Get in front of the decision-makers who matter most to your business
The problem
Sound familiar?
If you sell to other businesses, one of these is probably why you are here. Usually it is all three.
“We need more leads, and nobody can tell me where the next one comes from.”
Referrals and word of mouth got you this far. They do not scale, they cannot be forecast, and they go quiet exactly when you need them not to.
“We get enquiries. They are just the wrong ones.”
Job hunters, students, agencies pitching you, and buyers with no budget. Once sales stops trusting the enquiries, the whole channel gets written off — usually fairly.
“We tried LinkedIn once. It was expensive and nothing happened.”
A click on LinkedIn costs around $11. That is real. What is also real is that most accounts are running settings that quietly inflate it, and nobody ever told them.
The cause
All three come from the same thing
Your ads are going to the wrong people. Not through carelessness — LinkedIn sends them there by default, and nobody tells you it is happening.
Fix who sees the ad and the other two problems ease off on their own. The enquiries get better because the right people are seeing them, and each real one costs you less, even though the price of a click never changes.
Four settings decide most of it, and three of them are switched on the day an account is opened. If you are already advertising, open yours next to this and check. If you are not, this is what you would be walking into.
Take the two-minute assessmentCheck your own account
EstimateRoughly 46% of your spend reaching people you did not choose — about $27,600 over a year, from 4 settings nobody told you about.
Directional estimate, not a measurement — the real number depends on your audience and your creative. The settings and their defaults are real, and the first three arrive switched on.
Check the rest of the accountWhy LinkedIn
Most advertising guesses who you are. LinkedIn doesn't.
Google works you out from what you searched. Facebook, from what you looked at. LinkedIn simply knows where you work and what you do, because you typed it in yourself and you keep it up to date.
Choose the person, not the keyword
Job title, seniority, industry, company size, or a named list of companies you want to win.
Reach them while they are at work
Nobody opens LinkedIn for holiday photos. They are checking suppliers and thinking about work problems.
See which ads brought in customers
Connected to whatever you already use — a CRM, a spreadsheet, an inbox.
Try it
IllustrativeOut of 1.2 billion. That is 0.00325% of the platform — and it is the only part you would pay to reach.
An illustration of how filtering narrows an audience, not live LinkedIn data. Real sizes come from Campaign Manager's own forecaster.
Who this suits
It depends on your deals, not your industry
Four things decide whether LinkedIn pays for itself, and none of them is your sector. If they are true of your business, this works. If they are not, we would rather say so on the first call than take the money.
It works when
- A customer is worth five figures or more over the relationship
- More than one person has to agree before you get paid
- You can name the job titles of the people who sign
- Somebody can follow up an enquiry within a day
It does not when
- You sell to consumers rather than to people at work
- The deal closes in a single call with one person
- You need the enquiries to arrive this month
- Nobody owns follow-up yet
The Shortlist Method
What the first ninety days look like
Four stages. Each one ends with something concrete on your desk, so you always know what you have paid for.
Getting to know your business
Who buys from you, what they pay, and how long they take to decide.
Week 1-2
Planning the campaigns
We decide who to target and who to leave out, what the ads will say, which formats to use, and how to split the budget between people who have never heard of you and people who already have.
Week 2-3
Going live
We build the campaigns, set up the tracking, connect it to wherever you handle enquiries, and switch it on.
Week 3-4
Doing more of what works
Once it is clear which audiences and which ads are pulling their weight, we put more money behind them and keep testing new angles against them.
Month 2 onwards
Results
What this usually looks like
Published benchmarks rather than our own claims, worked through at $5,000 a month, so you can redo the arithmetic on your own numbers before you talk to anyone.
It compounds, it does not switch on
The first months are spent finding out which audiences and which ads actually pay. The value shows up once you know.
Pipeline influenced
* Worked out at $5,000 a month. Pipeline uses ZenABM's 2026 LinkedIn benchmarks — $5.21 of pipeline per $1 spent at the median, $15.20 for the top 25%, across 211 B2B companies and $5.5M of ad spend. Enquiries assume a cost per lead of $120–250 in North America and Western Europe. These are other companies' medians, not a forecast for yours.
Questions
The things people actually ask
Including the awkward ones. If yours is not here, ask us directly and you will get a straight answer.
Ask us somethingHow much do I need to spend on ads?
More than you would on Facebook, and it is better you hear that now. A click on LinkedIn costs around $11 on average, because you are paying to reach a specific person at a specific company rather than whoever happened to scroll past.
As a rough floor, LinkedIn tends to make sense once you can put a few thousand a month behind it and a customer is worth five figures to you over time. Below that the maths gets hard and we will say so.
For most companies this is not new money. If you are already spending on Google or Facebook and selling to businesses, it is usually a question of moving some of it.
Do I need a CRM or special tracking set up first?
No. Plenty of our clients run their enquiries out of a shared inbox and a spreadsheet, and that is fine to start with.
We work with whatever you already have. If you do use a CRM we will connect the ads to it so you can see which ones led to real customers. If you do not, we will set up something simple that does the same job.
How long before I see anything?
You will see enquiries in the first few weeks. You will not know what they are worth for about three months, because that is roughly how long it takes for the first ones to work through to a decision.
LinkedIn itself asks for about two weeks per campaign before its own targeting settles down, so nothing should be judged in week one. We will show you the numbers throughout — you just should not act on them too early.
Is LinkedIn right for my business?
It suits you if you sell to other businesses, if a customer is worth a decent amount over time, and if more than one person is involved in deciding.
It does not suit you if you sell to consumers, if you need enquiries this month, or if nobody on your side can follow one up within a day or two. We would rather tell you that on a first call than four months in.
Who owns the ad account?
You do. It is opened under your company name, on your card. If we stop working together you keep the account, the audiences we built, the ads and the history.
Some agencies run your ads inside their own account, which means you leave with nothing. We think that is a bad deal and we do not do it.
What do you charge?
A flat monthly fee, agreed before we start, based on how much work the account needs. Never a percentage of your ad budget — an agency paid that way earns more when you spend more, which is exactly the wrong incentive when the honest advice is to spend less.
The first ninety days are a fixed term because that is how long it takes to produce a result worth reading. After that it is month to month.
Do you guarantee results?
No, and be careful with anyone who does. We are bidding in an auction against other advertisers and nobody controls that.
What we will commit to is the account being yours, a flat fee, no long contract, and telling you early if it is not working rather than quietly running the budget down.
Where to start
Find out whether LinkedIn is worth your money — in two minutes
A dozen questions about your business and how you are running things now. You get a straight read on screen, including the things that would quietly cost you money. No email, nothing sent anywhere.