Question from a reader:

I run our LinkedIn newsletter of roughly 3K readers for a financial technology company. Our Sales Manager worries it’s not pulling in enough leads, especially enterprise ones, and wants to ditch it in favor of bottom-funnel content. I see value in building long-term trust and our own list through the newsletter. I could use your perspective: What should I focus on if I want a newsletter to resonate with the right audience?

—Kate

The tension you’re describing isn’t really about the newsletter. It’s about two wildly different definitions of what’s “working” in your marketing.

The Sales Manager is measuring with leads as the metric.

You’re measuring with trust as the metric.

Neither of you is wrong. But you’re not having the same conversation. It’s the old blind-men-and-the-elephant problem: One of you has hold of the trunk, the other the tail, another an ear… and so on. Each is adamant they’ve got the whole story.

A few thoughts for you and the Sales Manager, who in my head I’ve now named Steve. (For no reason other than he seems like a Steve.)

Start with the newsletter’s actual job. A newsletter is like a border collie: It needs a job or it’s just racing around your strategy deck, barking at random metrics.

Its job is not to say, “We cover fintech.” Its job is to help one specific reader think through a specific kind of problem.

So in financial services technology, step away from the broad topic bucket:

NOT THIS: payments, platforms, the magic and wonders of fintech

YES THIS: feelings—meaning the anxiety, decision, or ambition your reader carries into work on a regular Tuesday

Maybe that’s:

• What keeps them up the night before a board meeting
• What decision they’re worried about getting wrong
• What pressure lands on their shoulders every quarter

Step into their shoes. Slip on their skin. Feel what they feel. (You toss the border collie a biscuit. He spins with joy.)

The goal is that tiny electric moment when a reader pumps their fist in the air and screams inside their head: YES. This is exactly how it feels for me.

And the more precisely you write to someone, the more the wrong someones opt out. Godspeed, Wrong-someones. Self-selection is good in B2B Marketing.

(Quick aside on unsubscribes, because marketers can get weirdly tender about them—and I used to, too: Let them leave. It’s better they leave than linger on your list like zombies—dead-eyed, shambling around, clicking nothing, wanting nothing. Not everyone is your person. That’s perfectly fine.)

Back to Steve.

Steve wants enterprise buyers. Fair enough, Steve.

But here’s the secret about the magical and elusive unicorn called the enterprise buyer: They rarely convert cold from bottom-funnel content.

They research slowly. They trust slowly. They buy slowly. A newsletter that builds familiarity over six months is doing work that a cold demo offer simply won’t get the chance to do.

So what’s missing here isn’t the newsletter. It’s the explicit connection between what the newsletter builds—trust, familiarity, credibility—and what the business eventually wants: pipeline.

Which means that if you want the newsletter to pull real strategic weight as it herds prospects like a border collie all over the internet… you need two things:

1. A clearer editorial through-line—a point of view readers come to associate with your brand
2. A better picture of who is reading—not just how many

Because 3,000 readers who are CFOs at mid-market companies is an entirely different asset than 30,000 random LinkedIn subscribers.

The newsletter isn’t the problem.

You and Steve both need the patience to let that connection materialize.

Related: Should You Publish a LinkedIn Newsletter or a Traditional Newsletter? Or both?