Thought leadership for hidden buyers is the strategy B2B companies need when their product is superior but their brand visibility is low, especially among the deal’s most critical influencers. I keep thinking about a comment that came up during a recent client workshop. One participant said, “We know we have the better product. It costs more, but it’s worth it. The real challenge is that no one knows who we are.”

It’s a familiar story in B2B: if buyers haven’t heard of you before they get into the room, you’re already playing catch-up. Moreover, the people you’re typically trying to reach might not even be the ones making the final call. Increasingly, deals are influenced by hidden buyers. They are the people behind the scenes; the ones doing the research, influencing stakeholders, raising concerns, pushing back on pricing, or pushing ideas to the C-suite. They’re not on your contact list or in your CRM, but they are silently shaping the conversation.

Thought leadership and the dark funnel: Why early influence of hidden buyers is key

According to the 2025 Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report:

• 40% of B2B deals stall because hidden buyers were missed.
• 95% of hidden buyers say strong thought leadership makes them more open to a vendor.
• And 53% of buyers say great thought leadership matters more than brand recognition.

Thought leadership isn’t about puff pieces or generic blog posts. It’s about showing your company understands the problem before someone asks for the solution. You are creating trust with people you can’t see, creating content people inside the company actually want to pass around, and getting ahead of objections before they ever come up.

That’s precisely the point made by Patrik Høgberget, a ‘self-motivated’ Enterprise Account Executive, who wrote on LinkedIn: “If you’re only targeting the obvious stakeholders, you’re missing the real influencers. Prioritise hidden buyers with bold, actionable insights and a human touch.”

This human touch can help you with what marketers call the dark funnel – it’s the part of the buyer journey you can’t track with analytics or attribution tools, and it includes:

• Watercooler chats on Slack
• Podcasts shared in group texts
• Internal discussions between non-obvious stakeholders
• Quiet research from team members not on your radar

These are the conversations where opinions are formed, long before a demo is booked. In fact, according to the 2024 Edelman–LinkedIn report, 95% of B2B buyers aren’t even in-market at any given time. So if you’re only showing up when someone downloads a white paper, you’re way too late.

Building trust with hidden B2B influencers

I’ve worked with brilliant teams who’ve built amazing products, only to get lost in the noise because they didn’t invest in visibility, trust or storytelling. They thought “the right buyers will find us”, but the reality is the right buyers are hiding. And if you’re not showing up in the places they’re looking, you’re not being considered at all.

In the B2B space, people tend to think that it’s the technical product information that will close the sale. It reminds me of something someone once said to me: sales is about building relationships – and good thought leadership content that shows we understand our buyers’ challenges can help us do just that.

Today’s buyers want to hear from real people who anticipate their challenges. They want content with a unique tone or style, written in a more human, less formal tone. So, make your thought leadership a priority, not an afterthought, and build for the people behind the scenes, not just the ones on the org chart.

Read more: 10 ways to nail B2B messaging in seconds

By Denise Wall, Aspidistra CEO

Photo by Crazy Cake on Unsplash