How a consulting firm stopped selling software and started orchestrating change — and what it teaches every B2B supplier about what comes next.
Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens — Future of Selling research programme — May 2026
If you had asked someone in 2010 what an enterprise IT consultant sells, the answer would have been straightforward. They sell expertise in a particular software platform — SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce — and the consulting hours required to implement it. The pitch was a product pitch. The buyer was the CIO. The deal was a fixed-scope project with milestones. The salesperson’s job was to navigate the procurement process, secure the contract, and hand off to delivery.
That model is not gone, but it is increasingly thin. I spent two long research conversations recently with Bart Van Kerkhoven, who runs commercial operations at delaware in Belgium, and what emerged is a sales model that bears almost no resemblance to the picture above. delaware sells transformations, not implementations. Its salespeople are not product experts but what Bart calls Gentil Organisateurs — friendly hosts, in the Club Med tradition, who bring people together and facilitate the work that actually creates value. The customer no longer buys a software project. The customer buys an orchestration of change inside their own organisation. And the supplier who continues to show up with a product pitch is selling to a buyer who has already moved past it.
This article is what those two conversations produced. delaware is one of the clearest illustrations in our research base of what enterprise B2B selling looks like once the old transactional model has stopped working — what we have been calling, in the From Value Selling to Value Engineering research, the move from selling a proposition to engineering a customer’s transformation.
Four pressures, converging at once
Bart was direct about what has changed. Four pressures, none of them new in themselves but all converging at once, have made the old consulting sales model commercially untenable.
The first is that customers can learn online. The information asymmetry that justified the traditional consultant — the consultant knew the software, the customer did not — has eroded. SAP videos, Microsoft documentation, peer LinkedIn posts, and AI-generated implementation guides. Whatever the consultant explained in the first three meetings, the customer can now find it on a Saturday afternoon. This is not the end of B2B sales. It is the end of B2B sales as information transfer. The salesperson who arrives in 2026 with a presentation of features is showing up to a meeting that the customer has already had with themselves.
The second is that cost pressure has come back with force. Bart was honest about the last eighteen months. Whatever sophisticated business case the consulting firm prepared, the buyer in 2025 and the first half of 2026 has tended to decide on cost. He called it the red block — the bottom layer of the case, labelled ROI, the one that, under permacrisis pressure, ends up doing all the work. The other layers — risk reduction, resilience, strategic alignment, people, planet — get discussed but not weighed. Bart is optimistic that 2026 will bring back more sophisticated discussions; we will come back to that tension.
The third is that risk has been pushed back to the supplier. Customers increasingly demand fixed-price commitments at implementation, not just at scope. The vendor is expected to absorb the change-management risk that customers have historically owned. Bart’s answer — a structured bonus-malus model — is one of the most interesting commercial constructs in the interview. The underlying shift is that the customer is no longer purchasing a service. The customer is purchasing an insurance contract against the failure of their own change process.
The fourth is geopolitics. Bart raised — without my prompting — the question of what happens if a Trump administration decides that American software can only be used in America. France has already moved partway down that road, declaring some categories must use French software. Sovereign cloud, regional resilience, dual-stack architectures, and exit plans from vendor lock-in. These were not topics in delaware’s customer conversations two years ago. They are now standard. The CIO who used to buy a single best-of-breed platform now buys an architecture optionality strategy, and the consultant who cannot speak to that strategy is not in the room.
None of these pressures resolves the others. They compound. And they all land on the same consulting sale at the same time, which is why delaware’s response had to be structural rather than tactical.
The Gentil Organisateur — why it is the right image
Bart’s central image for the new sales role is the GO — the friendly host at a Club Med village whose job is not to be the expert in any particular activity but to bring people together, facilitate connections, and create the conditions under which the activities can succeed. The image is precise. The salesperson is not the person who knows the answer. The salesperson is the person who knows who to bring into the room so that the answer can be co-created. The expertise sits with the customer, with the partner ecosystem, with the implementation team. The salesperson’s value is in the orchestration.
