Quick answer
Reach and pipeline have come apart on LinkedIn. You no longer need a post to travel to get clients from it, and chasing virality is the most common way founders waste a year. What still works is a profile that reads like a landing page, commenting more deliberately than you post, a content mix weighted to how-tos rather than hot takes, and moving a good comment into a conversation the same week. I run this alongside cold email rather than instead of it.
I recorded an 84 minute conversation about social selling with Frank Sondors and Alan Ruchtein. Frank has been on LinkedIn for fifteen years and posts close to daily. Alan has spent more than fifteen years in sales, writes a newsletter five days a week, and has passed six hundred editions of it. I am somewhere behind both of them, at roughly ten thousand followers after taking the platform seriously for about a year.
I'm Hlib Storchak. I build and run outbound systems for B2B founders and sales teams, mostly cold email and LinkedIn as one motion, and I have booked 2000+ meetings for B2B clients doing it. What follows is what the three of us actually agreed on, including the parts that contradict the advice you usually see.
The myth that keeps founders invisible
When Frank asked each of us for the biggest myth about LinkedIn, I said it was the belief that you have to go viral to get clients from it. I still think that is the one that does the most damage, because it sets a bar that has nothing to do with revenue and then makes people quit when they do not clear it.
Alan picked a different one. The advice to always be polite and agreeable, he argued, is advice that keeps you invisible. Not rude, and not disrespectful, but willing to take a position someone could disagree with. A post nobody can argue with is a post nobody remembers.
Both myths point at the same failure. People optimise for being seen and liked rather than for being recognised by the forty or so buyers who actually matter to them.
The experiment that shows reach is not pipeline
This was the most useful thing said in the whole conversation, and it is Alan's, so I will give it in his terms.
He ran the same post three times over a year. Same copy, same creative, same time of day. Twelve months ago it went, in his description, properly viral: over three thousand comments, a thousand newsletter subscribers, a thousand people taking the resource. Six months later, the same post got roughly half the reach and the same number of people reaching out in the DMs. A week before we recorded, he posted it again. Twenty five comments. A thousand impressions. In his words, not even his mother saw it.
It still produced four leads. Two of them closed.
Read that again. A post with a fraction of its former reach delivered the same commercial outcome. Reach collapsed. Pipeline did not. If you are measuring your LinkedIn on impressions, you are measuring the variable that moved and ignoring the one that did not.
The practical consequence is that a quiet month on LinkedIn is not evidence that LinkedIn stopped working for you. It is usually evidence that the algorithm changed, which it does constantly and without telling anyone. The thing to watch is conversations started, not impressions served.
Your profile is a landing page, not a CV
Everything you post sends people to one place, and it is not your website. It is your profile. Treat it as the landing page it is.
Alan's rule is coherence. If your banner shows a city skyline, your headline says you help fintech companies, and your about section opens with an anecdote about your friends, a visitor cannot work out what you do, and they will not spend a second trying. Everything should express one offer: I do this, you get this result, by this process.
My own version of the same rule is narrower. Get a photograph that looks professional, and pay someone if you have to. Make the banner simple. Write the headline in the first person, because writing about yourself in the third person reads like a press release. And treat the about section as a sales letter rather than a career history.
Mine has opened the same way for years: that I started learning cold email and outbound at seventeen. It works because the people I sell to are at the start of the process I went through, so it lands as recognition rather than as a credential.
The one line most profiles are missing
My headline ends with an instruction: DM me "grow". A handful of people do exactly that every month, usually looking for advice or for a specific resource.
It works because of something Alan put well. If you do not tell people what to do, most of them do nothing, and that is how we are built rather than a failure of interest. You can offer and offer and offer, but the ask has to be somewhere, and a single word is the lowest friction ask there is.
The same applies to the featured section, which most people leave empty or fill with a company brochure. Alan points his at the programme he sells. I point mine at videos.
Comments now outperform posts
If you take one tactical change from this, take this one.
Frank's figure, from watching his own numbers and the public data, is that up to forty percent of your total reach can come from commenting on other people's posts rather than from posting. That matches my experience closely. It is meaningfully easier for me to get three thousand impressions from a comment than from a post, and comments cost a fraction of the effort.
The mechanics matter. Frank keeps notification bells on for accounts in his space, his size or larger, because the first comments on a post collect the most attention. He picks posts he thinks will travel, on the logic that if he is optimising for reach he should comment where the reach will be.
What neither Alan nor I have is a formal commenting playbook, and we both said so. What we have instead is a rule about what not to write.
What makes a comment worth posting
"Great post" does not work. Alan's position is that it never did. His filter is that a comment is either contrarian or it adds something concrete, and if it is neither he does not comment. Mine is simpler and amounts to the same thing: if I genuinely have nothing to say, I keep scrolling.
