rhythm: five deliberate choices per week, three steps, and the patience to let a conversation ripen. It starts with selection, before the first letter. Five people per week, chosen on three criteria: do they fit who you really help, do they sit in the sweet spot of shared connections, and do you have real context about their situation? And read how someone thinks before you write a single word.
Step 1: the physical package. A postcard, a personal handwritten letter, and a QR code to a dedicated landing page. The letter says three things: why you are contacting this particular person, what you recognize in their situation, and which hand you are extending. The landing page is not a sales page but a verification screen: ‘Who is this person, and is this worth my time?’. The headline I use says it all: you are not looking for more clients, you are looking for the right ones.
Step 2: the connection. You do not push, the recipient chooses: a LinkedIn connection, a phone call, or a coffee right away. That is not a detail. It is exactly the equal footing from the previous blog, put into practice. The client is at the wheel, you offer.
Step 3: the cockpit conversation. Short, five to fifteen minutes, no pitch. The other person already has context, so you ask sharp questions instead of explaining. Rackham (1988) showed long ago that success in complex sales is tied to the quality of your questions, not the force of your arguments: does this fit now, is this the right moment, what is really going on? Exactly the conversation the previous blog was about.
You are not looking for more clients. You are looking for the right ones.
Why this works on equal footing
Every part of this approach respects the new reality. You choose deliberately, because you only have something to say to those you truly understand in their context, their job-to-be-done (Christensen and Raynor 2003): that is the conversation beyond the expertise. You let the client verify for themselves through the landing page, because they want to be at the wheel. You let them choose the channel, without pressure. And your conversation is sensemaking (Adamson 2022), not a sales pitch, because value does not arise in what you tell but in the interaction itself (Vargo and Lusch 2004). That is how you approach new contacts in a world where the client already knows everything: not with volume, not with information, but by earning one real conversation, at the right moment.
In practice: do not open a list of two hundred this week. Choose five. For each one, write down a single reason why you are contacting that specific person, a reason that fits no one else. Send one thing by post. And then wait for them to choose. Upstream does not start with sending more. It starts with choosing better.
References
- 6sense. 2025. B2B Buyer Experience Report. San Francisco: 6sense.
- Adamson, Brent. 2022. “Sensemaking for Sales.” Harvard Business Review 100 (1): 48–57.
- Adamson, Brent, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman. 2012. “The End of Solution Sales.” Harvard Business Review 90 (7–8): 60–68.
- Burt, Ronald S. 1992. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Canada Post. 2015. A Bias for Action: The Neuroscience Behind the Response-Driving Power of Direct Mail. Ottawa: Canada Post.
- Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. 2003. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
- Cialdini, Robert B. 1984. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: William Morrow.
- Gartner. 2019. The B2B Buying Journey. Stamford, CT: Gartner.
- Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78 (6): 1360–1380.
- Narver, John C., Stanley F. Slater, and Douglas L. MacLachlan. 2004. “Responsive and Proactive Market Orientation and New-Product Success.” Journal of Product Innovation Management 21 (5): 334–347.
- Rackham, Neil. 1988. SPIN Selling. New York: McGraw-Hill.
- Vargo, Stephen L., and Robert F. Lusch. 2004. “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing.” Journal of Marketing 68 (1): 1–17.
Series · Value in the conversation · Add Business
Want to take this further?
This insight does not stand alone. Explore the other parts of this series and take the next step in your own course.