A freight forwarder, a food trader and a three-billion-dollar fulfilment network appeared on BBC television this weekend. Without knowing it, all three described the customer our research keeps meeting.
This weekend, BBC’s Talking Business devoted an episode to supply chains. Three guests, three sectors, three very different sizes of company. And all three, without ever using our vocabulary, described the finding at the centre of our research: B2B customers are no longer only buying products, features or savings — they are buying resilience.
Three companies, one buying logic
Ian Baxter has run the UK freight management company Baxter Freight through thirty years of the industry. His verdict on the present: “I’ve never seen it this difficult.” He listed COVID, Brexit, the Ukraine war, the conflict in the Middle East, a cost-of-living crisis and extreme weather — and called the result a permacrisis. His response is not prediction but preparation: “We’re expecting new events, even though we don’t know about them. It’s about expecting the unexpected.” In practice that means optionality — being, in his words, not wedded to one particular airline, one particular shipping company, one particular route. And it has changed his position in the customer relationship:
“What it has done is brought us closer to our customers, closer to their plans. We are a more significant, more valued and valuable advisor and helper to our customers.”
Ian Baxter, Baxter Freight, on BBC Talking Business
The second guest, food trader Nadia Alyabyshenko, learned the same lesson the hard way. When Russia invaded Ukraine, her entire supply base disappeared and her business stood still for six months.
“I understood I cannot rely on one source.”
Nadia Alyabyshenko, food trader, on BBC Talking Business
The third guest made the pattern commercial. Sean Henry’s company Stord, now valued at three billion dollars, sells independent brands the ability to flex inventory across a network of more than a hundred fulfilment locations — without fixed contracts and without fixed assets. Merchants who cannot absorb shocks on their own buy that ability from the network. Flexibility is not a feature of the product. Flexibility is the product.
What the customer is actually buying
Across our own interview base, one word has replaced everything else as the common element of what B2B customers value: resilience — the ability to withstand shocks, in five forms: financial, continuity, strategic, workforce and planetary. The broadcast confirmed two specific findings. First, crisis converts the supplier into an advisor: Baxter’s “more valued advisor” is the same shift our interviewees describe, where the seller’s worth is measured by how much uncertainty they help the customer navigate. Second, customers now protect themselves by keeping the option to switch suppliers — which means suppliers who sell independence, rather than fighting it, are selling exactly what the customer values. Stord adds a third, sharper point: resilience can be engineered into the proposition itself, priced and sold, rather than promised in a slide.
The honest qualifier
Two cautions keep this article honest. Chief executives on television talk their own book — Stord profits directly from the thesis that merchants buy flexibility, so its testimony is corroboration, not proof. And resilience is not free. The trader’s alternative routes through Turkey, Iraq and Saudi Arabia tripled her costs; Baxter was equally plain that higher costs are “ultimately passed on to the man and woman in the street.” A value proposition built on resilience must therefore survive the hardest conversation in B2B: who pays for the buffer, and how is that price justified? That is precisely the question a business case has to answer — and most of the propositions we study still argue benefits while their customers are pricing risk.
The work
When a freight forwarder, a food trader, a technology unicorn and a national broadcaster all converge on the same description of buying behaviour, it is no longer a trend to watch. It is the environment commercial leaders are selling into today. The question each of them should take from the programme is simple: is your value proposition still arguing benefits, while your customer is buying resilience? The customer on the news this weekend is the same customer in your pipeline this morning.
Is your proposition answering the customer who buys resilience? Take the seven-question self-audit. From the Future of Selling research programme, co-led by Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens and Prof. dr. Javier Marcos — see the working paper Engineering Systemic Value in B2B on the publications page.