Your Buyer Has Already Checked Your LinkedIn

Not formally. Not on paper.

But the decision had already begun moving.

Enterprise buying decisions don’t start on calls.
They start in silent risk evaluation.

Years ago, I was part of a team pursuing a major oil & gas enterprise in Asia. We had spent months building relationships, running workshops, and demonstrating the technology. The interest was real. We knew an RFP was coming.

But something was off.

The operational sponsor wasn’t evaluating features. He was evaluating credibility.

Our approach was different from what the industry had been using. That made it promising — and risky.

So we did something unusual.

We brought in a respected independent consultant from another geography — someone with deep operational credibility in oil & gas. We worked with him for a week straight. Even weekends. We co-authored technical papers and position documents outlining a new way forward.

When the RFP was released, entire sections mirrored the language from those papers.

We didn’t just respond to the RFP. We shaped it.

And we won one of the largest implementations in the region.

Looking back, the lesson was simple: the decision did not begin when the RFP was issued. It began months earlier, when they started asking themselves:

Can we defend choosing this vendor?
Will this decision look intelligent six months from now?
Does this team understand our world deeply enough to reduce risk?

Research now confirms what we experienced intuitively.

Industry research consistently shows that enterprise buyers spend the majority of their buying journey researching independently before engaging sales. By the time vendors are formally contacted, preferences are already forming.

6sense reports that a large percentage of buying decisions are made before a prospect ever fills out a form.

Edelman’s B2B Trust Barometer shows that thought leadership significantly increases buyer trust — especially when it signals competence and vision under uncertainty.

And Harvard Business Review has written extensively about what they call “career risk” in enterprise procurement: decision-makers are not just evaluating vendors. They are protecting their internal reputation.

Enterprise buyers don’t just buy solutions. They buy defensibility.

They buy the ability to justify the decision to their board, their CFO, and their peers.

That’s what we were giving them with those papers. Not information.

Cover.

Twenty years ago, buyers pieced this together through white papers, conference talks, industry forums, and reputation networks.

Today, it happens in one place.

LinkedIn.

When a buyer looks you up, they are not reading casually. They are scanning for risk signals.

They are asking:

Does this founder have a coherent point of view?
Is the narrative consistent?
Does the thinking feel original or derivative?
Is this someone who understands the industry in depth — or someone echoing headlines?
Will I look intelligent recommending them?

In large enterprises, product shortcomings can be explained. Founder uncertainty cannot.

If your narrative feels short-term, reactive, or unfocused, it raises questions about longevity. About direction. About conviction. Enterprise buyers want to work with leaders. If you are not yet the leader, they want to see the DNA of one.

They want evidence that your company has a long future ahead of it — not just a clever product today.

In the past, they pieced this together through white papers, conferences, and private networks.

Today, it happens in a single search.

The RFP is rarely the beginning.

It is the formalization of a silent evaluation that started much earlier.

Which means the real pre-sale does not happen in your pitch deck. It happens in public.

Next week, I’ll unpack why technically sophisticated founders often underperform here — not because they lack expertise, but because they misread what buyers are actually scanning for.

Until then, remember this:

Before the first meeting, the decision is already moving.

And your buyer has already checked your LinkedIn.

If this way of thinking resonates, you can explore the full Pre-Sale framework at presale.co/start.