How to Drive Sales with Founder-Led Marketing on LinkedIn
Key Takeaways
- Before posting anything, lock yourself in a room for a weekend and map your worldview, your narrative, and the points of view that ladder up to it. 'We focus on service' isn't a differentiator.
- Founder-led marketing gets dropped because it isn't producing measurable revenue, usually because the likes come from your existing network instead of your ICP.
- Three likes from new people in your ICP is a bigger signal than 300 from peers. Build on that and the three become 30, then 300.
- One post built on a single POV did 64,000 impressions, 623 likes, 10+ qualified leads, three clients, and over 20k in MRR.
- Four posts a week is Influent's magic number. More cannibalizes impressions and usually means less effort per post. 75 to 80% of client posts are text.
- Expect green shoots at 90 days and regular lead flow at six months. Source ideas by having a teammate interview you for 60 to 90 minutes once a month, then write like you talk.
Garret Caudle is the founder and CEO of Influent, a LinkedIn marketing agency he launched in 2022. At the time of recording it had 10 full-time people in the US plus a few contractors, was hiring someone every six weeks, and expected to be around 20 by year end. Kuba Grajcar hosted. The conversation is a start-to-finish playbook for founder-led marketing on LinkedIn: what to figure out before you post, how to tell whether it’s working, how often to post, and how to keep going.
Map your beliefs before you post anything
Kuba opened with the standard Agency Journey question: your number one tip for agency operators. Garret’s answer had nothing to do with posting. Any agency owner who wants to scale, he said, needs to put extreme amounts of work into mapping their belief system first.
The best way to do that is to open up a Figma chart, lock yourself in a room for a weekend, order pizza, you can make it fun, but force yourself to map out all of your core beliefs about the way the world is changing and about how you believe the industry should be approached… If your answer for how you do them differently is, well, we focus on service, that’s not good enough.
Kuba asked what goes on the map. Garret walked through his own in three layers: a worldview, a narrative, and the points of view that ladder up to it.
An example worldview that I have: LinkedIn is the most untapped opportunity in content marketing today, and I will fight anyone who disagrees with me on that… Now my narrative is the future of content marketing is people first… and the best way to deliver that is to create content consistently through personal LinkedIn accounts of founders, executives and other subject matter experts… So my point of views underneath that: managing a CEO’s LinkedIn account is a full-time job.
Other POVs on his list: LinkedIn can be full funnel, and the CEO’s account should be run by the marketing team or an agency. That one, he said, has gotten him in some fights.
Three likes from your ICP beat 300 from your network
Kuba described the usual pattern: a marketer spends 20% of their time on the founder’s LinkedIn, one post a week, counted as a brand thing. Why does it stay on the back burner? Garret’s answer: because it isn’t effective, and marketers prioritize what works. The founder posts a few times, gets 50 likes, then 40, then 30, and loses steam. Look at who liked those posts and most weren’t in the ICP, so there were no leads and not much real awareness either. The fix is to read a different signal.
When you win a like from three people within your ICP who are new to your network, that is a massive signal, and that signal gets ignored 95% of the time… But if you do it and you pay attention and you create content that way, you end up turning those three into 30 and those 30 into 300.
One POV post brought in 20k of MRR, and the engagement became a call list
Garret’s example of a post built on a single point of view from his map:
One that uses that exact POV as a hook: supporting your CEO’s social media account is a full-time job. And then I go into the details of why that is and what the actual reality is that I believe. That post then gets 64,000 impressions, 623 likes and ends up generating over 10 qualified leads, three of which convert into clients and turns into over 20k worth of MRR from one post.
Why it worked, in his telling: people who already believe running a CEO’s account is hard are the people in market for his service, and the post found them. He also warned against ending with a call to action, which “almost always de-authenticates the post.” The open door is a comment, a like, or a DM.
Then there’s what to do with six months of engagement. For one client, Influent had about 600 decision makers who had interacted with the content. They scored the list, took the 200 with the highest engagement, and ran a two-part campaign: a short personal note from the executive (“if you ever want to talk shop about X, Y or Z, I’m your guy”), which booked a few calls, plus the sales team reaching out to the rest of the buying committee at those companies. That second part is where most of the booked calls came from, and they’re doubling down on it. Watch at 24:22 for the full walkthrough.
Four text posts a week, then 90 days, six months, a year
Kuba asked about frequency.
Our magic number is four a week… One, after four, for most of our clients we start seeing some cannibalization. LinkedIn is unlike other platforms in that they surface your post for a longer period of time… The second part is the amount of time and quality you’re putting in each post. If you’re doing more than four posts, my guess is that you’re not putting enough time and energy into each post individually.
On format: 75 to 80% of Influent’s client posts are text. Carousels, charts, and video have a place (video especially in commoditized industries where you need to explain something technical), and selfies mostly reach your existing network, so use them sparingly if lead generation is the goal.
On timing, Garret said ROI depends on deal size, but the shape is consistent. Within 90 days you should see what he calls green shoots. His examples: website traffic from LinkedIn up 60%, prospects mentioning your posts on sales calls, a client who churned two years ago coming back. By six months, some regular level of lead flow. By a year, “you will not want to stop this machine you’ve built.” Influent’s client retention after the first year is 95%.
Get interviewed once a month, then write like you talk
Kuba asked for a recipe a founder could follow without an agency.
I would create my thought leadership map, and that thought leadership map would generate me those POVs ideally, and then I would basically take each of those POVs and I would ask someone on my team to just interview me based on those. Hey, so you said a CEO’s LinkedIn account is a full-time job, tell me about that, why?… I would do it once a month. Have them go through, do a 60 or 90-minute interview touching on every one of those POVs, and I think what you get there is a fantastic transcript.
Comments on your own posts are the other source: three times as many post ideas as you’d get from your own head. For the writing itself, Garret gave three rules. Be economical with words and make sentences punch. Put the main message in the hook instead of burying it at the bottom. And cut anything flowery.
If you use ChatGPT or Claude or whatever to write these posts, what you’re going to find is it’s going to be extremely embellished, and there’s going to be a lot of superfluous language, and there’s going to be a lot of formality… Write like you talk. That’s what I would say. Write like you talk… Write like you’re a friend giving some advice to somebody else. Don’t write like you’re writing a blog or something.