Who are Six Sells?
Six Sells is a B2B executive communications agency for senior executives in the media and advertising industry.
Here are some of the most frequently asked questions we are asked about what we do, why we do it, how we do it, and who we do it with.
These answers were written by Mike Nicholson, CEO, at Six Sells and are based off the experience of working with hundreds of people over the past 7 years.
Who are Six Sells?
Six Sells is a B2B communications agency that helps sales and marketing leaders become credible, authentic thought leaders.
We create personable, organic thought leadership content that helps your senior executives become more visible and more memorable among the people who matter most to your business.
We also use LinkedIn Ads Manager to build precise audience segments so your content lands directly in the newsfeeds of the people who influence the buying decision.
Why does personalised content matter on LinkedIn?
People prefer people. On LinkedIn, familiar faces and familiar voices get far more attention than faceless corporate updates. Even so, most company content still comes from brand pages instead of senior leaders. Personalised content creates real connection, builds trust, sparks engagement and leads to meaningful commercial outcomes.
How does Six Sells improve content visibility?
We start by creating compelling, human thought leadership content in the voice of your senior leaders. Then we amplify it strategically. We build audience segments inside LinkedIn Ads Manager so your content is boosted directly into the newsfeeds of the exact companies and decision makers you want to influence. This is how we deliver relevant reach. You reach the right people with the right message at the right time.
What is a communications framework and why does it matter?
One of the biggest reasons that people don’t post more on LinkedIn is because they don’t really know what to write about.
This is why a communications framework is the foundation of your content strategy. It clarifies who you want to speak to, the stories you need to tell them, and which people inside your organisation should tell those stories.
Think of it like an Excel spreadsheet.
- Three columns represent your three ideal audiences.
- Under each column, three rows represent the three stories you want to tell that audience.
- You end up with nine core stories that you can tell in rotation.
- Those nine stories rotate.
- The core messages stay consistent, but can be told in many different ways.
- You avoid random acts of marketing, or long periods without saying anything at all.
Can marketing teams effectively ghostwrite for executives?
Sometimes, but not often. Writing credibly at an executive level requires deep industry experience. A junior marketer cannot mirror the tone, nuance or commercial understanding of a senior leader. At Six Sells, we have three senior writers with more than 90 years combined experience across media, marketing, advertising and adtech. We have run teams, sold media, built tech and worked with agencies and brands. That is why we can write in a voice that feels genuinely yours.
Do I have time for a thought leadership playbook?
Yes. It is far less demanding than most people think.
Month one takes around two hours.
From month two onwards you need about 30 minutes a month.
We speak with you directly to unlock your ideas, thinking, stories and tone of voice. You answer naturally, and we turn those insights into weekly content that reads as if you wrote it yourself.
Should I focus my thought leadership on specific topics?
Yes. Your content should align with the problems and challenges your ideal clients are dealing with right now. If you talk about random topics that only interest you internally, your content will not land. Your communications framework identifies the right topics, the right audiences and the right angle for each story. This keeps your content consistent, relevant and commercially useful.
How do I maintain an authentic voice?
Authenticity cannot be faked. Senior decision makers in B2B can spot generic, templated or AI-generated content instantly. At Six Sells, we spend real time with you every month capturing your phrasing, worldview, tone, humour, examples and stories. Everything we write sounds like you because it is built from your thinking and your language.
We do not outsource any client-facing content to AI. Humans respond better to human content, and people are already building a sixth sense for sniffing out AI-generated slop. AI is brilliant for streamlining back-end tasks, but your client-facing content should stay human.
Does thought leadership actually impact business?
Yes. Our clients consistently see real commercial results from thought leadership content. This is a relationship-driven industry. People connect with people, not brands. Thought leadership helps your senior leaders become recognisable, credible and trusted. When someone has seen enough of your content to understand who you are and how you think, they are far more likely to connect, respond and engage.
Many Six Sells clients have won six figure deals that started with a single inbound message sparked by a post we ghostwrote. They felt familiar enough to reach out, and that is the power of thought leadership done well.
