LinkedIn Is A Sales Tool. Start Treating It Like One

Before they take your call, they’ve already read your feed. That’s not a generalization; that’s how decisions get made now. LinkedIn is where that impression lives, and for most CEOs, it’s being managed like an obligation rather than the revenue-generating asset it is.

I’ve spent nearly 25 years in communications, working alongside C-Suite execs and the ask has never changed: “Help me with LinkedIn.” What has changed is the reality at the other end of that ask. A communications team used to run with a loose brief and produce something that at least sounded like the executive it represented. Today, with AI doing much of the generating, the gap between a feed that sounds like you and one that merely approximates you has never been more visible, or more costly.

According to research cited in Entrepreneur, personal profiles generate five times more engagement than company pages, and organic company page posts now account for just 1-2 percent of what shows up in a typical LinkedIn feed. LinkedIn isn’t rewarding logos. It’s rewarding people, and the most valuable person in your organization to have a credible, active presence on the platform is you.

The Problem Isn’t AI. It’s What We’ve Handed Over Along with It.

Most CEOs have invested in communications infrastructure—a team, strategy and likely AI tools. But investing in communications is not the same as valuing it, and that distinction is where most executive LinkedIn strategies quietly break down.

Here’s what I’ve watched play out across organizations. The CEO says help me with LinkedIn. The communications person says of course. And then the CEO disappears back into running the company and the communications person is left to generate content without the one thing that makes it worth reading…the executive’s actual thinking. Before AI, that gap produced content that was serviceable. Today it produces content that’s polished, plausible and indistinguishable from everyone else’s because it was generated the same way—from a prompt, not a person.

What gets lost isn’t authenticity in the abstract, it’s the specific texture of your judgment, along with the friction points and counterintuitive lessons you developed by being in rooms where the decisions had real consequences. That’s material your audience can’t get anywhere else, and when AI’s generating your point of view rather than sharpening it, that material disappears. What remains is content that sounds professional and says nothing, and the people you most want to reach will notice before you do.

Brief Your Comms Person the Way You Brief Your Sales Team

The fix isn’t a new tool or a different strategy—it’s a relationship and it takes less time than most executives assume. Meet with your communications person, not to review a content calendar but to talk. Tell them what’s been keeping you up—the customer conversation that reframed a problem you thought you’d solved, the industry shift you’ve been watching, the decision you made last quarter that you’re still turning over in your mind. That raw material is what separates a LinkedIn presence that generates genuine interest from one that generates noise.

Think about how you prepare your sales team. You give them your strongest arguments, your clearest proof points and your read on the market and competition. Your LinkedIn presence deserves the same investment because it’s doing the same job—just earlier in the process, before anyone has picked up the phone and at a moment a prospect is still deciding whether you’re worth their time.

Before the next post goes live under your name, ask yourself one question: Is there anything in it that could only have come from you? If the answer is no, it isn’t ready—not because the writing isn’t good enough, but because the thinking behind it isn’t yours, and the people you’re trying to reach will feel that, even if they can’t name it.

That’s not a higher bar for AI use. It’s a higher bar for what earns the right to carry your name and do real work for your business.