A German financial brokerage was practising capability-building selling thirty years before we had a name for it. The case still teaches — and quietly warns — every B2B sales leader thinking about long-horizon customer relationships.
Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens — Future of Selling research programme — May 2026
A young person graduates from university in Germany. They are a doctor, or a lawyer, or an engineer, or an economist. They are about to take a recruitment test for their first serious job, and they have no idea how to prepare for it. A financial advisor offers to help them with the test — without charging anything, without selling them anything, without even asking them to sign a document. The advisor works for a financial brokerage. The brokerage has decided, as a matter of strategy, that the way to win this person’s lifetime financial business is to first make sure the person actually has a lifetime career to spend that money on.
This is MLP. It has been running this model since the 1970s. When we wrote about it in From Selling to Co-Creating in 2014, the case sat in a chapter on getting into the customer’s purchasing process early. Reading the case again twelve years on, with the current framework’s vocabulary, I think the case was doing something the chapter heading did not quite capture. MLP was not getting into the purchasing process early. MLP was building the customer’s capability to one day have a purchasing process at all.
The model
MLP Group is one of the largest financial advisory firms in the German retail market. It employs around three thousand self-employed brokers across roughly three hundred branches. Its clients are university-educated professionals — doctors, lawyers, economists, scientists, IT specialists, engineers, academics. The firm has chosen these client groups deliberately. They share two features that matter for the business model: high future earning potential, and attractive risk profiles.
MLP’s vision, as the firm states it, is to be the best partner to these clients at every stage of their lives — for pension, asset management, and risk management. The crucial words in that sentence are at every stage of their lives. The firm is not designing a transaction. It is designing a four-decade relationship that begins on the day the client graduates and ends with their retirement. The financial products are obvious. What the firm did differently was structure the relationship around the client’s career rather than around the financial products.
So the firm helps young graduates prepare for recruitment tests and job interviews. When a self-employed doctor or lawyer wants to sell their practice, MLP’s network finds a candidate to buy it, and the firm acts as the broker on that transaction. Because each branch specialises in a particular professional group, the brokers accumulate an industry network and an industry understanding that lets them give career advice as readily as financial advice. The product the client buys at any single moment in the relationship is a pension plan, or a portfolio review, or an insurance contract. The relationship the client is part of is something quite different.
The 2014 framing — and what it missed
In the 2014 book, we used MLP to illustrate one of the early answers to a question many B2B sales organisations were starting to ask: how do you get into the customer’s purchasing process before the invitation to tender? The MLP answer was, in effect, to start the relationship so far upstream that the question of a purchasing process never arises in adversarial form. By the time the client has any financial decision worth making, the MLP broker has been their trusted source on far more than finance for a decade.
That framing was correct as far as it went. The case is still one of the cleanest examples I know of relationship-as-positioning. But the framing concentrated on what MLP was doing to win the eventual sale. Re-read in 2026, the more interesting question is what MLP was doing to the customer. The brokerage was not just positioning itself for a future transaction. It was making the customer more successful — more employable, more strategically informed about their own profession, better connected, better prepared. The financial business followed. The capability-building came first.
A strong sale does not just create revenue. It increases the customer’s ability to succeed after the sale.
Future of Selling research programme — working principle
That principle is the centre of where the current research has gone. In B2B industrial conversations, we see the same pattern emerging in quite different forms. The supplier that wins consistently is the one whose contribution to the customer’s success is bigger than the product they sell. The MLP case was demonstrating this in retail financial services thirty years before the current research had a vocabulary for it.
The two roles, in sequence
There is a piece of the MLP model that I want to draw out because it answers a question I am asked in almost every sales-organisation workshop. The question is some version of: my sales people are good at one thing or the other — closing new business, or developing existing relationships — and I cannot find people who do both. How do I design a sales force that can?
MLP’s answer is to not require the same person to do both at the same time. The model is sequential. In the first years of a broker’s career at MLP, their main job is to acquire new clients and build a portfolio. They are closing. Their conversations are with people who are not yet clients, and their daily work is acquisition. As their client portfolio grows — and the firm targets a steady-state portfolio of more than two hundred clients per broker — the role shifts. The same broker is now spending most of their time on consultative work with existing clients whose situations evolve as their careers evolve. Some brokers stay more consultative. Others stay more relationship-oriented. The firm allows the role to specialise in the second decade in a way it does not in the first.
This is a piece of sales force design that B2B suppliers consistently get wrong. The hunter-farmer split is usually engineered as two separate populations, with a handover at some point. The handover is where the customer relationship most often breaks, because the closer who built the relationship and the farmer who inherits it are different people with different incentives and different reads of the account. MLP’s model treats it as one person in two phases. The same broker who closed the client at graduation is still the broker at the retirement-planning conversation thirty-five years later. There is no handover because there is no other person.
How the economics actually work
This is where the case gets harder, and where the honest qualifier sits.
MLP’s brokers are self-employed. They work on one hundred per cent commission. There is no salary, no draw, no guarantee. A new broker in their first three years is, by definition, building a portfolio from zero. They have very few clients; those clients are mostly young professionals with low immediate financial commitments, and the commission produced is modest. The broker is working hard, taking real personal risk, and earning very little. The 2014 case is candid about this: the speed at which the new broker builds their portfolio is essential to their motivation, because if it takes too long, the broker concludes they are working too hard for too little, and quits.