Which metrics should I track for thought leadership ROI?
It is not about likes or comments. Most LinkedIn users are lurkers. They read silently, without engaging publicly.
At Six Sells, we focus on relevant reach. We build your ideal audience in LinkedIn Ads Manager and boost your organic content directly into their newsfeeds. We then report on:
- How many times your content was viewed
- Which companies viewed it most
- Job titles, seniority and geography of your audience
- Whether you are reaching the right people consistently
This goes far beyond vanity metrics. It shows whether your thought leadership is landing with the people who matter.
What results can I expect from Thought Leader Ads?
Thought Leader Ads are a long-term investment. They help you build awareness, familiarity and trust at scale. Once someone recognises your name, they are far more likely to accept connection requests, reply to emails, respond to outreach and agree to meetings.
Several Six Sells clients have secured large commercial deals directly from Thought Leader Ads and boosted posts. The combination of human content and precise targeting is what drives the results.
What is the best strategy for sending LinkedIn connection requests?
Start with identification, not activity. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to:
- Identify the right accounts (companies).
- Identify the right leads (people inside those companies).
- Connect with around ten people per day.
Do not exceed that. LinkedIn will flag you as potential spam if you connect too aggressively.
Always include a personalised connection note that explains why connecting might benefit them. Most outreach is written all about the sender. Flip that. When your request feels human, respectful and relevant, acceptance rates increase.
Over time this compounds. You build a network of the right people, not random numbers.
How do I turn views, impressions and reach into real leads?
Use the B2B buyers journey. There are seven positions including zero.
Stage 0: Cold
They do not know you or your company.
Stage 1: Awareness
They have heard of you but cannot clearly explain what you do.
Stage 2: Familiarity
They understand who you are, what you do, how you do it and why it matters.
Stage 3: Trust
Humans trust what feels familiar. Familiarity builds trust.
Stage 4: Interest
Interest appears when a compelling event happens inside their organisation. Interest is not binary. Someone may be interested in your offer but unable to act due to competing priorities.
Stage 5: Consideration
They compare your offering with competitors to decide who does it better, faster, more credibly or more cost efficiently.
Stage 6: Purchase
They choose you, a competitor or the status quo.
LinkedIn content builds the first three stages at scale. Consistency moves people from cold to aware, from aware to familiar and from familiar to trusting. When something shifts inside their business, trust turns into interest and that is when you see inbound enquiries.
At Six Sells, companies that nail their problem statements always get more inbound interest than those who just talk about what they do.
How do I identify my ideal audience on LinkedIn?
We use LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Start by identifying the right accounts which is simply B2B language for companies. Then identify the right leads which means people inside those companies.
You can filter by:
- Job title
- Function
- Seniority
- Geography
- Keywords
- Company size
- Industry
Connect with around ten a day. More than that risks LinkedIn throttling your outreach. Always include a personalised note that explains why connecting might matter to them.
When paired with a strong content strategy, this approach compounds quickly. Your ideal clients start to recognise your name, which increases acceptance rates and warms up future conversations.
What is the best way to measure success on LinkedIn?
Inbound enquiries are the best outcome. Many of our clients have won six figure deals from people who quietly read their content and reached out at the right moment.
However, most meaningful signals are invisible. People repeat your language back to you in meetings. Prospects tell you they see you everywhere. Those cues show your content is working.
We also provide a relevant reach report for clients using our organic plus paid strategy. If you were targeting senior marketers in automotive brands, your monthly report might show:
- BMW saw your posts 200 times
- Mercedes 150 times
- Audi 90 times
- Job titles and seniority of viewers
- Geographic breakdown
This tells you not just how many views you got, but whether you reached the right people in the right companies consistently.
Most importantly, almost all of the inbound new business we have received at Six Sells came from people who never visibly engaged with our content. Only one person ever liked a post before enquiring. Everyone else read quietly and reached out when the timing was right.
What is the difference between personal branding and thought leadership?
Personal branding is the impression people have of you. Thought leadership is your thinking shared.