This is a substantial reframing. The traditional sales role rewarded mastery of the offering. The new role rewards mastery of the room. The two are not opposed — you still need to know what you are selling — but the centre of gravity has moved. A consultant who knows SAP inside out but cannot get a CEO, a CFO, and a COO to align on what they actually want is, in 2026, a worse salesperson than one who knows SAP less well but can hold that meeting together.
Bart said something else that captures the shift exactly. He noted that the word “sales” itself carries a negative connotation now — that customers, when they hear someone described as a salesperson, mentally categorise that person as someone whose advice should be discounted. delaware actively tries not to call its salespeople salespeople. The relabelling is not cosmetic. It is a recognition that the older role no longer describes what the work actually is.
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 binding logic the research has been documenting at the level of the proposition. Inside a customer’s organisation, a CEO talking about ambition, a CFO talking about ROI, a CIO talking about architecture, and a COO talking about adoption are talking about the same transformation in four mutually incomprehensible languages. They want the same outcome. They cannot agree on how to describe it. The deal stalls — or worse, the deal closes on terms that satisfy one stakeholder and fail another, and the project fails at implementation because the alignment was never real. delaware’s GO sits between these stakeholders and converts the proposition into the vocabulary of each. The Layered Business Case is the artefact that holds the translation together; the GO is the person who actually performs it in the room.
The customer becomes the channel
The mode I found most interesting in the conversations is the one that inverts a default assumption of B2B selling. The traditional model treats each customer as a separate account, and the supplier’s relationships with one customer as orthogonal to its relationships with another. delaware has built an explicit programme — they call it Del20 — that treats their twenty top customers as a single community to be cultivated together. Customers come to delaware to pitch problems. Other customers in the room indicate, via a gamified mechanism with coins, which of those problems they share. Pooled customer budgets, topped up by delaware, fund the co-creation of solutions to the shared problems. delaware is, in this mode, neither selling to the customers nor advising them. delaware is the host.
Bart described one specific dinner where two of his clients — a major bakery group and a major panel-products manufacturer — spent five hours talking about a data transformation one of them had completed with delaware. The other client left having received what Bart called five hours of consulting from another customer, with delaware in the corner facilitating. The economic logic is clean. delaware did not have to deliver five hours of its own consultants’ time. Customers believe other customers far more readily than they believe consultants. The first customer’s experience served as a more credible case study than any deck delaware could have produced.
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 deeper insight is structural. In an industry where every competitor is selling broadly similar capabilities — delaware is competing with the other large consultancies that all implement SAP and Microsoft — what differentiates one supplier from another is not the technology. The technology is identical. It is the ecosystem that the supplier has built around the technology. Del20 is an asset that competing consultancies cannot replicate without building their own customer community, which takes years and cannot be acquired. The coalition-builder mode produces a competitive moat that the product alone cannot.
The supplier as insurance institution
The third mode is the most commercially consequential of the four, because it is the mode in which delaware’s pricing gets set. Bart’s framing was striking:
We are, in the end, an insurance institution for our customers. They want guarantees. They want to push the risk of the change process back to us. We cannot accept all of it, but we have to design contractual mechanisms that share it credibly.
Bart Van Kerkhoven, delaware Belgium
The mechanism delaware uses is what Bart called the bonus-malus model. The pricing structure is not fixed-price — delaware wants as little fixed-price as possible — but it is also not pure time-and-materials. Instead, the contract attaches bonuses for outperformance and capped malus penalties for underperformance against agreed milestones. delaware accepts a reduction in unit margin in exchange for shared upside if the project delivers ahead of plan. The client accepts a slightly higher base rate in exchange for a cap on overruns and a partial transfer of the implementation risk to the supplier. The mechanism is transparent — both sides see how the rate moves with outcomes — and it converts the contractual relationship from adversarial to aligned. This is the Risk and Resilience dimension from the white paper made operational in the structure of the contract.
The other side of this mode is the one Bart raised more reluctantly. delaware now qualifies out of opportunities it would have taken five years ago. The trigger is solvency and ethical risk. The story he told was about a fashion group that went bankrupt two weeks after delaware completed a multi-million-euro project — payment had come in on time, but the firm had been weeks from collapse during the implementation, with delaware essentially holding the ERP system together for an organisation that was already failing. He used a memorable image:
You do not want to be the orchestra leader on the Titanic. The day we pull the plug on an ERP project, we kill the customer’s ability to invoice. We are last man standing in the operational chain. That is too much exposure for us to take on a customer whose balance sheet we have not understood.
