Anna Anonymous: The Invisible Buyer Who Will Redefine Your 2025 Marketing Strategy

In a rush? Here are the highlights

• Why 95% of B2B buyers like Anna Anonymous skip sales, and what to do about it
• The hidden impact of decision fatigue and how it silently rules you out.
• How cognitive fluency (a.k.a. “KISS”) turns anonymous visitors into confident buyers.
• The 95:5 rule: Why 95% of your audience isn’t buying right now—and why that’s okay.
• Want to win more deals? Help buyers like Anna before they even know your name

Meet Anna Anonymous: The Modern B2B Buyer

Picture this: An operations manager for a division of an enterprise company is tasked with finding a new SaaS platform. She knows the stakes, and so does the buying team she’s leading. This is her first major project since being promoted eight months ago. Making the wrong choice will be a setback for her and the team, both personally and professionally. Please say hello to Anna Anonymous

She's a Millennial, part of the generation that grew up with the internet and smartphones, now making up over 70% of B2B business buyers. Like most of her peers, she’s tech-savvy but not in IT, and a self-reliant information seeker.

Today, we find Anna up earlier than usual because her four-year-old was awake in the middle of the night. With coffee in hand, she opens her laptop at the kitchen table to have another look at Promising Technologies’ website. She thought she spotted some useful information there Sunday while skimming the web as she and her husband watched the game. But as she returns to Promising Vendor’s site, she struggles to find the specific information she thought she saw.

She’s starting to believe vendors hide ‘the good stuff’ to force her to talk to salespeople, her last resort at this stage of her research. She doesn’t have time to dig around the vendor’s site much longer. She has about an hour to take out the dog, get her son ready to ride to preschool with her husband, get ready for work, and hop on her first Zoom call of the day. When that’s over, she’ll head into the office for more meetings, but she must pick up her son by 4:30 PM, then get both of them home to help her husband get dinner on the table.

With an eye roll, she bookmarks Promising’s site for now, resolving to tackle it again tonight after her family routine is done. Frustrated that this research task isn’t easier, she pushes back from the table, straightens her shoulders, and thinks to herself, "challenge accepted." With renewed focus, she heads upstairs to get ready.

Anna is one of the growing ranks of highly influential buyers that, statistically speaking, you’ll never meet. Why? Because 85% of B2B buyers have established their purchase requirements and ruled-in or ruled-out vendors without ever contacting a salesperson.

B2B buyers never really wanted sales conversations early in their buying process in the first place

Anonymous Buying on the Rise

As we head into 2025, Anna and her B2B peers are firmly in the driver’s seat, and they know it. With endless information at their fingertips and digital channels enabling anonymity, these decision-makers dictate their own journeys. They decide when—or if—they’ll engage with vendors.? They’ve been hard to ‘see’ for some time, and, according to research from Trendemon,they’re becoming practically invisible.???

In 2021, 87% of the buyer journey occurred without direct interaction with vendors. That figure rose to 92% in 2022 and reached 95% in 2023, confirming Anna and her peers have rapidly changed B2B buying forever. These additional facts confirm the visibility gap:

• In 2024, only 5.31% of companies saw known contacts come across their website, a 16% decrease from 2023.?
• Also last year, buyers spread their attention to more vendors, resulting in 33% year-over-year declines in three categories: unique site visitors, website sessions, and pages read.?

If we look a bit deeper, there’s another truth in these findings: B2B buyers never really wanted sales conversations early in their buying process in the first place. Instead, they sought them out because, in the past, sales teams—as Anna suspected earlier in our story—were the gatekeepers of critical information, ‘the good stuff.’? So how are vendors supposed to engage Anna and her cohorts if they don’t know who they are?

Reverse-engineering the dynamics of Uncertainty, Decision Fatigue, and Information Overload, provide the equation to build genuine buyer confidence

Behavioral Economics Can Shine a Light on the Unknown

Behavioral economics is a branch of science that integrates insights from psychology, neuroscience, and microeconomic theory to understand why people make choices and how these choices can be influenced or improved. When applied to reaching Anna Anonymous and her peers, there are three dynamics that must be confronted: uncertainty, decision fatigue, and information overload. Let’s quickly look at each:

• Uncertainty Triggers Skepticism: Change is inherently unsettling. The brain’s amygdala, tuned to detect risk, reacts strongly to decisions involving significant change. When buyers encounter vague or incomplete information, this risk-detection system heightens caution, leading them to rule out vendors who leave critical questions unanswered.
• Decision Fatigue Is Real: Too much poorly organized information overwhelms the brain’s capacity to make decisions. Autonomous buyers, already navigating complex group dynamics and technical requirements, often shut down when faced with the excess noise of multiple vendor-promoted distinctions and decisions, opting for vendors that make their value obvious and the buyer's path simpler.
• Information Overload Erodes Trust: Processing unclear or irrelevant content adds to buyers’ cognitive strain. This friction erodes trust and confidence, making it harder for buyers to see the vendor as a reliable partner or take the next step forward fearing they’ll purchase a solution that won’t provide the business value promised

