Your Lead Problem Isn’t What You Think It Is

Your Lead Problem Isn’t What You Think It Is

Most operators don’t lose deals because of weak demand. They lose them because execution breaks between signal and follow-through. The pipeline looks full. The calendar is busy. But outcomes lag behind activity.

At a certain level, growth doesn’t fail from lack of opportunity. It fails from operational drag, fragmented decision-making, and systems that don’t hold under pressure. The cost isn’t just missed revenue. It’s leadership bandwidth getting consumed by things that should already be solved.

Preferred listening on the go? Catch the full podcast episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

The Hidden Constraint

The default assumption in most organizations is that more input solves the problem. More traffic. More leads. More campaigns.

But as discussed in the conversation with Anthony Blatner, the issue isn’t volume. It’s alignment between inputs and qualified outcomes.

When cheaper channels generate higher activity but lower-quality leads, teams end up spending time filtering instead of converting. Sales cycles extend. Decision speed slows. Leadership gets pulled into diagnosing problems that originate from poor upstream filtering.

This creates a hidden tax on execution.

You see it in teams that are “busy” but not advancing. In dashboards that look healthy at the top of the funnel but collapse deeper in the pipeline. In repeated conversations about improving conversion without addressing the quality of what’s entering the system.

The constraint is not effort. It’s the absence of a decision-making framework that prioritizes qualified outcomes over surface-level efficiency.

The Operating Shift

The shift is from optimizing for activity to optimizing for qualified progression.

This is where operational leverage actually begins.

Instead of asking “How do we get more leads?” the better question becomes:

What is the cost per qualified opportunity, and how consistently can we produce it?

This reframing changes how capital is allocated. It also changes how teams operate.

Rather than chasing low-cost clicks, operators start aligning marketing, sales, and data systems around a single standard: does this input produce forward movement in the pipeline?

This is a discipline shift. It requires tighter feedback loops, better instrumentation, and clearer ownership across stages.

It also requires accepting that higher upfront costs can produce lower total cost when execution is aligned.

That’s not a marketing decision. That’s capital allocation.

Execution in Practice

There are a few execution patterns from the conversation that highlight how this shift actually works inside an operating business.

1. Full-Funnel Visibility Over Front-End Metrics

One of the most common breakdowns is over-indexing on early-stage performance. Campaigns that generate low-cost leads get scaled quickly, even if those leads never convert.

The correction is straightforward but often ignored: track progression beyond the initial conversion.

This means tying marketing inputs directly to CRM stages. Not just leads, but qualified leads, opportunities, and closed outcomes.

When this visibility is in place, scaling decisions become clearer. Campaigns are no longer judged by volume, but by their contribution to pipeline movement.

This reduces noise and prevents teams from chasing false positives.

2. Lead Qualification as a System, Not a Judgment Call

Another key execution layer is the introduction of structured lead grading.

Instead of relying on intuition, teams implement a simple qualification step immediately after lead capture. A binary or tiered system that answers: is this the right type of opportunity or not?

This does two things.

First, it creates a feedback loop that improves targeting and messaging.

Second, it protects leadership bandwidth by preventing misaligned opportunities from moving deeper into the pipeline.

Without this, teams end up spending time evaluating deals that should have been filtered out earlier.

3. Content and Distribution as a System, Not an Event

The conversation also highlights a critical distinction in how content is used.

Most teams treat content as isolated output. A post, a campaign, a one-time push.

The more effective model is to treat it as part of a structured funnel.

Cold content introduces ideas and establishes relevance. Retargeting reinforces positioning. Offer-driven content converts.

Each layer builds on the previous one.

This reduces randomness and creates consistency in how prospects move through the system. It also reduces the need for constant reinvention, which is one of the biggest drains on execution capacity.

4. Delegation as Risk Control, Not Just Time Savings

A less obvious but critical insight is how delegation is used.

In many cases, leaders avoid delegating certain activities because they view them as low leverage or difficult to standardize.

But in environments like LinkedIn, where consistency and manual interaction matter, delegation becomes a form of risk management.

Automating incorrectly can lead to platform penalties or reputational damage.

