Could you add a buying intent feature on LinkedIn?

Thanks for reading! Let me know if there’s a topic you’d like me to cover.

You probably get daily emails and phone calls from Sales Development Reps asking for your time. They are almost always a few degrees off from someone you want to talk to. The best reps are worth talking to because they are experts in their field and share genuinely interesting information.

The worst reps? You don’t spend much time with them because they are either cold-calling you with an irrelevant pitch, sending you an InMail, making a connection request, or pivoting immediately to a pitch.

As a buyer, you can start multiple demo processes when you are ready to purchase. But what about the vendors you don’t know about and never find, because they don’t know you’re looking?

Imagine a #ReadyToBuy status

What if there was a #ReadyToBuy status on Linkedin where you could pick a category, product type, and time frame?

“I’d like to set a 7 day alert in Sales Engagement for call recording tools #ReadyToBuy”

“We have a 3 month period to evaluate new CRMs for our 50 person software firm #ReadyToBuy”

“I’m not sure what we need but we need to improve our average time to lead”

In a perfect world, SDRs would find you and deliver a perfect pitch.

Practically speaking, this won’t happen. SDRs (and everyone else) will swarm a status like that one with irrelevant information. AI bots will comb LinkedIn posts and send irrelevant crap.

As a public-facing feature, #ReadyToBuy status might have not been a great idea. But as a companion product, it might be great!

Suppose you could privately post to LinkedIn that you’re ready to buy and get a vetted list of matching companies to your effort. If you could do this as part of an existing subscription, that might be pretty interesting.

Introducing… LinkedIn Intent

In a feature that offered the ability to make a sales inquiry in a private way through LinkedIn, where would it show up in the platform?

LinkedIn already offers solution areas for:

• Talent (jobs)

• Marketing (ads)

• Learning (content)

• Subscriptions (Sales Navigator and Premium)

Adding an Intent category for advertising could allow Linkedin an opportunity to create a new product or offer highly targeted access to buyers.

Here’s how it could work from the advertiser’s perspective:

1. Salesforce would like to know when companies between 51-100 employees are looking for Customer Relationship Management solutions

2. They bid for leads during a date range and geographic area

3. “Winning” a lead grants them the ability to communicate with the buyer as one of a few companies that can communicate and kick off a deal room

4. Negative feedback increases the cost of the lead

And from the buyer’s perspective:

1. A buyer is interested in sales call recording tools for the next 7 days

2. They would like to speak to 2-5 teams that have expertise in topic clustering and transcription for a demo and a pilot if all goes well

3. They would also like to include or exclude a few named vendors

4. When the request expires, they would not like to be contacted

This kind of intent is hidden today – it isn’t accurately measured by “prospected downloaded a whitepaper” or “someone from that company spent a lot of time on our website” – and it’s hard to kick off the buying process with something other than Request a Demo.

Adding an Intent feature to LinkedIn might unlock a whole new market.

Where’s the friction?

Or maybe it wouldn’t. This functionality hasn’t happened yet with LinkedIn, so we can assume there is friction to resolve to make this a reality.

What are some reasons this might not work?

1. Buyers might not trust an intent conversation powered by ads

2. Suppliers might not think this is a high-intent lead because it’s happening outside their platform

3. Both might not trust LinkedIn as a place to have this conversation

4. The real buyers might not be on LinkedIn

Still, I think it’s worth a try the next time you investigate new technology and want to kick off a buying process.

How could you test this?

When you’re starting a buying process, post a message asking for vendor feedback and prospective demos and see what kind of response you get.

If you want, send the vendor into a shared Slack channel or similar where you can run a parallel process between multiple vendors.

If you’d like to run this process anonymously, start the conversation by using an email anonymizer and request a demo. The goal? Get better discussion around prospective purchases when you truly have intent to buy. Spend less time talking about solutions when you’re not in market.

What’s the takeaway? “Intent” to buy is a fuzzy concept – why not make it more explicit? If LinkedIn is a place where a lot of B2B buyers hang out, one logical place to build this interaction is inside LinkedIn. Done right, this feature could also drive new ad revenue at the same time it provides better outcomes for companies seeking new solutions.