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Personal branding & thought leadership 16 min read

Edelman 2025: why B2B buyers trust a byline more than your brochure

| By Patrick de Carvalho

Contents

Your sales deck never reaches the person who kills the deal. That's the finding buried in the seventh edition of the Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, published in 2025: 40%+ of B2B deals stall not because a prospect said no, but because someone inside the buying group who never sat in a meeting with you said no on their behalf. Edelman and LinkedIn call them hidden buyers, and the report's whole argument turns on one number: 95% of them say strong thought leadership makes them more open to being contacted by a vendor they'd otherwise ignore. I've run sales conversations on LinkedIn since before it had a feed, and I've watched this exact pattern kill deals I thought were closed. This piece pulls the report apart, adds the numbers from the 2024 edition that the coverage keeps dropping, and ends with what I still don't know about it.

In short: Edelman and LinkedIn surveyed nearly 2,000 management-level professionals in 2025 and found that "hidden buyers," internal stakeholders in finance, legal, compliance, procurement, and operations, consume as much expert content as visible decision-makers but rarely talk to a salesperson. 64% trust thought leadership over marketing materials to judge a vendor's competence, 86% want content that challenges their assumptions rather than confirms them, and 79% are more likely to defend a vendor during an RFP if that vendor publishes consistently. The 2024 edition put trust at 73%, up from 59% in 2019: this isn't a one-year blip, it's a six-year trend.

What the 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn report actually measured

Start with the methodology, because most write-ups skip it and the skipping matters. Edelman and LinkedIn fielded the survey between March 17 and April 3, 2025, to nearly 2,000 management-level professionals across seven markets: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, Australia, and India. The median respondent took 11.5 minutes to complete it. This is the seventh consecutive year of the study, running since 2018, which is long enough to track a trend line rather than a snapshot.

The 2025 edition's real contribution isn't a new statistic. It's a new segmentation. Prior editions split respondents into decision-makers and influencers. This year, Edelman split the sample again, into target buyers (the contacts your sales team already has) and hidden buyers (the ones who show up nowhere in your CRM but can still stall or kill a deal). That split is the entire reason this report is worth reading in 2026 rather than filed alongside a dozen other content-marketing surveys.

One number to hold onto before anything else: over 40% of B2B deals stall because of internal misalignment inside the buying group, not because of anything a salesperson said or didn't say. That's the business problem this whole report is built to explain.

Who hidden buyers are, and why your CRM never met them

A hidden buyer sits in finance, legal, compliance, procurement, or operations. They didn't take your discovery call. They don't show up on the org chart your champion sent over. And when they raise an objection in an internal Slack thread you'll never see, the deal stops moving, sometimes permanently. All In's companion piece on hidden buyers maps this stakeholder group function by function.

The report states it plainly: hidden buyers exert roughly as much influence over the purchase decision as the buyers your sales team actually talks to. The catch is that 71% of them report little to no direct interaction with a vendor's sales representatives during the entire evaluation. They form an opinion of your company without ever speaking to anyone who works there. Whatever they read, unprompted, on their own time, is doing the persuading your sales team thinks it's doing in the call.

Most companies never build a message for this audience, because most companies don't know this audience exists. Sales content gets written for the person in the room. The person blocking the deal from three departments away gets nothing.

What hidden buyers read, and how rarely they talk to sales

Here's the part that should unsettle any marketing team still gatekeeping thought leadership behind a form: hidden buyers consume nearly as much of it as anyone else. 63% of hidden buyers spend more than an hour a week reading thought leadership, against 64% of target buyers. That's a two-point gap on a behavior most companies assume only their known contacts engage in.

They also use what they read for the same purposes a target buyer would. 55% of hidden buyers say thought leadership helps them evaluate a vendor, close to the 56% of target buyers who say the same. 51% of hidden influencers use strong content to convince a C-level executive internally, and 52% use it to bring other members of the buying group on side. They are doing your internal selling for you, entirely off your radar, using whatever you happened to publish.

Behavior Target buyers Hidden buyers
Read 1+ hour of thought leadership weekly 64% 63%
Use it to evaluate a vendor 56% 55%
Report little to no contact with sales during evaluation n/a 71%
Got C-suite encouragement after engaging with vendor content 41% 35%

That last row is the one I'd stare at longest if I ran a marketing team. Target buyers get more internal air cover after reading your content than hidden buyers do, a six-point gap. Read generously, that's a coaching opportunity: whatever you're publishing works better once someone already inside the deal amplifies it. Read less generously, it means your content still isn't reaching the room where hidden buyers actually operate.

The trust gap: a byline is beating your brochure

The 2025 numbers on trust are direct. 64% of respondents trust thought leadership more than a vendor's marketing materials and product sheets when judging competence. 71% call it more effective than traditional marketing or sales content at communicating what a vendor can actually do.

Those numbers don't stand alone. The 2024 edition, one year earlier, asked a closely related question and got 73% of decision-makers saying an organization's thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities than traditional marketing materials, up from 59% in 2019. The same edition found that roughly 60% of decision-makers would pay a premium to work with a vendor producing strong thought leadership, 86% said they'd invite a company to bid on a project based on consistent quality content, and more than 75% said compelling thought leadership had prompted them to research a company they hadn't originally considered. About 23% of the people who went and researched a company for that reason became a customer.