This is also the part of the job Alan refuses to delegate, and I agree with his reasoning. The commenting is the business. It is the part where a stranger decides whether you know anything. Handing it to a tool is handing over the only thing being evaluated.
| Comment type | What it signals | Worth posting? |
|---|---|---|
| "Great post" or a restatement | That you wanted to be seen next to the author | No |
| A respectful disagreement | That you have run this and formed a view | Yes |
| A concrete addition, number or example | That you have information the author did not include | Yes |
| A relevant resource or method | That you are useful before you are paid | Yes |
| Anything generated for you | That nobody was home | No, and see below |
The content mix that holds up
Alan runs a simple pyramid and it is the most transferable framework in the conversation.
Roughly ten percent of posts are top of funnel: whatever is genuinely current in your world, because a live topic is the one everybody has an opinion about and therefore the one most likely to travel. Around eighty percent is the middle, and it is how-tos. The actual method, step by step, given away. The last slice is bottom of funnel, where you show a transformation a client went through and ask for the conversation.
The eighty percent is where people flinch, because it means publishing the thing you would rather charge for. Alan's answer is that some of his clients could execute it themselves, and most cannot, and that is exactly why they call him. I would put it more bluntly: the play is not the valuable part. Knowing which play to run, and when, is the valuable part, and you cannot put that in a post.
That is the same reason I give away a library of the plays I hand to AI agents rather than keeping it back.
The hook is most of the post
My most viral post so far was two words long in substance: I'm quitting LinkedIn. It was clickbait, it was not true in the way it sounded, and it worked. It did nothing for the first couple of hours and then moved sharply.
The hook is what makes or breaks a post, so it is the part worth testing rather than agonising over. I keep a library of hook structures, a habit I picked up from Julius Biliauskas when he helped me rebuild the back end of my content, then run the finished post through an AI model to generate variations and pick the one I think will travel. I use the same model for formatting, because a post nobody can skim is a post nobody reads.
Alan does the same thing more systematically, with a custom assistant loaded with his hook library, his tone, and an explicit list of what it must never write. That last part matters more than people expect. Most AI writing fails because nobody told it what to avoid.
What stopped working
Two things, and both of them are things the advice industry still recommends.
Short form video stopped working for me on LinkedIn entirely. Frank's read from his own posting is the same: text only, or text plus an image, outperforms video on reach. He still posts video, but for a specific reason, which is that engagement per impression is unusually high even when the reach is small. If you are optimising for reach, video is a poor trade. If you are optimising for the strength of the impression on the few who see it, it is a good one.
The second is the generic lead magnet. The "comment FRAMEWORK and I will send you the guide" post is, in Alan's words, so overused that it now suppresses reach. His important caveat is that this depends entirely on who you sell to. Sell to junior sales development reps and there is an endless supply of people who have not seen it before. Sell to VPs and heads of sales, as he does, and they took the bait once and are done.
Why video still earns its place
The featured section of my profile is videos, and they are deliberately narrow. Each one answers a single question or addresses one problem, because that is how people arrive: not ready to talk to anyone, looking for one specific answer.
Alan described the effect better than I would have. When a prospect eventually messages you and describes their situation, you send them the seven minute video that walks through exactly that process. By the time they join a call, in his estimate, it is already half sold, because they have watched how you think and how you work before they ever spoke to you.
That is the actual argument for video in B2B, and it has nothing to do with reach.
Turning a comment into a conversation
Reach that stays on the platform is worth nothing. The step people skip is the deliberate move from a public comment to a private conversation.
My process is short. I reply to every comment from a human. Where the person is in my ideal customer profile and their comment suggests there is something to discuss, I take it to DMs, and if there is a real conversation there I will book a call, sometimes the same day. People respect that more than a long exchange of messages. I do not enjoy texting for a week to arrive somewhere a fifteen minute call would have settled.
Alan's version has a step I have started stealing. He asks permission before sending a voice note. Nobody says no, and it converts a cold DM into something that feels like a conversation between two people. Frank's counterpoint is worth keeping in mind: a voice note cannot be skimmed or sped up on LinkedIn the way it can on WhatsApp, so it is a real imposition on the listener. If you like talking rather than typing, dictate and send text.
The signals worth watching on LinkedIn
Everything above is organic. The reason I run LinkedIn next to outbound rather than instead of it is that the platform also emits buying signals, and a signal is what makes a cold message land.
Three that came up, in ascending order of how few people use them.
- Social listening in the local language. We scan for people publicly asking for recommendations, in their own language rather than in English. Scandinavia produces a surprising number of these. When someone is openly asking who to hire, arriving in the thread is not cold outreach, it is answering a question.
- Hiring, read properly. A company hiring a go to market person is a weak signal on its own. A company hiring its first one, which you can check in thirty seconds by looking at who already works there, is a strong one.
