Picture this: You’re sitting in another pipeline review meeting. The same deals have been stuck for months. Your sales team is frustrated because they can’t get past the gatekeepers. Marketing’s ABM campaigns are technically perfect, but somehow they’re not moving the needle. Sound familiar?
Here’s what nobody talks about: In enterprise B2B sales, you’re not selling to a company, you’re selling to a committee. Often 10 to 20 people, sometimes more. And most of them are invisible to you until it’s too late.
The real enemy is not your competition. It’s the status quo. Your prospects would rather live with their current headaches than navigate the complexity of change. Traditional Account-Based Marketing (ABM) execution, despite all our best efforts, often fails to create enough momentum to overcome this inertia.
What if I told you there’s a LinkedIn strategy that actually works?
Not another tool or platform, but a fundamental shift in how your entire team uses LinkedIn.
We call it Profile-Based Marketing, it is a sub-category of Account-Based Marketing which puts people first, and it’s revolutionising how enterprise B2B organisations achieve real ROI from LinkedIn.
How much time and budget have you invested in your company’s LinkedIn page?
And how much engagement are you really seeing from your target accounts on that page?
Personal profiles generate 561% more reach than company pages. Not 56%. Five hundred and sixty-one percent.
At Pitch121 we have seen high-profile campaigns run through individual profiles versus a big corporate page, being 15 times more effective.
Yet most of us are still treating LinkedIn like it’s 2015, pushing everything through our company page and wondering why our B2B sales performance isn’t improving.
Your sales team knows this pain intimately. They’re sending InMails into the void (with a pitiful 3% response rate, if they are lucky).
Their posts disappear without a trace, their connection acceptance rates are 15% or less, and 90% of B2B buyers never respond to cold outreach at all.
Meanwhile, your executives, and your subject matter experts, your visionaries, the brains behind your products a.k.a. the people who could really move the needle – are “too busy” to be active on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a people-first platform. It always has been. People connect with people, not logos.
Employee Advocacy Platforms don’t cut it. The cookie cutter posts are going out, but a lack of a strategy means they are still not being seen by your target accounts.
Yet, there can be huge ROI from LinkedIn, when it supports your marketing and sales strategy. And to be deeply embedded, you need a People-first LinkedIn Strategy.
Profile-Based Marketing isn’t about getting your team to share more company content. It’s about transforming your subject matter experts and executives into genuine thought leaders or simply clever people who share what they are doing, who earn trust, respect for your brand, and a following. And they happen to work for your company.
Think of it as the difference between a corporate billboard and a trusted advisor at a dinner party. Which one would you rather listen to?
This LinkedIn strategy also creates meaningful connections through real people having real conversations. It’s ABM execution at its finest! Engaging your target accounts where they actually are, in a way they actually respond to. For complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise deals, it’s the difference between hoping for engagement and guaranteeing it.
Before you do anything else, stop. Look at your team’s LinkedIn profiles. If they read like résumés or, worse, like they haven’t been updated since 2019, you’ve already lost.
Here’s what expert LinkedIn profile management actually looks like:
Start with headlines that intrigue rather than inform. Instead of “VP of Sales at TechCorp,” try “VP, Finance Automation | TechCorp works with HSBC & UBS | | Keynote speaker & Author | ex-Santander, ex-Moody’s”
See the difference?
Your summary isn’t your bio, it’s your personal value proposition. What makes you uniquely positioned to be able to help that person reading it. Who are you, do you have shared values, passions, hobbies even. All of this makes you memorable – which is needed to stay front of mind over time.
Your featured section isn’t a dumping ground, it’s your greatest hits album.
And that background banner that’s either generic or outdated? That’s prime real estate for your current campaign or thought leadership position. Have you taken advantage of the 3 second scroll that offers alternative banners?
Every profile needs to tell a story that aligns with your company’s narrative while maintaining individual authenticity. It’s a delicate balance, but when done right, it transforms your team into a network of interconnected brand ambassadors.
Here’s where things get interesting. Traditional ABM execution tells you to map stakeholders. We say: connect with them. All of them. Before they even know they need you.
Start by having your executives make the first move. When your CEO connects with their CEO, acceptance rates double for everyone else on your team who follows. It’s like having a VIP introduce you at an exclusive event. This multi-threaded LinkedIn strategy creates a web of connections that becomes nearly impossible to ignore.
We’re not talking about random connection requests. This is surgical precision enabled by Sales Navigator, identifying those with common ground, with mutual connections, the active users, understanding their priorities, and connecting with genuine intent to provide value.
Something we’ve discovered at Pitch121 is that when you connect strategically, magic happens. The more of your colleagues we are connected with, the more likely you are to accept. If you have heard of a brand from a previous connection, you are more likely to accept someone else from that brand.
This is subtle, if we mention the connection in the message, we draw suspicion and it doesn’t work as well.
What does this mean?
This means we double a sales person’s connection rate when we connect a colleague who is a peer or someone more relevant first.
We don’t want you to stop reading as the good bit is yet to come, but if you want to learn more about the tests and results we have done to optimise your connection acceptance rates, do check out our Research Report on our website here.