Delegating to trained support, such as virtual executive assistants, allows execution to continue without exposing the organization to unnecessary risk.

This is not about offloading work. It’s about maintaining system integrity while protecting leadership focus.

Leverage Outcome

When these elements are in place, the outcome is not just better marketing performance. It’s operational clarity.

Teams know which inputs drive results.

Decisions are based on progression, not activity.

Execution becomes more predictable.

Most importantly, leadership bandwidth is preserved.

Instead of reacting to breakdowns, leaders operate from a position of control. They can focus on higher-order decisions like strategy, capital allocation, and team development.

This is what operational leverage actually looks like in practice.

Not doing more. Doing fewer things with higher precision and better alignment.

Connect With the Guest

To learn more about Anthony Blatner and their work:
Website: https://speedworksocial.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyblatner/

The Immediate Move

If the pipeline feels inconsistent or heavier than it should, the issue is not volume. It’s structure.

Audit where opportunities break between initial interest and qualified progression.

Implement a clear qualification step. Align metrics across the full funnel. Remove any activity that does not directly contribute to forward movement.

Leadership bandwidth is not lost in strategy. It’s lost in re-decisions, misaligned inputs, and systems that don’t hold.

Fix the structure, and capacity expands without adding hours.

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Full Transcript

Most leaders don’t have a pipeline problem. They have a follow-up and focus problem. Today, we’re joined by Anthony Blattner, founder of SpeedWorks Social and host of LinkedIn Ads Radio. He’s helped SaaS companies turn LinkedIn into predictable pipeline engine without adding more chaos to their day. Anthony, welcome to Scale Smart, Grow Fast. I’d for you to share a little bit more about your background and what led you to SpeedWorks Social.

Yeah. Hey Harley, thanks for having me. So a little bit about my background. I come into the marketing world from, from the tech world. I started my career early on doing software development and started my first business doing mobile app development. So I originally I worked for IBM for a few years, and then I started my own business building mobile apps for other people. This was like the very early days of the iPhone and it was.

It was a great, great space to be in at the time. And then, you know, after a while of building a lot of mobile apps, people started asking for help of, can you help us get some more downloads, get some more users and get people to sign up for it. So that was kind of the natural transition into getting into the marketing world. And, know, back in the day, it was try a little bit of everything, Google ads, Facebook ads, you know, all across the board, SEO and LinkedIn. And then.

because we were working with largely like tech companies and startups and stuff like that. We often found that LinkedIn was the best performing channel for all those types of companies. So this marketing agency we’ve had for about 10 years now, which seems like a long time and maybe.

Maybe like seven of those 10 years we’ve just decided just to focus on LinkedIn because seven years ago there was not many people doing LinkedIn. It was working very well for these types of tech companies. Obviously nowadays there’s a lot more people on LinkedIn which is great for both sides. But that’s how we got our start into getting into LinkedIn marketing and have just focused on LinkedIn ever since.

was actually at lunch today with someone who used to work in the SaaS space and were kind of lamenting about going to SaaS masterminds and these guys would be like great tech minds, but really struggled to get these products that they have and these great technology and engineering ideas out to the masses because they were not marketing people and didn’t have a clue what they were doing. So love that you’re here, maybe can shed some light for people like that today. I’m curious if you could take us back to that moment where you realized that LinkedIn

could be more than just another channel and what kind of distinguishes it from the other platforms out there that benefits people for getting their product out there.

For sure. So I do, I always remember this one project that I worked on like very early on. It was for a data analytics company that was basically selling dashboarding software to mid-market and bigger companies. Like it would, it had a lot of data security, data privacy and stuff like that type of tools built in. So it was meant for like bigger companies.

in, those, when we first started, we started by running everything for them. So we did Google ads, we did meta ads, and we did LinkedIn ads and you know, Google ads, you would get a lot of people searching for data analytics or research and stuff like that. But found that often like those types of people were maybe students looking for research that might use at school or maybe some research that they were doing, on meta. You know, a of people were downloading some different