Thought leadership helps build your personal brand because people buy from people they know, like and trust or respect. Sharing useful content consistently helps people understand how you think, what you know and whether they trust you.
So simply put, thought leadership builds your personal brand. Your personal brand is how people know you, think about you, trust you and respect you.
At Six Sells, we help leaders build both parts. We make sure your personal brand feels human and consistent, and we base your content on the real problems your ideal clients are dealing with. That combination moves people from cold to aware, from aware to familiar and from familiar to trusting.
How do I choose the right topics to talk about on LinkedIn?
At Six Sells, we start by analysing your website, sales deck, marketing collateral and one pagers. Clear themes always appear. These themes become the foundation of your thought leadership topics.
A useful way to think about this is a Venn diagram with three circles:
- What you do
- What your ideal clients care about
- What is genuinely unique about you
Most companies only have the first two circles, and that is fine. Uniqueness is rare. When you understand where those circles overlap, you can then identify the problem statements inside each topic. What is the problem? Why does it matter? Why does it need solving now?
This becomes your content roadmap and keeps you consistent, relevant and commercially aligned.
How long does it take LinkedIn to produce real commercial results?
There is no universal answer because the outcome depends on several factors. It depends on the length of your sales cycle, how aware your market is of your brand today, how familiar they are with your offering and whether the problems you solve are seen as urgent.
Research from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute shows that around 95 percent of B2B buyers are not in market on any given day. Your job is to stay visible so that when something changes inside their organisation, and a compelling event pushes your category up their priority list, your name is already familiar.
At Six Sells, we have had clients close six figure deals before onboarding is even complete. Others take longer. The deciding factor is consistency. If you do not publish consistently, you are invisible in the newsfeed. Your ideal clients scroll every day, some multiple times a day. If you are not there, someone else is taking the attention that could belong to you.
What is the difference between organic posting and paid promotion on LinkedIn, and how should I use them together?
Organic content is the personable content written by an individual and posted natively in the newsfeed. People pay far more attention to the personable content of familiar people than they do to company content published by faceless brands. Organic posts build familiarity and trust.
The limitation is distribution. You are in the lap of the LinkedIn algorithm. You cannot control who sees your content, and you have almost no visibility on which companies and job titles actually read it.
Paid promotion solves this. You boost your organic post directly into the newsfeeds of the exact companies and people you want to reach. The post looks identical to organic content, but distribution becomes precise.
With paid you also get proper reporting. You see how many times your content was viewed inside your target audience and which companies saw it most.
Organic plus paid is the strongest combination. Organic builds trust. Paid ensures the right people see it consistently.
How do I avoid sounding salesy on LinkedIn?
Show up as a human. Write how you speak. Talk about the problems your ideal clients are trying to solve. Demonstrate that you understand those problems deeply.
Do not pitch.
The Problem, Agitate, Solve framework helps.
- Problem: Use the problem as the headline.
- Agitate: Explain why it matters and why it is a problem worth solving.
- Solve: One short line showing how you think about solving it.
For outbound, offer something valuable with no strings. If you have a piece of research your ideal clients would genuinely want, offer it freely. If they accept, continue adding value without pitching.
Humans are reciprocal, but they resent being sold to immediately. The too long did not read version is this - Show up as a human and add value. Think about what you can give, not what you can get. Over time you earn the right to ask for a conversation.
How do I optimise my LinkedIn profile?
Your profile needs to make sense to your ideal clients within a few seconds. It should clearly explain:
- Who you are
- What you do
- Who you do it with
- How you do it
- Why they should care
Your profile should also contain the keywords your ideal clients might search for. These need to appear naturally across your headline, about section, experience and skills so you rank higher in LinkedIn search.
We always recommend avoiding the I help X do Y headline formula. It looks salesy and generic. A stronger approach is:
- Your title
- Your domain expertise
- The areas you are known for
- The sectors you work in
Your profile is the landing page for your personal brand. Make it useful and make it human.
What should my LinkedIn headline be?
