This week, LinkedIn’s Sales Solution business unit pulled off a pitch-perfect, multi-threaded lightning strike to introduce the “deep sales” category it is creating.

Early this past summer, the LSS leadership team brought in CDA to help with category design. We worked together to first understand why the sales profession is in trouble, and then define a solution to that problem that LinkedIn could bring to the world. That solution is the company’s new deep sales platform.

Importantly, deep sales is a category, not a brand. LinkedIn’s job with its strike is to show people the problem that now exists in sales so that no one can unsee it, and show why a new kind of solution – deep sales – is needed, whether LinkedIn does it or not. But LinkedIn is the one solving the problem, and defining how that problem should be solved, proving to the market that LinkedIn understands and knows how to help. A great lightning strike hits people over the head with that and makes the market – and competitors – take notice.

As my Play Bigger co-author Christopher Lochhead likes to say, a great strike should cause would-be competitors to call emergency board meetings. We’ll never know if that’s happening, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

As happens in a great lightning strike, LinkedIn focused its energy and resources on a concentrated effort to make its audience take notice of the new category. Here’s what that included:

• A wrap around Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. The glossy wrap showcases LSS’ deep sales ad campaign, which brilliantly draws a contrast between shallow selling and deep selling, with a subtext that shallow selling is the problem and deep selling provides the solution.
• A takeover of the Nasdaq electronic billboard on Times Square in New York. I met up with about 40 people from LinkedIn’s New York office who came to celebrate as the billboard went live soon after 10 am on Tuesday.
• Around that same time, LinkedIn pushed out a wave of content. That included an article in Harvard Business Review by Alyssa Merwin, global VP of sales for LSS. The headline: “B2B Selling Is in Trouble. Deep Sales Is the Answer.” Dozens of LSS people from all over the world posted stories and photos on the LinkedIn platform under the hashtag #deepsales, including this one by Gail Moody-Byrd, LSS VP of marketing. And the company launched an explainer video with their category point of view. Category design only works when supported by the CEO, and LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslanky even got into the act, holding up the deep sales ad for photos.
• A huge presence at Dreamforce. Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce convention draws 170,000 participants a year. LinkedIn set up a studio and cafe on the campus and hosted a number of live and streamed sessions, including one called “Are You Stuck in the Shallow (Selling)?”

A lightning strike is a moment in time, meant to have a punch-in-the-nose impact. But it can’t end there. From conversations I’ve had over the past couple of days, it became obvious to me that the deep sales story has energized LinkedIn Sales Solutions across every function, including marketing, sales, management, and a product team that now has a North Star to follow as it develops new products and features. The LSS brand and marketing teams have created ads that you’ll continue to see, reinforcing the deep sales story.

So, from all of us on the CDA team to everyone on the LSS team: hats off to you. While we’ve seen great lightning strikes, we’ve never seen one quite like this. The market and would-be competitors can’t help but take notice. Now the daily work begins to build and secure the category for the long run.