Offers are signing up for things just because they thought it was an interesting free offer or like it was a flashy PDF or something. But when you go to look at those leads, pretty much none of them fit like the

criteria that the company was looking for. then comparing that to LinkedIn, where pretty much every lead that came through was like a good fit. So when you look at those metrics side by side, it was very clear that LinkedIn was the winner there. And we ended up pushing most of the budget to LinkedIn. So I always remember that project because it was just like super clear of the cost per qualified lead comparing these different channels. And, you know,

That was the one that always sticks out of my mind. And ever since then it’s been like, okay, LinkedIn is the place for B2B. If you’re, if you’re selling B2B to a niche professional, that’s where LinkedIn really stands out. You know, if you’re going to go sell to every business owner, know, maybe you have credit card processing software, maybe Meta is a better channel for that. So whenever you have a big broad audience, Meta might be a better channel for that. But yeah, I always think about that project.

And then that’s not to say that these other channels don’t have any place in B2B. Like there’s definitely some use for Google ads and meta ads in B2B marketing, but used the right way so that you’re targeting the right people and not just kind of driving a lot of cold traffic that isn’t going to be a good fit for

I how you broke that down. Now, some people may have heard or when they’re doing online research about getting into advertising that LinkedIn ads or LinkedIn marketing tends to be on the pricier side for the cost per click or impression or those different metrics. What would you say to someone who is seeing this and being like, well, it’s cheaper to go on Meta or these other platforms?

Yeah, really at the end of the day, have to look at your cost per qualified lead that you’re getting. And when, you know, when you look at Meta versus LinkedIn, Meta is almost always going to look cheaper. But if you’re getting, you know, 50 cent clicks, but none of them are the right people, then it doesn’t matter. So at end of the day, you have to look at cost per qualified lead that’s coming through and then kind of understand your metrics in that way.

You if you run Google display ads or meta ads, those are always going to look cheaper than LinkedIn. So you just got to make sure that you’re, you’re measuring the traffic and the results that you’re getting from that traffic. and then comparing them that way. So those are, those are some thoughts on that. but also I’ll say the, you know, the newer thing in LinkedIn these days is what’s called thought leader ads. it sounds fancy, but really just boosting posts from people. and the advantages.

person will always get higher engagement rates than a company. So we see much better performance from running these thoughtlier ads and with them, the engagement rates are so much higher that we can achieve much lower costs in a manner that’s competitive with the cost you’re going to see on Meta. So we can now get pretty competitive with Meta’s metrics and we know our traffic is all the right people that we’re going to.

And so actually it might be more cost effective because you’re getting the right people and not wasting money on leads that are taking maybe your sales team’s time and they’re just not the right people. That makes a lot of sense. I’d love to hear if you could maybe take us back and talk through one of your biggest mistakes that you made when you were first starting to scale these LinkedIn campaigns and what did it teach you about trusting your data and your team?

That’s a good question. What’s one of the biggest mistakes? I think working in the ads platform, you know, it can be too easy sometimes to see, this campaign is driving a really good cost per lead and a lot of leads. Let’s go crank that one up. But you need to then go look at what is, how are those leads moving after?

that initial conversion point because sometimes it can be very easy to drive a lot of leads for something, but maybe those people don’t have the right type of intent or the thing that they’re downloading maybe is a little bit misaligned with your main core offer. So very often in B2B marketing, the lead magnet strategy can be an effective one to use for a lot of industries. It can be when you need to generate new demand or if someone’s not

actively searching for you. Like if it’s a new category or a new product, then it’s hard to go straight to like get a demo or contact us because people need to learn something first. So that’s when switching to like a lead magnet strategy can be a more effective version of that, where you’re to offer some kind of downloadable guide checklist, webinar, stuff like that can all be effective. So sometimes

when you’re split testing different content items, you might find one is getting a lot more downloads, but you need to then look at what’s the conversion to call and to call into opportunity after that for those leads coming through and not just look at that pure front end cost per lead because that’s a mistake that yes, I have made in the past is you’ve you’ll over, you know, over index on, we’re getting a lot of leads here. Let’s crank that campaign up. But you really need to look at the full.

funnel as to like how those leads are moving afterwards. So if you’re using any kind of CRM, that makes this a lot easier. Something that we do for all clients is a lead grading step where as the lead comes in, we have them or their salesperson grade the lead for just a very quick initial, know, is this the right person or no, to give us, you know, to let us know like are the right people coming in through this offer and through this audience. If not, then we need to make some adjustments. So we do have that lead grading step.

