This is a recording from a webinar broadcast on 29th April 2026 by David Richter, founder of LinkedIn marketing agency ClickPop. To watch the full webinar recording, complete with accompanying slides, click here.

In this webinar, we explored the growing “LinkedIn Performance Gap”: the difference between commercial teams that use LinkedIn strategically and consistently, and those that leave revenue opportunities on the table.

Using survey data from 250+ B2B commercial professionals, alongside real behavioural data gathered directly from LinkedIn, we looked at how usage patterns differ across sales, business development, account management, and customer success roles—and how those differences relate to business performance.

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Um, I'm briefly just gonna set the context on why LinkedIn matters. I won't go on that. Presumably, if you're on this, on this webinar, you've already got a sense that LinkedIn actually matters, but I'll just recap on some of the, the data behind that. I'll give you a very quick overview of who ClickPop are and what we do, then we'll get into the interesting part, the data from the survey that we've run, uh, this year.

And then finally, I'm gonna leave you with some practical actions that you can take away and implement in your organization. Um, so before we get into the data, uh, why LinkedIn specifically? Well, look, unless you've been living under a rock for probably the last five, maybe even ten years,

It's, it's not niche, it's not an optional platform. There's over one billion members globally. There's more than sixty-seven million companies represented on their platform. In the UK alone, there's forty-five million members, and that basically means if you're in a white collar profession, almost certainly you're going to have a LinkedIn profile, and probably you're going to be logging in regularly.

So LinkedIn's data shows it's not just passive usage. Around fifty-four percent of members log in at least once a week. So people aren't just creating profiles and forgetting about them, they're actually using it. From a commercial point of view, two stats really stand out. First is that eighty percent of LinkedIn users describe themselves as having influence over business decisions.

So that doesn't mean that they're all the key decision-maker. As we know, B2B buying tends to happen via multiple stakeholders, multiple,

So LinkedIn clearly matters, and in this, in this webinar, we're gonna be looking at what it is that commercial teams are doing that help set them apart and, and be successful in their roles on LinkedIn Um, before we get onto that, little bit about Klikpop. So, um, I'll start actually with, I suppose my love affair with LinkedIn.

So this is a screenshot of a project that I posted on Upwork in the very early days of LinkedIn. So at the time, I was working for a very small HR software and payroll company, and I'd noticed a bit of a strange coincidence that when I looked back at the number of new customers that we had won over the course of a year, it just so happened that nearly all of them had had a new head of HR or a new HR director join that

So that was interesting to note. And at the time, I'm not even sure that LinkedIn Sales Navigator even existed. If it did, it certainly didn't allow you to filter, uh, by people who are new to role or new to company at that time. So I had this software developer build me a tool that essentially scraped the careers pages of every website that I could find, and it was looking for mentions of any vacancies, any hiring opportunities that had HR manager or head of HR in the job title, and that would give me a heads-up of who to target with our sales and marketing activity.

Thankfully, LinkedIn have ended up making this whole process a lot simpler. They've launched l- uh, Sales Navigator. Within there, you've got the ability to filter by people who've changed jobs recently, uh, changed companies recently, all that sort of stuff. But the principle remains the same. So when a business makes a purchase, at its core, it's still people buying from other people, and more often than not, those businesses and those people give off some kind of signal, which means we can target

Uh, and it means that we can get the right message to them at the right time and hopefully influence their buying decision. And that's where Klikpop comes in. So, um, Klikpop is a LinkedIn-first marketing agency. We help B2B companies to generate more demand, convert that pipeline into sales, and crucially help them retain and expand existing customer accounts through smarter, more strategic use of LinkedIn.

We've developed a whole bunch of unique systems and processes that include things like intent data and paid reach and organic content, so that not only are we using LinkedIn to, to build visibility, but we're using it to build relevance and credibility and trust. And it's that trust and, and particularly human connection that turns visibility on LinkedIn into revenue So onto the data then.

Um, and before we get into the findings, I suppose it's, it's worth kind of grounding this in

One of the screening questions that we asked when people were starting the survey was whether their employer focused primarily on selling to other businesses or directly to consumers. Anyone who said consumer was screened out of the survey straight away. So we can be, we can be confident that the data represents B2B buyers, the sorts-- sorry, B2B sales teams, B2B commercial teams, the sorts of people who, um, LinkedIn will have a- an effect in one way or the other on their success in their role.

