Could you add a buying intent feature on Linkedin?
Why doesn't LinkedIn have #ReadyToBuy as an option? It would be a great way to signal to buyers that you've got intent, and create a marketplace. Read: "Everything Starts Out Looking Like a Toy" #235
Hi, I’m Greg 👋! I write weekly product essays, including system “handshakes”, the expectations for workflow, and the jobs to be done for data. What is Data Operations? was the first post in the series.
This week’s toy: a chrome extension that adds random jumpscares to sites you’d like to visit less. The idea is that aversive conditioning will help you to spend less time there. (I’d like to apply that idea to tasty snacks in my refrigerator). Edition 235 of this newsletter is here - it’s January 27, 2025.
Thanks for reading! Let me know if there’s a topic you’d like me to cover.
The Big Idea
A short long-form essay about data things
⚙️ Could you add a buying intent feature on LinkedIn?
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:
Salesforce would like to know when companies between 51-100 employees are looking for Customer Relationship Management solutions
They bid for leads during a date range and geographic area
“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
Negative feedback increases the cost of the lead
And from the buyer’s perspective:
A buyer is interested in sales call recording tools for the next 7 days
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
They would also like to include or exclude a few named vendors
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?
Buyers might not trust an intent conversation powered by ads
Suppliers might not think this is a high-intent lead because it’s happening outside their platform
Both might not trust LinkedIn as a place to have this conversation
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.
Links for Reading and Sharing
These are links that caught my 👀
1/ lnstant printing - Tools that bring digital ideas to analog processes are among my favorite. (I’m still waiting for Vestaboards to become about 1/10 as expensive.) PrinterCow is a similar idea letting you print anything to a thermal printer easily. Custom receipts, individualized grocery lists, or one time passwords to events … the possibilities are endless. (And think, no more printer drivers.)
2/ Instead, take wifi out of my car - And yet, maybe introducing digital ideas like APIs into analog things like cars can be Very Bad. Here’s a story about the ability to remotely take over any recent Subaru car through the Starlink service.
3/ About your premiums… - Brian Potter helps answer the question: why is my homeowner’s insurance going up … so much? TL;dr: it’s not just natural disasters, and it’s more complicated than you expect.
What to do next
Hit reply if you’ve got links to share, data stories, or want to say hello.
The next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” - Chris Dixon