And then from there, if you’re using any kind of CRM system like HubSpot or Salesforce, all of those have like the qualified lead step and the opportunity step so that you’ll know, okay, yes, this lead did progress to further stages. And those are the things you need to be then watch.

Awesome. Well, it sounds like you really learned some valuable lessons there. Watching the numbers and the metrics and tracking them is so important. I’m curious what your journey has been. Obviously, when you start out, doing everything yourself, leveraging both technology to help with scaling these LinkedIn pipelines as well as delegating, if you can speak to that in your experience.

Yeah. So it is a very exciting time for anything tech or online these days with all the AI stuff. So I’ll get to that a second, but first let’s talk about delegation. So on LinkedIn, there’s a lot of stuff that are…

I’ll say kind of nice to have, you’ll see a lot of people talk about, you should be making connection requests. You should be liking posts. You should be commenting on posts that your average CEO is not going to do. They don’t have time to do that. They’re, they’re focused on what their day to day is. They don’t have time to jump on the link to do this stuff. This is a perfect opportunity to delegate that to somebody. and I’d say that this is not, this is not a great thing for AI yet. Maybe AI will get there, but

You know, everyone has seen the AI comments and the AI posts on LinkedIn and it just looks bad when you see that you, you know, you, you know, it’s AI generated and you gives you a worse feeling about the person that you’re seeing post that again, a CEO is not going to want to be putting that out there and having other people think that of them. So this is a great use case to delegate to somebody, whether it could be a marketing leader on your team or a VA is great for this. So those are some good cases for that.

You know, they can go send those connection requests. They can go like those posts, leave those comments, and then that really starts to generate a lot of activity on LinkedIn. And that is, that does set a really good foundation for everything else that you’re going to do afterwards. So I talk a lot about advertising strategies and including those thought leader ad strategies where you’re boosting posts from people. So the more activity that that profile generates, the more…

the better the foundation that builds for everything else that we’re going to do on top of that. So it is a very, it doesn’t all kind of work together and build on each other. So next let’s talk, we can talk a little bit about the AI stuff. So AI is very, very interesting these days. You know, I think the easiest thing that most people can conceptualize is using it to generate posts, right? Write some posts for me. I do, Hey, recommend go, go do that. A lot of people, the biggest hurdle, like we work with lots of companies and lots of executives.

It is, you’d be surprised sometimes how much of a hurdle it is to get somebody to post on LinkedIn, or it’s like, we just need to get you some posts. Like I’ll write you some posts. You just need to get them out there. and I find, you know, giving them the content is the best, is the best way to get them started. The second best way is to show them their competitors who are posting well on LinkedIn and being like, we’re losing ground if you’re not posting, because you can see that these competitors are generating a lot of activity. so those are the two things that really help you get somebody to post, but from there.

you know, eventually you want them to be generating their own posts or their marketing leader or manager to be doing that. So AI is a great tool for that. One workflow I love is taking your call recordings from your past week and connecting the end. with like MCPs these days where you can add connectors to Claude or chat, GPT, you can say, Hey, go look at all my call recordings from this past week. Take a look at the transcripts and

and suggest some LinkedIn post ideas from like some insights and some LinkedIn post ideas from those call transcripts. And that just gives you a very unique set of posts that you could post on LinkedIn. Otherwise you might be getting some pretty generic kind of boring stuff. Cause I do talk to a lot of people and they’re like, yeah, I try to use AI, but it was kind of boring. It didn’t kind of, know, kind of seem like those, those, those noisy posts that you see all over the feed. And they’re like, I don’t want to do that. Well, if you give it.

more accurate starting content relevant to you, then it’s going to generate stuff from you. So take call recordings. I love that workflow. And use that to generate some posts. And then of course, don’t just click posts on that. Give it a little bit of human love, know, make sure it sounds like you do some editing to it. You know, I like to break it up a little bit. AI can be a little overly formal when it’s writing because as AI it wants, it’s going to output perfect grammar most of the time and stuff like that. Even if it doesn’t sound the way that somebody would actually write it. So take a Passover, edit it, put it your voice. You know, if, if you tend to use emojis, go at them in,

and just make it sound like you. can definitely do some training for the AI. You hey, here’s all my posts that I’ve written so far, or here’s a bunch of my other writing and let it learn based off that. But I find take a Passover and edit it yourself a little bit and just make it sound a little more conversational. So AI is very interesting. Writing content is the easiest thing. And then from there, we’re doing some very interesting things with in the ads platform. Now you can connect Claude to the ads platform. There are MCPs out there to do that.