In terms of the roles represented, forty-two percent of them say that the majority of their role is prospecting. So think of, uh,

I would imagine that those sorts of job titles are things like account executive or salesperson or sales consultant, that sort of role. And then twenty-seven percent stated that their primary focus is on managing and growing existing accounts. So think of account managers and perhaps customer success teams.

There were an additional five percent that fell into an other category. So those are gonna be roles where they've got an overarching visibility across the whole revenue cycle from prospect through to existing customer. So think of things like chief revenue officer, chief commercial officer as the job title.

And in terms of seniority, um, it's a real, real balance. So twelve percent were entry level, seventeen percent were individual con- contributors but at a senior level, forty-four percent were managers, twenty percent said they were director level, and seven percent said they were in the C-suite. So we've got

Now, the first question, uh, in the survey that we asked was-- it was really simple. It was just back to basics. How often do you actually log into LinkedIn? And when you break this down by role, the differences are pretty stark. So if you look at people whose role is primarily prospecting- 45% of them said they're on LinkedIn multiple times a day.

That then drops to 22% for people who say their role is mostly focused on nurturing and closing deals. And then if you're an existing customer account manager, only 10% of those say they log in multiple times a day. So already you can see a little bit of a trend, a little bit of a pattern emerging. The closer the role is to new business creation, the higher the LinkedIn

Now, that in itself isn't hugely surprising, but it does get more interesting. So if you look at account management and customer growth roles, around a quarter, so 24%, say they log in less than once a month, and 7% say they never log in at all. That's, like, that's shocking. That's almost embarrassing, right?

And there's absolutely no reason why if LinkedIn is somewhere that your target market is spending time in the early stages of their buying journey, that simply because they've become a, a prospect or even a customer of yours, that they somehow stop participating on LinkedIn. That's absolutely not the case.

If they're on the platform for one part of the journey, they're almost certainly gonna be on the platform when they're an existing customer as well. By and large, people ignore marketing emails now. I know that I certainly do. LinkedIn, I would argue, is one of the few places where you can stay visible and build relationships and spot opportunities between formal touch points.

So what this

So specifically we asked, excluding liking or commenting on peop- on other people's content, uh, how often do you post unique content on LinkedIn? So it excludes the more reactive type of content like liking or commenting on someone else's content. It's all about producing your own content on LinkedIn.

You see a very similar pattern emerge. So people in prospecting roles are far more likely to say that they are posting daily. Those in nurturing and closing roles tend to sit in a bit of a middle ground a few times a week, maybe once a week. And then you get to account management and customer growth roles.

63% of them say they post less than monthly or

But the data suggests that the opposite is happening Now, if you were on the webinar last, last month, you might recognize this slide. This is actual observed behavior. It's not self-reported. It shows the percentage of employees who posted at least once in the last 30 days broken down by function. This data comes from LinkedIn's own data.

I've just grabbed it from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and doing my own research. So the data is, is solid, it's credible. Now, number one, the numbers, uh, are much lower. Compared to the self-reported data about are you posting at least monthly, the actual evidence would suggest that the numbers are much, much lower.

So people are overestimating how often they are posting, or they're at

So there is a clear gap there. There's a clear gap between what people say they're doing versus what's actually happening. And when you break this down further, the pattern still holds. So what I would say with this is that directionally the survey is useful. Whilst we've got that gap between what's actually happening and what's self...

being self-reported, directionally the difference is enough that it's, it's a reliable indicator as to what's going on. Okay? Now this matters because it means a lot of employees and teams are overestimating how visible and active they really are, and that might be skewing their behavior. If, if people think that they're posting, uh, more often than they are, it probably means that they're going to be in reality

And then the next question really is trying to answer the, the more commercial question of does any of this actually matter? It's one thing to know how active people are on LinkedIn, it's quite another to, to have a sense for whether it's actually impacting sales revenue and the growth and success of the organization.

And so we looked at how LinkedIn activity relates to whether people in a sales role, in a commercial role, whether they are saying they expect to hit, exceed, or miss their targets. Again, this is self-reported, so treat it with a bit of caution. But even if people are overestimating, the pattern is still meaningful, and the pattern's pretty clear.

