Selling as co-creation

In the late 2000s the conditions of B2B selling shifted under several pressures at once. E-commerce was eroding traditional roles. The internet had ended information asymmetry — customers no longer needed salespeople as “talking brochures.” Globalisation was intensifying competition and shrinking margins. Companies began questioning whether the cost of a sales organisation could still be justified, and which value, exactly, salespeople were adding.

The research response of that period was that salespeople had to move from selling to customers toward selling with them. To generate new ideas, suppliers needed to involve their customers more deeply in shaping what would be sold next, and in some cases to build ecosystems of partners with whom they could co-create value. The book From Selling to Co-Creating (2014) documented the early findings; the 2018 Harvard Business Review article Entrepreneurial Selling developed the implications for sales leadership.

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Three forms of co-creation

Strategic co-creation

For large account managers, the move was upstream — from problem-solving with the procurement team toward goal-setting with the executive team. The salesperson’s role was no longer to identify pains and propose solutions, but to help the customer articulate where the business was going, and to co-build the strategies and visions for getting there. Salomon and Callebaut were among the cases that illustrated this shift most clearly.

Experience co-creation

Influenced by Vargo and Lusch’s work on value-in-use, salespeople were increasingly involved in helping customers adopt and implement what they had bought. The point of sale was no longer the end of the relationship; it was the start. The aim shifted from selling value to ensuring the customer captured value. This gave rise to new roles, most visibly the customer success manager. In some cases, the supplier took over an entire customer process to deliver the end experience.

Product co-creation

In some cases, co-creation took the form of joint product development — the supplier and customer designing the next product together, sharing technical knowledge in both directions. SAP and Barco’s 2011 collaboration on the control room of the future, built on the then-new SAP HANA database, is one of the clearest examples in the research. CGI’s inspiration centres for joint use-case discovery with technology customers fit the same pattern. Actemium extended this further into ecosystem co-creation.

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Reconsidering the value proposition of sales itself

A central claim of the co-creation wave was that for sales to remain relevant, the value proposition of sales itself had to be reconsidered. Sales had to become more like a service — helping customers co-create their outcomes, strategies, and even future products. We drew on the analogy of the large consulting firms, which have no traditional sales department in the classic sense yet sell continuously through their consulting activities. Some of our research suggested that salespeople, like consultants, could one day charge customers directly for the value-added services they provided.

We also observed a familiar failure pattern. Many companies began calling their sales strategies “co-creation” without changing the underlying value proposition. Customers eventually realised that no real co-creation was happening, and trust eroded. The same pattern had appeared in the 2000s, when companies relabelled their products as “solutions” while continuing to sell exactly as before. Renaming the work is not the same as redesigning it.

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Publications from this period

• From Selling to Co-Creating · book, 2014. The principal output of the first wave. Documents the three forms of co-creation through interviews and case studies from B2B firms.
• From Selling to Co-Creating · TEDx talk, 2014. Régis introduces the central research question and the co-creation framing. This is the 2014 articulation; the research has continued to develop since.
• Entrepreneurial Selling · Harvard Business Review article, 2018. Extends the co-creation framing into a treatment of how salespeople need to behave more like entrepreneurs — identifying opportunities, building partnerships, taking commercial initiative.

A fuller listing is on the publications page.

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B2B firms in the research

Salomon, SAP and Barco, Actemium, CGI, Callebaut, Bekaert, and others. Each case sits in one or more of the three forms of co-creation. Some are documented in the book and the HBR article; some are written up on this site; others are still being prepared.

All cases →

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Co-creation has not been replaced. It has been absorbed.

The drivers of change shifted after 2020. Sustainability, geopolitics, regulation, and the financial repricing of risk have changed what suppliers are now being asked to argue, evidence, and prove. The current wave of the research — published under the working title Value Engineering — is the response. But it does not replace the co-creation framing of the first wave. It builds on it.

Discovery and solution design are still co-created with the customer. Stakeholder alignment still happens through conversation, not through pitch. The Layered Business Case is, at its heart, an instrument for co-creating a defensible decision across a coalition of stakeholders. The co-creation logic remains foundational; what has changed is the dimensions across which value now has to be argued, and the structural devices needed to argue it.