By follower count, the top influencers on LinkedIn are famous business figures and big creators, and they are rarely useful for a B2B company. For B2B, the influencers that move pipeline are operators with roughly 10,000 followers who still do the job their audience does. Work with them through small co-created packages (around three posts), give them real product access, skip the tracking links, and measure the lift in signups.
The top influencers on LinkedIn, if you rank by followers, are household names: people like Bill Gates and Richard Branson, plus a layer of full-time creators who post about leadership, careers and productivity. They're worth following for ideas. For most B2B companies, they're the wrong people to work with.
The influencers who actually move a B2B pipeline look different. They have around 10,000 followers, a full-time job in the field they write about, and an audience made of people who do that same job. This post covers both: who the top voices are and what they do differently, and how a B2B company should (and shouldn't) work with LinkedIn influencers.
Who the top influencers on LinkedIn actually are
"Influencer" on LinkedIn means a few different things, and mixing them up is how companies waste budget.
| Type | What they look like | Useful for a B2B brand? |
|---|---|---|
| Famous figures | CEOs, investors and authors known outside LinkedIn | For following, rarely for partnering |
| Full-time creators | Posting daily about careers, productivity, personal branding | Only if your buyer is their audience |
| Niche experts | Known names inside one function, like B2B marketing or growth | Often, if the niche is yours |
| Operator micro-influencers | About 10K followers, still doing the job, writing about the work | Usually the best fit |
| Your own executives | Founders and leaders at your company | The most underused option |
Most "top LinkedIn influencers" lists stop at the first two rows. They're fine if you want inspiration. If you're a company trying to reach a specific buyer, the bottom three rows are where the value is.
What LinkedIn Top Voices means
LinkedIn has run its own recognition program for high-profile members for years, first as "LinkedIn Influencers" and more recently as Top Voices, shown with a badge on the profile. The details of who qualifies and how the badge looks have changed several times, so I'd check LinkedIn's own pages for the current rules rather than trust any blog, including this one.
What matters for you is simpler. A Top Voice badge tells you LinkedIn noticed someone. It doesn't tell you whether their audience includes your buyer. A badge holder who writes about leadership to 300,000 general readers can be a worse partner for a sales tech company than an SDR team lead with 9,000 followers who are all SDRs.
What top voices do differently
I spend a lot of time reading the people whose content clearly works, trying to reverse-engineer what they do. A few patterns keep showing up.
They rarely mention their product. When I look at founders like Dan Martell, Amos Bar-Joseph or Adam Robinson, most of their posts are about ideas, stories and lessons. The product shows up after the reader is already interested, often after a DM. The content earns the attention and the product is what happens next.
The founder's own voice is the engine. Dan Martell has talked about attributing around $24M in revenue to his content, and it's content he creates himself. His marketing team's job is to amplify that voice. The corporate-sounding version produced by a team on the founder's behalf is exactly what most B2B companies publish, and it's why most of them get nothing from LinkedIn.
They write from inside the work. The best operator-influencers describe what they did this week, what broke, and what helped. That specificity is what makes their audience trust them, and it's also why a product mention from them lands differently than an ad.
They're consistent for a long time. None of the people I learn from got there on a three-month sprint. Their audience is the result of years of showing up.
If you want to see how this applies to a founder's own feed, I wrote about it in how founders actually build thought leadership.
Why operator micro-influencers work for B2B
I was listening to a Dave Gerhardt podcast episode with the CMO of lemlist, a sales tech company, and she described exactly how they run influencer marketing on LinkedIn. It's the clearest playbook I've heard for this, so I'll walk through it.
Their buyers are salespeople and SDRs. So the influencers they look for are salespeople and SDRs: micro-influencers with around 10,000 followers who are actually doing the work. While doing the work, these people write about what's helping them, or they write genuinely engaging posts about their process. And at some point in the post, the product they're partnering with appears as part of that process.
The hard part, she said, is finding them. And the reason they're hard to find is also the reason they work: they're busy. They have full-time jobs. For them, influencer income is a side gig. That's what keeps their content credible, because the audience knows they're not full-time content people selling to them.
It's also why I got excited about this model. I even sketched a marketplace that would connect B2B companies with operator-influencers and handle the matching, contracts and payments, because these people don't have time to find brands, invoice them and manage the relationship. I haven't built it. The more I thought about it, the clearer it became that the hard part is the collaboration, and a marketplace can't do that part for you.
How to work with LinkedIn influencers in B2B
Here's the process as I understood it from that conversation, plus what I'd add from my own experience with founders and content.
- Pick operators who still do the job. Look for people whose followers are your buyers and who still do the job. Their engagement quality matters more than their follower count. The engagement rate calculator is a quick way to sanity-check a candidate's recent posts.
- Give them real product access. They need to use the product and form their own opinion. If they don't know anything about the product, the post won't be engaging or convert.
- Co-create the content. Expect a ping-pong of a few iterations between your marketing team and the influencer. It's joint work, and both sides have to put effort in.
- Keep their voice. If you hand them a script, they won't post it. They care about their work, their audience and their posts, and the content has to sound like them.
- Start with a small package. lemlist's usual starting point was three posts, which is enough to see how it performs.
- Expand what works. If the first three posts perform, move to a larger package, like ten posts or a yearly arrangement with the same person. It gets better as the relationship matures.
Once a post from an influencer performs well organically, you can also put paid budget behind it. LinkedIn's thought leader ads let you promote posts from individual members, and the rules on whose posts you can sponsor have been expanding. I cover the paid side in how to boost a LinkedIn post.
How to measure an influencer campaign without UTM links
Attribution is where most B2B influencer programs fall apart, because people try to be too scientific about it.
The first thing lemlist avoided was tracking links. Putting a UTM link in an influencer's post screams marketing material, and people don't like it. It hurts the exact trust you're paying for.
Instead, they measured it like this:
- Look for a signup uplift. Track the signup trend, and check for a lift whenever an influencer post goes live. That's the immediate impact.
- Turn the lift into revenue. Take the uplift, multiply by your conversion rate, then by customer lifetime value. That gives you a minimum ROI.
- Remember it's a floor. She pointed out that most buyers, something like 95%, aren't in the market at any given moment. The posts are nurturing them too, and that effect doesn't show up in the signup spike.
- Add reach metrics later. As the program matured, they also tracked impressions, reach and reactions, treating it as both lead gen and demand gen.
I like this approach because it's honest about what it can and can't prove. The signup lift shows the program is doing something. The long-term effect is bigger and harder to see, and you accept that.
What B2B companies should not do with LinkedIn influencers
From that conversation and from what I've seen founders try:
- Don't pick by follower count. A creator with a huge general audience will get you impressions from people who will never buy.
- Don't write their posts for them. A post that sounds like your marketing team, published under someone else's name, gets the worst of both.
- Don't judge a partner on one post. Give it a small package and a few weeks.
- Don't expect a clean last-click number. Decide up front how you'll measure uplift, and accept that nurturing effects are real but invisible.
- Don't forget the influencers you already employ.
That last one is the point I'd underline for founders. The operator-influencer model works because the voice belongs to someone who does the work. Nobody does the work at your company more than you and your leadership team. A founder who writes from inside the business, the way Dan Martell does, is an influencer the company fully controls, with no package to renew.
That's the thing I keep coming back to: you can't lead what you've never touched. Hiring outside voices works. Your own voice compounds, and nobody can end that contract. If you want the case for that, I made it in LinkedIn personal branding is the only equity you keep, and it's the reason I built Liftli around drafting in the founder's own voice.