Building a Pipeline on LinkedIn Without Chasing Likes: Expert Insights with Sophie Steffen

Sophie Steffen has spent twelve years moving between social media, community management, and performance marketing, and she has done it long enough to be honest about which channel actually fills her agency’s calendar. The answer, since 2019, has been LinkedIn. Every single client she has signed at Kunoichi - the growth performance marketing agency she co-founded and runs from Barcelona - has come through LinkedIn. Patrycja Radwanska sat down with her to find out exactly how that happens, and what she would tell someone staring at a blank LinkedIn composer with no idea what to type.

Expert Insight Interview

Hosted by: Patrycja Radwanska (Editor at Lead Gen Manager) LinkedIn ↗

Guest: Sophie Steffen (Co-founder & CEO of Kunoichi) LinkedIn ↗

What follows is a tour through the mechanics of LinkedIn as a B2B acquisition channel, from the unglamorous truth about consistency to the very specific Monday-Friday content cadence Steffen uses to publish five times a week without burning out. She does not promise virality and she does not promise quick wins. What she does promise is a system - one that compounds over years the same way an index fund compounds, and that turns posts into pipeline if you are willing to keep showing up.

Key Takeaways

Consistency Beats Virality: Chasing likes is the wrong scoreboard. 90% of LinkedIn growth is showing up week after week, year after year, regardless of which posts get engagement and which fall flat.
Pick a Cadence You Can Actually Maintain: Whether it is once a week or five times, the system must be small enough to survive a bad week. Most people fail not because the strategy was wrong but because they overcommitted in week one.
Define the ICP Before the Post: Posting without a clear ideal customer profile and a clear goal produces content that is technically published but commercially invisible. Pain points are gold, and the only way to find them is to know exactly who you are writing for.
Treat LinkedIn Like a 20-Year Investment: Think index fund, not lottery ticket. Visibility, credibility, and trust compound, but only if you commit to a horizon measured in years rather than quarters.

Why LinkedIn, and Why Now

Steffen is unsentimental about the channel. LinkedIn matters because it is the only network that sits squarely at the intersection of social and business, which makes it uniquely well-targeted when you want to run campaigns and uniquely well-suited to expanding a professional network that turns into revenue. She has built her entire client base from it since going freelance in 2019, and the agency she runs today still acquires every new client through the platform.

The shift she points to is not technological but behavioral. People follow people, not brands. They follow the founder, the operator, the thought leader - and when they see that person consistently in their feed, the gradual accumulation of exposure becomes credibility, and credibility eventually becomes a discovery call. None of that requires a viral hit. All of it requires staying visible long enough for the slow physics of trust to do its work.

“I gained all my clients through LinkedIn, and I still get my clients through LinkedIn. That’s why for me especially, it’s super important.”

The trap most people fall into is thinking the goal is the post. The goal is the pattern. Each individual post is a tiny deposit. Some of those deposits will get a thousand impressions and two likes; others will get one impression and a discovery call. The point is not to predict which is which. The point is to keep depositing.

The Consistency Problem Nobody Wants to Hear About

Ask Steffen what separates the people who grow on LinkedIn from the people who give up after six weeks, and she will give you a single word. Consistency. Not creativity, not virality, not which AI tool you used to write the hook. Consistency, by her estimate, is roughly 90% of the work.

The reason most people fail at it is not laziness. It is perfectionism. Aspiring LinkedIn creators look at the polished posts in their feed and assume that is the bar they need to clear before they hit publish. They sit on drafts. They overthink hooks. They wait for the moment when they will produce something brilliant. That moment never arrives, and the months pile up.

“If you’re chasing likes, you’re in the wrong path. It’s about building that trust, and that consistency only builds when you post every week in a regular way.”

The fix is mechanical, not motivational. Pick a cadence small enough that you cannot fail at it - once a week, twice a week, whatever you can guarantee even during a bad month. Then protect that cadence ruthlessly. The system has to be manageable. Steffen records her content drafts on the stationary bike at her gym because it is the only way she can guarantee two birds, one stone, every weekday morning.

Read our full deep-dive on consistency over virality

A Monday-Through-Friday Content Cadence That Actually Holds Up

The most concrete and immediately useful part of the conversation is the framework Steffen has built for her own posting schedule. Five posts a week, Monday through Friday, with each day serving a distinct purpose in the relationship she is trying to build with her audience.

