The research
Sixteen years of research into how B2B selling is changing
The Future of Selling research programme began in 2009. The question that started it remains the question that drives it today.
How do B2B salespeople continue to add value for their customers?
The question was prompted by a clear shift in the late 2000s. The internet had collapsed information asymmetry. Customers no longer needed salespeople as “talking brochures.” E-commerce was eroding traditional sales roles. Companies were beginning to ask whether the cost of their sales organisations could still be justified. ING in the Netherlands, in the depths of the financial crisis, asked us how a bank could continue to sell when the value of advice itself was in question.
The research began as a collaboration between TIAS Business School in the Netherlands and the Sales Management Association in the Netherlands. It quickly grew into a broader international project when Prof. dr. Javier Marcos at Cranfield School of Management joined as co-author. Together we have conducted interviews with B2B firms across Europe and beyond, sustained over more than a decade and a half.
Research method
How the research is done
The empirical work is interview-based. In each interview, four anchor questions structure the conversation; the rest is allowed to develop from there.
- What are the main trends you have experienced or observed in your market over the last five to ten years?
- What are the main changes in customer behaviour you have experienced or observed over the last five to ten years?
- How has your value proposition changed over the last five to ten years?
- How has your sales organisation changed over the last five to ten years?
These questions are based on Churchill’s 1977 sales force effectiveness model. In that model, market trends, customer behaviour, and the products and services a sales force sells are largely outside the direct control of salespeople — yet they have a significant impact on sales performance and effectiveness. The four questions force the interviewee to describe what they are experiencing in each of those external dimensions, and then to describe whether their internal sales organisation has adapted to match.
A recurring observation
The pattern that keeps surfacing
One observation has come up consistently across both waves of the research, across industries, and across countries. Interviewees describe many changes in their markets, in their customers, and in their value propositions. They describe very few changes in their sales organisations.
Companies see the changes happening around them. Their strategies, products, and value propositions adapt. But the sales organisation — the people who actually meet customers, structure deals, and carry the proposition into the world — tends to evolve more slowly than everything else. The gap is the research programme’s recurring finding. It is also the reason the work continues: each new driver of change creates new pressure on a sales function that is, almost everywhere, still organised for the conditions of fifteen or twenty years ago.
Two waves of research
From co-creation to value engineering
The same research question has produced two distinct waves of response, because the drivers of change shifted between them.
2009–2018: the co-creation wave
The drivers were globalisation, e-commerce, and an intensifying need for innovation in saturated markets. Suppliers needed to involve their customers more deeply in shaping what would be sold next. The research documented three forms of co-creation — strategic, experience, and product — through cases including Salomon, SAP/Barco, Actemium, CGI, Callebaut, and Bekaert. Outputs from this period include the book From Selling to Co-Creating (2014), the TEDx talk of the same year, and the 2018 Harvard Business Review article Entrepreneurial Selling.
2022–present: the value engineering wave
The research restarted in 2022 after the disruptions of COVID. New drivers had emerged and were compounding: sustainability pressure, geopolitical instability, tightening regulation, the technological capacity to measure environmental and social impact, and a financial system that had begun pricing in the kinds of risk it once ignored. A catalyst for restarting the work was the 2023 project with ING and Solvay Business School on selling sustainability — in a striking symmetry, ING had also been one of the original triggers of the research in 2009. Co-creation remains foundational in this wave, but is now nested inside a broader response: a multi-dimensional value framework, the Layered Business Case as a structural device, and Systemic Value Selling as the operational method.
Aim of the research
What the research is for
The aim is practical. To develop new value-creation and selling frameworks that help B2B salespeople continue to perform and remain relevant in a changing business environment. The frameworks are tested in workshops, applied in client engagements, and refined through the next round of interviews. The site is where the working outputs of this process are published — case studies, field notes, working papers, and the tools that emerge from them.
Future Of Selling 