As we’ve mentioned previously, No decision confidence = no sale. B2B buyers like Anna expect more than ever from providers and their buying journey. And eventually winning the sale is not proof you're addressing these high expectations. Recent Forrester research found “83% of buyers expressed dissatisfaction with the winning provider in one or more areas of the purchasing process”.? However, by reverse-engineering the dynamics of uncertainty, decision fatigue, and information overload, we find most of the equation needed to build genuine buyer confidence, and remain in the shrouded selection process that leads to? account and revenue growth.

Getting a Buyer’s Attention with the “KISS” of Clarity

The scientific term underpinning the much-repeated “Keep It Simple, Stupid” or KISS heuristic is cognitive fluency. Put simply, cognitive fluency refers to the?‘ease of understanding.’ That is to say the easier it is for us to find, read, and understand a piece of information, the more believable and actionable we perceive it to be. Given that, the implications for marketing to Anna Anonymous become obvious: if we provide well-organized, helpful information tailored to her needs and those of her buying team, it will naturally compel them to take a longer look at our offerings giving us a better shot at being short-listed and considered for a purchase.

Imagine how Anna’s research would have gone had Promising Vendor’s content creators spent a little time “KISSing” up to Anna:

• Answer her common questions early: Buyers should never have to hunt for essential information. By creating content that reduces the risks of change and answers key questions like, “How does this solution improve current processes?” or provides proof that it works for teams like Anna’s, Promising Vendor avoids triggering skepticism and shrinks the size of the process change that comes with a new SaaS solution.
• Speak to her entire buying team: If Promising Vendor also provided easily shareable, well-organized content to address the concerns of other decision-makers on Anna’s team, she could quickly send that to her technical, financial, or security leads who are going to request the information eventually. This starts to build consensus among the group leading to more productive buying team discussions, and shorter sales cycles for Promising Vendor.
• Show her, don’t tell her: Had Promising Vendor also provided claims with customer evidence, use case data, and testimonials along with third-party validation, Anna would know she isn’t in the pool alone. Learning how others like her benefited from Promising’s solution helps Anna and team ‘see’ them as a potential partner that is credible and trustworthy. What’s more, framing customer evidence as use cases provide context to solutions placing the focus on business outcomes.? This move is a remedy to the product-centered, overly technical, superlative-laden mindset some vendors still have.

With anonymous buying on the rise, helpful, accessible information isn’t just a courtesy any more—it’s one of the most compelling reasons for buyers to invest time exploring a vendor’s offerings further.? And, KISSing up to Anna now has a dual benefit—it not only boosts immediate interest, it builds brand recall for the future.

The 95:5 rule: Why 95% of your audience isn’t buying right now—and why that’s okay

If you haven’t encountered the formal writings about the 95:5 rule, you’ve likely intuited it already. In short this heuristic is a reminder that “95% of the buyers for your solution are not in the market at the time they see your content” , but we do have the opportunity to create a memory link in the buyer's mind that will be triggered later.? While somewhat obvious, an additional insight from Behavioral Economics tells us that when we humans start considering a purchase, we first use our memories to recall vendors we’ve had some experience with or have some knowledge of.? We do this before heading to a computer to begin a search.? And when we do start working through a search, we strongly prefer brands we are familiar with at some level.? So it's fare to say our final takeaway comes more from our mother’s kitchen than from deep scientific research, “we get one chance to make a first impression”

Helping Anna Anonymous through her research, you’re not just another option; you become THE preferred option when the time is right

Helping Buyers Buy Better: A Clear Path Forward

Think back to Anna Anonymous. As someone balancing tight schedules, family commitments, and high-stakes work decisions, she embodies the modern B2B buyer. When buyers like Anna initiate contact, they already have a positive association with the vendor and a high level of confidence in their ability to meet her needs. In fact, 84% of the time, the first vendor that buyers such as Anna contact is the winning vendor.

The takeaway is clear: by helping Anna Anonymous through her research, you’re not just another option; you become THE preferred option when the time is right.

At Liaison, we know how hard it can be to catch of glimpse of Anna. If you’re curious about how your content might help Anna, we’d love to have a chat. Using our 48-point Impact Assessment Model, we can analyze your marketing collateral from multiple buyer perspectives to help you uncover your unique strengths, gaps, and opportunities. Our goal is to help you understand where your content stands and how it can be tweaked to help buyers like Anna before they even know your name. Clients that implement recommendations from our Buyer Impact Analysis quickly see their prospects become less skeptical of them, more confident in themselves, and more likely to buy better solutions with fewer regrets. That's worth a chat isn't it?