Multithreading means building a relationship with several people in a buying group instead of relying on one contact. On LinkedIn, the lightest way to do it is to comment on the posts of each person who will have a say, in terms that fit their role, so that when your name comes up in an internal meeting more than one person in the room already knows it. It does not replace meeting those people. It makes the meetings easier to get and warmer when they happen.
Most advice on multithreading LinkedIn sales conversations starts with a message to your contact’s boss. This post starts earlier, with public comments, because they carry far less risk of treading on your contact’s toes.
Why deals that rest on one person fail
There are three common ways it goes wrong. Your contact leaves or is moved to another project. Your contact turns out to have less say than they implied. Or your contact does everything right and is overruled by someone who has never heard of you and has no reason to care.
Multithreading protects against all three, and the third is where comments help most. A person who has never heard of a vendor tends to vote for the safe option: the incumbent, the bigger brand, or doing nothing. A person who has seen your name a handful of times, attached to sensible remarks about their own work, is at least neutral. In a committee, moving two people from unaware to neutral can decide the outcome.
The usual obstacle is social. Emailing your contact’s boss can feel like going over their head, and sometimes it is. Commenting on a public post is different. It asks for nothing, it needs nobody’s permission, and it bypasses no one.
Find out who is actually in the group
Ask your contact first. “Who else will have an opinion on this?” is a normal discovery question, and the answer is better than any guess. Then use LinkedIn to fill in what they left out:
- Read who comments on your contact’s posts. Colleagues from the same company who turn up repeatedly are often teammates or the boss.
- Look at who they tag in posts about projects, launches and offsites.
- Check the company’s people page for the functions that always get a vote in your kind of sale: finance, IT or security, and procurement.
- Watch for newcomers. A new name on a meeting invite is someone to follow that day.
Aim for three to five people. The wider account-level approach is described in account-based engagement on LinkedIn. The same mapping applied to partner companies is in LinkedIn for partnerships and business development.
Four roles, four different comments
Take one deal as the example. You sell an accounts-payable automation platform, and you are three weeks into conversations with a logistics company of about 2,000 people. Your contact is the Director of Finance Operations. The CFO will sign. An IT security architect will assess you. A procurement category manager will negotiate.
| Role | What they tend to post about | What your comment should do | What to avoid |
|---|---|---|---|
| Economic buyer (CFO) | Results, strategy, team milestones. Often infrequent. | Offer an operator’s observation at their altitude | Flattery, product detail |
| Champion (Director of Finance Operations) | The daily problem, process ideas, team wins | Take the problem seriously and add something they can use | Agreeing so eagerly it reads as sales |
| Technical evaluator (security architect) | Tools, standards, vendor irritations | Show you understand their scrutiny and welcome it | Marketing language of any kind |
| Procurement | Supplier management, savings, process. Rarely. | Be courteous and substantive on the topic | Anything that sounds like softening them up |
The economic buyer
The CFO posts perhaps once a month. This time it is about her team bringing the month-end close down from ten days to six.
Six days is a real result at your entity count. The teams I’ve seen get under a week mostly stopped treating accruals as a month-end job and started estimating them mid-month. Was that part of it, or did the gain come from somewhere else?
Why it works: it treats her as an operator and skips the applause. It brings a pattern from outside her company, and the question is one she can answer in a line, or ignore without awkwardness. Nothing in it touches invoices or your product.
The champion
Your contact posts about his AP team drowning in invoice exceptions.
Exceptions are rarely random. When you tally them by supplier, a small group with odd invoice formats tends to produce most of the pile. A one-week count might be worth doing before changing any process.
Why it works: it gives him a cheap next step he could take with or without you. A comment that helps your champion look sharp in front of his own team does more for the deal than one that agrees with him.
The technical evaluator
The security architect complains, with some justice, that vendor security questionnaires have turned into theater.
Agree on the questionnaire fatigue. The question I wish more buyers asked is what happens when a user is revoked at 5pm on a Friday: which sessions die, which tokens survive, and for how long. It tells you more than forty rows about encryption.
Why it works: it is written from the buyer’s side of the table. A vendor who volunteers a harder question than the questionnaire asks is signaling that they expect to pass it. Be sure you can answer it yourself before you post it.
Procurement
The category manager posts, rarely, about a supplier consolidation project.
Consolidation targets always look cleaner on the slide than in the tail. The long tail of small suppliers carries most of the admin and little of the spend. Did you set a threshold below which you leave them alone?
