No one's answering. Now what?

Robert Cornish
Founder & CEO
December 3, 2025

The new playbook for getting on your buyer's radar

In a world where people won’t take phone calls or emails, where they set up their email and AI is answering it or blocking it. Even text messages are being blocked and ignored.

Here are some stats to think about:

Email & Cold Call Response Rates (The Decline)

  • Average cold email reply rates dropped to 5.8% in 2024 (down from 6.8% in 2023)
  • The average cold calling success rate in 2025 is 2.3%, almost half of what it was in 2024 (4.82%)
  • 80% of cold calls go directly to voicemail, and B2B voicemail response rates are below 5%
  • Apple's Mail Privacy Protection has made email open rate tracking less reliable, as it automatically preloads email content even when recipients don't actually open emails

Source: Belkins Cold Email Study, Cognism Cold Calling Report

Podcast Listening Growth

  • Just under 100 million Americans age 12 and older now listen to podcasts every week
  • As of 2025, there are over 584.1 million podcast listeners worldwide—nearly double the number from 2019
  • Podcasts now account for 10% of all audio listening, reflecting a fivefold increase over the past decade
  • YouTube is now the most-used platform for podcast listening in the U.S., with 30% of weekly podcast listeners choosing it over traditional audio apps

Source: Edison Research Infinite Dial 2024/2025

YouTube & Video Marketing

  • YouTube has 2.53 billion monthly active users and a potential ad reach of 2.53 billion users
  • 89% of businesses use video marketing in 2025, and 95% of companies consider video marketing important—a rise of 7% from the previous year
  • YouTube users are 3X more likely to watch a tutorial than read instructions
  • 87% of viewers have bought from a brand after seeing it on YouTube
  • About 53% of B2B content marketers use YouTube

Source: Wyzowl 2025, Google/YouTube data

Short-Form Mobile Video (Reels, Shorts, TikTok)

  • 73% of consumers prefer short-form videos to search for products or services
  • YouTube Shorts daily views grew from 30 billion in 2021 to 90 billion in 2024
  • Video content will make up 82% of global internet traffic by 2025
  • In 2025, U.S. adults are projected to spend an average of 48 minutes per day on short-form video platforms
  • The content formats that deliver the highest ROI are short-form videos (21%), images (19%), and live-streamed videos (16%)

Source: Statista, HubSpot

The options at this point are to:

  • Ads on LinkedIn, social media, and YouTube.
  • Organic content that’s authentic and spread across social media and online. The key word being authentic here. There’s already noise and comments from people who want to see authenticity.
  • Blogs and article articles and newsletters. Think, well-written thought pieces, information, insights, or editorial style. Something people will actually read.
  • Podcasts and publicity vehicles to get the word out. People are listening to podcasts and still watch various styles of news and press.
  • Audio platforms and audio news articles. I wrote an earlier post about this; I think Apple News-style audio articles will be key. They can also be long-form stories in audio format.
  • YouTube videos, tutorials, examples, and demos or reviews as well as content to pitch products or show them. This is a key platform that every business should be focused on.
  • Owned media that drives both AI and readership and views. I wrote an article earlier about the Hodinkee strategy and how they used owned media to create an editorial-style site that helped them drive $100M sales as the single strategy focus.  I also saw that Kyndryl recently launch The Kyndryl Institute taking a similar approach.

Owned Media Examples

Hodinkee:

  • Hodinkee crossed $100 million in annual revenue as a content-driven watch media company
  • Founder Ben Clymer stated: "We believe content and commerce is the future of everything"
  • Hodinkee reported 22.2 million annual unique visitors to its website and over 1 million social media followers

The Kyndryl Institute:

  • Kyndryl launched The Kyndryl Institute in December 2024 as a convener of original ideas and insights that introduce fresh perspectives on innovation at the intersection of technology and business.
  • The Institute publishes original perspectives from thought leaders to guide organizations competing in an age of transformation

Sources:

  • AI recommendations from organic content across the web that recommend your company when people search the various AI platforms like ChatGPT. Try it. Ask ChatGPT for the best companies that do what you do and see what it says. If you want to be at the top of this recommendation, it will require a significant organic content strategy including written words on sites like Reddit and Quora, owned media, videos, short reels, tutorials, directories, reviews, and so forth. This should be a key strategy going into 2026.

AI Search & Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

  • ChatGPT currently has over 300 million weekly users, receives over 1 billion daily queries, and ranks 9th among most-visited websites
  • According to Y Combinator data, traditional search engine volume is predicted to drop 25% by 2026 and 50% by 2028, replaced by traffic from generative engines like ChatGPT
  • 84% of marketers recognize generative engine optimization (GEO) as a strategy
  • An Ahrefs study found that 63% of websites are now seeing traffic from AI platforms

Source: Search Engine Land, Ahrefs, Y Combinator

These are really the things that need to be the focus today, which all basically come down to strategic content in the right places where the audience lives, and where the audience spends time to get their attention in order to route them in and through the sales process (which a lot of it could be sidestepped, making it an easier lift on sales).

I do think the pendulum will swing as well, and people will demand authentic content that’s not AI-generated, and people will want to go to live in-person events. They will want to meet in person. Many will demand more FaceTime calls, and potentially some will demand real phone calls again as they get overrun with AI and automation that is hard to verify or authenticate.

Authentic organic content will potentially be the leading strategy going forward for both organic and paid ads in order to get on your buyers’ radar, drive them into sales, and help sales sell and close new business.

Demand for Authenticity

  • A recent study found that 50% of consumers can detect content generated by AI, and 52% were less engaged when reading AI-generated copy
  • The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer shows that 79% of Gen Zers emphasize the importance of trusting brands more now than in the past
  • Hootsuite's Social Media Trends Report found that 62% of people mistrust content if they suspect it was created by AI
  • Human-authored content generates over 5 times more traffic than AI-produced pieces

Source: Edelman Trust Barometer, Bynder, Hootsuite

The other thing I'll say is this -- it is't willy nilly fragmented content shotgunned across the web (if you do this it's better than nothing) but it's really strategically thought out flows to an exact audience (buyer) that walks them right into the sales journey.

Here's some key insights from a Gartner report:

From the Gartner report:

  • Only 17% of the total B2B purchase journey is spent meeting with potential suppliers. Considering the average deal involves multiple suppliers, any given sales rep has roughly 5% of a customer's total purchase time.
  • Millennial business customers are over twice as skeptical of sales reps as baby boomers, with 44% of millennials preferring no sales rep interaction in a B2B purchase setting.
  • 27% of the buying journey is spent researching independently online, while only 17% is spent meeting with potential suppliers.
  • Over half of all B2B buyers reported feeling overwhelmed specifically by the volume of trustworthy information they encountered as part of their purchase journey.
  • The average number of individual stakeholders involved in a complex B2B purchase has grown from just over five ten years ago to over 11 today, occasionally flexing up to nearly 20.

Source to Gartner report

Can AI make content, sure but it's early and we're already hearing people talk about AI slop and their desire for authentic real content. In other words trust will be a key metric in 2026.

Just take a second to document your own habits. What do you do? How would one get to you? Pay attention to that.

— Robert

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