What a 2014 wire-spike case from Bekaert still teaches B2B sales leaders about how value is co-created — and where co-creation, on its own, stops short.
Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens — Future of Selling research programme — May 2026
Every research programme has a small set of cases it keeps coming back to. For ours, one of them is a Belgian wire manufacturer that, in 2014, taught us most of what we then thought there was to know about how B2B suppliers build value with their customers rather than for them. Re-read through the framework we use today, the same case is still right about almost everything it claimed — and quietly silent on the one thing the next decade of research has been about.
The case became a chapter in From Selling to Co-Creating, the book Bill Donaldson, Javier Marcos and I published that year. It became a slide in workshops. It became a story I have now told in front of more than a thousand sales leaders across European industry. What follows is the case as it was told to us by Hendrik Thooft, Lieven Somers, Michel Vandevelde, Filip Verhoeve and Koen Cremmery at Bekaert — and what, twelve years on, I now see in it that I did not see then.
The wire and the spikes
Bekaert is a global leader in metallic wire-based materials. The case I want to come back to sits inside a small corner of the business: the textile industry. In a textile carding line, raw fibre is passed through cylinders covered in fine metallic spikes. The spikes break the fibre bundle apart and align the strands into something the weaving machine can handle. The carding cylinder is the bottleneck of the entire line, which runs continuously and stops only for maintenance. The wire and spikes that wrap the cylinder are a tiny fraction of the capital cost of the machine, but they govern almost everything that matters: throughput, product quality, dust generation, downtime.
At some point in the late 2000s, Bekaert acquired a company that had — without anyone immediately realising it — a university licence on a new geometric design for the spikes. The design was unproven, more complex to manufacture, and entirely theoretical. To turn the licence into a product, Bekaert needed a textile manufacturer who would let them test the new spike on a real production line. This is not a small ask. A carding line is one of the customer’s most valuable assets, and the test was, by definition, a test.
Why one customer said yes
The sales force found a customer who agreed. Reading the case notes today, the reason that customer agreed jumps off the page in a way I do not think it did in 2014. It was not the technology. It was not the patent. It was that Bekaert’s sales executive on the account had, over years, built a relationship deep enough that the customer was willing to take the operational risk of letting them try.
Our sales people practically live at the customer in order to ensure the process runs fine.
Bekaert executive, original 2014 interview
That sentence does a lot of work. It describes a model of B2B selling in which the supplier’s role is not to arrive periodically with an offer, but to be embedded in the customer’s daily operating reality. The sales executive at the carding customer was, in practice, an extension of the customer’s own production team. The patent was the trigger. The relationship was what made the trigger usable.
The test ran. Throughput on the line went up by twenty per cent. The new geometry produced less dust, which lowered maintenance costs. Because the fibres held more precisely, they could be made thinner — a material saving the customer had not even asked for and that Bekaert’s engineers had not predicted. The customer found the second-order benefits. Bekaert found the first-order one. On the back of that test, the supplier co-developed further geometries for other end-use applications. A patent that had sat dormant became a product line.
What the 2014 reading captured — and still captures
In From Selling to Co-Creating, we used this case to argue for four principles that suppliers had to internalise if they wanted to do this kind of work systematically rather than by accident. Focus on the customer’s ends, not on your means. Turn the customer into an active partner. Build value propositions on the supplier’s organisational capabilities, not just on its products. And drive learning through dialogue and relationships, rather than through transactions.
All four still hold. The carding case is still one of the cleanest illustrations I know of all four operating in the same engagement. The customer was not a buyer of spikes; the customer was a co-producer of a production system in which the spikes were a component. The two organisations’ capabilities — Bekaert’s metallurgy and patent, the customer’s production line and process-monitoring skill — were complementary, and the value emerged from their combination. The relationship was what made the dialogue possible. The dialogue was what made the learning possible. The learning was what made the next set of products possible.
That argument was correct. It is, I now think, also incomplete.
What the 2014 reading could not yet see
The case stops at the moment the new spike geometries become commercial products. It does not follow the deal into the customer’s procurement process. It does not ask how the value created during the test was structured in the eventual purchasing decision. It does not describe how Bekaert’s other sales teams, working with other customers, could replicate the carding result without an external trigger like a dormant patent.
In 2026, those are the questions that distinguish suppliers who consistently capture the value of co-creation from suppliers who create it and then watch it leak away in the contract negotiation. The twenty per cent throughput gain, the dust reduction, the thinner fibres — these are concrete operational benefits, sitting across at least three of the five value dimensions we now use: ROI through throughput, Risk and Resilience through lower maintenance variability, Strategic through a product the customer’s own customers could not source elsewhere. But there is no evidence in the case that any of these dimensions was written into the procurement file as a defended line item. The case treats the test result as commercial proof. The current framework would treat it as the raw material that still needs to be assembled into a Layered Business Case before the customer’s procurement committee can defend the decision to a CFO.
The honest qualifier in the case is the one we wrote into the closing pages of the 2014 book and then spent a decade trying to answer. The Bekaert carding work was triggered by an event the firm did not engineer. Strong relationships then converted the trigger into a test. The structural question — how a supplier without a free patent in its drawer can build the same outcome by design rather than by luck — is the question the carding case raises and does not answer.
Living at the customer, twelve years on
I want to be careful here. It would be easy to write this article as if the 2014 carding case were a charming early-stage example that the 2026 framework now supersedes. That is not what I think. The case is still the cleanest demonstration I know of how a salesperson’s depth of presence inside a customer’s operation is the precondition for the work that follows. No business case template, no methodology, no AI-assisted account research replaces what that Bekaert executive built by being there.
AI will not replace what happens at a human level. You must have boots on the ground. You must sit with your customer and look them in the eyes.
Kaneka procurement leaders, 2026 — saying the same thing
I quote the Kaneka leaders on purpose. Twelve years apart, in different industries, in different countries, the same sentence appears in the field notes. The dimension of B2B selling that AI has not commoditised — and probably cannot — is the one the Bekaert carding case was already centred on in 2014. Presence. Trust. Translation between functions that do not share a frame. The salesperson who lives at the customer is doing work that has become more valuable, not less, as everything around it has been automated.
What the 2026 framework adds is a structure for what that salesperson does with what they learn. Living at the customer is what allows the value to be discovered. Structuring the discovery into a business case the customer’s procurement committee can defend is what allows the value to be captured. Bekaert, in the carding case, did the first half by instinct and the second half by luck. In a permacrisis economy where buyers are managing risk rather than optimising price, and where coalitions of twelve are signing what one signature used to sign, neither instinct nor luck will be enough. The work is to teach the discipline that puts the two halves together. That is the work the research programme is still doing. And the Bekaert wire-and-spikes case, twelve years on, is still one of the clearest places it began.
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 Bekaert carding case re-read in this article. A companion piece in this series re-reads the second Bekaert case in the same book — the Dramix construction case — through the current framework’s risk-absorption lens. Further companion articles re-read more recent interviews at Kaneka, Chevron Phillips Chemicals and Delaware.
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