The Hidden Buyer Gap Could Be Ruling Out Your Brand. Here’s How to Close It.

Picture this B2B marketing nightmare scenario: 

You’ve done everything right. You targeted the right top decision-makers, reaching them with content and ads that were engaging and persuasive. They downloaded your whitepaper, you nurtured their interest, and your company made the short list of vendors.

Except late in the game, things went cold. The buying group decided to go another direction, and worst of all, you have no idea why. 

Turns out, it’s because your brand got nixed by an unfamiliar Hidden Buyer — one of those behind-the-scenes stakeholders who leave no visible traces of their activity but often hold decisive veto power. 

Behold: the Hidden Buyer gap. It’s a disconnect that should be atop the priority list for marketers everywhere, because roughly half of all B2B deals dissolve due to lack of consensus. Read on and we’ll cover some specific steps you can take to close the gap and win consensus within buying groups.

B2B Buying Groups and Hidden Buyers

“Buying groups are not new to the B2B world,” says Penry Price at Fast Company, “but as more people get involved, deals are much harder to close.”

That’s just reality in the complex mechanics of B2B sales. Challenger conducted an analysis on buying group gridlock and found that when the size of the decision-making team moved beyond five, the likelihood of completing a deal dropped precipitously, from 53% to 31%. 

“Part of the challenge is group mentality—it’s hard for one or two people to fight for a decision that the rest of the group doesn’t support,” Price explains. “Research also shows that larger groups are more susceptible to confirmation bias—the tendency to favor information that aligns with previously held beliefs. People want to stick with what’s familiar.”

This insight underscores the importance of building broader brand awareness beyond a single executive or decision-maker. As the research and purchase journey plays out, you want a full range of decision-makers to recognize your brand and, ideally, associate it with a level of quality and trust.

The good news is that B2B marketers are largely aware of this and many have developed strategies for reaching those various visible buyers, using savvy data analysis and smart targeting to ensure they are accounting for decision influencers who download resources, attend webinars or click an ad. Where things get tricky is accounting for the stakeholders who are hidden from sight, yet hold equal sway in decision-making.

What are Hidden Buyers?

A Hidden Buyer is a highly influential decision-maker in the B2B buying group — often from procurement, finance, or legal — who plays a key role in approvals but remains invisible to most marketing efforts because they don’t engage with ads, content or intent signals. Despite their low visibility, they are often the gatekeepers of trust and risk.

B2B Institute partnered with NewtonX and Bain & Company to research social and emotional group-based decision-making dynamics. They found that compared to Target Buyers (product experts), these Hidden Buyers have almost equal decision-making influence within buying groups – 49% versus 51% — but a distinct set of priorities.

On the one hand, you have a set of individuals who are focused on how the solution works. Does it fulfill our needs? Will it be easy to implement? Do we believe in the ROI proposition? 

On the other hand, you have people who are more concerned with the brand and its reputation. Are they legit? Are respected in the industry? Do we trust them?

Whereas the three most important decision drivers for the Target Buyer set were 'advanced features,' 'transformational potential' and 'innovation,’ the Hidden Buyers said they care more about ‘reliable brands,' 'peace-of-mind,' and 'vendors that are trusted by my peers.'

“Hidden Buyers are much more influenced by brand than Target Buyers,” writes LinkedIn’s Mimi Turner, “and are 70% more likely to reject brands that are not well-known to others and 31% more likely to reject brands that they themselves do not know. Once again, brand knowledge or lack thereof is the threshold of vendor rejection.”

Building consensus means reaching buyers both seen and unseen

The findings of this research only serve to underscore the critical stakes of brand building. Familiarity with the vendor across both segments of the buying group makes a huge difference; a lack thereof can be a consensus killer. 

Survey responses show that products are overwhelmingly unlikely to be bought when not known to the whole team: 81% said that at the start of the purchase process, ”everyone" or "almost everyone" knew the brand that was eventually bought. Meanwhile, only 4% of the sample said their company bought a product that "only the recommending function" knew of. 

If you’re spending all your effort focusing on the Target Buyers you can see, you are missing a big part of the picture and creating a great deal of consensus-building risk. This is where deals are lost: it’s been estimated that 40% to 60% get abandoned because the buyer group could not agree.

Reaching Hidden B2B Buyers and Building Consensus

So, how can you more confidently account for these Hidden Buyers and ensure they’re not silently knocking your brand out of the running? It doesn’t require supernatural skills, but rather a few strategic shifts. Many of these are in line with the greater evolution of B2B marketing, so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Here are a few recommendations for a Buyer Group Strategy that meets this challenge head-on:

• Treat brand awareness as the decision-making linchpin that it is. Shared awareness trumps price and product quality when it comes to gaining consensus. Invest in broad, top-of-funnel brand-building efforts to be top-of-mind across the full group.
• Balance rational and emotional messaging. Selling Target Buyers on your features and innovation still matters. But it doesn’t outweigh the perceived value of reliability, credibility and brand safety.
• Create tailored content for multiple stakeholder personas. End users, executives, procurement and legal all need distinct messaging aligned to their priorities and concerns.
• Facilitate agreement, not just conversions. Focus your strategy on removing doubt, building internal alignment and creating a coalition of confidence within the organization.
• Rethink and success metrics. Lead-gen and short-term engagement KPIs can’t tell the whole story. Align marketing, sales and finance teams around a common understanding of goals and measurement. 
  

“To truly succeed, marketing and sales teams need an end-to-end holistic view of the customer journey, enabling everyone to gain a deeper understanding of the buying group. Instead of seeing a slice of activity, like lead generation, you need a comprehensive understanding of how all key decision-makers across accounts—including ‘hidden allies’ who can advocate for your brand—engage with campaigns and progress through the buying cycle.” - Penry Price (Fast Company)

It turns out our job is B2C marketing after all: building-2-consensus, that is. B2B strategies should be crafted and executed with this overarching goal in mind. Learn how the LinkedIn Audience Network can help you achieve it by reaching more professionals, more frequently while maintaining quality and brand safety.