So the firm has built two structural counterweights into the model. The first is the branch manager’s role. Branch managers are required to co-finance the extensive training of each new recruit. That cost-sharing arrangement is not a piece of administrative housekeeping. It is the mechanism by which the firm aligns the manager’s incentives to the new broker’s success. A branch manager who has paid into a recruit’s training has every reason to coach, field-train, and mentor that recruit through the difficult first years. The training cost converts the manager from a passive supervisor into an active stake-holder in whether the recruit makes it.
The second counterweight is the deliberate narrowness of the client segment. By focusing on professional groups with high future earning potential, the firm is choosing customers whose value grows steeply with time. A twenty-five-year-old engineer is not a profitable client. The same person at fifty, with a paid-off house, two children at university, an inheritance to manage, and a retirement to plan, is one of the most valuable clients in retail financial services. The model bets the early years against the later ones.
The fragility in the model is visible in the case notes and worth naming clearly. The recruitment funnel is brutal. Many people start, few survive the first three years. The brokers who do survive carry the firm. The model works in aggregate even if it does not work for every individual. That is the trade-off the design accepts. It is not a trade-off every sales organisation can accept, and it is one B2B sales leaders should think hard about before importing the model wholesale.
What translates to B2B industrial selling, and what does not
I want to be careful here. MLP is a retail financial services case. The clients are individuals. The product is regulated. The buying coalition is one person — and sometimes that person’s partner. None of those features describe the world most readers of these articles work in, where the buying coalition is twelve people, the product is operational rather than personal, and the procurement process has a structure of its own.
What translates is the principle. Help the customer succeed and the supplier becomes structurally indispensable, rather than periodically competing for the next order. The Kaneka chemical engineers we interviewed last year described their best supplier in almost the same language MLP’s brokers use about their best clients: the supplier knows our business better than some of our own people do, and we cannot imagine running this without them. The mechanism by which the supplier got there was not finance brokering — it was decades of being on site, understanding the production line, anticipating problems, training operators. But the structural position is the same. The supplier is part of how the customer succeeds.
What does not translate is the commission-only economics. A B2B industrial sales force cannot replicate the MLP self-employment model in most cases — the deal cycles are too long, the upfront investment per account is too large, and the regulatory and reputational risk is too concentrated. What B2B suppliers can borrow, and what most of them have not, is the sequential role design. Not hunter-then-farmer-as-different-people, but hunter-becoming-farmer-as-the-same-person, with the firm’s incentives realigned to support the transition rather than reward the handover.
What this means for sales leaders now
If you read the MLP case in 2014 as a story about getting into the purchasing process early, you read it correctly for that moment. In 2026, with what we now know about how durable B2B relationships actually get built, the case is doing more structural work than the 2014 chapter heading credited.
Three things stand out for sales leaders thinking about their own design. The first is that the supplier’s strategic contribution to the customer’s success — not to the customer’s purchasing process, but to the customer’s actual ability to succeed — is the right unit of analysis for a long-horizon sales relationship. If you cannot articulate what your firm does for the customer beyond the product, the relationship is transactional regardless of what your CRM says about it.
The second is that sales force design has to follow the relationship arc, not fight it. People who are good at acquisition are usually not the same people who are good at long-term consultative work, but the same person can be both at different career stages. Designing the firm’s role architecture to allow that transition — rather than forcing a handover — is one of the highest-leverage decisions in sales leadership. MLP made that decision forty years ago. Most B2B suppliers still have not.
The third is the hardest. A capability-building model only works if the firm is prepared to carry the cost of building the capability before the value flows back. MLP carries that cost through the tied-agent commission model and the branch manager’s co-financing of training. Most B2B suppliers carry it as a vague aspiration in a slide deck. The principle is portable. The financial discipline behind it usually is not.
Thirty years on
The MLP case has aged differently from the Bekaert cases I have re-read recently. The Bekaert work was structurally smart and locally invented — one team in carding, one team in concrete, both doing pieces of what we now call Value Engineering without a vocabulary for the discipline as a whole. MLP, by contrast, designed a whole-firm model around a single conviction and ran that conviction for half a century. The conviction is the one the current framework keeps coming back to: the supplier that makes the customer more successful captures more value than the supplier that makes a better product.
Thirty years on, the conviction is not new. What has changed is the cost of the alternative. In a 2026 economy where buyers are managing risk rather than optimising price, where the buying coalition has expanded from one signature to twelve, and where AI has commoditised the supplier’s information advantage, the firms that still know how to be structurally indispensable to their customers’ success are doing what MLP figured out in the 1970s. Most B2B suppliers will not import MLP’s model wholesale. They could not. They should not try. What they can do is read the principle behind it, and ask honestly whether their own model still serves it.
About the Future of Selling research programme. Co-led by Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens (Solvay Brussels School / AMS Antwerp Management School) and Prof. dr. Javier Marcos (Cranfield School of Management). Continuing the work first published in From Selling to Co-Creating (Lemmens, Donaldson and Marcos, 2014), which is the source of the MLP case re-read in this article. The original MLP case study cited in that book was developed by Anderson and Kupp (2008) at ESMT European School of Management and Technology. Companion articles in this series re-read further cases from the 2014 book — CGI on innovation centres as Value Design, and the two Bekaert cases on textile carding and Dramix concrete reinforcement — and more recent interviews at Kaneka, Chevron Phillips Chemicals and Delaware.
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