But through all my testing, like MCPs are a great tool, but they can be limited in the fact that they’re like, like pre pre-configured APIs where someone’s like, okay, you know, here’s, here’s 20 API calls you can make from this MCP. But most APIs are pretty extensive that 20 doesn’t, isn’t fully giving you full access to the API. So I’ve built.

my own API interface to the LinkedIn ads API. And like anybody can do this. It’s very easy to do. you just tell Claude to do it. does it for you. build your own API interface so that you can just communicate directly with the LinkedIn ads API. And then you can start to get to some more interesting things.

you know, the couple of connections I would make is your LinkedIn ads connection, and then maybe your CRM connection, HubSpot, whatever it is. And then you start to pull that data out and tell Claude to analyze your LinkedIn ads performance data versus your HubSpot CRM data and make some connections of, Hey, this campaign is driving you the best leads. Go and those leads are turning into sales opportunities and HubSpot go spend more there.

because blending together the LinkedIn ads data versus your serum data is really where the magic happens. And it can be challenging sometimes to see that because LinkedIn’s got the spend and the clicks, HubSpot has meetings and opportunities, and sometimes you have to manually export those and blend them together to get those stats. But if you can just tell Claude to go do it, that really simplifies the whole process a lot.

Those are just some interesting examples. And then from there, there’s just like, you know, once, once you get something into like an MCP and Claude, then like the options are infinite. So there’s some more advanced stuff that you can do, but I’ll kind of leave it at that for the purpose of this episode.

And one of the themes I’m hearing is like, there’s great opportunity, both on delegation and leveraging technology AI specifically. One thing that stands out is you still have to have a human in the loop, the thought leader, right? Whether it’s you, you know, helping a CEO or a CEO coming in and like kind of following your guidance, there’s got to be that human in the loop to make it effective. You know, you cannot just say, Hey Claude, do all my ads.

it needs to have someone to get it set up right. You’ve got to have that plan. And so I think that’s an important point that you’re making there. One question I had too was, along with some of the opportunities that you shared, like the Thought Leader promotion, leveraging AI with the LinkedIn ads and your CRM, are you finding it important to find ways to have people on LinkedIn or whatever social platform they’re on grow their direct

network, their connections, I think it’s the term in LinkedIn, or like friends for Facebook and Meta, and like what strategies, if that is important to you, suggest people leverage.

Yeah. So your connections are definitely one piece of the pie. It doesn’t end there, but it does kind of start there. So building your network is useful because, you know, a lot of what we do is how do we get more impressions to your content? The first step is just building awareness, getting people to know who you are, what you do, and then you can deliver the CTA. So the bigger your network, the more people are going to organically see your content. So definitely network is one step of the process. And you can…

You can send those connection requests. LinkedIn has tightened those limits a lot. So you can send about a hundred to 125 a week. So do use those? And the best thing to do is in sales navigator, if you have sales navigator, you can filter by people who have viewed your profile. So it’s kind of the warmest, almost retargeting stuff you can do. So, Hey, if someone’s viewed my profile, great, let’s go make sure we connect with them. You’ll have the highest connection rate out of that. You know, maybe you filter that down to like your ICP.

You know, the right job title, the right type of company who has viewed your profile and they connect with those people. And then for any leftover ones, go connect with, with your target audience. so that’s kind just one piece of the puzzle. Other things you can do is the more content you post, you can gain followers out of that in the top right corner will be a little follow button for someone who’s not connected or following you. So the, the better content you post, the more likely someone is to click follow on that button. I find that,

those document carousels tend to be some of the best stuff. Well, those in videos are like the top two because for whatever reason, people find those documents very interesting. Like they often want to save those and send them to somebody else on the team and just tends to get a lot more followers. And then same with video too. You kind of like get the, people kind of really get to know you when you post a video of yourself, maybe talking about your topic.

