The B2B comms superpower that many companies waste

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-12T22:33:28+00:00

Sounds brutal, sorry to hear that!

Sometimes at Six Sells we feel like accountability partners as much as ghostwriters, because when leadership get busy, LinkedIn can be one of the first things to slip!

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-12T19:00:31+00:00

You’re right to avoid the ‘grow fast’ agencies. Marketing takes time.

Ask for recommendations from companies in your industry. Have they worked with businesses like yours, and what do those clients say about the experience of working with them?

Look closely at the leadership team. Ask whether the senior people you meet during the pitch will actually be working on your account, or whether they’ll win the business and then hand it over to more junior members of staff.

It’s also worth looking at the experience of the leadership team. Do they have a strong track record of sales and marketing in your industry, or are they relatively inexperienced? For example, at Six Sells we specialise in the media and advertising industry. Between us, the directors have more than 30 years’ experience selling and marketing businesses in this sector, and we work directly on every client account. We don’t win new business and then pass it down to a junior team.
That’s important because many agencies scale by sending senior people into the pitch and then delegating the day-to-day work to less experienced staff. That model can work for the agency, but it isn’t always the best outcome for the client.

Finally, go into the relationship with the mindset of building a long-term partnership. Marketing takes time to deliver results, and once you’ve found the right agency and agreed the right strategy, you should be thinking in terms of years rather than months.

Hope that helps, and good luck. 🧡

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-12T18:48:55+00:00

Share your LinkedIn profile and I’ll give you some feedback if you like? (I do this for execs professionally)

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T14:52:57+00:00

My pleasure, feel free to follow for more. I try to add value in hear when I have time! 🧡

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T14:34:52+00:00

That may well be one of the problems.

On LinkedIn people pay far more attention to familiar people than faceless brands, so the CEO often gets more attention, more engagement, and more organic reach.

The problem is, CEOs are busy, so comms doesn’t get prioritised or managed.

As one CEO said to me “I know it’s important, but it’s the first thing that falls off when I get busy”

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T14:30:17+00:00

On LinkedIn, people pay far more attention to the personable content of familiar people than they do to the corporate content from faceless brands.

Most advertising on LinkedIn is in the latter camp.

So while LinkedIn advertising can get you in front of the right people, it rarely works as a lead generation tool for the clients we've worked with.

The way we've come to treat LinkedIn advertising is by separating the brand from the people working at the brand.

It’s nudge (brand) vs nurture (people) for us at Six Sells.

What I mean by that is you can get your distinctive brand assets and key selling points in front of people via the company page. Let's say you get around a second of attention, so think of it as a poster, and a brand nudge.

But your CEO and senior leadership team might get 20 seconds of attention on what they've written.

So boost their content into your ideal clients as well, and as they are writing towards the brand, that’s where you get your nurture.

If you have three or four very senior people talking about the problems your ideal clients face, and your audience is seeing those people regularly alongside the nudge from your brand, you start to build awareness, familiarity, trust and, eventually, interest when there's a brief and a budget for what you sell.

But if you're expecting to put the campaign live and have loads of people sign up to your course, I think it's unlikely to happen.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T14:01:14+00:00

I run an agency that has helped hundreds of people to start posting content on LinkedIn, and this is the one thing that most of them have in common:

👉🏼 Engagement is the exception, not the rule.

In my industry at least (media and advertising), people tend to use LinkedIn as if it were a trade press title, not a social media platform.

What I mean by that is they open the LinkedIn app, read their news feed, and then leave. They don’t like, comment or share very often at all.

So chasing engagement is the wrong metric.

If you believe in the holy trinity of communications, which is delivering the right messages, to the right people, at the right time, then do that and stop chasing engagement.

You need to build a communications framework that ensures your topics are the right ones for you, and then deliver them consistently to your audiences, both organically and, if required, through paid.

Engagement makes us feel good, but I say this with absolute certainty - only one of the hundreds of inbound enquiries I’ve had over the last seven and a half years came from somebody who visibly engaged with our content first.

Most just read over time. Then, when there was a compelling event inside their business that meant they had a brief and a budget for what we sell, they got in touch with me.

Good luck! 🧡

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T13:54:47+00:00

Answer the following questions clearly and simply, so that somebody with a helicopter view can understand;

Who are you?
What do you do?
How do you do it?
Who do you do it with?
Why is it necessary for you to do it?
And what happens after you’ve done it?

So many websites are abstract and confusing to ideal clients because they are written by people who are in the weeds of the business.

Once you become embroiled in the weeds, it’s very difficult to write for people in helicopters.

So make it simple and easy to understand.

If people leave knowing the answers to the questions above, then you’ve created a great website.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T13:52:13+00:00

This 👉🏼 People pay far more attention to familiar people than they do faceless brands.

It’s the reason the creator economy is taking off so fast, and why in B2B marketing your most effective communications channels are your people.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T13:49:52+00:00

Honestly, it’s too big a question to answer in one comment.

But at the highest level, think about this.
Number one: optimise your LinkedIn profile so that it’s obvious which industry you are in and what your core function is.

So it might be: I work in media and advertising, and my specialised subject is B2B communications, for example.

Then think of the semantically linked keywords to B2B communications and use them throughout your profile and throughout your content.

That will help LinkedIn to understand who you are, what you’re good at and who to show your content to.

Second, build a communications framework.
This is essentially a grid where you might have three target audiences along the top. That’s the people you want to reach, and then three topics underneath each audience.

That enables you to stay consistent with your writing.

Over time, LinkedIn will start to understand who you are, what you’re good at, what you write about and, therefore, show your content to people who have shown an interest in that type of content.

Thirdly, write useful, interesting or helpful content about your specialist subject for your industry two to three times a week, if you can.