Monday opens the week soft, with industry news. The goal is to be useful and current - what shifted in AI, what new platform launched, what changed in the LinkedIn algorithm. Tuesday goes behind the scenes: a framework her agency uses for client onboarding, a glimpse of company culture, a workflow that produces social proof without requiring her to brag. Wednesday is the heaviest content day - expert insights, case studies, an interview like this one, the kind of post that positions her as a thought leader and that can be repurposed as paid top-of-funnel content if she chooses to amplify it.

Thursday flips outward. It is community day. Appreciation posts, thank-yous to team members, polls, surveys, anything that signals she is paying attention to other people rather than only herself. Friday closes the week the way Monday opened it - soft, human, personal. A vulnerable moment, a fun fact, a reflection. Something that reminds her audience there is a person behind the brand, and that person has failures and friends and hobbies just like everyone else.

Read our full deep-dive on the Monday-to-Friday LinkedIn framework

Goal First, ICP Second, Pain Points Third

For anyone starting from zero, Steffen is emphatic that the worst mistake is to begin with the content. The content is the last step. The first step is the goal. What are you trying to achieve - network expansion, personal brand, client acquisition, internal positioning at your company? The goal dictates everything downstream.

Once the goal is clear, the next step is the ICP. Not the abstract demographic but the actual person. Picture the name, the company, the title. What is that person struggling with? What are they confused about? What are they trying to improve? Those answers - the everyday challenges of a real human you can name - are the well from which every useful post is drawn.

“Once you know who you’re actually talking to, understand their pain points. That’s gold. That’s where you actually want to get into the nitty-gritty stuff.”

The mistake Steffen sees repeatedly is the guru post - the founder who is so eager to demonstrate expertise that every post becomes a humblebrag about their wins. People recognize that pattern instantly, and they discount accordingly. The posts that actually build trust are the ones that lead with experience, lesson, failure, or honest perspective. Authenticity, in her phrasing, is the connective tissue between expertise and trust. Without it, expertise feels like marketing.

Read our full deep-dive on defining your ICP for LinkedIn

Automated Outreach: How Half of 11K Followers Got There

Steffen is candid about something most LinkedIn growth content pretends does not exist: roughly half of her 11K followers came from automated outreach campaigns. She runs them for herself and for her agency’s clients, and she is matter-of-fact about why - manually sending one-by-one connection requests at the scale she needs would consume time she does not have.

The toolkit she uses is well-defined. Linked Helper for connection request automation. Heyreach, Lemlist, PhantomBuster, and Waalaxy as alternatives in the same category. Apollo for the layer above, where LinkedIn outreach meets email outreach in a single coordinated motion. The principle that ties them together is that LinkedIn is not a standalone channel for B2B acquisition - it is one half of a sequence where email picks up where the connection request leaves off.

The targeting matters more than the tooling. Steffen builds her audiences either through account-based marketing - specific companies, specific titles, specific countries - or through firmographic filters like industry and headcount. Once that audience is defined, automation simply means you can send the same well-thought-out outreach to a hundred people in the time it used to take to send it to ten. The organic growth from her content compounds on top of that automated foundation, and over time the ratio shifts. People start finding her on their own.

Read our full deep-dive on LinkedIn outreach automation tools

Think Index Fund, Not Lottery Ticket

The metaphor Steffen returns to at the end of the conversation is the one worth holding onto. LinkedIn growth is an investment, and like any investment that actually compounds, the relevant time horizon is ten, twenty, or thirty years - not one. Most people quit because they applied a one-year horizon to a thirty-year practice.

The implication is freeing. Individual post performance stops mattering very much. A post that flops is not a setback, because the setback was always imaginary. A post that lands is not a breakthrough, because the breakthrough was always going to come from the accumulated weight of having posted for years. The data each post generates is useful - patterns emerge, you learn what your audience responds to, you refine. But the engagement on any single post is noise.

What signal matters, in Steffen’s framing, is whether you are still showing up in year three when the people who quit in month six are watching from the sidelines. That, more than any clever hook or any framework, is what separates the people who build a pipeline from the people who do not.

Full Interview Transcript

Read the full interview transcript

Patrycja Radwanska: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Let’s Talk Marketing. Today we’re hosting Sophie Steffen. She’s a co-founder and the CEO of Kunoichi, a growth performance marketing agency, helping brands scale through smart marketing strategies. Sophie, you definitely need to explain the word Kunoichi, because that’s quite of a tongue twister.