So those are the best two to build your following and then from there once you have a good top-performing post that’s a good candidate to go boost and then from there you can kind of just you know run the continue running the process that way

And then overall, like the best thing if you’re trying to build followers is those comment to receive type of posts. Some people have had bad experiences with those, but at end of the day, if you’re like offering a good piece of content to people and then you actually give it to them when it comes out, that’s all you got to do. And then, you know, people will be happy. Sometimes you’ll see those people haven’t followed up with everybody, haven’t sent it to everybody, and then they’ll get annoyed and frustrated. But those comment to receive posts are like one of the fastest ways to build your network.

Not everyone’s going to do that, but if you do have interesting pieces of content that you can share, that’s the best way to build your follow-up.

And is the handler for those like comment to receive posts something that can be automated? you found that? Or is it best to like just leverage that virtual assistant again to just monitor those and go ahead and deliver the deliverable at that time.

Yeah. Another good time for delegation. Definitely would delegate that to a VA. You want to be very careful. I do not recommend automation on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is trying very hard to ban and remove any account that uses automation. So LinkedIn’s getting smarter and smarter about it. They’ve recently banned other companies who have done automation on LinkedIn. So you just, you see the trend happening. You know, they’re banning the companies and they’re starting to ban people that do automation. So just.

You know, no, no CEO wants to lose their profile. So at the end of the day, you want to make sure you’re doing it the right way. You’re not going to get yourself banned. Um, so yeah, the recent examples are like Apollo got banned maybe a year ago and then Hey Reach just got banned. And it’s because those platforms were automating actions on LinkedIn. They were scraping data from LinkedIn. LinkedIn doesn’t like that. So they got rid of those platforms and then, you know,

I actually just read an article that anytime you visit LinkedIn, LinkedIn scans your browser for extensions you might be using that might be, that are known to do automations on LinkedIn. So be careful with the browser extensions you’re using and just be careful with the automation that you’re using. Um, you know, I’ve, I’ve heard of a lot of people being fine with doing a little bit of automation, but I’ve also heard of a lot of people getting their profiles restricted or banned or something like that.

I as an advertiser do not recommend automation and if you do, just be very, very careful with whatever you’re doing. The flip side of that is, hey, it’s much easier to go delegate this to a VA. LinkedIn is very aware that most CEOs have an assistant out there, any kind of mid to big size company. Pretty much all those CEOs have an assistant of some sort who’s gonna help them with anything that they’re doing on LinkedIn. So, LinkedIn’s very aware of that.

So the delegation route is the better route to go. Do not automate things on LinkedIn. You know, don’t, you can try your luck, but you might get banned.

So leave the automation and technology more for the backend, the links between the API for the LinkedIn ads and just analyzing the data and helping generate content, sounds like, and put the human in the loop for the actual direct interaction.

Yeah, and it’s interesting you talk about the human loop step. Like I think that is a very important step for anything that you’re going to do AI based. And then the other thing that I think a lot about that I’ve heard about is called the skilled operator.

problem or situation or scenario where at end of the day, whatever you’re using AI for, you still need to know what you’re doing to know if the output’s any good. So whether you’re writing content or analyzing performance data or whatever it is, like analyzing your financials, like the output, the recommendations, you still need to know if it’s good or not. So

You know, I don’t, AI hopefully will be making us more efficient, but, you know, it’s not going to eliminate every job and everything because you still need to know somebody, you still need to have somebody who knows what they’re doing. So hopefully it makes teams and companies more efficient and people more efficient. But the other day you still need to know if what, what it’s outputting is good.

Well, that’s a perfect segue into a question I had for you, which is like when something does work, you get that post where you get a lot of engagement, you get a lot of leads coming through it. How do you turn that into a repeatable process instead of just having it as a one-off win?

