Productivity Centre

I was chatting with a marketing director in Manchester last week who was genuinely baffled. "Frank," she said, "my LinkedIn posts used to get thousands of views. Same content quality, same posting schedule. Now? Crickets. What the hell happened?"

I pulled up her last ten posts. Every single one had a link in the main text. There was her problem.

LinkedIn fundamentally changed the rules in 2026, and most people are still playing by the 2024 playbook. Having trained professionals across 70+ countries on LinkedIn strategy, I can tell you this with absolute certainty: What worked 18 months ago will actively hurt you today.

The Three Seismic Shifts

External links are poison. Posts with links see 60% less reach. I tested this myself—same post, same timing. The version without the link got 4x more impressions.

Comments beat likes. A post with 50 genuine comments outperforms one with 500 likes. LinkedIn wants conversations, not superficial engagement.

Engagement pods are dead. The algo...

I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Dubai last month, scrolling through my calendar for 2026. sixty-three confirmed speaking gigs. Another dozen in negotiation. My fee higher than it's ever been.

And here's what hit me:

Not a single one of those bookings came from cold outreach.

Not one came from a fancy marketing campaign.

Every single booking—every single one—came because someone saw me speak, or knew someone who saw me speak.

After 25 years on the professional speaking circuit across 70+ countries, I can tell you the uncomfortable truth: 95% of my bookings come from someone in the audience seeing me deliver.

The other 5%? They came from people who watched my showreel and thought, "That's exactly what we need."

Your stage performance is your real marketing. Everything else—your website, your AI prospecting, your social media presence—exists to get you on more stages where more people can see you work.

But here's where it gets interesting.

AI is fundamentally changing how speak...

I had a conversation last month in Amsterdam with a sales director who'd been in the industry for 20 years.

"Frank," he said, looking genuinely bewildered, "I used to know exactly how to close a deal. Now I don't even know when the bloody deal starts."

I laughed. Then I realised he wasn't joking.

Welcome to the new world of sales, where everything you learned in 2015 is about as useful as a Rolodex. (Yes, I'm old enough to remember those.)

Look, the fundamentals haven't changed—people still buy from people they trust, relationships still matter, value still wins. I've been training sales teams across 70+ countries for a quarter-century, and those truths are eternal.

But how those fundamentals play out? That's shifting faster than a politician's promises.

The sales professionals absolutely crushing it right now aren't the ones with the slickest pitch decks or the biggest LinkedIn networks. They're the ones who've adapted to how buyers actually behave in 2026—not how sellers wish t...