An enterprise consultancy stopped selling implementations. What its customers now buy is orchestration — and no single salesperson can deliver that alone.
Ask what an enterprise IT consultancy sells and the traditional answer is expertise: deep knowledge of SAP or Microsoft, plus the hours to implement it. Bart Van Kerkhoven, who runs commercial operations at Delaware in Belgium, told me that model has stopped working — because the expertise no longer sells. Whatever a consultant used to explain in the first three meetings, the customer can now find online on a Saturday afternoon. That is not the end of B2B sales. It is the end of B2B sales as information transfer.
The Gentil Organisateur
Delaware’s answer is a new central sales role. Bart names it after the Gentil Organisateur — the friendly host at a Club Med village whose job is not to be the expert in any single activity, but to bring the right people together so the activities can succeed. The salesperson is no longer the person who knows the answer. The salesperson is the person who knows whom to bring into the room so the answer can be co-created.
The role exists because of what happens inside the customer. A CEO talking about ambition, a CFO talking about return, a CIO talking about architecture and a COO talking about adoption are describing the same transformation in four mutually incomprehensible languages.
“Very often the people in their own organisation do not understand each other. They want the same thing, but they cannot explain it to each other. We are the translator that sits between them and converts it into their language.”
Bart Van Kerkhoven, Delaware Belgium
This is the role our research calls the Value Orchestrator, observed in the wild. It answers the customer demand we call “Involve everyone”: when value crosses functional boundaries, someone has to align the wider decision coalition — and customers increasingly expect the supplier to do that work.
Let the customers do the selling
The most surprising construct in the case inverts a default assumption of B2B selling: that each account is separate. Delaware runs a programme that treats its twenty top customers as one community. Customers come to pitch problems; the others signal which problems they share; pooled budgets, topped up by Delaware, fund co-created solutions. Bart described a dinner where one client spent five hours telling another about a data transformation it had completed — five hours of consulting, delivered by a customer, with Delaware facilitating from the corner.
“Customers still believe each other far more than they believe us. Bring them together and let them tell each other their journeys — we sit in the corner, throw in the occasional idea, but mostly we let them do the work. That is the new sales channel.”
Bart Van Kerkhoven, Delaware Belgium
The structural point matters. Delaware’s competitors implement the same platforms; the technology cannot differentiate. A customer community built over years is the one asset a competitor cannot copy.
A team, not a hero
Delaware serves 850 customers in Belgium — far beyond what classic account management can cover. So the sales function has been unbundled into differentiated roles. A customer-success team holds the long tail, and its charter is explicitly non-commercial: its measure is satisfaction and retention, not pipeline. A separate profile closes. The Gentil Organisateur orchestrates the large transformations. And on the risk side, contracts carry a transparent bonus-malus structure — bonuses for outperformance, capped penalties for underperformance — so that Delaware visibly shares the implementation risk its customers now insist on pushing back to the supplier. That is the demand we call “Guarantee the results”, written into the pricing.
The honest qualifier
Bart refused to let me overclaim, and the case is stronger for it. Under recent macroeconomic pressure, the multi-dimensional value case has rarely decided the deal: “All this is true. I see it back in every conversation. And then it gets decided on cost.” When I suggested that poorly articulated value cases invite exactly that outcome, he sharpened the point: it is both. Buyers under stress fall back on price even when the wider case is made well — and suppliers who never built the case give the buyer nothing else to decide on. The firms building the capability now are the ones positioned for the moment conditions let the wider case count.
The work
Delaware concentrated its commercial organisation on what earns its place — orchestration, the customer community, risk-sharing contracts, the long-tail relationship function — and shed what any consultant can do. Bart’s summary is the finding: “The days when one salesperson could do everything are over. Sales is no longer an individual sport. It is a team sport.” The question for every supplier is not whether to hire better salespeople. It is whether the team around the customer has been built at all.
What the orchestration role requires of an organisation: see The Value Engineering Capability Model. 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.