We left LinkedIn’s Indie Summit with one figure we keep coming back to: 40% of B2B deals are lost to indecision, not to a competitor winning.
The reflex is to read that as a product or pricing problem, but usually it is neither. The average B2B buying group is around ten people, a CMO, a CFO, a security lead, a team lead, and several others, each with their own priorities and their own questions to answer before they will sign off. When none of them is actively against you but none is fully convinced, the deal does not go elsewhere. It simply stalls.
Most B2B marketing is not built for that. It is built to win over one decision maker, separate you from competitors, and push toward a conversion. That makes sense when one person holds the call. It falls short when ten people have to arrive at a shared level of confidence, often without ever speaking to your sales team.
The question stops being how to beat the competition and becomes how to make it easy for a group to say yes, and that changes what you make, where you run it, and what you measure.
Your buyers show up already researched
LinkedIn shared a figure that sharpens the point: 94% of B2B buyers now use LLMs somewhere in their buying process. Most of that ten-person group has already run its own research before your campaign reaches them. They have asked an AI to compare vendors, read the category, and arrived with specific questions and a healthy dose of skepticism. That changes the job of your consideration content. Material that positions you favorably against rivals does less than it used to, because the reader has often already made that comparison without you.
What moves a cautious, informed group is content that names the risk they are already worried about and takes it head on. The brief moves from “here is why we beat the alternatives” to “here is why the thing you are worried about is not the obstacle you think it is.” That is a harder brief to write, and it is the one that maps to how the decision actually gets made.
Why video does the job here
If you need to build trust across ten people who may never talk to your sales team, you need something that travels, gets rewatched, and builds recognition over time rather than demanding a decision in one exposure.
LinkedIn’s data points to video for that job. Members who see video ads are, by their research, 1.6 times more likely to complete a lead gen form from the same brand, video holds a 95% retention rate, and it is growing 60% faster than other content on the platform. Agencies leaning into video are reportedly growing 20% year on year while the rest stay flat. Those numbers are worth stress-testing against your own account, but the direction is hard to argue with.
The deeper reason video fits is about how it moves. A written asset gets read once. A video gets dropped into a Slack thread, played in a meeting, watched by the CFO and the team lead and the procurement contact, each taking the same context from the same source. That shared exposure is exactly what a group trying to reach alignment needs, and it is something written formats rarely manage.
The hook is where it’s won or lost
None of that helps if the video does not get watched, and on LinkedIn that comes down almost entirely to the opening seconds. 86% of members are on mobile, so your video is fighting for attention on a small screen in a busy feed. LinkedIn found a 36% lift in click-through rate when a hook opens with a specific number or statistic. Contrarian statements, questions that name a real pain point, and content that creates genuine urgency tend to outperform too. The thread running through all of it is specificity: generic B2B creative that could belong to any product gets scrolled past, while something that names what the viewer is already thinking about stops the scroll.
Production value is worth a rethink as well. Lo-fi clips, behind-the-scenes moments, and workplace culture posts have been beating polished production in plenty of cases on LinkedIn. That sounds backwards until you remember what a cautious buying group is really assessing. They are not only judging your product. They are judging whether they trust you, and authenticity signals trust faster than a high production budget, especially for people who have already done their research and are looking for reasons to believe.
If you want formats to test, BrandLink has delivered a 130% higher video completion rate than standard in-feed video, and LinkedIn’s CTV reaches 94% of members with a 2.6 times stronger awareness lift than linear TV.
The question for your next brief
The indecision problem is real, and it is probably costing more pipeline than most B2B teams think.
Campaigns built to win a comparison do not address it. Video, distributed so it reaches a buying group repeatedly and in context, and built on creatives that names real risk rather than just showing off the product, is how you start to close the gap.
So the question worth asking before the next brief is simple. Are you building to convince one person, or to get ten people comfortable enough to move?