People who say that they post daily are significantly more likely to s- also say that they, uh, are expecting to exceed their targets. To put a number on that, 28% of, of daily posters

They are much more likely to say that they're just gonna scrape their target, may- maybe they'll hit it- But they might miss it as well. So again, this doesn't prove causation, but it strongly suggests that consistent visibility and activity on LinkedIn is associated with stronger commercial outcomes. And when we compare that to actual LinkedIn data that we've analyzed previously, we see a similar pattern show up.

So in the last webinar, we looked at real activity data, not surveys, what people are actually doing, and we matched it with the growth rates of the organizations that they're employed by. What we found was that people working in high-growth companies were significantly more likely to have posted on LinkedIn in the last thirty days than those in slower growth organizations.

And that held true

Again, it doesn't prove causation, but there is consistency, enough to take it seriously. And that trend that I mentioned for the mid-size organizations, it exists at enterprise businesses too. So for companies with a thousand or more employees, we considered high-growth companies to be ones where their head count had grown by at least ten percent in the last year.

Slow-growth companies were businesses whose head count had stayed static, or maybe it had shrunk. Something else to point out on this slide, it applies to the previous one as well, is that the greatest difference in participation between the high and low growth companies is the sales and account management teams.

They've got a

Their participation on LinkedIn really does seem to matter to the commercial success of the organization. So the self-reported data, it does seem to be significantly inflated. That's probably to be expected. But because it follows a similar pattern to the actual participation data that we're seeing on LinkedIn, it's definitely a trend worth paying attention to.

So we've looked at posting behavior, but I wanted to take it back, I suppose, really back to basics. All right? And so we asked a question about the number of connection requests and engagements that people were

This increases to 19% for those in nurturing and closing roles, and it jumps to over 50% for those who are responsible for managing and growing existing customers. That's mad. I mean, if, if I was,

if I was the CEO of that company and half of my customer success team were never making any new connections with their customers, I'd be tearing my hair out. At the other end of the spectrum, those in prospecting roles are much more likely than the people who are closing, closing new deals and managing existing customers, they're much more likely to have sent 11 or more new connection requests per week.

Perhaps that's

So the fact that more than half of them are saying that they never send any new connection requests is absolutely infuriating. The chart on the right then shows how many meaningful engagements commercial teams are reporting having on LinkedIn. So basically, very similar trends seem to exist. Customer teams much more likely to say they're having zero meaningful engagements.

Prospecting teams more likely to having, uh, reported lots of engagements with, with prospects, and it does seem to be causal. I suppose that makes sense, right? So the more connections that you make, the more, uh, meaningful connections and interactions you're gonna have. So it's not just coincidental, and

So the more connections you have, the more relevant your network becomes, the more opportunities you're gonna create for conversations. It sounds obvious, but this shows that the basic level of activity is not happening consistently across teams, and it is a missed opportunity. It's a missed opportunity particularly for customer retention and expansion.

And then we wanted to really understand why this might be. So there's, there's obviously something going on that's causing people, even in the same company To be using LinkedIn less in their commercial role. So we looked at what tools people say they're using, specifically whether they're using the free version of LinkedIn or whether they have access to LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Again, the pattern's quite telling. So in prospecting roles, more than half, fifty-seven percent, are reporting having access to LinkedIn Sales Navigator. In nurturing and closing roles, that drops

It is one of the richest sources of data that you can get about your customers, about the relationships they're having, about what, what's exciting for them, what they're interested in, what's going on in their lives, buying intent, stakeholder movement, changes at an account level. And yet the people responsible for retaining and growing revenue are the least equipped to use it.

As before, it's kind of interesting to understand that there is a difference in, in adoption of LinkedIn Sales Navigator between roles. The next question then really is to understand does any of this actually matter? Does any of this lead to stronger commercial outcomes for those teams or not? And so we looked at LinkedIn Sales Navigator and how it relates

Again, the difference is pretty striking. Much like before, the difference is quite stark. Those people who say they re-- they've got access to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, seventy-three percent say they expect to significantly exceed target. Only twenty-seven percent say they don't. Compare that to the people using the free version of LinkedIn.

Only forty-seven percent say they expect to significantly exceed target. More than half, fifty-three percent, are not expecting to. So you've effectively got seventy-three percent versus forty-seven percent. That's a meaningful gap. What this is saying is that if you're in a commercial role and you've got access to Sales Navigator, you are fifty-five percent more likely to say that you expect to significantly exceed target than your peers without Sales Navigator.

