Reading what a buyer writes about

A buyer who posts on LinkedIn is handing you their priorities in their own words. Most sellers scroll past it.

Read it like research. It's the closest thing to a discovery call you'll get before the first meeting.

What the posts tell you

People write about three things. What they're proud of, what they're working on and what bothers them.

The proud posts tell you what they're measured on. A VP of operations who celebrates on-time delivery numbers is judged on on-time delivery. A CIO who posts about a successful platform launch got credit for the launch, and now owns whatever comes after it.

The working-on posts tell you the agenda. A leader writing about building a data team, hiring for a new function or restructuring a department is telling you where their attention is this quarter.

The bothered posts are the most useful. They're rarer and often softer. A post about the cost of technical debt, or the difficulty of hiring engineers, or why transformation programs fail. They're usually written in general terms. But people write about what's in front of them.

Look for repetition

One post is a moment. Three posts on the same theme over a couple of months is a priority.

So scroll back. Read the last ten or twelve posts, not just the latest. Notice the topics that keep coming up. Notice what they comment on in other people's posts too. Comments are often more candid than original posts.

Say a head of supply chain posts about supplier diversification, comments twice on a peer's post about inventory visibility, and shares an article about nearshoring. That's a pattern. She's worried about her supply base, and she doesn't have the data she needs to manage it.

Stack it with the account

Posts tell you what's on the person's mind. They don't tell you whether there's money behind it.

Check the account. Does the 10-K name the same issue? Are they hiring for it? Did she start the role recently? Topic signals carry the least weight alone. Stacked with business pressure or a new leader, they turn a guess into a strong hypothesis. The buying signals guide covers how that works.

Write to the theme, not the post

There's a temptation to quote the post back. Don't. Telling someone you saw their post and loved it is what every vendor does.

Use the theme as context for your hypothesis. Reference it lightly. Then make your guess about the problem underneath.

You've written a few times lately about supplier diversification, and the 10-K mentions shifting sourcing away from a single region. That's a big change to land on the supply chain team. My guess is the hard part isn't finding new suppliers but getting reliable lead time and quality data from them once they're onboarded. Is that close, or is the bigger issue something else?

She knows you read her posts. But you didn't flatter her. You thought about her problem.

Know where the line is

Reading what a leader posts publicly is fair. They wrote it for an audience.

Going further isn't. Don't reference personal posts about family or health. Don't stitch together their old comments to make a point. Don't bring up something they posted three years ago at a different job. Stay with recent, professional posts and the themes inside them. There's more on staying on the right side in competitor engagement without creeping people out.

Read the committee too

The economic buyer posts about strategy. The champion often posts about the team and the work. The technical lead posts about tools and architecture, sometimes in technical forums instead of LinkedIn.

Read all three. Their themes will differ, and those differences tell you how to write each version. The buyer gets the strategy hypothesis. The champion gets the workload hypothesis. The technical lead gets the system hypothesis.

What a buyer writes about is what they think about. Read it closely, stack it with the account, and write to the problem behind it.