A second 2014 Bekaert case — set in concrete reinforcement rather than textile carding — quietly invented what the 2026 framework now treats as a structural value dimension.
Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens — Future of Selling research programme — May 2026
There is a Bekaert case in our 2014 book that I overlooked at the time. It sits a hundred pages after the more famous co-creation story about textile carding, and it describes a much smaller, much more practical commercial move that I now think was ahead of where the research itself was. The supplier sold a technically superior product into a market that should have bought it on the merits. The customer did not buy on the merits. So the supplier took on the customer’s risk.
In 2014, that move read as a clever sales aid. In 2026, with European industry in the middle of a structural shift in how buyers manage uncertainty, it reads as something the framework now puts at the centre of the proposition. This article re-reads the case in that light, with the same caveat that applied to its companion piece: the 2014 Bekaert team did this once, locally, in one product line. The decade-long question that followed was how a supplier can teach the same discipline across the whole sales organisation.
The product and the buyer
Bekaert manufactures a steel-fibre concrete reinforcement product called Dramix. It replaces the conventional wire mesh that contractors have used for more than a century to reinforce concrete in floors, tunnels, and industrial slabs. The product is technically superior on most dimensions that matter to the building’s owner. Faster to install, more uniform in performance, fewer cracks over the structure’s lifetime. It is also more expensive per unit than mesh, and unfamiliar to the contractor who will actually pour the concrete on site.
The sales work in this market has a structure that is worth noticing. Most of it is upstream. Bekaert’s people spend their time with architects and engineering firms, getting Dramix specified into the project before the contractor is even appointed. Sales people educate prescribers. They support the engineering company with the technical calculations. They run tests to prove the product’s performance against conventional mesh. By the time the project goes out to tender, Dramix is in the specification.
That is half the deal. The other half is the contractor.
Why the better product was not enough
Once Dramix is specified, the contractor still has to be persuaded to deploy it. And the contractor is the wrong stakeholder to convert with a performance argument. The performance argument belongs to the building’s owner, who will not be on site when the concrete is poured. The contractor’s question is different. If the new method fails on a structural project, the cost of the failure dwarfs the saving on the material. A construction company can lose its reputation, its licence, or its business on a structural failure. The contractor is not buying reinforcement. The contractor is buying a guarantee that the building will stand.
This is the gap. The owner sees performance and wants the better product. The contractor sees risk and prefers the method they have used for a century. The two stakeholders are on the same project, looking at the same product, and they want different things from it. A proposition that lands the owner cannot land the contractor. A proposition that lands the contractor will not by itself land the owner. The supplier is selling into a buying coalition whose members do not share the same definition of value.
Most B2B suppliers in this position retreat to one of the two stakeholders. They sell harder to the prescribers who already believe them, and they hope the contractor will follow. Or they cut the price for the contractor, which erodes the very margin the better product was supposed to earn. Bekaert, in the 2014 case, did neither.
The structural move
The supplier attached an insurance product to Dramix. If the new method failed on the contractor’s site, Bekaert absorbed the initial cost of the failure. The supplier took on the contractor’s exposure. The contractor’s question — what if this goes wrong — was answered before it was asked. The performance argument was no longer competing against the risk argument; the risk argument had been moved off the contractor’s balance sheet and onto Bekaert’s.
The perceived risk of using this new method may be too high for a building constructor to take. For that reason Bekaert also has a special insurance solution, which allows them to take over the initial risk.
From Selling to Co-Creating, 2014, on the Dramix case
Read in 2014, this looked like a smart sales aid. The insurance was a way of getting reluctant contractors over the line on the first deployment, with the expectation that experience of the product would do the rest of the work on subsequent projects. The book describes it that way, and the description was accurate as far as it went.
Read in 2026, the same move is doing something much more structural. The supplier is not lowering the contractor’s price. The supplier is changing what the contractor is buying. Dramix without the insurance is reinforcement at a premium. Dramix with the insurance is reinforcement plus the supplier’s balance sheet standing behind the first deployment. Those are different products. They are different value propositions. And the second one has a dimension the first one does not.