Your headline needs to be clear, credible and true to how you want to be perceived. Start with your title or a short descriptor that does not trigger the sales radar. People are wary of anything that looks like a connect and pitch merchant.
Include the right keywords for your industry and expertise. For example, my headline includes:
- CEO at Six Sells
- People shaped communications
- Executive ghostwriting
- Content strategy
- Thought leadership
- Social selling
If your job title is something like Sales Executive, that is nothing to be ashamed of, but it may trigger resistance from brand marketers. If that is the case, you can lead with a descriptor before your title. For example: Media partnerships. Retail media. Sales Executive.
The headline should reflect what you do without looking contrived or templated.
How often should I post from my company page and personal profile?
Company page posts receive fleeting attention, so you can post three or four times a day without overwhelming people. Keep them short. A single line plus an image using your distinctive brand assets works best. Company pages build aggregate attention which Havas describes as lots of small moments of attention that add up over time.
For senior leaders, the cadence is different. Start with once a week. If you have enough helpful, relevant and interesting content to share, you can build to two, three or even four posts a week. Volume is fine if quality remains high.
How do I write content that leads to inbound enquiries?
Lead with the problems your ideal clients are experiencing. Talk about why those problems matter, why they are painful and why they are worth solving now. Most executives have a to do list of 200 things. Your job is to explain why your topic deserves to move up their list.
When you build a credible argument around a problem, a single line at the end explaining how you think about solving it is enough. You do not need a pitch. You just need to show that you understand the terrain.
We have worked with hundreds of executives at Six Sells, and the ones who receive the most inbound interest are the ones who nail their problem statements. People are far more likely to get in touch when they feel you understand their world.
Do video posts get better traction compared to written posts on LinkedIn?
Video posts will often get more views than text-only posts, but not always. The main reason is dwell time. When someone pauses to watch a video, even for a few seconds, that pause signals to LinkedIn that the content is engaging. The platform then tends to show it to more people. LinkedIn has also doubled down on video recently, so they are actively encouraging more of it in the feed.
At Six Sells, we think about video slightly differently to most. LinkedIn seem to be positioning themselves as the TikTok of the business world, which means mobile-first, vertical video. That can work for company page posts, but in the UK we consistently see senior audiences responding better to interview-style video content in a horizontal format. It feels more natural, more credible, and more aligned with B2B expectations.
As a LinkedIn Top Voice, I receive quarterly newsletters from LinkedIn. In a recent one, they said the optimal length for a LinkedIn video is around 90 seconds. That length keeps attention without dragging on and fits the way people consume content on mobile.
The bigger point is that video is the medium that most closely resembles how humans experience real life. Sight, sound and motion all together. That makes it an ideal way for leaders to build awareness, familiarity, trust, authority and likability — the human factors that shape B2B buying long before a sales conversation happens.
This is why so many Six Sells clients now record interview-style videos with us, either in the studio or remotely. Video gives your audience a sense of who you are, how you speak, how you think, and whether they would want to work with you. That is exactly what moves people from cold, through awareness and familiarity, into trust.
And if you want help with this, Six Sells has a London video studio and a virtual video team that can plan, shoot, edit and produce video content for you.
I share content from my marketing team and feel that covers everything. Do I still need to post my own thought leadership?
Yes, you absolutely do. On LinkedIn, people pay far more attention to the personable content of familiar people than they do to the corporate content published by faceless brands. Company page posts have their place, but they get fleeting attention from anyone who does not already work with you.
When your executive team shows up as humans, in their own voice, talking about the problems your ideal clients are wrestling with, everything changes. You get far more organic reach, far more attention, and far more engagement because people buy from people they know, like, and trust. Not from logos.
This shift from “only the company posts” to “the company and the exec team post” is transformational. It builds the personal brands of your leaders, which strengthens existing relationships and opens new ones. It also drives more inbound because your people become familiar and trusted in the newsfeeds of the clients who matter most.
Which members of my team should be writing thought leadership posts on LinkedIn?
