Delaware: sales is no longer an individual sport
An enterprise consultancy stopped selling implementations. What its customers now buy is orchestration — and no single salesperson can deliver that alone.
Regis Lemmens
Can I count on you when the next thing breaks?
Forty years of accumulating shocks have changed the question buyers ask. It is no longer “is this a good deal?” It is “can I rely on you when the next disruption hits?”
CGI: the business case you can buy
Business cases are everywhere in B2B sales — and almost none of them are real. CGI named, scoped and priced the work of proving value, and turned the business case from a sales document into a service.
The buyer already has the answer. They want someone to sign it.
Gartner finds that most B2B buyers now check AI-generated insights with a salesperson. The first analysis is done before you arrive. What is left is the part only a person can do: stand behind it.
You are no longer a salesperson
Deals increasingly die not because the value was unconvincing, but because buying has become too hard. The seller’s new job is to make the customer able — and confident — to buy.
Accent: stop selling the vacancy, sell the system
A recruitment supplier re-anchored its proposition from filling vacancies to improving the customer’s whole recruitment system — and found the senior conversation it could never get before.
Kaneka: the better product cannot win
A technically dominant product, a deal that collapses to price — and what that says about every value proposition built on being better.
Three companies, one word: resilience
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.
A new working paper: Engineering Systemic Value in B2B
Where the research stands after two years of interviews with B2B commercial leaders. The unit of competition has moved from the offer to the customer's system.