Bart Van Kerkhoven, delaware Belgium
The consequence is that delaware now runs much stricter pre-qualification — balance-sheet analysis, cash-flow checks, shareholder-structure review — before accepting an opportunity. They also include toxic-client criteria: working conditions, ethical exposure, reputational risk. Some opportunities are declined explicitly. Risk reduction in this market now runs in both directions. The customer pushes risk back to the supplier; the supplier pushes some categories of risk back by declining to participate at all. Pre-qualification, historically a question of sales efficiency, has become a question of insurance underwriting.
Sales as a team sport — the unbundled role
delaware has 850 customers in Belgium, which is a long tail far beyond what any traditional account-management structure can serve commercially. Bart’s solution is to differentiate the sales function explicitly. He has a customer-success team whose explicit, non-negotiable charter is to be non-commercial. The KPI is NPS and retention. It is not pipeline. It is not bookings. The role is to be — Bart’s image — “everyone’s friend.” The person calls each customer in the long tail twice a year, just to check in, asks how things are going.
The economic logic is unobvious until you sit with it. A commercial salesperson calling a customer twice a year produces resistance — the customer hears a sales pitch coming. A non-commercial customer-success person calling twice a year produces relationship. When something happens at the customer six months later — a new pain point, a regulatory change, a new project — the customer thinks of delaware not because delaware sold to them, but because delaware was already in the room as a trusted presence. The role is, in effect, an insurance policy on the long tail. The cost of maintaining the relationships is low. The optionality value of being top-of-mind when a real opportunity arrives is high.
Bart was clear that this only works because delaware has rigorously differentiated the commercial roles. The customer-success person cannot also be the closer; the closer cannot also be the customer-success person; the GO who orchestrates the system-level transformation is a third profile again. He said it as directly as anyone in our research base:
The days when one salesperson could do everything are over. Sales is no longer an individual sport. It is a team sport. You have to differentiate — otherwise you get a constant mix of these roles and customers hate that. They want to know which conversation they are in.
Bart Van Kerkhoven, delaware Belgium
The honest qualifier — when the red block does all the work
There is a temptation, in documenting a case like this, to claim that the upper layers of the business case carry the deal. Bart made it impossible to do that, and the article is stronger for it. He was direct that, across the past eighteen months of macroeconomic pressure, the upper layers have not in fact carried the deal. The decision has continued to come down to the bottom layer — economic ROI, the red block — and the upper layers have ended up as cherry on the cake.
All this is true. I see it back in every conversation. And then it gets decided on cost. The upper layers were part of the process, but they were swept off the table at the moment the decision was made. That has been the rhythm of the last eighteen months.
Bart Van Kerkhoven, delaware Belgium
I pushed back gently. My observation, looking across the research base, is that suppliers who claim the upper layers were ignored are often suppliers whose upper layers were not articulated well enough. The case material we look at in workshops often shows real risk-reduction value or real strategic alignment value, but expressed in language that does not survive a procurement conversation. The fault is not always the buyer’s. Bart conceded the point and gave it back to me more sharply: it is both. Buyers under macro stress fall back on price even when the upper layers are articulated well. And suppliers who have not articulated them well give the buyer no choice but to fall back on price.
The position the article should land on is this. The Layered Business Case is necessary but not sufficient. The supplier who has not built it is selling on a one-dimensional case in a market that has become five-dimensional, and they will lose earlier. The supplier who has built it well will not always win on the upper layers, but they will be in the conversation where the upper layers can shift the outcome when conditions allow. Bart’s optimism that 2026 will bring those conditions back is a working hypothesis. The suppliers who will benefit from it if it is correct are the ones who built the capability during the eighteen months when the red block was doing all the work.
The human renaissance — what AI has not touched
We closed the second interview on AI. Bart’s position is one I have now heard from multiple practitioners across the research programme. AI commoditises knowledge. The information that used to be the consultant’s expertise can now be retrieved by the customer in seconds. What this does is not eliminate the consultant. It strips away the part of the consultant’s job that was actually low-value, and leaves the part that always created the real value — and that AI cannot touch.