This also means that we can have 50+ connections to a target account with someone in your business in just a few months, and when that happens, something very interesting happens with the algorithm.
Forget everything you know about social media content calendars. This isn’t about posting consistently; it’s about posting strategically and amplifying intelligently.
Your content must speak directly to your target accounts’ pain points in their language. But the secret sauce is the algorithm bubble.
When your team engages with each other’s content, LinkedIn’s algorithm takes notice. Suddenly, your content appears in your target accounts’ feeds not once, but repeatedly, from different trusted voices.
When you thoughtfully engage with your prospects’ content first, you exponentially increase the chances they’ll see and engage with yours.
This is where the magic happens. When PBM is firing on all cylinders, your sales team enters conversations that are already warm.
Connection acceptance rates for sales people jump from 10-20% to 30-50%, we’ve even seen 70%!
Not only that but a note added in the connection request with a light and open follow up note, means that response rates increase by 35%.
And here’s the number that makes CFOs smile: 20-25% of LinkedIn messages turn into meaningful conversations that can be taken off LinkedIn.
Multi-threaded deals don’t just close, they close 20-40% faster. And when 15% of decision-makers change jobs annually, those multiple connections become your insurance policy against deals walking out the door.
The handoff to sales becomes seamless. Instead of cold lists, they receive “FANlists” (Lists of people that make up your “Future Advocacy Network”) of engaged stakeholders who already know your value proposition.
It’s the difference between cold calling and calling a friend.
These FANs are added to your CRM and are tracked from first touch on LinkedIn to revenue.
We track everything: connection acceptance rates, engagement from target accounts, network growth, post impressions, and most importantly, pipeline impact.
One B2B tech company warmed over 100 stakeholders across 10 accounts in 30 days, this is month one, and you have to trust the process.
The result at the end of the first year?
The same SDRs had been able to open doors easier, after all they were inviting the people they contacted to meet this expert who had connected and engaged in their posts these last few months.
They had long sales cycles, so they measured the success in their CRM based on Pipeline Value. Three times their annual total. That’s a 300% year-over-year increase with new CRM leads and without increasing sales headcount. That kept the Private Equity owner very happy, but not as much as when the deals came over the line in H1 the following year.
This is not a one-off.
For clients trying to drive awareness to launch new products, get known in new markets, or get traction in accounts who have wouldn’t have heard of their brand.
A financial software company’s six executive profiles generated 961,000 impressions in one year. Not through ads. Through authentic engagement.
Another financial services team achieved 5 million impressions over 2.5 years, with campaigns via personal profiles proving 15 times more effective than company page efforts.
You could calculate what those impressions would cost in advertising, then compare it to the organic reach your team generates, but it wouldn’t be like-for-like, while most ads on LinkedIn get ignored, we do it because the targeting is good. If you can target your posts with PBM and leverage personal perspectives to draw people in, who are then added to your CRM and followed up by your sales team, the ROI from content and a LinkedIn PBM strategy becomes undeniable.
Profile-Based MArketing isn’t just another LinkedIn tactic, it’s the definitive approach for complex B2B sales and exceptional ABM execution. While your competitors are still broadcasting from their company pages and spending a fortune on advertising, you’ll be building genuine relationships at scale.
This isn’t about gaming the system. It’s about using LinkedIn the way it was designed to be used: person to person, professional to professional. With expert LinkedIn profile management and coordinated team execution, you’ll cut through the digital noise, engage high-value prospects effectively, and dramatically accelerate your B2B sales performance.
The question isn’t whether Profile-Based Marketing works – we’ve proven it does. The question is: How much longer will you wait while your competitors figure this out?
Your pipeline doesn’t have to be a mystery. Your ABM campaigns don’t have to fall flat. And your team doesn’t have to struggle for engagement. Profile-Based Marketing delivers consistent ROI from LinkedIn, robust campaign amplification, and most importantly, a sustainable competitive advantage in the enterprise B2B space.
Because in enterprise B2B sales, relationships aren’t just important—they’re everything. And relationships happen between people, not companies.
Why do traditional B2B sales approaches, heavily reliant on company pages, often fall short in the current market?
What is the “Status Quo Challenge” in modern B2B sales and how does Profile-Based Marketing address it?
What is Profile-Based Marketing (PBM), and how does it differ fundamentally from traditional Account-Based Marketing (ABM) in its execution?
What are the key elements of an optimised individual LinkedIn profile within the Profile-Based Marketing framework?
How does “cross-connecting” enhance connection acceptance rates in target accounts?
What is an “algorithm bubble,” and how does Profile-Based Marketing leverage it for content amplification?
Which specific ways does Profile-Based Marketing contributes to faster deal cycles?
What are “FANlists” and your Future Advocacy Network?
Beyond connection acceptance rates, what are two other key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure the ROI of Profile-Based Marketing?
How does Profile-Based Marketing build resilience against deal churn when key decision-makers change jobs?
See what actually works to spark real conversations on LinkedIn—backed by data, not guesswork.
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