Your buyers qualify you for months before they ever call, and your vendor's people pass deals to names they know. Here is how the partners who get this right use LinkedIn.
The short answer: LinkedIn is where your buyers do their qualifying before they ever contact you, and where your vendor's own people decide which partner's name to pass along. An ERP implementation partner that shows up there every week gets onto shortlists it never pitched for. One that stays quiet gets found only when someone goes looking, which is usually after the shortlist is written.
We run LinkedIn for the leadership teams of implementation partners, so this page is what we have learned doing it, including the parts that have nothing to do with us.
A company replacing its ERP forms an evaluation committee, and that committee reads for months before it speaks to a single partner. By the time they get in touch they have self-qualified most of the way and cut the field to three or four names. Everything that decided whether you made that cut happened in public, with nobody from your side in the room.
That is what executive content is actually for. Your practice lead writing about why implementations fail is not marketing fluff, it is the exact material a committee member reads at month two of their research, and the reason your name is familiar when the longlist gets drawn up.
Most partners cannot rely on the vendor to feed them enough deals to live on, and every partner knows it. But the channel still matters: the vendor's sales and leadership people pass work to partners they know and trust. So part of the job is being visible to them, not just to buyers. When your executives post and the vendor's own team likes, comments and shares, two things happen: your content travels through their networks, and your name comes up in rooms you are not sitting in.
We build this in deliberately. Alongside the buyer list, we connect your executives with the vendor's regional sales and leadership people, so everything your leaders publish lands in front of the people who route deals.
Every partner in your ecosystem implements the same product. When a committee compares three of you, the software cancels out, and price starts deciding, which is a race everyone loses. What breaks the tie in your favour is familiarity: the buyer who has watched your practice lead's videos for four months walks into the first call already half decided. They are not qualifying you from zero, they are confirming what they already believe.
One of our clients, an SAP implementation partner in the US, has been running this for eighteen months across two of their leadership team, with 4 million views along the way. The numbers are on the proof page, straight off their own dashboards.
Each executive gives one recorded hour a month. That hour becomes 30+ posts and videos in their own voice, posted daily, comments answered. Behind it, 400+ connection requests a month go to a named list, your target accounts first if you have a list, plus the vendor ecosystem. Every piece is approved by your side before it goes out. The full system, with pricing, is on the main page.