Yes. So what you do is you start to build a funnel out of your LinkedIn posts. if you’ve done any marketing, the marketing funnel is a common concept where you’ll have your cold layer and then you’ll have your retargeting layer so that once somebody engages with your cold layer, maybe you’re targeting that to your ICP or your target accounts. And then once somebody clicks on one of those, watches the video, then those people get retargeted with all of the rest of your content. So you start to build that journey.

So this is what starts to make it a repeatable process is as they engage then get retargeted you can add you can add website retargeting so anybody who visits your website will get retargeted you can add company page retargeting so anybody who visits your company on LinkedIn can get retargeted so these are all good things to be building in and then You know kind of the three main steps are number one. You’re gonna have your cold layer So what I like to use there like there’s a lot of stuff that can work there, but what I see work best

across the board for everybody is like a good case study. And it needs to be the like, here’s how you can achieve XYZ results. Here’s some steps or here’s a tutorial or here’s information that you can use. Not the we’re so awesome because we got this result case study, but here’s how you can do it to type of case study. That’s what that’s why people are on LinkedIn to read those types of posts and learn something that they can take back to their job and their company. That’s what they want. So if you’re

If you’re posting that, that’s perfect content to start with. So case studies across the board can work well. There’s lots of that can work well, but across the board is case studies. And then from there, retarget them with a whole bunch of different posts, maybe other case studies, maybe podcast clips, other things. A lot of things can go in that second layer. And then your third layer can be your offer posts. So at this point, know, people have engaged with you a few different times. They have a much better picture of who you are and what you do.

And then from there, then you can deliver your offer post. So this type of post could be much more direct into, hey, here’s what we do. Here’s how we help people. Click here for a free consultation or a free demo or free trial, whatever it is. And then that would be then boosted to that third layer. Again, people have engaged with you few times. They have a much better picture of who you are.

And a couple of tips here is one, you can post without the link initially, maybe just app tag your company instead of the link so that you get the maximum organic reach. And then after a couple of days, you can then go edit that post, switch that tag to a link and then boost it so that you’re getting your organic engagement. You then edit it and then you boost it. And now it’s going to run as a boosted post. You’re not worried about it getting like less reach because of the link.

you’re boosting it so you know it’s going to give it’s reach. And then yes, lots of people, you know, maybe shy away from putting links into posts because very often on social and like there’s a lot of like mixed research out there, but very often on social, if you put a link in a post, you get less reach out of that post. So.

Once you boost something, you know the algorithm is going to be serving it because you’re boosting it as an ad. So that’s a way to just make sure your content is getting served to the right people that you want it to and not just leaving it up to the organic algorithm. So once you set this up as a funnel, then that’s how you start to build repeatable results and drive people to whatever your final offer is.

There’s a huge amount of value you just shared there. Appreciate all those tips for everyone listening. And one question I think a lot of people have on their minds right now is like, especially with LinkedIn, it seems to be evolving a lot. It’s changing what it promotes, what people like. We’ve already talked about some of the things that’s changed just in the last few years. What do you think leaders need to be preparing now to do to protect their pipelines ability and their leadership freedom over the next six, 12, 18 months?

Can you repeat that question over time? I’ll do the wave for your editor.

Yes. So basically, you know, it was a long question. So I’ll shorten it up. as LinkedIn evolves, what should many leaders be preparing to do now to protect their pipeline stability and their leadership freedom over the next 12 to 18 months?

Yeah, so it is about building systems, I believe that, you know, some of these things that we’ve talked about of analyze your call transcripts and then create LinkedIn posts from that. Like we’re talking about systems here for the most part. Like that’s how you start to get it out of from just like one-off chats with Claude into like something that saves you time. So people should be.

I think everybody should be learning AI now, like learning how these tools work, learning how the MCPs work and all this stuff, because I think it is getting better and more useful and more integrations are being built. So it’s definitely like, that’s where everything is going. You need to learn it now so that you can take advantage of it. But that said, for like executives to like start, you know, saving themselves time, there’s a few different things, I think.