Risk and Resilience as a structural dimension
The framework we use today organises customer value across five dimensions. ROI for the economic return. Risk and Resilience for the exposure the supplier absorbs. Strategic for the customer’s market position. People for the workforce. Planet for environmental and regulatory impact. Of these five, the one most consistently missing from B2B propositions — and most consistently demanded by buyers — is Risk and Resilience.
The reason it is missing has a history. The just-in-time supply chain that European industry optimised through the 2000s and 2010s treated risk as a residual cost to be squeezed. Brexit, the Ever Given, COVID, the war in Ukraine, the Iran conflict — the accumulated shocks of the past decade have produced a buyer who is no longer optimising for price within a stable supply context. The buyer is managing risk within a permanently unstable one. Trend 1 in our current framework names this shift: From Sustainability to Risk Management. The trend is not about whether sustainability matters. It is about how environmental and operational risk now travels under the same heading on the procurement file.
The buyer has already moved. The question is whether the supplier has moved with them. Suppliers who position their offer as absorbing exposure — guaranteeing prices, guaranteeing supply, taking on outcome risk, replacing capabilities the customer can no longer maintain in-house — are in a different conversation than competitors positioning on cost. The Dramix insurance is one of the earliest examples we have on record of a B2B supplier doing exactly this. The 2014 case did not have the vocabulary for it. The supplier did not need the vocabulary in order to deploy the move.
The honest qualifier
I want to mark clearly what the case is not. Bekaert in 2014 was not running a unified risk-absorption discipline across the firm. The insurance was attached to one product line, in one market, because the contractor’s risk profile made it commercially necessary. The carding case in the same book describes a quite different set of moves in a quite different market, with no insurance product anywhere in the picture. The construction team and the textile team were doing different things, in different ways, for reasons that made sense locally.
That is the honest qualifier. The Dramix move was structurally important, but it was structurally important only inside one corner of the business. The synthesis that the current framework asks for — Risk and Resilience as a named dimension that every account team can consider when assembling a Layered Business Case — was not yet there. Building that synthesis, across the whole sales organisation, is what the next decade of the research has been about.
Most suppliers I work with today are still in the same position the 2014 Bekaert team was in. Risk-absorption moves are being invented locally, on individual deals, by individual sales executives who have noticed that the deal will not close without one. The moves work. They are also fragile, because they depend on the individual rather than on a discipline. The work is to lift them into the standard architecture of how every proposition gets built.
What this teaches sales leaders now
If you are running a B2B sales organisation today, the Dramix case is worth reading for three reasons. The first is that the better product does not always close the deal — and the reason is not that the buyer disagrees with the value. The reason is that the value and the risk sit on different stakeholders’ desks, and a proposition that addresses only one of those desks will fail at the other.
The second is that price reduction is not the only answer to a buyer’s risk. It is, in fact, often the worst answer, because it erodes the margin that funded the better product in the first place. Absorbing the risk directly — through guarantees, insurance, outcome-based pricing, or capability replacement — leaves the price intact and addresses the actual blocker. The supplier ends up with a more defensible deal at a higher margin than the discount path would have produced.
The third is that a risk-absorption move only works if the supplier can carry it. Bekaert could insure the first Dramix deployment because the failure rate was low enough, and the firm’s balance sheet was strong enough, that the expected cost of the insurance was small relative to the deal it unlocked. A supplier who attaches a guarantee to a product whose failure rate they have not measured is not absorbing risk. They are exposing themselves to it. The discipline is to know the difference.
Twelve years on
The Dramix case has not aged the way I expected it to. When we wrote the 2014 book, the construction story sat in the background of the more interesting co-creation story about textile carding. Twelve years on, with the trend that organises so much of the current research running across every conversation we have with European suppliers, the construction story has moved forward. It is one of the earliest examples we have of a supplier treating customer risk as a dimension of the proposition rather than an obstacle to it.
The carding case taught us that value gets created jointly with the customer. The Dramix case taught us, quietly, that value gets captured by absorbing what the customer cannot. Both lessons were in the same book. The decade since has been about learning to teach them together.
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 Dramix case re-read in this article. A companion piece in this series re-reads the other Bekaert case in the same book — the textile carding co-creation case — through the current framework. Further companion articles re-read more recent interviews at Kaneka, Chevron Phillips Chemicals and Delaware.
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