The LinkedIn playbook coaches have followed for years pretty much ends at the profile. You post, you comment, and eventually someone trusts you enough to click the link in your headline. Then the actual business happens somewhere else. On Calendly, in Stripe, on Zoom.
That changed on May 12, 2026, when LinkedIn began rolling out Advice Sessions. LinkedIn Advice Sessions for coaches work like this: you set an hourly rate, and a paid, bookable call shows up on your public profile behind a “Get advice from me” button. Someone books it and pays for it without leaving the platform. LinkedIn takes no cut of what you earn.
Two things to know before you get excited. As of this writing, it’s available in the United States only, and only to people paying for Premium Business or a higher tier.
What the feature actually does
Strip away the announcement language and you’re looking at a booking page that lives inside your profile instead of outside it. You name your hourly rate. A visitor sees the button, picks a time, pays, and the call happens through the LinkedIn experience. No separate scheduler, no separate checkout, no link in a DM that a prospect has to trust.
There are a few details worth noting, because the coverage has been pretty vague about them. The $80 rate you’ve probably seen quoted is LinkedIn’s own screenshot example. It’s not a benchmark, a suggested rate, or evidence of what anyone is charging. Price your session the way you’d price any hour of your time. One outlet covering the launch for financial advisors reports that payments run on Stripe and paid calls happen over Google Meet underneath a LinkedIn wrapper, which nobody else has confirmed. Treat that as a plausible detail rather than a settled fact.
Eligibility is the part most coaches will trip over. Premium Business is a paid subscription, reported at roughly $60 a month. Broader availability has been described as planned for the coming months, and an expansion to lower tiers is said to be under consideration. Neither has happened yet that we can find. If you’re outside the US or on the free tier, this is a thing to watch, not a thing to plan around.
Nobody knows whether it works yet
Here is the most useful takeaway in this whole article, and it’s about what’s missing. Roughly three months after launch, zero adoption numbers, booking volumes, conversion rates, or lead-quality data have been published anywhere. Not by LinkedIn, not by the outlets that covered the rollout. One advisor quoted at launch put the expectation about right when he cautioned that it may not automatically produce a stream of free leads.
So anyone telling you Advice Sessions are filling coaching practices is guessing. So is anyone telling you they’re a flop. What you can reason about is the trade-off, and that turns out to be enough to make a decision.
What it replaces, and what it leaves out
What it replaces is friction. Every hop between your profile and a paid call is a place where interest cools. Someone reads your post, likes it, clicks through to your profile, follows a link to a scheduler, sees a payment form, and decides to think about it. Collapsing four steps into one button is a real win, and it’s the best argument for the feature.
What it leaves out is everything that comes after the call. Nothing in LinkedIn’s materials or in the independent coverage describes a CRM, a way to sell a package or a retainer, recurring billing, or any follow-up sequence. The feature appears to begin and end at a single paid hour. That’s not a criticism of LinkedIn. It’s just a description of the scope, and it tells you where your own system has to pick up the slack.
The money question deserves a sidenote of its own. Paid expert calls are not a new thing, and the fees charged elsewhere are real. Clarity.fm, the longest-running marketplace of its kind, charges experts a 15% service fee per call. Superpeer, which built a business on paid live one-to-one calls for creators, was acquired and shut down at the end of 2024, leaving the people who ran their calls there without a platform. Zero percent is genuinely generous. It’s also a launch decision, not a promise, and platforms that host your revenue have a way of changing terms or disappearing.
The discovery call question
There’s an obvious objection to all of this. Once people can pay you for an hour, a paid session starts competing with the free conversation that actually sells your coaching.
That only happens if you let the two collapse into each other. They’re different conversations with different jobs. A discovery call is a sales conversation. Its job is to find out whether you and this person should work together, and the reason it’s free is that you’re both still deciding. A paid session is delivery. The person has already decided you’re worth money, and they came for an answer to something specific.
Those two people are usually not the same person on the same day. The buyer who books a paid hour off your profile is warmer than a cold lead and colder than a referral. They’ve read enough of your thinking to pay for more of it, and they haven’t committed to anything beyond an hour. That’s a real segment, and most coaches have no way to serve it at all right now. Keep your free discovery call exactly where it is and treat the paid session as a second door.
How to use one paid hour to get somewhere:
A single session only earns its place if it can grow into an engagement. Here are four moves that make that jump more likely:
1. Price it as work, not as a sample
A cheap session attracts people shopping for cheap. Set your rate at what an hour of your attention is genuinely worth and the booking itself will qualify the buyer. If your hourly equivalent inside a coaching package is $300, don’t list $75 here because it feels friendlier.
2. Narrow what the hour is for
“Coaching session” is not an offer. “One hour on whether to leave your role or renegotiate it” is. A specific promise on your profile does the qualifying work that a discovery call would otherwise have to do, and it gives you a real chance of delivering something complete inside sixty minutes.
3. Coach the whole hour
The temptation with a paid stranger is to hold something back so there’s a reason for session two. Resist it. People buy more coaching after an hour that changed something, not after an hour that hinted at what you’d cover later.
4. End with the map, not the pitch
In the last five minutes, name what you’d work on together over the next three months and what it would take. Then stop. That’s not a close. It’s information the person needs to decide, and it’s the natural moment to mention that you also work in longer packages.
Oh, and since LinkedIn gives you nothing to follow up with, be sure to get their email during the session and put them into whatever system you already run.
Who should skip it entirely
- Anyone outside the US, or not on Premium Business. The button isn’t available to you yet. Nothing to decide.
- Coaches whose clients don’t come from LinkedIn. If your pipeline runs on referrals, speaking, or a podcast, paying about $60 a month to turn on one button is a bad trade. The feature amplifies an audience you already have, and building one is separate work.
- Coaches whose only offer is a long engagement. If your work genuinely requires six months to be worth anything, a one-hour product misrepresents it, and the person who books it may leave underwhelmed by something you never meant to sell.
- Anyone whose current booking flow already converts. If people already find their way to your scheduler and pay without hesitating, you’re solving a problem you don’t have.
That leaves a specific coach. One who posts regularly, whose profile already gets traffic from that posting, who can define a genuinely useful hour, and who has somewhere for a warm buyer to go next. If that’s you, this is worth a quarter of testing.
Deciding without data to lean on
The best frame for a new feature like this isn’t “does it work?” It’s “what does trying it cost me, and how will I know?” Turning it on costs a subscription you may already be paying for, an afternoon of setup, and the risk of a few sessions with people who weren’t a fit. Decide up front what you’re watching for. Bookings in ninety days, sure, but also how many of those people you’d actually want as clients.
And keep the older work in perspective. A bookable button on a profile nobody visits does nothing at all. The less glamorous part is still important, which is showing up in the feed with something worth reading, and then having a profile that makes a stranger want more of your thinking. Advice Sessions can shorten the last few steps of that journey. But they don’t start it.
We’ll keep an eye on this one as real numbers surface and as the rollout widens past the US. In the meantime, the coaches who benefit most from a shorter path to a paid conversation are the ones whose LinkedIn presence is already doing its job. Build that, and every booking tool that comes along afterward has something to work with.