You can hire a personal trainer or ask AI to write you a workout plan. AI’s plan is probably better. The personal trainer still works better. Why? Because people are motivated by other people, not by AI. The salesperson of tomorrow is the personal trainer.
Bart Van Kerkhoven, delaware Belgium
Bart took this in a direction I had not expected. He talked about the necessity of being physically present at customers — out of Teams calls, out of email chains, in a car driving to a meeting with a road map and a customer brief. He talked about empathy as the differentiating skill, and about what salespeople in the 1950s and 1960s would have called the likeability factor — the personal trust and likability that makes a customer prefer to do business with one supplier over another even when the offerings are equivalent. He was clear that he sometimes hesitates to say this in engineering and consulting contexts because the likeability factor is dismissed as old sales, the relic of a relationship-driven era that competent modern selling has supposedly transcended. He was equally clear that the dismissal is wrong:
If you wait long enough, everything comes back. The likeability factor is not old sales. Old sales was friends with nothing to say. New sales is friends who also have something to say — friends with the systemic credibility behind the friendship.
Bart Van Kerkhoven, delaware Belgium
This is the Trend 4 dynamic from the white paper made personal. AI commoditises information. What is left is presence, judgement, translation between stakeholders who do not share a frame, and the building of trust that makes the customer want to do business with you even when the offerings are equivalent. The eight hundred and fifty customers delaware serves through its long-tail function are not being managed by AI. They are being managed by people whose KPI is the relationship. The Del20 dinners are not virtual. They are dinners. The GO is not a software interface. The GO is a person who can read a room. AI is the thing that makes the human role economically possible at scale, by automating away the administrative weight that used to consume the consultant’s day. It is not the thing that replaces the human role.
Manufactured locally — and what the pattern adds up to
Bart mentioned one detail in passing that I want to close on, because it surprised me. The manufactured-locally argument — the case that Belgian consultants working to Belgian standards, with the local resilience that follows, is genuinely worth more than offshore alternatives — has become a real differentiator for delaware on the Belgian market against Indian and other offshore competitors. The pendulum movement, he called it — the pendulum is swinging back. Customers who five years ago would have routed work offshore on cost grounds are now routing it onshore on regional-resilience and trust grounds. The geopolitical pressure on European business is, paradoxically, producing a commercial premium for local supply that European producers had thought was gone.
This is the same logic that Chevron Phillips is operating in chemicals with its Beringen plant. It is the same logic Kaneka is operating in polymers when it offers supply guarantees European competitors cannot match. The four pressures of permacrisis do not only constrain the supplier; they also revalue the parts of the supplier’s footprint that competitors offshored to lower-cost regions. delaware is harvesting this. Many of its competitors are not.
Stepping back, what delaware is doing is the same shape of work I have described in the Kaneka and Chevron Phillips articles — a deliberate concentration of commercial capability on a small number of activities performed at depth, and a deliberate shedding of everything that does not directly serve the strategic core. The activities delaware is investing in are GO-style orchestration, the Del20 customer community, the bonus-malus risk-sharing contract, the long-tail customer-success function. The activities delaware is moving away from are the ones any consultant can perform — generic implementation, software training, transactional support. What is left is small, focused, and senior. It is the only part of the commercial organisation that will earn its place in the next decade of enterprise B2B.
The conclusion that holds across all three cases — Kaneka from the buyer’s seat, Chevron Phillips from the supplier’s reorganisation, delaware from the consulting firm’s restructure — is the same. Cost has stopped being the binding constraint. Risk has taken its place. The supplier who absorbs risk wins. The supplier who orchestrates the room wins. The supplier who builds the upper layers of the business case wins on the deals where conditions allow. The supplier who waits for stability to return loses, because the stability is not returning. The firms that recognise this and act on it coherently will operate in a different conversation than the ones who do not. delaware is one of those firms. So is the part of European industrial B2B that is quietly rebuilding the commercial model rather than tightening the existing one.
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 and Marcos, 2014) and developed since across hundreds of interviews and structured workshops with B2B commercial leaders across European industry. To follow new outputs, visit futureofselling.eu.
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