- Competitor followers. Frank's team extracts the followers of competitor company pages, strips out the job seekers, and messages the remaining ideal customers with one line: you are following this company, do you use them by any chance? He reports reply rates of twenty to forty percent, which is far above anything a pitch achieves, because it is a genuine question rather than a pitch.
Alan made the point that turns a signal into a message, and it is the part most people get wrong. Do not sell the trigger. Congratulating someone on their funding round is what everybody does. Sell the consequence: if this has happened, then in ninety days this will be the problem on their desk, and here is what happens if they do nothing about it. Same trigger, different message, different result. That logic is the same one behind building an ICP that converts, and it applies whether the message arrives by email or by DM.
What the bots are doing to all of this
I am, by some margin, the worst affected person in that conversation. On a typical post I will get thirty comments and twenty five of them are machine generated. I have turned my notifications off entirely, because opening the app to twenty alerts that contain nothing is worse than no alerts at all.
Both Frank and Alan were blunt about it, and I agree with them. The value of an automated comment is zero, everybody can tell, and the people buying them are damaging the only asset they have. Alan is emphatic that being behind on AI is a real risk, but that this particular use of it is self harm on a platform that is human to human by definition.
My prediction, for what it is worth, is that this gets better rather than worse for anyone doing it properly. The more automated the feed becomes, the more obvious and the more valuable it is to be visibly a person.
What it actually costs in hours
This surprised the three of us when we compared. Alan, at more than sixty thousand followers, spends about four to five hours a week. I spend four to six across LinkedIn and YouTube together. We are six times apart in audience and roughly identical in time spent.
The hours are not what separates a profile that produces pipeline from one that does not. Consistency over a long enough period is, and the cost of consistency is mostly psychological. Alan's explanation for why most people never post is imposter syndrome and the comparison trap, and I think he is right. You look at someone with a hundred thousand followers, decide you are behind, and do not start.
Key takeaways
- Reach and pipeline have decoupled. Alan's identical post lost most of its reach over a year and produced the same number of leads, including two closed deals.
- Your profile is the landing page every post sends traffic to. One offer, expressed consistently in the banner, headline and about section, in the first person.
- Commenting can account for up to forty percent of your reach, at a fraction of the effort of posting. Either be contrarian or add something concrete. Otherwise do not comment.
- Weight the content roughly ten percent to what is current, eighty percent to how-tos, and the rest to proof and a clear ask.
- Short form video on LinkedIn and generic comment-for-a-guide lead magnets have both stopped pulling, though the lead magnet depends heavily on how senior your buyer is.
- Four to six hours a week is the real cost. Consistency over a year is what separates the profiles that produce pipeline.
What I would do in the first thirty days
If you are starting from a profile that has never produced a conversation, this is the order I would work in, and none of it requires you to go viral.
- Fix the profile first. One offer, stated the same way in the banner, the headline and the about section. Put a single word instruction at the end of the headline.
- Build the audience deliberately. Add ten to fifteen people from your ideal customer profile every day. This is the habit I would pick above all others, because posting to the wrong audience is the most common reason good content produces nothing.
- Comment before you post. Turn on notifications for fifteen accounts in your space, and write one genuinely additive comment a day. You will learn what lands faster here than anywhere else, and it is easier than writing posts.
- Then post, three times a week, weighted to how-tos.
- Move every good conversation off the feed within the week, and offer a call rather than a seventh message.
If you want the compounding version of this, Alan's closing advice was to spend the early months talking to other creators in your space rather than only to prospects, and to publish things jointly with them. His argument is that it grows you faster than posting alone, and it is the one piece of advice in the conversation I have not properly acted on yet.
FAQ
Do I need a big following to get clients from LinkedIn?
No, and the evidence in this conversation points the other way. Alan's post that reached a thousand people produced four leads and two closed deals. What matters is whether the right few hundred people see you at all, which is a targeting problem rather than a follower-count problem.
How often should I post?
Consistently enough that people recognise you, which for most founders means two or three times a week rather than daily. Spend the time you free up on commenting instead, which reaches more people per hour spent.
Should I use AI to write my LinkedIn posts?
For hook variations, structure and formatting, yes, and both other guests do. For comments, no. The commenting is where a stranger decides whether you know anything, and automated comments are obvious to everyone reading them.
Does social selling replace cold email?
Not in my experience, they compound. A common pattern for me is that someone receives a cold email, checks the profile, and reaches out on LinkedIn to start the conversation there. The profile is what makes the cold email credible, which is why I run them as one motion rather than two channels.
How long before LinkedIn produces pipeline?
Longer than outbound and with a much better cost curve afterwards. I took my profile seriously for about a year before it was producing reliably, having posted irregularly for a year before that. If you need meetings this quarter, build outbound and treat LinkedIn as the thing that makes next year easier.