I'm laying out two survey years side by side on purpose. Most coverage of this report cites whichever number ran in the press release that week and moves on. Put the 2019, 2024, and 2025 figures in a line and you get something more useful than a headline stat: a company that has spent six straight years asking buyers the same question and watching trust in expert content climb every time it's asked. That's a trend a competitor with a bigger logo and a slicker deck can't buy their way past.

Buyers want to be challenged, not flattered

This is the finding that should change what you publish next week, not just what you believe about content marketing. 86% of hidden buyers prefer content that challenges their existing assumptions over content that confirms what they already think. 91% are actively looking for insights that surface a risk or an opportunity they hadn't identified on their own.

Buyers are not asking to be told they're right. A post that repeats the industry consensus, the kind every competitor in your category is already publishing, tests well internally and does nothing externally. A post that says "your vendor selection process is optimizing for the wrong risk" creates friction, and friction is what gets remembered, forwarded, and cited when the buying committee meets without you in the room.

Anthony Marshall, Senior Research Director for Thought Leadership at the IBM Institute for Business Value, put it in terms that track directly onto this data:

"Quality thought leadership can engage hidden buyers in innovative ways, converting detractors into powerful advocates."

That's the mechanism, stated by someone who studies it professionally, not a marketing slogan dressed up as insight. A hidden buyer who starts as a skeptic can end as the person defending your proposal in a room you're not invited to, and the report puts a number on how often that happens: 79% of hidden buyers say they're more likely to champion a vendor during an RFP (Request for Proposal, the formal document buyers use to solicit and compare competing bids) if that vendor has published consistent, high-quality thought leadership.

The opening for companies nobody has heard of yet

Brand recognition is supposed to be the moat. This report says it's a smaller one than most executives assume. 53% of decision-makers report that when a company's thought leadership is strong, brand recognition matters less to their evaluation.

Kate Vitasek, a Distinguished Fellow at the University of Tennessee's Global Supply Chain Institute, framed why that gap exists:

"Subject-matter experts value thought leadership from lesser-known brands for innovative thinking and alternative approaches."

Read that against the trend data from the last section. A large incumbent has more to protect and less incentive to publish anything that could be read as controversial. A smaller company, one nobody's heard of yet, has almost nothing to lose by taking a position that costs it something. That asymmetry is the entire opening: the buyer segment least attached to your logo is the same segment most persuadable by what you actually have to say.

None of this substitutes for a track record. It changes what gets you in front of the buyer who's never heard your name: not a bigger ad budget, but a sharper argument, published under a name someone can look up.

What an executive does with this on Monday morning

None of what follows requires a martech purchase or an agency retainer. It requires deciding to write for an audience most companies still ignore.

Map your last five closed deals, won and lost, and list every internal name that surfaced during the process beyond your main contact. Finance sign-off, legal review, a procurement gatekeeper, an ops lead who asked a hard question in week three. Those names are your hidden buyer roster, and they read content on their own schedule, not yours.

Write at least one post a month aimed specifically at one of those functions. A finance-facing post on the real cost of a bad vendor switch. A compliance-facing post on what actually breaks in an audit. Generic "thought leadership" written for nobody in particular reaches nobody in particular. All In's personal branding framework covers how to build that positioning without sounding like every competitor's post.

Pick a position that costs you something. If every post you publish could be signed by any competitor in your category, it isn't doing the job this report describes. State plainly what's overrated in your industry, back it with a number from your own client work, and let the disagreement be the point.

Track what the report actually measures, not just what's easy to pull from a dashboard. Likes tell you nothing about a hidden buyer, since 71% of them never talk to your sales team anyway. Track inbound mentions of specific content during a sales cycle, and ask your champion directly, before the deal closes, whether anyone on their side read something you published. It's a five-minute question that most sales teams still never ask. The methodology behind how a feed decides what an audience like this even sees is covered in All In's methods.

What I don't know

This section exists because the honesty of a piece like this gets judged on it as much as on the numbers above it.

I don't know how the 2025 results break down by country. The seven-market sample includes the US, the UK, and Germany, but none of the public write-ups I could find split trust, RFP advocacy, or consumption behavior by market. I'm treating this as a global pattern because that's what the published data supports, not because I've confirmed it holds identically in Berlin and in Boston.

I don't know the exact overlap between the 1,934-respondent figure cited in the most detailed methodology write-up I found and a larger 3,484 figure that appears in one LinkedIn-published summary of the same research program. It's possible the larger number includes a broader research effort beyond the core fielded survey. I couldn't resolve the discrepancy from public sources, so I'm citing the smaller, better-documented number and flagging the gap rather than picking whichever number sounds more impressive.

And here's the one that matters most: LinkedIn co-publishes a study concluding that publishing more content on LinkedIn drives B2B trust and sales outcomes, using LinkedIn's own audience as the survey pool. That doesn't make the findings false. Hidden buyers are a real, previously undernamed phenomenon, and the mechanism described here matches what I've watched happen in real sales cycles for two decades. But a platform's own research about the value of activity on that platform is not a neutral instrument, and no writeup I found, including the ones I'm citing, said so out loud before this one.