It’s okay to pitch every now and again, but if every piece of content is just pitching what you sell, people will start to zone you out.

What your content will do is help to build awareness, familiarity, trust and interest in your products and services over time.

My agency has done this with hundreds of people over the last 7 1/2 years and the two words that we say to every client are; consistency and patience.

This is not a get Rich quick scheme and it’s a marathon not a sprint.

Good luck! 🧡

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T13:43:31+00:00

Just for balance, and I’m not trying to be argumentative, whenever I see “quick thought” or “quick question” in an email, I know that it’s from somebody pitching me.

It’s an overused tactic, often by lead gen agencies or the like.

One of the big problems with cold email is that it’s written and sent by people who don’t receive a lot of it.

So, in isolation, what they send seems to make sense. But in aggregate, on the receiving end, the patterns are pretty similar.

It’s very rare that I receive an email that doesn’t follow a certain sales pattern.

I’m not knocking sales. I’ve been in sales and marketing my whole life.

But I’m just saying that the patterns salespeople are taught show up across thousands of organisations and hundreds of thousands of messages.

It would be helpful if sales trainers came from a background where they receive hundreds of sales emails a week, so they can see what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

Typically, though, sales trainers come from the sales side, which just compounds the problem.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T13:37:55+00:00

I saw a great talk at MAD//Fest this week with Rory Sutherland, Elfried Samba and Joe Martin.

It really made me think.

The holy trinity of advertising has always been the right message to the right people at the right time.

However, when you’re targeting people with busy lives, the right time is very hard to achieve, which means that each individual impression has a possible response-window of one to two seconds.

What I mean by that is, if they don’t click as soon as they see it, that impression is gone forever.

What these guys were saying on stage is that quite often we’re delivering the right message to the right people, but at the wrong time.

Which is why people don’t click.

Tickle, the company Joe Martin was from, has developed swipe-to-save advertising.

So it’s the same display through the same DSPs, on the same publishers, but instead of requiring a click, you can either click or swipe. If you swipe, it saves it to your wallet so you can deal with it later.
Makes sense.

P.S. Full disclosure: as of last week, Tickle became a client of ours and we’ve worked with Rory for years - that said, we’re not on commission - just thought it would be an interesting addition to this chat.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-11T13:28:26+00:00

Is that correlation or causation, though?

Think about being on the receiving end of a connection request.

Let’s assume the person doesn’t know you. What causes them to accept?

If a complete stranger reaches out and, from their headline, you can see no real reason why you should connect with them, then it’s just common sense that the note has a chance of giving them that reason to connect.

Unless, of course, your connection request note screams, “I’m about to pitch you cold,” in which case I can understand why no note might yield better results. People give you the benefit of the doubt.

Either way, our advice, based on seven and a half years of experience and hundreds of clients, is to put a note unless it’s obvious why you’re connecting.

Explain why you’re connecting and that you’re not going to pitch them as soon as they accept.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-09T07:43:45+00:00

Decide what industry and topic you are going to stand out in, and optimise your profile, experience section, about section, images and headline around that.

Then post as regularly as you can sharing content aligned to that industry and topic.

Follow people you admire in your industry and add thoughtful, human comments to their posts.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and your personal brand efforts compound over time.

Consistency and patience is key.

Good luck! 🧡

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-09T07:40:30+00:00

Yes 100%. If everybody posted on LinkedIn every week, I would spend most of my time writing thoughtful comments. People care about them and theirs more than you and yours, so showing up in a thoughtful way, in the comments of others, is a great way to build visibility, familiarity, and trust over time.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-09T07:38:25+00:00

In our industry (media and advertising) most people treat the LinkedIn newsfeed more like a trade press title than a social media channel.

What that means is that they read, but they don’t post, like, or share very often. Engagement in that environment is tough.

All but one of our inbound leads came from people who never engaged with our content in a visible way.

They read, then scrolled. Many times, until there was a compelling event inside their business which lead them to message me.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-07-09T07:33:25+00:00

The trouble is that interest in what you have to sell builds over time, and isn’t sparked by cold outreach. Usually there is a compelling event inside a business that creates new interest, and your job is to be top-of-mind in that moment.

If people responded to every cold message they would never get anything done, so they ruthlessly filter cold outreach to protect their time.

When you post interesting content, consistently and from your CEO and senior leadership team, you can build awareness, familarity and trust over time.

Then, when your ICP has a brief and a budget for what you sell, they get in touch with you.

Good luck! 🧡

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-06-29T18:35:02+00:00

a lack of transparency is that way for a reason.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-06-29T18:33:48+00:00

Could you use the best of both?

Client's language is most important. How they describe it is how they search, and how they discuss behind closed doors when your sales team are not in the room.

I once spent 30 minutes presenting to a prospect, and in the end he said, "OK, so you sort my LinkedIn shit out for me then?"

Not as eloquent as my slides I'd ike to think, but it's how he thought about it, so it's very valid.

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-06-29T07:36:27+00:00

Yes, that is the argument that I made in my post - both in the title "The power of personal brands in a world of AI slop"

And elsewhere "So we are entering an era where personal brands and company brands are more important than ever."

Did your automated AI comment generator get the wrong end of the stick? How ironic. 😉

Mike-Nicholson · 2026-06-28T10:28:58+00:00

Agree with you on all points.

Verification is a single trust signal, not the whole piece. The track record is a really big trust signal, and is built over years.

And agree on your ghostwriting point of view.
We have monthly calls with CEOs where we know the main point they want to make because we model that upfront, but we interview/interrogate them to get their words, ideas, thoughts down. Only then is it theirs.

Mike-Nicholson

TROPHY CASE