Good LinkedIn training for sales teams shows reps how to spot who engages with relevant posts, then phone those people with a specific reason. Niall Ratcliffe, CEO of LinkedIn agency Noticed, calls this fishing content. It works because the buyer has already put a hand up, which automated DMs never achieve.
Will Ockenden and I ran an automated LinkedIn DM programme for a couple of months, so I interviewed Niall with a grudge. Our colleague Andy got a few positive replies, then asked to be taken off it because it felt like selling his soul. Messages that say “I see that you run an agency of over 20 people in Leeds, and you’ve currently won 45 PR awards in the last eight years” still land in my inbox, and I wince at every one.
Niall is 25, runs a 17-person agency in Manchester and has around 60,000 followers on LinkedIn. His answer to my grudge was so detailed that I joked we would have to edit some of it out. Here is the practical version for anyone training a sales team.
Why do automated LinkedIn DMs fail sales teams?
They fail because personalisation tells the reader nothing about timing. A message that quotes your job title and your city still arrives at a random moment, and the reader can tell.
Niall was blunt about this. “What actually matters is the relevance,” he told me. His example was a packaging company. Instead of mailing a giant list, his team watched for signals such as a brand newly listed on Ocado and a visit to the client’s website, then contacted people who showed both at once.
I put it to him that it works like buying a car. You only read the car email when you need a car, and no amount of clever copy changes that.
How does fishing content turn LinkedIn posts into leads?
Fishing content is a post about what you sell, written so that only likely buyers react to it. Everyone who likes or comments goes to the sales team as a warm lead, with the post as the reason to call.
Niall splits his own posting into two kinds. Awareness content shares lessons only he has lived, such as what he learned over dinner with the entrepreneur Daniel Priestley. Fishing content breaks down a workflow his agency uses. “Anyone who engages with it, I class them as if they’ve bit onto my reel,” he said. His team then enriches the data with email addresses and phone numbers and passes it straight to sales.
The call itself is gentle. A rep says, “Hi, I saw you engage on a bunch of Niall’s content around this topic. Is that something you guys are chatting about internally?” Niall gave a neat example of why reach is the wrong target. A viral post about his dad working in a factory would pull huge numbers and give his sales team nothing to act on. A workflow post earning 75 likes, with perhaps 20 from his ideal customers, is worth more to him.
I asked whether prospects find that creepy. Niall’s reply was that LinkedIn already shows who commented on what, so the call simply uses what the platform makes public. Your mileage may vary, and it is worth checking your own data protection position before copying any of this.
His rule for the mix is simple. When the pipeline is full, he posts roughly 60 per cent awareness content and 40 per cent fishing content. When the pipeline is thin, he flips the ratio.
If your reps need hands-on practice with this, take a look at our LinkedIn training for sales teams.
Should the whole sales team post on LinkedIn?
Yes, if you give them a reason to. More posters means a bigger pool to fish in, and each rep can receive the leads who engaged with their own posts.
Noticed pays its staff for follower milestones. “Starts with an Audible voucher, scales up to our holiday away, a week away, we pay for everything,” Niall said. By his account, “we spend 3k and we got 17 million impressions last year through our team”. He also described an education client whose sales team of 75 plus all post, calling it “an absolute game changer”.
Bizarrely, I was already mulling over how to get our own team posting more when he said this, so the interview paid for itself before the question about mistakes. Niall did add one caveat. His agency has 17 people, and the picture changes at 300.
Can you fish for leads on your rivals’ LinkedIn posts?
Technically yes, because engagement on LinkedIn is public. Niall suggests picking the leadership teams of the ten biggest competitors in your sector and watching who engages with them. LinkedIn restricts automated scraping, so read its rules on prohibited software before building anything.
“The new marketer finds creative ways to steal their competitors’ leads,” Niall said, which is the line that made me reach for the edit button. I raised the scraping worry on air too, because I did not think you were allowed to do it. He argued that LinkedIn cannot stop people reading who liked a post without wrecking the platform as a networking tool, and that “LinkedIn’s just one of many signals” anyway. I have not tested his method myself, so treat his results as his claims. They include a million pounds of sales a year through LinkedIn, from a three-person sales team.
Independent figures back up why he cares about this. According to Willow’s April 2026 analysis of 374 company pages, going from 1,000 to 10,000 followers only roughly triples impressions, which is a weak return for a tenfold audience. Reach alone will not fill a pipeline.
What went wrong when Noticed added every channel at once?
Noticed sent direct mail, cold email and LinkedIn messages to something like 10,000 people with no signal of who was buying, and lost a client worth about £6k a month. Niall was on holiday that Christmas while his team in Wilmslow ran what he called a Henry Ford production line, stamping letters, and they sent him videos of it. A very modern way to ruin a break.
His diagnosis was refreshingly simple. “People massively overlook the channel and underrate the signal,” he said. A channel is only a vehicle for the message. Today he would score every account against the ideal customer and send the expensive mail to the best few. In his words, “I would have scored the account, I would have done direct mail to the top 10 accounts”.
His bigger flop came at around 23, when Noticed launched a service called creative account-based marketing. The team spent a week on promo videos and the launch produced no leads at all. Six months of self-doubt followed. “It was just a positioning issue,” he told me. The offer was fine and the label was not, and he now describes the work as revenue growth.
- The mistake: Piling direct mail and cold email on top of LinkedIn DMs for a list of about 10,000 people, with no signal of who was ready to buy.
- Why it happens: Channels are easy to add and easy to count, so adding more feels like progress. Nobody checks whether the people on the list are in the market.
- The fix: Track buying signals such as post engagement, score each account against your ideal customer, and spend the costly channels only on the top few.
My view on this: relevance beats reach
I agree with Niall about relevance and I have the scars from automated DMs to prove it. My connection requests now fill up with people selling AI services, and I open each one to judge whether a human wrote it.
Where I pushed back was reputation. I told him you can fetch 20 leads, but if you have zero credibility in your market, nothing comes of them. He agreed, and added that “relevance will get you foot in the door and start the conversation”. Then the committee Googles you, and a slapdash website loses the deal. I also pointed out that I teach LinkedIn strategy, and what he described sounded like a sales engine.
So my advice is to start with one question: why are your reps on LinkedIn at all? Most people I know are there for a better job or for new business. Train them for the second reason, and watch who bites.
I keep thinking about those templated DMs, and a robot that knows my postcode has never once won my business.
Ready to put this into practice?
Want your reps practising this with an expert beside them? See our LinkedIn training for sales teams.
Listen to the full episode
Watch the full episode with Niall Ratcliffe on YouTube, or find every conversation at embracingmarketingmistakes.co.uk. Niall’s LinkedIn agency is Noticed.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes is the weekly podcast I host with my Prohibition PR co-director Will Ockenden, where marketing and PR leaders share the mistakes that taught them most
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