It usually pays to start with the CEO or founder, because in our experience across media, advertising, marketing, and adtech, the most senior people get the most traction and the market tends to pay far more attention to senior voices than to anyone else. Think about how Elon Musk talks for X or how Mark Zuckerberg talks for Meta. People want to hear from leaders, not logos.
But the best way to decide who else should be writing thought leadership is to build a communications framework. Once you’re clear on the audiences you want to reach and the stories you need to tell to each of those audiences, it becomes obvious who in your organisation should tell which story. Some stories naturally sit with the CEO, but others are better told by sales, product, marketing or strategy. The goal is to match the right story with the right person, told in their own tone of voice, so you get the attention of the people who matter most to your business.
Will people get fed up with seeing posts from me all the time or with me repeating the same message?
The short answer is no, and the longer answer is that everything starts with your communications framework. Once you identify the key audiences you want to reach, let’s say three for this example, you now have three columns. For each audience you map out the three core stories you need to tell them, which gives you nine stories in total, and each of those stories can be told in a hundred different ways. So while the core message stays consistent, the way you bring it to life changes every time.
If you post once a week and you have nine stories on rotation, any one message only lands with your audience four or five times a year, which is nowhere near too often. People forget most of what they see on LinkedIn because they are scrolling, dipping in and out between meetings, and mostly lurking, not engaging. Repetition is not a negative on LinkedIn. It is the thing that makes the message stick. It works in exactly the same way as brand building for companies: consistency of message delivered frequently. People remember far less than you think, and if you only say something once, you may as well not say it at all.
How can I prove to my CEO that LinkedIn posts are working?
The art of B2B marketing is getting the right messages to the right people at the right time, and once you break it down like that, it becomes much easier to prove that LinkedIn is working. The right messages come from your communications framework. This is where you map out the audiences you want to speak to and the specific stories you need to tell to each of those audiences. Once that is agreed and signed off, you know the messages are correct.
The right people are reached by building audience segments in LinkedIn Ads Manager for each of your target audiences and then boosting your CEO and senior leadership content directly into the newsfeeds of those people. That removes the randomness of LinkedIn’s algorithm and gives you precision. You know your content is landing with the people who matter.
And the right time is whenever those people are in the headspace to read and absorb something new. Email inboxes are overflowing. Automation and AI have made that worse. LinkedIn, however, is where people go when they have a few minutes and want to read, learn, or catch up. So your thought leadership appears at the exact moment they are receptive.
To prove it, we give you a monthly report that shows exactly how many times your content was viewed inside your target audience. And if you work with Six Sells, we go a step further. We show you the top companies that viewed your content and how often they saw it. So you can walk into your CEO’s office and say: these are the messages, these are the people, and this is how many times they saw our content. That is proof.
Should I include attachments or external links in my LinkedIn posts?
LinkedIn posts work best when the entire message is written natively in the newsfeed. Think about how people actually use LinkedIn. They scroll, they tap “see more”, they read for a few seconds, and then they move on. Most people do not want to click away to another website while they are in that flow.
If your goal is to drive traffic to an external blog, video, or article, you need to approach it differently. Our working theory at Six Sells, based on hundreds of executives we’ve supported over seven years, is that organic reach gets throttled when you include a link that takes people off LinkedIn. Nobody outside LinkedIn knows exactly how the algorithm works, but we’ve seen this pattern consistently.
So here is the practical approach:
- If you are posting organic only, put the link in the first comment, not the main post.
- If you genuinely want to drive traffic off-platform, use organic plus paid.
- Build an audience segment in LinkedIn Ads Manager containing the exact people you want to reach.
- Write your personable thought leadership post with the link included.
- Then put paid budget behind that organic post and boost it directly into the newsfeeds of the right people.
This way, even though the link reduces organic reach, the paid boost guarantees that your ideal audience still sees it. Organic plus paid gives you control, precision, and reporting, rather than leaving the outcome to chance.
These answers were written by Mike Nicholson, CEO, at Six Sells and are based off the experience of working with hundreds of people over the past 7 years.
Email hello@sixsells.co.uk if you have any further questions.