Again, self-reported, so take the exact percentages with a bit of a pinch of salt. But directionally, it is clear.

You need to give them the tools to do their job. And if we zoom out and then summarize really what we've seen so far, what we've spoken about so far, is there is a really clear pattern emerging. LinkedIn usage and investment in it drops as you move along the revenue cycle. At the top of the funnel prospecting, you've got high activity, high tool adoption, consistent usage of LinkedIn As you move into nurturing and closing, and especially customer account management, activity drops off sharply.

You can summarize it with LinkedIn usage decays as revenue risk increases. So the parts of the business where revenue is most at risk, you've alread- you're already getting that revenue, all right? So it's at risk. Then retention and expansion, long-term customer value, they are the areas where LinkedIn is used the

It's slightly counterintuitive, and it's a bit of a trope. It's, it's so often said that retaining your existing customers is much cheaper, more efficient than trying to top up new accounts. It's cheaper to retain a customer and to grow an, a customer account than it is to win a, a new account. But what the data's showing us is that businesses are actually treating it in the opposite way.

So it's, yes, it's a behavior gap, but it's also an investment gap across teams. So it's something to do with how organizations are supporting or not their commercial functions to actually succeed in their roles. And it isn't just an i- an investment gap. So culturally, there are clear gaps as well. What this chart shows is it's just the total data, and we'll get onto some filters in a moment, but it's the total data, uh, answering the question, what does LinkedIn actually help you do in your role?

And the options were identifying new opportunities, starting conversations, nurturing deals, closing

Now, that's interesting because in the previous slides, we've seen that account management type roles are the ones participating least in LinkedIn. They're the ones that have got the least investment in tools to do their job on LinkedIn, and yet they're saying that LinkedIn's frequently helpful in terms of keeping track of what's going on with their customers.

That's interesting. And then we broke it down. We broke it down by whether people felt confident in creating content on LinkedIn that's going to appeal to their ideal buyers, to their customers. The chart on the left is from people who report that they are very or somewhat confident in creating content on LinkedIn that's gonna appeal to their ideal buyers.

The chart on the right shows, shows responses from people who say that they

In many cases, that difference is twenty to forty percentage points, and in relative terms, that's multiples of times higher. So this isn't about being present on LinkedIn In fact, you could argue that this is more of a forward-looking indicator of presence on LinkedIn is actually about knowing how to use it effectively.

A similar trend exists when we look at the culture of the organization as well, whether leadership actively encourages LinkedIn usage, or maybe it's sort of somewhat encouraged, maybe it's frowned upon, maybe it's actively discouraged, or maybe LinkedIn m- maybe the leadership is just somewhat neutral about...

You know, they're indifferent. They, they don't really care

Usage drops, and so does impact. I've certainly witnessed this in my life. So, uh, I was in a role previously leading the marketing team for a SaaS business. Um, it was acquired, so happy days. Everyone's, uh, had a good exit and all of that, and we got acquired by a private equity company. And in their wisdom, one of the first things the, the new leadership did, uh, after they'd acquired this business was issue a decree that nobody was allowed to post anything on LinkedIn unless it had been approved by the marketing team or by the management team.

Unsurprisingly, employee advocacy overnight dropped off a cliff, and that was something that we had worked so, so hard to build. So if the culture of the organization doesn't

Um, by enablement, we mean whether individuals have received any training. Where LinkedIn is supported with training, people are much more likely to say it helps them succeed in their role. So it isn't about individual behavior at this point. This is, this is at an organizational level. It's about the systems and processes and tools and investments that you're making to help people do their job, the tools that people have available to them, the expectations set by the leadership team, and the capability of your people built through training them to do things effectively.

If you can get these things to align, LinkedIn can become a consistent commercial lever and not just something that some people use some of the time when the mood strikes them.

Now, I've said a few times, uh,

So even if the exact percentages aren't perfect The direction of the trend is very consistent, and the differences that we're seeing are large enough that it's, it's unlikely just to be noise. So the sensible conclusion isn't that more activity on LinkedIn is gonna guarantee perf- better performance for the sales team or for the business, but it is that there's a clear relationship between how teams l- use LinkedIn and how they perform commercially.