Trust is earned in public, not printed in a brochure

Put the two report years together and the direction is unambiguous, whatever quarrel you might have with any single number in isolation: trust in expert content has climbed for six straight years, and the buyers most influenced by it are the ones your sales team has never spoken to.

None of this is a call to publish more. Volume was never the variable. The variable is whether what you publish could have been written by any competitor with a content calendar, or whether it carries a number, a name, and a position that costs its author something. Hidden buyers read on their own time, form their own opinion, and only sometimes tell anyone what changed their mind. Your job isn't to catch them in a meeting. It's to have already said something worth repeating by the time they get there.

FAQ

What is a hidden buyer in B2B sales?

A hidden buyer is an internal stakeholder, typically in finance, legal, compliance, procurement, or operations, who influences a purchase decision without being a vendor's direct sales contact. Edelman and LinkedIn's 2025 report found hidden buyers exert influence roughly comparable to visible decision-makers, yet 71% report little to no direct interaction with a vendor's sales team during evaluation.

Do B2B buyers really trust thought leadership more than marketing materials?

Yes, based on Edelman-LinkedIn's own survey data. In 2025, 64% of respondents said they trust thought leadership more than marketing materials and product sheets to judge a vendor's competence, and 71% called it more effective than traditional marketing content. The 2024 edition put comparable trust at 73%, up from 59% in 2019.

How many people were surveyed for the 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn report?

The most detailed public methodology puts the fielded sample at 1,934 management-level professionals across seven markets, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, surveyed between March 17 and April 3, 2025. One LinkedIn-published summary cites a larger figure of 3,484 for the broader research program; the exact relationship between the two numbers isn't stated publicly.

Why do B2B buyers want content that challenges their assumptions?

According to the report, 86% of hidden buyers prefer content that challenges what they already believe over content that simply confirms it, and 91% are actively seeking insights about risks or opportunities they hadn't already identified. Content that only restates industry consensus provides no new information for a buyer to act on or share internally.

Can a small or unknown B2B company compete with thought leadership?

The data suggests yes. 53% of decision-makers say strong thought leadership makes brand recognition matter less in their evaluation. Kate Vitasek of the University of Tennessee's Global Supply Chain Institute notes that buyers specifically value fresh thinking from lesser-known brands, since smaller companies have less incumbent position to protect and more room to take a clear stance.

How does thought leadership affect the RFP process?

79% of hidden buyers say they are more likely to champion a vendor during an RFP (Request for Proposal) if that vendor has published consistent, high-quality thought leadership. That advocacy happens inside the buying committee, in conversations a vendor's sales team is never part of, which is why the 2025 report treats it as a distinct outcome from direct engagement metrics like likes or comments.

Sources

  1. Edelman & LinkedIn, "2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report: Invisible Influence," 7th edition, 2025. https://www.edelman.com/expertise/Business-Marketing/2025-b2b-thought-leadership-report
  2. Edelman & LinkedIn, full report PDF, July 2025. https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2025-07/2025%20Edelman-LinkedIn%20B2B%20Thought%20Leadership%20Impact%20Report_FINAL.pdf
  3. Alexandra Rynne, LinkedIn Business Blog, "How B2B Marketers Can Use Thought Leadership to Influence Hidden Buyers," 2025, quotes from Anthony Marshall (IBM Institute for Business Value) and Kate Vitasek (University of Tennessee). https://www.linkedin.com/business/marketing/blog/research-and-insights/b2b-thought-leadership-influence-hidden-buyers
  4. ContentGrip, "The strategic role of thought leadership in B2B decisions," 2025. https://www.contentgrip.com/edelman-linkedin-thought-leadership-report/
  5. Peak Digital, "B2B Thought Leadership 2025: 95% Of Hidden Buyers Open To Sales," 2025, methodology detail (1,934 respondents, seven markets, March 17 to April 3, 2025 fieldwork). https://peakdigital.online/reports/b2b-thought-leadership-2025-edelman-linkedin-hidden-buyers/
  6. Demand Gen Report, "Marketers Need to Gear Content to Hidden B2B Buyers: Edelman/LinkedIn," 2025. https://www.demandgenreport.com/industry-news/news-brief/marketers-need-to-gear-content-to-hidden-b2b-buyers-edelman-linkedin/49901/
  7. Column Content, "Thought Leadership Statistics and Trends You Need to Know," citing the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report (73% trust figure, up from 59% in 2019; premium pricing and bid-invitation figures). https://columncontent.com/thought-leadership-statistics/

All In: hidden buyers read LinkedIn before they ever take your call

The report's core finding matches what a two-decade LinkedIn presence teaches faster than any survey: the people who decide your deal are rarely the people in the room with you.

All In is the B2B media that decodes LinkedIn, expert blog, weekly podcast and newsletter for SME leaders and sales directors who want to turn LinkedIn into measurable growth. An original creation by Patrick de Carvalho, on LinkedIn since 2004. Motto: "I Never Lose."

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