Most content teams hit the same wall: you’re putting out great content on LinkedIn, engagement looks healthy, and people are saying nice things in the comments. But the moment your CFO asks what it’s actually doing for revenue, your stomach drops.
We’ve been there.
You’re confident it’s working — you see the DMs, the profile views, the invites to speak — but it’s hard to turn those moments into numbers. That’s the tension. The finance team speaks pipeline. The content team speaks visibility. And somewhere in between, the value of LinkedIn gets lost in translation.
Let’s fix that.
Why leadership struggles to see the value
The CFO isn’t trying to rain on your parade. Their job is to allocate resources toward what brings in the most return. They don’t care about post likes — they care about CAC, sales velocity, and ROI. And if your content efforts aren’t showing up in HubSpot or Salesforce, they might as well not exist.
We’ve seen founders kill great content strategies because they didn’t see the link to revenue. Not because the content wasn’t working — but because the team didn’t frame the value properly.
So if you’re running LinkedIn content and struggling to justify the spend (time, team, or budget), the real issue might be positioning. You’re probably showing metrics that matter to you — not to them.
You don’t need to track everything — just the right things
The first thing we did at Column was stop reporting on vanity metrics. Instead of showing clients their follower count or average likes, we walked them through a simple framework:
- Attention (post views)
- Interest (comments, DMs, shares)
- Intent (inbound messages, demo requests)
- Pipeline (qualified leads tied to content touchpoints)
- Revenue (closed-won deals that mention content or touch LinkedIn)
Most attribution models ignore LinkedIn because the platform doesn’t track every click the way Google Ads does. But that doesn’t mean content isn’t working. It means you need a smarter way to track it.
One thing we recommend to all clients: add a “How did you hear about us?” field to every demo or discovery form. Keep it open-ended. Then go through responses monthly and tally every time someone writes “LinkedIn” or “Saw your posts.”
If you want to get fancier, use CRM tagging. When an inbound lead says “I’ve been following your founder for months,” tag the opportunity as “content influenced.” That one move changed the game for a client of ours last quarter — turned out half their pipeline had seen their LinkedIn content before booking a call.
Thought Leadership Ads make the invisible visible
LinkedIn’s new Thought Leader Ads (TLAs) let you promote posts from personal profiles — not just company pages. This is a huge unlock. Before TLAs, your founder could post an amazing thread, and maybe 1,000 people would see it. Now you can run it as an ad and get it in front of 100,000 decision-makers.
That means you can finally track impressions, clicks, and conversions from thought leadership — using the same paid metrics your CFO is already comfortable with.
We ran a TLA for a B2B SaaS client that promoted a founder’s breakdown of their onboarding strategy. In two weeks, the post hit over 40,000 impressions, drove 87 profile visits, and brought in 12 demo requests. Every one of those demos was marked in the CRM as “content-first” — meaning they came because of the content, not cold outreach.
Why content matters before they ever book a demo
There’s something else we’ve seen over and over: marketing and sales teams spending too much time selling to people who aren’t ready.
If someone’s never heard of you before, it doesn’t matter how good your landing page is. Cold leads need warming. And that’s where organic content comes in — especially founder-led content on LinkedIn.
When your audience sees you explain a problem they’re facing, share a case study, or break down how your product actually works, you’re building trust. And when trust is high, sales friction goes down.
We’ve watched sales cycles shrink by 30–40% for founders who consistently post on LinkedIn — because buyers already feel like they know you.
One client told us, “Our demos feel different now. Prospects show up already convinced. They’re just looking for pricing and logistics.” That’s the power of preselling through content.
The hidden ROI most teams forget to mention
LinkedIn doesn’t just drive leads. It helps with hiring. It brings in partnerships. It builds a reputation. But none of that gets counted if you’re not telling the story.
We encourage clients to track secondary ROI too — the “soft wins” that drive business value:
- Better candidates applying for roles
- More VCs and investors sliding into DMs
- Prospects referencing posts in meetings
- Higher share of voice in their category
These aren’t easy to quantify, but they matter. And they add up.
How to package this for your CFO
Forget showing your CFO a spreadsheet of likes. Instead, show them:
- How many leads came from content
- How many deals mentioned LinkedIn
- How Thought Leader Ads drove traffic and conversions
- How sales cycles shortened because of preselling
Use their language. Show pipeline and booked revenue. And don’t forget to include a few screenshots — a CFO who sees a prospect saying “Hey, I’ve been following you on LinkedIn — would love to talk” is much easier to convince.
Final thoughts
Content isn’t fluff. It’s sales enablement at scale.
But if you’re not measuring it right — or telling the right story — it’ll always look like fluff to the people holding the budget.
The good news? With a few changes to how you track, tag, and report results, you can make LinkedIn one of your highest-performing channels.
We’ve seen it happen. You can too.
If you want help turning your founder’s voice into content that drives revenue, reach out. This is what we do.
Mo is the founder and CEO of Column Content, a thought leadership content agency that helps leaders get seen. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
