December 2, 2025
Marketers have spent decades obsessing over “the buyer persona.” Entire frameworks, workshops, and strategy decks revolve around understanding one idealized decision-maker — their pains, motivations, frustrations, and buying triggers.
But the modern B2B buying process doesn’t look like that at all. Deals rarely hinge on a single persona. They hinge on a group.
LinkedIn’s B2B Institute has been sounding the alarm about this shift. Their research points to a far more frustrating reality than most persona frameworks acknowledge:
More than 40% of B2B deals are abandoned before completion — not because buyers prefer a competitor, but because the buying group simply cannot agree.
In some industries, that abandonment rate climbs as high as 60%.
This group-level gridlock is the real enemy. Not price. Not messaging. Not even product quality.
So the question becomes: if decisions are made by committees, not personas…
is all this persona-building actually helping, or has it blinded B2B marketers to the real problem?
A persona describes one stakeholder.
A B2B deal involves many.
The B2B Institute describes two categories inside every buying group:
These hidden buyers are the ones who quietly derail deals.
And because persona work usually ignores them, companies end up crafting perfect messaging for the wrong audience — or at least for too small a slice of the real audience.
This is why the B2B Institute argues that:
B2B marketers often aren’t competing with better products — they’re competing with products that are easier for a group of strangers to agree on.
That’s the heart of the consensus problem.
The B2B Institute’s findings highlight a pattern that every experienced B2B marketer has felt in their bones:
Buyer groups tend to choose the least risky option — the one everyone has heard of, not necessarily the best one.
This explains why:
It’s not a clash of features — it’s a quest for group safety.
If 7–11 people have to say yes, the easiest “yes” wins.
This is also why the Institute repeatedly emphasizes category visibility and broad brand awareness. You don’t win because your champion loves you. You win because the rest of the room doesn’t fear you.
Internal champions try to sell your story for you — but they have to survive the internal gauntlet:
If even one critical stakeholder doubts the vendor, momentum dies.
This is where most deals evaporate.
Not because the product is weak — but because the internal politics of the buying group slowly grind the deal to a halt.
Personas aren’t worthless. They’re simply incomplete.
They help you understand individual motivations.
But they don’t help you win a room.
If your marketing only speaks to a single persona — the eager champion — you’re leaving the majority of the real decision-makers unaddressed. The B2B Institute’s work shows that aligning the entire group is the true challenge in B2B.
So instead of throwing personas out, the better move is to expand the model:
Personas help you craft empathy.
Consensus gets you chosen.
B2B marketers need both — but the second is where most strategies fail.
Consensus isn’t won with the perfect pitch to a single persona. It’s won by reducing the perceived risk across the entire buying group.
The findings from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute (with Bain), combined with long-term research on brand effectiveness, point to a few consistent drivers of group agreement:
Familiar brands win not because they’re better, but because they’re easier to defend in a room full of anxious stakeholders.
This is where mental availability — being top-of-mind before the buying process even starts — becomes a competitive advantage.
A strong brand lowers resistance before the first meeting.
Most marketing talks to the champion.
Consensus comes from reassuring the people who weren’t looking for you in the first place: procurement, finance, legal, IT, operations.
These stakeholders rarely raise their hands — but they veto more deals than the main user ever will.
Deals die when the champion can’t explain the value simply and credibly across the organization.
If your story requires nuance, slides, or a product demo to survive… it won’t.
Winning vendors give champions narrative tools, not just product sheets.
Committees respond more strongly to risk reduction than to benefit expansion.
This means emphasizing reliability, compatibility, stability, and predictable outcomes — the things that calm a group, not just excite an individual.
This is the sleeper advantage.
Winning vendors create materials designed for internal circulation:
simple summaries, FAQ docs for CFOs, implementation roadmaps for ops, security briefs for IT.
The easier it is for a champion to get everyone to nod, the faster the deal moves.
In B2B, consensus isn’t a final step.
Consensus is the sale.
Vendors win when the whole room can say “yes” without friction, fear, or extra meetings.
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