71% of the People Deciding Your Deal Will Never Talk to Sales

The meeting you weren't invited to

You know the deal. Warm champion, good demo, a follow-up that went well. Then a meeting happens without you, and the deal goes quiet.

That meeting has a name in the research. The 2025 Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Report calls the people in it hidden buyers, and found that 71% of them have little or no contact with sales teams. They skip your calls and miss your demo. They still get a vote.

So what are they basing it on?

Whatever they can find. And whatever your champion forwards them on a Tuesday afternoon.

The same report gives a decent picture of what moves them:

• 95% say strong thought leadership makes them more open to a vendor's outreach.
• 79% are more likely to argue for a vendor in the RFP if that vendor publishes good thinking consistently.
• 64% trust thought leadership over product sheets and brochures when judging what a company can actually do.

Put plainly: the people you never meet are reading. The question is whether they're reading you.

The company page isn't going to save you

Most B2B marketing is built for the buyer you can see: the one who fills in the form and turns up to the call. The rest of the committee gets the company page, which mostly announces new hires and trade-show stands.

There's good news buried in the same research. 53% of decision-makers say strong thought leadership makes brand recognition matter less. A smaller firm with sharper thinking can beat a bigger name with none. That's about as level as B2B gets.

Three ways into a room you can't enter

1. Write things worth forwarding. One clear point, a bit of evidence, no fluff. Something your champion can drop into the internal thread without editing.
2. Answer the committee's worries, not your feature list. The technical lead wants to know how it works. Finance wants to know it won't overrun. One founder can't speak to all of them; a few voices from your team can.
3. Be there when they look. Hidden buyers read on their own schedule, over months. Posting in bursts misses them. A steady rhythm catches them.

The decision gets made either way. Make sure something of yours is in the room when it does.