There does seem to be something going on. Now, even though we can't prove a direct causal link, I'm gonna give a sort of logical argument why

Familiarity with the people and with the brand is gonna improve. Trust. Trust is absolutely crucial. Trust is gonna build faster, and it's gonna build stronger. Now, if you're in an outbound team, if you're doing outreach, if you're business development, your outreach activity, I would argue, is gonna be more effective.

Prospects already are going to recognize who you are, the things that you believe in. If it's going to, uh, be, say, a closing role, maybe an account exec, a sales, uh, a sales executive type role, it's likely to improve your win rates for your existing pipeline. I cannot imagine that a salesperson who's consistently showing up on LinkedIn, posting relevant, interesting content is ever gonna damage their chances of closing a deal.

And then for existing customers,

And then you look back through the CRM, and you can see this person's been sent the email 10 times, and they've opened it three times, but people have email blindness. You just don't see marketing-type emails. What people do pay attention to is stuff that's appearing in their feed on LinkedIn. It's their sort of personal safe space.

It's, it's, it's freer of spam than your inbox. None of this is ever gonna guarantee growth on its own, but taken together it helps explain why participation shows up so consistently alongside it. And then if we accept that there are clear differences in how LinkedIn's being used, even in the same organization, it's differences

At the prospecting team, it's widely adopted, not perfectly, but it's there, and as you move further down the revenue cycle, usage drops off. In many cases, usage drops off quite sharply. That is a gap. And then really then the question becomes, well, what are we gonna do about it?

Number one, build capability, not just awareness. Educate your people. We saw, we saw the impact that confidence in your ability to actually produce content that's gonna appeal to your customers, to your prospects, that is a massive, massive lever in actually getting people to participate and realize value.

So show what good looks like. Give real examples of posts that generate conversations and not just impressions. Invest in training in your people. Number two, make it easy. Remove friction. When people understand

So reduce friction, give them prompts or themes. Help somebody who's in a business development role, in a sales role, in a customer account management role. Give them prompts or themes, or examples of stuff that they can rehash themselves so they're not just staring at a blank page. It's really hard. These people aren't, aren't people who've worked in marketing roles for 10 to 20 years.

They're going to have a little bit of blank page, uh, fear when they, when they're asked to write something. Make it easier. Make it easier, and they'll participate more. Make it safe as well, so remove perceived risk. We've seen in previous webinars that there is a massive drop-off between more junior roles and, uh, more senior roles in their participation on LinkedIn.

The more junior roles, the ones who are maybe a bit fearful about saying the wrong things, what if it doesn't land properly, not even sure that they're, they're allowed to be doing it, they are going to be participating on LinkedIn much, much less than someone in a director or more senior role. So create psychological and

Give them guidelines on what's appropriate. Give them examples of posts that's good enough for them to share. It doesn't need to be perfect, polished content from the marketing team. In fact, it's pretty typical that you would see a little bit of rough and ready content is gonna perform a bit better.

People are kind of tuning out the stuff that's too polished, too perfect. Model it. Show that leadership are actively participating. Remove the fear of getting it wrong. And when people get it right, praise them publicly. And then finally, motivate them. Give them a reason to care. If people understand that LinkedIn participation is actually going to help them succeed in their roles, they will be more likely to prioritize it as part of their day job.

Link it to the pipeline and revenue metrics. Don't focus on vanity metrics like likes or impressions, but actually show that the, the accounts that they're, they're engaging with on LinkedIn are more likely to close, more likely to stick around, more likely to expand their revenue. Help them to be

And if you can show people that this is actually gonna help me hit my sales number, their behavior is gonna change. And if it doesn't, you are well within your rights to start introducing it in, uh, in, in your performance reviews. As long as you've got the evidence, as long as you're tracking it Why wouldn't you do that?

If you can put these four things together, you're going to move LinkedIn from something that people use occasionally when the mood strikes them to something that becomes a consistent part of how your commercial team operates and succeeds. So hopefully you found all of this interesting. Hopefully you found it useful.

Um, if it's raised any questions about how your own business, how your sales teams are using LinkedIn, um, I am offering a free audit. So, uh, we'd look at how are you, your business is using LinkedIn. We'd look at participation. Uh, we'll look at how you're stacking up against your competitors. We'll look at, uh, your ads and how they're working for you, or perhaps not, and practical ways that you can make LinkedIn work harder for growth.

Um, so that's about it. Um, thank you very much for joining. Um, if you do have any questions, I look forward to hearing from you, uh, very shortly. All right. Many thanks.