Buyers Aren't Avoiding Sales. They're Avoiding Strangers

The Stat Everyone's Misreading

According to LinkedIn's 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, cited by Social Media Today, 71% of buyers say they hardly ever talk to sales. Read on its own, that sounds like buyers have checked out of human conversations entirely. Read next to the rest of the report, it says something narrower and more useful: buyers have checked out of conversations with people who show up cold.

The same report found that 75% of decision-makers consider thought leadership content a more trustworthy way to assess a company's capabilities than product sheets or marketing materials, per Social Media Today's coverage of the LinkedIn data. That's not a rejection of sales. It's a statement about sequencing. Buyers want to form a view of who they're dealing with before a rep enters the picture, not instead of a rep entering the picture.

This distinction matters because the two readings lead to opposite actions. If you believe sales is dead, you either build a bigger outbound machine to compensate for a colder market, or you outsource trust-building to a content vendor and treat it as a top-of-funnel tactic. If you believe buyers are avoiding strangers, the fix is upstream: stop being a stranger before the outreach happens.

What Buyers Are Actually Avoiding

A useful frame from B2B Insider's Substack breakdown of the same report: buyers aren't rejecting sales as a function, they're rejecting sales as a first touchpoint. By the time a rep reaches out, buyers with any real influence in the deal have often already formed an opinion, based on what they've seen a person say publicly, not what a brand page says about itself.

This lines up with a pattern I've watched repeat across enterprise sales cycles in Israeli B2B tech: the first "real" meeting isn't the first contact. It's the third or fourth touch, after a prospect has quietly read a founder's posts, watched how they answer hard questions publicly, and decided whether this is a company worth 30 minutes of a VP's calendar.

Nearly six in ten buyers discover new vendors through creator content during early awareness, and close to half visit a vendor's site during the decision phase after seeing creator content, according to LinkedIn's data as reported by Social Media Today. That's the funnel already running, whether or not you're staffing it. The only question is whether the content shaping that awareness comes from your team, or from a competitor whose founder has been posting for two years while yours has been "too busy building."

The Hidden Buyer in the Room

The most underused number in the whole report is this one: 95% of "hidden buyers," the stakeholders with major sway in a buying group who are hard to reach through traditional sales or marketing, say strong thought leadership makes them more open to outreach, per Social Media Today's summary of LinkedIn's findings.

Hidden buyers are the people who never take a discovery call, never fill out a form, and rarely show up in your CRM, but who can kill or approve a deal from the side of the room. Traditional outbound can't reach them because outbound assumes someone is willing to be reached. Content changes that math, but only if it's coming from a person they'd recognize as credible, not a logo.

This is the group most Israeli founders write off as "not my ICP" because they're not the named economic buyer. They're often the reason a 12-month enterprise cycle either compresses or stalls at legal and procurement. Winning them over isn't a sales motion. It's a visibility motion that has to already be running by the time your AE needs their sign-off.

The Israeli Founder's Default Mistake

Here's the pattern I see most often at Seed to Series B: the founder built the product, closed the first ten customers personally, and then, the moment there's budget, hires a content person or a marketing agency and hands them "thought leadership" as a deliverable.

It rarely works, and the report explains why. Buyers aren't responding to content. They're responding to a specific person's judgment, applied publicly, over time. A content manager can write in your voice. They cannot have your scar tissue. They weren't in the room when you lost the deal to a competitor with worse tech and better positioning, and they can't reproduce the instinct that comes from having been wrong about your market once already.

This is also where the LinkedIn ad data gets interesting. B2B companies increased their LinkedIn ad budgets by 31.7% between Q3 2024 and Q3 2025, compared to just 6% growth on Google, according to Factors.ai. More telling: within that LinkedIn spend, allocation shifted from lead-gen objectives, down from 53.9% to 39.4%, toward brand and engagement objectives, up from 17.5% to 31.3%. Marketers are already voting with budget for exactly what the thought leadership data predicts. They're just often putting that budget behind a brand page instead of a founder, which is the same mistake in a different line item.

Meanwhile, AI agents are scaling the execution layer of GTM fast. Juniper Research projects AI-agent-automated customer interactions growing from 3.3 billion in 2025 to over 34 billion by 2027, per Demand Gen Report. That capacity is real, but it automates outreach, not trust. Feed it a stranger's message and it sends that stranger's message to more people, faster. It doesn't make the sender less of a stranger.

Scar Tissue Beats a Content Calendar

None of this means founders need to become full-time creators. It means the specific function of "being a known, credible point of view before the first cold touch" cannot be fully outsourced, because the credibility is the founder's, not the channel's.

The founders I've watched do this well don't post daily. They post when they have a real position: a decision they made that most peers in their category wouldn't, a mistake that cost them six months, a blunt take on why a common piece of GTM advice doesn't apply to their kind of product. That's what 75% of decision-makers are responding to when they say thought leadership beats a product sheet. It's not volume. It's a person who clearly has skin in the game.

This is slower to build than a campaign and faster to compound than most founders expect. Enterprise cycles in Israeli B2B tech routinely run 12 to 18 months. A founder who's been visible with a consistent point of view for even six months of that cycle isn't a stranger by the time procurement gets involved. A founder who delegated the entire function to a content hire, and shows up personally only for the closing call, is exactly the stranger the data says buyers are avoiding.

Where to Start This Week

This isn't a content strategy. It's a visibility discipline, and it starts with the founder or CEO, not the marketing hire.

A short checklist I give founders before we build anything else:

• Identify the three decisions in your business you made differently than category convention, and write about why, not just what.

• Post under your own name, not the company page. The company page can amplify it. It cannot originate it.

• Target the hidden buyers explicitly: if legal, security, or finance stakeholders usually surface late in your deals, write content that speaks to their objections before your AE ever meets them.

• Stop measuring this by likes or followers. Measure it by whether prospects arrive at first calls already familiar with your position, not blank.

• Don't hand this to an agency in month one. Use one to help you find your voice and cadence, not to replace your voice with theirs.