Most of the people I talk to don’t want hundreds of clients. They want two, maybe three good ones a month. That’s it. If you’re selling your own expertise, not a piece of software, you only need a small number of clients paying you proper fees, and you’re set. So today I want to map out exactly how to sell expertise on LinkedIn, because most people are solving the wrong problem entirely.
I’ve run Maverrik for fourteen years now, and we’ve helped clients generate more than $100 million, £75 million, of new business in the last six years alone. Everything below is the same system I walk every one of my own clients through.
Why you need excess demand to sell expertise on LinkedIn
Here’s something that catches people out. If you go into LinkedIn thinking, “I just need one client,” the moment a lead shows up, even a mediocre one, you’ll take it. It saps your time, it’s not a good fit, and you end up compromising your whole business around people you shouldn’t be working with.
What you actually want is three or four potential clients on the table at once, so you get to choose. That excess of demand is what protects your price and your time. The businesses that struggle aren’t struggling because they can’t get clients. They’re struggling because of unpredictability, referrals dry up, you get buried in delivery work, and suddenly there’s a gap nobody saw coming. I’ve done it myself. The whole point of building a system is to stop that gap ever opening in the first place.
Start with the result, not the activity
Most people build their LinkedIn strategy from the action forward. Post more, connect more, hope it adds up. Flip it. Start from the result and work backwards.
Say you need two to three clients a month at $5,000 each. That’s $10,000 to $15,000 a month. If you close roughly a third of the calls you take, and that’s a fair, safe number, you need around ten quality calls. And because not everyone you talk to is ready right now- some need nurturing, some just aren’t a fit, you need around 30 quality leads to get those ten calls.
Thirty leads. Ten calls. Two to three clients. That’s the whole target, and it’s non-negotiable as a starting point. Most people never do this math, so they have no idea whether their current activity is even in the right zone.
The 3P framework to sell expertise on LinkedIn
Everything I do comes down to three parts: proposition, pre-selling, and pipeline.
Proposition comes first, and nothing else works without it. LinkedIn isn’t a social media platform; it’s a market. Moving your business onto it is exactly like taking a UK business into the US, or vice versa: same general language, completely different buying behaviour, decision-making, and terminology. You have to adapt to the market you’re entering, and if your whole operating style has been built around referrals, bringing that same approach onto LinkedIn will fail.
Inside proposition sits what I call the seven Ps: problem, promise, persona, process, proof, parameters, and price. You have to define every one of these before you attempt to sell expertise on LinkedIn at scale.
- Problem: the specific thing you solve.
- Promise: what changes for them if they work with you.
- Persona: exactly who this is for.
- Process: your method to get them from the problem to the promise. Not a course, not coaching itself, an actual approach.
- Proof: testimonials, case studies, thought leadership, anything that evidences you can do what you say.
- Parameters: the scope of what you’re actually delivering.
- Price: what it costs.
A lot of people tell me they sell intangibles, that it’s hard to quantify the impact of coaching or consulting. It isn’t, if you know the problem, the person, and the outcome. What’s actually happening when someone says that is they haven’t defined the persona clearly enough to build a real promise around it. Everybody buys outcomes. Nobody buys an intangible.
And on price specifically: if you feel awkward talking about your number, that awkwardness will leak out on every call you take and quietly kill your own sales. Put your price out there publicly. Get desensitised to it. This isn’t about being the cheapest option; it’s about removing your own hesitation from the room.
Pre-selling: conviction plus belief
Once your seven Ps are defined, people need to see two things from you: conviction that you believe in what you’re doing, and belief that it’ll actually work for them. Neither shows up by accident.
This runs across three places. Your profile, which has to educate people on your seven Ps clearly enough that someone landing on it for the first time understands exactly what you do and how to buy it. Your content, which reinforces the same message consistently, not by promoting constantly, but by demonstrating how you think and how your approach works, without a sales agenda attached to every post. And the web, meaning whether there’s genuine evidence of your expertise if someone googles you. This third one is the long game. If your business has run entirely on referrals, you might have twenty-five years of experience and still be a nobody online. LinkedIn content gets indexed everywhere now, including ChatGPT search indexing, so what you post becomes part of that backstory over time.
People often avoid sorting their profile because they don’t want to look salesy. That instinct backfires. Leaving your profile vague to avoid seeming pushy just means people can’t see why they should buy from you, which means you end up having to sell harder later to compensate. Get the profile and content sorted properly once, and it can sit there working for you for six months without another touch.
Why narrow beats broad
I could position myself as a general marketing consultant tomorrow. I know enough to help with email, websites, sales, all of it. But I don’t, because going broad means far more pre-selling is required before anyone understands which specific thing you can help them with.
I call this the Red Bull strategy. Red Bull got to 20% of the global soft drink market by not competing head-on with Coca-Cola. They picked small, specific segments, owned them, and expanded outward. Coca-Cola has the money, the manpower, and the time to win a direct fight. You don’t need to fight that fight. Own a segment, get specific, and the whole process gets faster, not because you’re capable of less, but because clarity converts and vague doesn’t.
Pipeline: the machine that runs itself
Once proposition and pre-selling are in place, the process to sell expertise on LinkedIn becomes mechanical. There are five paths to generate leads: live events, a newsletter, demand content, relationship-led selling, and hyper-targeted outreach. For most experts, the first three are the ones worth mastering.
Pick one. Not three. Trying to run all five at once means you’ll be mediocre at every one of them and burn out doing it. Live events alone have generated me 125,000 leads and $10 million in revenue over six years, purely by repeating the same format over and over. My first ever live, years ago, I had three glasses of gin beforehand out of nerves. By the third one, I was fine. The system gets easier once it’s built; it’s the getting started that feels uncomfortable.
Getting a lead is only step one. You then need to get them onto a call, which won’t happen if you just ask “fancy a call?” with nothing showing them what’s in it for them. On the call, your job is to uncover their specific problem in their own context, so your proposal actually fits rather than just sounding like a good service in the abstract. And once the call ends, momentum has to be actively maintained, not chased with “just checking in” messages that let the original reason for buying quietly fade.
All of this connects back to proposition. If you haven’t defined your persona clearly, you end up trying to bundle three different problems into one vague pitch, “I help you get clarity” being the classic symptom, and it means nothing to anyone. I can run these calls almost on instinct now because I’m solving the same problem for the same type of person, over and over. That repetition is what makes you a specialist, and it’s what makes the whole process faster and simpler over time, not slower.
Build the machine to sell expertise on LinkedIn
If you want to sell expertise on LinkedIn with clients coming in like clockwork, you need a machine, not a series of one-off efforts. That means: your seven Ps defined, your profile and content reinforcing them consistently, one lead generation path chosen and mastered, and a repeatable process for getting leads onto calls, proposing properly, and closing without losing momentum.
None of this requires you to become a full-time marketer or a content creator chasing virality. It requires the setup done properly once, which then runs on roughly thirty minutes a day. If you’re a subject matter expert who wants clients without living on LinkedIn, that’s the whole point of building the system this way: more demand than you can supply, which protects your price and your time.