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Succession Bio works with life science/biotech companies to help drive sales, licensing, and partnership opportunities.
We do this through market research to identify the right companies and people, craft scientifically credible messages, and then perform the outbound sales and marketing tactics on your behalf to facilitate meetings with the right people at the right companies.
Succession
Specializes in life sciences/biotech (it's all we do!)
Provides market research, messaging, and outbound sales/marketing services
Facilitates meetings and opportunities with the right people at the right companies for our clients
Sales training for teams of 10+ who want to find and close more deals with biotech and pharma
Your impressions fell off a cliff. That's the smallest of your problems.
You've noticed your LI engagement dropping. Same effort, same topic, same you, a fraction of the people.
You are not imagining it, you have not been shadowbanned, and no, it isn't because you stopped posting at 8:14am on a Tuesday.
The drop is real. It's also the least interesting thing to happen to your pipeline this year.
What actually changed
The published figures range from a 11% to 80% drop, and nearly every source is a company selling LinkedIn automation. Treat them accordingly.
What's more solid, from AuthoredUp: the damage isn't evenly spread. Company pages are down roughly 60 to 66% since 2024 and now reach about 1.6% of their own followers. Personal profiles got off far lighter and still pull around 5x the engagement of company pages. If you're a founder posting as yourself, "LinkedIn is dead" is dramatic. If you've been running a company page, less so.
Why: in January 2025 LinkedIn's research team published a paper on 360Brew, a 150-billion parameter model built to replace thousands of recommendation systems with one.
Fair warning before you quote me at a conference: LinkedIn has never confirmed this model powers the feed, and the paper was later pulled from arXiv over a licensing issue. Informed inference, not gospel.
But it fits what we're seeing. The old system spread your post based on who engaged with it early. The new one appears to read what your post actually means, weigh that against who you are and who each reader is, then decide who should find it useful.
So reach is less about follower count and more about whether the machine understands what you're about. Post on life science commercial strategy Monday, quote a motivational bloke Tuesday, comment on twelve AI tool launches Wednesday, and it has no shelf to put you on. So it puts you nowhere.
Test your format and hook all you like. Hold your topic steady, and make sure the terminology you're using mirrors what your prospects are saying on their profiles and in their own posts (this goes for the language you use on your company and personal pages too, not just your posts). Consistency is a distribution asset now, not a branding preference.
Where your buyers went instead
Those fixes give you more visibility, which leads to more top-of-funnel. It does nothing about where the decision happens.
Forrester surveyed nearly 18,000 business buyers this year: 94% used generative AI in their purchase process, and twice as many named AI or conversational search their most meaningful research source as named anything else, ahead of vendor websites, product experts and sales reps.
Your buyer asks an assistant "who does high-content imaging for 3D models" and gets three or four names back. If you're not one of them you're not in the deal, and you never find out.
So visibility isn't the goal. You need to be citable.
Now, and this is important, that doesn't necessarily mean publishing more. Seer Interactive looked at 47,000 citations across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity this year. 72% of cited pages looked fresh by last-update date, but only 42% by publish date. Over a quarter of the "fresh" pages first went up more than two years ago.
Updating beats publishing. Your best piece from 2024, refreshed with current numbers, will do more than three new ones nobody reads.
And whilst we’re on this topic, resist the urge to gate all your content. AI can’t read it, which means it can’t cite it. If you must gate your content (sometimes orgs have strict rules on this, we disagree, but we won't get into that argument right now), then break longer pieces down into shorter taster pieces, summaries or LI posts that have key terms your prospects are talking about or would be searching for, so AI can still find you.
Three channels, one system
Notice what those two have in common. LinkedIn decides who sees you. AI decides who gets named. Neither is a system you own, and either can be re-rated overnight without an email. So you want a third where you pick the name on the envelope: outbound.
That isn't a ranking. All three matter. They just don't work as three separate projects, which is how almost everyone runs them.
Yes, I run an outbound agency, so take the argument with the appropriate pinch of salt and check whether it's wrong. Everything here is also what we run on ourselves. You're reading one leg of it right now. It tripled our revenue last year. And yes, multiples are easy from a small base, which is exactly what I'd be thinking if I read that in someone else's newsletter.
Outbound gives you what the other two can't: you choose the fifty accounts that matter. But cold volume is bad practice and, on a UK or EU list, a decent way to meet your regulator. What makes a small list land is having something worth saying, which is what the content is for. Engaging your market with the piece you refreshed last week that you’ve already tailored so it speaks the language of their world is why the email isn't cold.
Then it runs backwards. Every reply, objection and "actually, our problem is X" is free market research: it tells you what to post and which page needs updating. Most people run outbound as a shouting channel, but really it's a listening one.
And the loop closes. ChatGPT and Google AI Mode pull 59% of their LinkedIn citations from individual member posts, not company pages. Your posting feeds the shortlist your buyer gets handed. The list you built tells you what to post.
The post, the page and the email aren't three channels. They're the same asset wearing three different outfits.
Six things to do this month
Read your profile as if you're the algorithm. If a stranger couldn't summarise you in one line, neither can the model.
Pick three topics and commit for 90 days. Vary the format, not the subject. Same three topics everywhere, using the words your buyers use.
Ask the assistants what your buyer asks. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity. Write down which names come back. If none is you, there's your gap.
Refresh your five best pieces before you write a sixth. Update the data and republish.
Write down the 50 accounts you actually want. Not a segment, names. Then work out who owns the problem, and tailor your content to them.
Change what you count. Impressions never paid you. Track profile views, inbound DMs, and put "how did you hear about us" on your enquiry form. If impressions halved and enquiries held, you had a spreadsheet, not a problem.
The platforms will move the goalposts again, and they still won't send a letter. We’ll keep you updated, but the core principles never change.
Anyway. Keep posting. Just stop running three channels as three separate hobbies.
Lead Generation: We’ll build target lists, write scientifically relevant messaging, and send messages on your behalf to book qualified sales meetings with biotech and pharma companies.
Training for Teams: If you want to upskill your team around prospecting, driving to close, key account management, AI, or any other topic, we can put together a training plan specific to your organization’s needs.
Strategy Call: Need more than training? Want help implementing and executing your sales strategy? In a 30-minute call, we will assess your company’s current situation and identify growth opportunities.