Why it works: it engages with her professional problem and stops there. Be realistic about this role. Many procurement people post little about work, and a few thoughtful comments will not change a negotiation. The most you gain is that your name is not completely foreign when the contract reaches her desk. If she does not post, leave it.
Rules that keep it from looking like a campaign
- Stagger it. Commenting on five colleagues on the same morning gets noticed. Colleagues talk, and the same unfamiliar name in everyone’s notifications is the kind of thing that comes up.
- Never repeat a point. If the same clever observation appears under two colleagues’ posts, both will eventually notice.
- Say nothing about the deal. No “great meeting last week”, no hint that they are evaluating anything. The evaluation is their confidential business, and your competitors can read comment threads too. Who can see your LinkedIn comments explains the visibility.
- Tell your champion. In a live deal, mention that you follow a few of his colleagues. He may tell you who matters most, and he will not be surprised when the CFO mentions your name.
- Start with the people nearest the problem. They tend to post more, their threads are smaller, and they are the ones who will speak up for or against you. Executives come later. How to engage executives on LinkedIn covers them separately.
Share the threads across your team
One seller commenting on five people at the same company can look intense. A team looks natural. A common split:
- the account executive takes the champion and the day-to-day users
- a solutions engineer takes the technical evaluator, because their comments will be more credible there
- a sales leader or founder takes the economic buyer
Each person at the account gets one owner on your side. Team coverage for LinkedIn engagement goes into how to assign and track this.
Turning threads into meetings
Public familiarity is preparation. The thread becomes real when the person is in a meeting with you, and the cleanest route is still an introduction from your champion. The comments make that introduction easier to ask for:
I’ve traded a couple of comments with your security architect about user revocation. It would help to get his questions on the table early instead of at the end. Would you be comfortable adding him to next Thursday’s session, or should I ask him directly?
Why it works: it gives your champion the choice of route, shows you are not going around him, and offers a reason that serves the buyer’s timeline as well as yours.
When someone outside your champion’s circle replies to you several times, a direct connection request with a short note is reasonable. Sending the connection request after you’ve commented has wording for that.
What multithreading through comments cannot do
It does not tell you what each stakeholder needs in order to say yes. Only conversations do that. It does not build the business case the CFO will ask for, answer the security review, or shorten procurement’s process. It also cannot reach the many committee members who never post. For those people you need introductions, meetings and material your champion can forward.
What it does is narrower and still valuable. It reduces the number of people in the decision who have no idea who you are.
Keeping up with several stakeholders at once
Four people per deal across a dozen deals is close to fifty profiles, each posting on their own schedule. Icebreakly takes the stakeholder profiles you give it, checks each one every day, and drafts a comment in your voice on their latest post, usually within a day of it going up. Every person carries a running touch count. On the Pro plan a team can connect several LinkedIn accounts in one workspace, so the engineer’s comments come from the engineer’s account and the executive’s from theirs. For live deals, keep it in approval mode and read every draft, because the tool knows nothing about what was said in your meetings. It also does not send messages or connection requests, and LinkedIn’s terms restrict third-party automation, so it is not free of risk. Plans are on the pricing page.
Do this on your biggest open deal today
Write down every person at the account who will influence the decision. Next to each name, note whether they have posted in the last two months and whether they have ever seen yours. Follow the ones who post, comment on one post this week, and ask your champion who you have missed. If the list of people who know you has one name on it, that is the risk to fix before anything else.
Frequently asked questions
What does single-threaded mean in sales?
A single-threaded deal is one where all of your contact with the account runs through one person. Everything you know about the account, and everything the account knows about you, passes through them. If that person leaves, is reassigned, goes quiet or turns out to have less influence than they suggested, the deal usually stalls, because nobody else there has any relationship with you.
Will my main contact mind if I engage with their colleagues on LinkedIn?
Public comments on public posts rarely cause offense, because they ask nobody for anything. In a live deal it is still good manners to tell your contact that you follow a few of their colleagues and to ask who else is worth following. Direct messages to their boss or to procurement are a different matter and should normally be agreed with your contact first.
How many people at one account should I engage with?
Three to five is a sensible range. Fewer than three leaves you exposed if one person moves on. More than five from a single seller starts to look like a campaign, and your comments get thinner. Add people as the deal reveals them, for example when a new name appears on a meeting invite.
Should several people from my company comment on the same contact’s posts?
Generally no. Give each person at the account one owner on your side, so the relationship belongs to somebody and the contact does not feel surrounded. The usual exception is seniority matching: your own executive engaging with their executive, while you stay with the champion and the evaluators.