Your buyer started 124 days before your CRM noticed

Hey friends, most pipeline reviews start the clock the day an opportunity gets created. Stage one, fresh deal.

Ask the buyer and they'd tell you a different story. They've been reading your posts, clicking your ads and poking around your website for months by then.

A new report put an actual number on that gap, and it's bigger than most forecasts assume.

In today’s Circuit:

🛠️ Operator Tip of the Week
📖 What 50k closed deals say about when buying really starts
💡 Tool Spotlight
📡 Across The Wire
🧪 Worth trying this week

Pull your last 20 won deals and your last 20 lost ones, and count how many contacts from the buying company were attached to each. Then do the same for the day each deal was created.

If your wins have more people on them, and most of those people showed up late, that tells you where to aim earlier. It takes about an hour in most CRMs and it's your own data, so nobody can argue with the sample.

Factors.ai just released a report built with LinkedIn, matching LinkedIn ad and organic engagement against CRM outcomes. The headline numbers cover 50,000+ closed deals worth more than $5B and over $150M in LinkedIn ad spend.

It's a vendor report, so we'll get to the caveats, but the patterns are worth a look because they line up with what other buyer research keeps finding.

The report found that people at the eventual buying account were engaging with the seller's brand on LinkedIn more than four months before the deal was created, around 124 days on average. They showed up on the seller's website about two months before.

So by the time a rep logs the first discovery call, the account has usually done a lot of looking already, and a fair bit of the shortlist thinking with it. Most forecasting and attribution starts counting at deal creation, which means the part where the buyer formed an opinion of you never shows up in the numbers.

The bigger finding is about how many people at the account had engaged before anyone talked. When six or more contacts at an account engaged with the seller on LinkedIn before the deal existed, win rates were 17.1 points higher.

Getting three or more additional people engaged once the deal was live added roughly another 16 points. And the mix of people mattered: deals where an end user, an influencer and a technical evaluator had all engaged showed a 22-point lift, the strongest role result in the data.

In practice, the people who use the product and the people who check it out technically get a say well before the person who signs.

Meanwhile, 76% of LinkedIn ad spend in the data targets director level and up.

That's understandable, since those are the people with budget. Trouble is, it puts most of the money in front of the most pitched people on the platform, while the end users and evaluators who shift win rates get a lot less attention.

Even the report says to go wider than directors, and it was put together with LinkedIn, who'd happily keep selling you the expensive senior audience.

Companies running LinkedIn ads alongside organic activity (company page and people posting) had 2.4x higher win rates than companies running paid alone.

On the money side, LinkedIn returned 1.6x on ad spend against 1.18x for Google in the same dataset, and LinkedIn-sourced deals came in with about 34% higher contract values.

LinkedIn's share of B2B marketing budgets in the data grew from 31.3% to 39.8% over 18 months, so plenty of teams are already acting on this.

This is Factors' own platform data, released with LinkedIn, so the sample leans toward companies already putting money into LinkedIn and already tracking it closely.

The coverage gives different company counts (850+ in the summary, 100+ CRM-connected companies in the detail), the time period isn't spelled out, and there's no baseline win rate to compare against.

All of these are correlations. Teams that get six people engaged are probably also better at targeting, content and follow-up, and some of the lift likely comes from that. We'd treat the direction as solid and the exact points as rough.

Teamfluence tracks who engages with your team's LinkedIn presence: profile visits, likes, comments and follows across your people's profiles and your company page. It checks those people against your ICP, enriches them and can push them into your CRM.

The fit: the report's biggest finding was that win rates went up when more people at an account had engaged before the deal existed, and that organic activity mattered alongside ads. A tool like this shows you which accounts are already circling, and how many people from each one, while they're still months away from a demo request.

The catch: a like is a weak signal, so you'll want to look at several people or repeat engagement from the same account before treating it as interest, and it only works if your team actually posts enough to get engaged with.

6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience study found buyers end up purchasing from the first vendor they contact more than 80% of the time, and 94% said they'd already ranked their shortlist before talking to any seller. Read here

Gong looked at 1.8M new business deals closed in 2024: won deals had twice as many buyer contacts as lost ones, and multithreading lifted win rates by about 130% on deals over $50K. Read here

A Factors.ai case study with Zembl found a LinkedIn Company Page view was a touchpoint in 19% of closed deals, a signal that had been invisible in their attribution before. Read here

- Add two or three more contacts from the buying side to every open deal, ideally a user and someone technical, and loop them into the next call or email.

- Look at the targeting on your LinkedIn campaigns and add one audience below director level.

- Ask your next three new opportunities how long they'd been looking before they talked to you, and write the answers down.

- If your company page hasn't posted this month, post something useful this week.