And I’ll kind of first I’ll walk through like the B2B marketing process. And then from there, I’ll have some stuff out of sight of it. But what you do is as you start to that funnel that I talked about first, it’s about the content that you’re creating. So build that process, get the content created, then also know who you want to be selling to. So the more clear and specific you can be about who your target audience is, the more targeted your ad campaigns can be. And then the more

The more you know your money will be spent on the right people because we don’t want to leave anything up to chance. We don’t want to be spending money on the wrong people. So you want to make sure you’re reaching the exact right people. And one of the best things you can do is build a target account list, whether that’s your Dream 100 or your TAM, your Total Addressable Market. Build that list so that

You know, the exact companies you want to be reaching and not just, you know, leave it, leaving it up to chance of who’s going to be seeing your ads. So that’s some of the groundwork you can do now. and like I said, from there, it’s about building systems. and I I still believe that right now, like, you know, outsourcing, delegating, VAs are a great thing to be doing that, some of this stuff cannot be automated with AI, you know, to the automation thing with LinkedIn is you want to be careful to not be using automation there. That’s where you need.

to human in the loop. Number one, just to be, just to not be doing automation that’s going to get banned. But then number two, to be reviewing the outputs of what’s coming out of these tools and make sure it’s good. And then, you know, doing the right steps to make sure things get posted and stuff like that. So a lot of steps there, but I think it comes down to building systems and then having the right people in place so that the things aren’t all on your plate, but you’re getting it outsourced and delegated from there.

Awesome. Now, what would you say is one common mistake you are continually seeing leaders make on LinkedIn today that’s hurting their results?

Hmm. That’s a good question. What is one common mistake? Every time I go to look at someone’s like an executives posts that they’re doing, not every time, but a lot of times, like it would just happen like yesterday when we were reviewing a couple of executives at a company and the content they’ve already posted. And especially when you generate stuff with AI, it tries to put maybe a little hook or like the first line.

Very often I see that they write a post and the first like couple lines don’t indicate exactly what the rest of the post is about. So this one that I was reviewing yesterday was about, a lot of his content was combining AI with education and the kind of the technology side of education, building educational platforms and courses and modules. But the first couple lines always talked about AI. So I’m sure that, you

What happens is people who see those posts, they see AI in the first couple of lines. They’re like, I want to read more about AI. So they click read more, but then the rest of the post is about education. Then you’re like, wait, what? And then they scroll by. So if you’re boosting that with an ad and then retargeting those people, you’re getting the wrong clicks because your first couple of lines talk about AI, but it doesn’t talk about the educational stuff that has main, you know, that’s what the business does. So your hook there is very important. You want it to be.

kind of pretty clear as to what the rest of the post is going to be about, because you don’t want to be drawing in the wrong clicks, which are then going to get retargeted. And then you’re spending more money on the wrong people or the people with the wrong intent. You know, again, they were interested in AI, but not necessarily education. So you’re bringing in the wrong people. So that’s something I see. I just thought about it. Like I see that all the time whenever we look at posts. So your first couple of lines are very important. Make sure you’re drawing in the right clicks.

That’s really powerful because you might have great content after that and had you attracted the right person could have been very powerful post. But if, like you said, you don’t have that hook right, it’s a total misalignment of the content with the audience there. So great advice there. Anthony, we’re running out of time here. If people want to learn more about you, connect with you and maybe we’d love to hear a bit more about your podcast about LinkedIn ads. What’s the best way for them to connect with you?

Sure. So getting started is I’m on obviously on LinkedIn a lot. So feel free to go connect with me there. I’m the only Anthony Blattner. You can look up, look me up there and kind of come to me there and follow. I talk a lot about LinkedIn ads. And then if you want to listen to our podcast, we have lots of episodes. It starts with a master class for the first like season, deep diving on everything A to Z. And then after that, we have lots of interviews, both with LinkedIn and with other LinkedIn practitioners. So you’ll pick up a lot of different good tips and tricks if you listen to those episodes.

Similarly, we also post that on YouTube with some good videos there, so feel free to check it out wherever you prefer. And then if you want help with your LinkedIn ads, you can find us at speedworksocial.com and we’ll always offer a free audit if you’re currently running ads. If not, we’ll help you put together a marketing plan.

Awesome. And then again, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It’s been a great pleasure having you here.

Thanks, Harley, it was fun to deep dive.