We came away from LinkedIn’s Indie Summit last week with one number we can’t stop thinking about: 40% of B2B deals are lost to indecision, not to a competitor winning.
The first instinct is to treat that as a product problem or a pricing problem. But most of the time, it isn’t either of those things. The average B2B buying group is ten people: a CMO, a CFO, a security lead, a team lead, and several others with different priorities and different questions they need answered before they’re comfortable signing off. When none of them are actively opposed but none of them are fully convinced, the deal doesn’t go to a competitor. It just stalls.
Most B2B marketing isn’t designed for that reality. It’s designed to convince one decision maker, differentiate from competitors, and push toward conversion. That’s a reasonable strategy when one person is making the call. But when ten people need to reach a shared place of confidence, often without ever speaking to your sales team, a campaign built to persuade an individual isn’t doing the job that actually needs doing.
The question stops being “how do we beat the competition” and starts being “how do we make it easy for a group to say yes.” That shift changes almost everything downstream: what you make, where you run it, and what you’re measuring.
Reaching a buying group that’s already done its research
Understanding who you’re actually trying to reach makes the problem sharper. LinkedIn shared data showing that 94% of B2B buyers are now using LLMs in their buying process. That means most of the people in that ten-person group have already done a version of research before your campaign reaches them. They’ve asked an AI to compare vendors. They’ve read the category. They arrive informed, with specific questions and pre-formed skepticism.
That changes what consideration content needs to do. Content that positions you favorably against competitors is doing less work than it used to, because the people reading it have often already made that comparison themselves. What moves a cautious, informed buying group is content that names the risks they’re already thinking about and addresses them directly. The brief shifts from “here’s why we’re better than the alternatives” to “here’s why the thing you’re worried about isn’t the obstacle you think it is.”
That’s a harder brief to write, but it’s the one that actually maps to how buying decisions get made.
The format that builds trust across a buying group
Given all of that, the format question becomes important. If you need to build familiarity and trust across ten people who may never have a direct conversation with your sales team, you need something that travels well, gets watched more than once, and builds recognition over time rather than asking for a decision in a single exposure.
LinkedIn’s data points to video as the format that does this job best on their platform. Members exposed to video ads are, according to their research, 1.6x more likely to complete a lead gen form from the same brand. Video has a 95% retention rate and is growing 60% faster than other content on the platform. Agencies with video-focused strategies are reportedly growing 20% year on year while non-video-focused agencies are flat. We’d want to stress-test some of those numbers against your own account data, but the directional case for video investment is hard to argue with.
The reason video works for this specific problem goes beyond the performance numbers though. A piece of written content gets read once. A video gets shared in a Slack thread, played in a meeting, watched by the CFO and the team lead and the procurement contact, each of them picking up the same context from the same source. That shared exposure is exactly what a buying group trying to reach alignment actually needs. You’re building familiarity across a group simultaneously, which written formats rarely achieve.
What this means for how you build creative
Knowing video is the right format is only useful if the video actually gets watched. And on LinkedIn, that comes down almost entirely to the hook.
86% of LinkedIn members are on mobile. Your video is competing for attention on a small screen in a crowded feed, against everything else someone has open. LinkedIn’s own data found a 36% increase in CTR when hooks open with a specific number or statistic. Contrarian statements, questions that name a real pain point, and content that creates genuine urgency also consistently outperform. The unifying thread is specificity. Generic B2B creative that could apply to any product in any category gets scrolled past, while content that names something the viewer is already thinking about stops the scroll.
On production quality: lo-fi content, behind-the-scenes moments, and workplace culture posts have been outperforming polished production in a number of contexts on LinkedIn. That sounds counterintuitive, but it makes sense when you consider what a cautious buying group is actually evaluating. They’re not just assessing your product. They’re assessing whether they trust you, and authenticity signals trust faster than production quality, particularly for an audience that’s already done its research and is looking for reasons to believe rather than reasons to consider.
For formats worth testing: BrandLink delivered a 130% higher video completion rate compared to standard in-feed video, and LinkedIn’s CTV offering reaches 94% of members with a 2.6x stronger awareness lift than linear TV campaigns. Both are worth serious consideration if you’re building presence across a buying group that takes months to reach a decision.
Bottom line
The indecision problem is real, and it’s probably costing more pipeline than most B2B teams realize. Campaigns built to win a comparison aren’t addressing it. Video, distributed in formats that reach a buying group repeatedly and in context, and built with creative that names real risk rather than just showcasing product, is how you close that gap.
The question worth asking before your next brief: are you building to convince one person, or to get ten people comfortable enough to move?