Patrycja Radwanska: So let’s put a pin on that. As we know, LinkedIn has become one of the most important channels for growth, not only for founders, but also for sales representatives, marketers, and agencies. Why? Because posting consistently builds credibility, trust, and visibility over time. So today we’re going to talk about what actually matters on LinkedIn, why consistency drives growth, how to start posting without overthinking it, and how showing up regularly can create opportunities over time.

Patrycja Radwanska: Sophie, welcome again. I would like you to start with a quick intro, and just straight away tell us why LinkedIn has become so important for you.

Sophie Steffen: Awesome, Patrycja. Thank you for that intro. And yeah, let me start with giving the listeners a brief explanation of what Kunoichi is. Kunoichi means the female ninja. Why female ninja? First, because I’m female, and I’m also a ninja. So I’ve been training martial arts since I’m a teenager, basically for anger control when I was in my teenage years. But now I also do it on the side. We have a dojo here in Barcelona, and apart from doing marketing stuff, I also teach and train martial arts.

Sophie Steffen: And my marketing journey actually began 12 years ago. I started with social media marketing, community management, and then I moved more into performance marketing, but the two are very connected. And today I wanted to give you a little bit of behind the scenes why especially LinkedIn has become so important, not just for me, but for every professional out there, I think, should be on LinkedIn.

Sophie Steffen: So just a quick teaser on why I think this network has become so important is because first it’s a social network, but it’s also a business network. So it’s very smart for targeting on when you run campaigns, but also to increase your network and also build business relationships. When I started as a freelancer in 2019 and then built my agency, I gained all my clients through LinkedIn, so it’s how I gained my first clients and I still get my clients through LinkedIn. That’s why for me especially, it’s super important.

Patrycja Radwanska: Sophie, let’s start super simple. Why do you even post on LinkedIn? What’s the goal behind it?

Sophie Steffen: Yeah, I think LinkedIn, especially because it’s a business social network, it’s great to build credibility. So when you do want to create business opportunities and people see your work and your perspective and insights, but also your opinion, that builds trust. And people usually follow people. They usually don’t follow a brand. You follow maybe the founder or some thought leader. So if you follow people and you see their content regularly popping up, that creates visibility, and that eventually will turn into interest, into opportunities, and then obviously at some point, hopefully, into clients.

Sophie Steffen: But the thing no one tells you is that you have to be consistent. So whether it be once, twice, or five times per week, the 99%, or I would say 90%, is really consistency.

Patrycja Radwanska: Yes, you’re mentioning that a couple of times. What do you exactly mean by that? What does consistency in this 90% really mean?

Sophie Steffen: I think the biggest problem people who don’t post and want to start posting is they want to create a great post. They want to have this post that goes viral and gets a lot of engagement, a lot of likes, and it’s not about that. If you’re chasing likes, you’re in the wrong path. It’s about building that trust, and that consistency only builds when you post every week in a regular way. Some people post every day. You don’t have to start with every day. You have to build a system that’s manageable. So don’t put too much on your plate, but you have to start somewhere, and you have to continue starting. So that’s something that’s really hard to start and then to show up. But the hardest part is really the consistency.

Patrycja Radwanska: Why do you think people struggle with consistency?

Sophie Steffen: I think because we’re in a society where perfectionism is still something that’s applauded. So we see these perfect reels, we see these perfect posts, and we want our posts also to be that way. But we don’t remind ourselves that these people also started with zero likes or maybe one like from our friend or from our mom. Maybe she’s not on LinkedIn, but so it’s about starting and just experimenting. So don’t overthink it. Don’t, you want to have that groundbreaking post every day. Again, don’t chase the likes, the engagement. I sometimes get a post that gets thousands of impressions and others only get one or two likes. It doesn’t matter. LinkedIn rewards consistency, and authenticity over perfection. And I get it. You see those posts that are perfect, but if you define your success by how many people actually like your content, you’re on the wrong path. So really it’s about less perfection and more authenticity.

Patrycja Radwanska: I love it. It’s really bringing us to the ground saying, look, you don’t need to be perfect, but you need to start from something, and it’s really good advice. So let’s say for someone who wants to start absolutely from zero, what should they actually post about? What is your advice here?

Sophie Steffen: Yeah, that’s a good question because obviously the content needs to be somehow useful, relatable, insightful or informative. But you don’t want to just post something that’s funny, or creates some sort of information and that’s it. You want to follow a specific strategy, and that obviously depends on your goal. So what is it that you want to achieve? And it might be different if you work in a company, you’re in sales, you’re in marketing. Your goal might be different than if you are an entrepreneur, or you’re a business owner and you want to get some clients from your network. So be clear on what is it that you actually want to achieve.

Sophie Steffen: And maybe it’s just network expansion, so networking opportunities or grow your personal brand. I know a lot of marketing leaders who want to get more exposure, and want to position them as thought leaders, which eventually will also benefit them as if they want to leave, for example, the company, but also for the own company they work in. So it’s like a win-win. So get clear on the goal. And then you want to be clear, for example, if you want to get clients from LinkedIn, what is that client, that ideal client, the ICP, ideal customer profile? So think of the person, think of the name, think of the company they work in, and think of the position.

Sophie Steffen: So really get clear on who’s your buyer that you want to attract. So who are you speaking when you actually post? So that’s the person, that’s the audience you should have in mind. And once you know who you’re actually talking to, understand their pain points. What are they struggling with? So what are they confused about? What are they trying to improve? What are their everyday challenges? And that’s gold. So that’s where you actually want to get into the nitty-gritty stuff. And here you want to offer solutions. So how can you solve those pain points? And usually it’s also what you’re probably offering, your product or your service. So that’s how you can leverage your expertise and your content to provide solutions for your audience. But also be mindful that it’s not all about showing off how cool and how good you are at everything. So people don’t like that, that guru part. Yes, thought leader, okay, but it’s still a social network, and people oftentimes they appreciate more those moments of experiences, lessons, failures, the authenticity, because that’s what really helps to build the connection and the trust.

Patrycja Radwanska: I love it. I think being authentic is definitely a key item here. I would like us to remember and highlight here. But I will push a little bit more. So how we should – when you think about people who are starting, I would like you to think about a simple structure that you can maybe share with us, how people actually can get started. What are the practical advices you could give us?

Sophie Steffen: Yeah. So once you know what type of content you want to create, for whom, because you know the pain points of the target audience, then it helps to have a mini framework, and obviously it depends on how often you want to post. So first be clear on the frequency, maybe once, twice, three times. I post five times per week, so from Monday to Friday. And you can reduce that, but typically on Monday I start with some industry news. The goal is to inform the audience and stay relevant about any updates. AI obviously is big, but really educational content, some news that might be relevant to the user, just to inform.

Sophie Steffen: So we start off a casual Monday. Then on Tuesday you might want to share some framework your company uses, for example, for a client onboarding or some team moments also, how you work, workflows, company culture. So that is the behind the scenes to create some social proof and also trust. On Wednesday, I like to go a little bit more in depth with expert insights. For example, interviews like these, or blog posts, or even like some deeper marketing lessons from your personal experience with clients, case studies, for example. So that’s where you can position yourself as a thought leader, how they want to call it. And this is also great content that you can then use if you do paid ads to actually boost then.

Sophie Steffen: So the typical top of the funnel, TOFU, not the food, but the first layer, the awareness layer, is great if you use member posts to boost on paid ads, and these are the type of posts that you typically are very good to create awareness. And then on Thursday, I love these Thursday posts for me because it’s about applauding others. It’s about community. It’s about building a relationship, engagement. So also appreciation posts are very light. So just give a thank you publicly to a team member or someone you’ve worked with, or also like creating events, surveys, anything where you see that you’re actually caring about others. It’s not all about you. Yeah? And Friday, again, similar as Monday, you want to start soft. You want to end the week in a casual, more like human content way. So personal stories, some vulnerable moments, some reflections, maybe some fun fact about yourself, which then the goal is to create just empathy and so people can relate to you.

Sophie Steffen: But really the goal is simple. You want to educate your audience, you want to build trust over time, you want to create this familiarity, so people actually feel, oh, this person actually is a normal human being like myself. They have failures, they have friends, they have hobbies, and you want to stay visible. So that’s really how you build growth. Remember the consistency part, so don’t start with like a huge plan, and then you don’t execute. That’s why you need to build a time schedule. So book a slot in your calendar so that you actually create the content. I like to do it in the gym because that’s for me two birds with one stone. So on the bike, I create the content on the bike. It’s not the best, but it works. I know that some of you also have like these walking bands in the office, so maybe that’s for you. But it’s really the important part to have it in your calendar. Sometimes I let it run by an AI for spellcheck, but really, keep – try to keep it as authentic as possible so that your voice is still heard in the posts.

Patrycja Radwanska: Wow, that’s, when I hear it, it’s still sounds like very packed week and a lot of work, and actually the word that came to my mind was absolutely consistency, right? Just a question on that. Do you follow the same schedule every week as you were just mentioning Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the same kind of post every week? Is this happening all the time or do you have any exceptions?

Sophie Steffen: Exceptions are always there. For example, when I see something from someone else and I want to just bring attention to it, I just share it. So maybe on some days I post twice, but I try to keep at least the five posts per week. This framework of actually molding the content on having news, then behind the scenes, then in-depth, then community, then something lighter, is something I created because it works for me. It doesn’t need to be that way, but you have to find your own system. You have to find your own schedule. But again, the real – the hard work is really the consistency, the start and continue. And ideas will come, and formats, and things you can write about, but be clear on what is it that you want to achieve. Because otherwise it’s just posting random stuff, and that’s also not the goal. So you do want to be clear what is it that you actually want to get out of your posts.

Patrycja Radwanska: Great. Thank you. And last advice. Where people can reach out.

Sophie Steffen: Yeah, so just I wanted to emphasis also on the goal of doing social media posting. Think of it like you would be investing. So typically you don’t invest for one or two years. You want to invest for 10, 20, even 30 years. So it’s the same part. Think long-term. Think about really building that trust, building credibility, building this system where you also can then analyze post and what works for you, because that’s also data. So at the beginning you’re just like testing, and then over time patterns, and those patterns will give you information on how you can actually refine content that works.

Sophie Steffen: Don’t chase the likes, but they will give you some sort of indication of what is actually working. But sometimes it also might be that you will get a lot of engagement, but not from your target audience. So also look at, again, your goal that you’re having. And for example, one of the goals is growing the network. I like to run automated campaigns. For example, in our agency we run automated LinkedIn campaigns to create more connection requests and more, so that you have more connections in your network. You can do that one by one, or there are tools out there that you can use to actually automate this for you.

Sophie Steffen: So once you know who you want to target, so if you have job titles, the countries, your buyer audience is in, and company profiles, you can do account-based marketing, ABM campaigns, or you can also run just industry-wise and company employee size numbers. Once you have that, you can – there are tools that you can automate, and some of the tools I like to use, Linked Helper. Actually, I have 11K followers now, and half of them are from automated campaigns because otherwise I would need a lot of time to one by one ask to connect. And now I also, it’s growing organically because people are following me more. Then other tools are Heyreach, Lemlist, PhantomBuster, Waalaxy, for example, important.

Sophie Steffen: But yeah. Apollo, for example, is also a tool where you can connect LinkedIn and then also run email campaigns. So these tools typically tend to work together, so that you, it’s not just about LinkedIn, but also email campaigns. And for me, the goal was always to increase the network, gain trust, credibility. One of my favorite people I like to follow is Amelia Sordell. She’s on personal branding. She’s very good. She has a lot of content on her website. So if you want to get some ideas, inspiration, apart from this interview, of course. But there, there are some more templates, about content ideas that you want to talk about.

Sophie Steffen: And yeah, if you want to have a chat and connect, obviously on LinkedIn, you can reach out and we can have a chat if you want to send me a DM. I’m always happy to talk over marketing or martial arts or anything else. Thank you, Patrycja.

Patrycja Radwanska: Thank you so much, Sophie. All right. It’s been a lot of takeaways today. I think that LinkedIn growth isn’t about being perfect, as Sophie has mentioned couple of times today. It’s about showing up consistently, sharing what you know, and building trust over time, not being perfect, but being authentic. And I think this is an amazing insights from you, Sophie. This interview was packed with super practical things that I hope our audience is going to appreciate. Sophie, thank you so much one more time for joining us and sharing your insights. Thank you.

Sophie Steffen: Thank you so much. Bye.

Patrycja Radwanska: Bye.

Tools Mentioned in the Interview

The following tools and platforms were referenced during this conversation.

Linked HelperHeyreachLemlistPhantomBusterWaalaxyApollo