Five strategies to succeed during the B2B sales revolution

Last year we conducted our first State of Sales Survey and discovered there was one topic, above all others, that sales leaders wanted to know more about.

That was how to deal with evolving customer needs and changing buyer behaviour.

It is easy to see why. The rules of business to business (B2B) sales are continuously being rewritten.

Gone are the days when salespeople were the primary gatekeepers of product and pricing information about complex products.

Today’s buyers are armed with virtually unlimited access to information. They complete 60 to 70 per cent of the customer journey before they even engage with a sales rep.

By the time they enter the negotiation, they already hold your pricing data, competitor comparisons, detailed product specifications, and sometimes even your cost structure.

This is more akin to business to consumer (B2C) sales, where product and pricing information is freely available – and even advertised - for individual customers to compare.

The change poses a threat for sales leaders, compromising their ability to shape and optimise the customer journey.

However, it also presents an opportunity – provided they are willing to fundamentally rethink their approach.

After all, business to consumer (B2C) sales has traditionally made it easy for individual customers to compare product and price information.

Here are five key lessons that you can immediately start to employ in your business to have you navigate today’s evolving B2B landscape.

These insights have been distilled from three of our favourite academic articles of the last five years, each of which was published in the world’s top marketing journals.

1 Turn transparency into a weapon

Let’s be brutally honest, many sales leaders still operated with an outdated “information asymmetry” mindset.

But in today’s competitive climate, they are wasting time and energy trying to protect pricing and cost information that customers can probably find anyway.

It may also be counterproductive, as Yashar Atefi et al reveal in their paper, Open negotiation: The back-end benefits of salespeople’s transparency in the front end.

Their data showed that proactive transparency, particularly early in the relationship, actually drives better commercial outcomes.

They found that early cost disclosure led to approximately $1,400 more in backend profits per customer.

Why is that the case? Because verifiable transparency builds trust, and trust drive profit.

The sooner you share that information, the better. Reactive or late disclosure of your pricing structure does not yield the same benefits.

That means it’s time to stop playing defence when it comes to information and start playing offence.

2 Reinvent your sales role

As we have already hinted, if your salespeople are still primarily functioning as “information providers” they are increasingly irrelevant.

Research shows that 94 per cent of buyers now extensively research products and prices online before they begin engaging with sales teams.

Four in every five customers go even further, only contacting salespeople once they have already shortlisted their options.

What does this mean for sales leaders? Stop training your people to be walking brochures.

Instead, start developing them as insight providers and complexity navigators. Your value doesn’t lie in telling customers what they can easily find using Google, it’s in helping them to make sense of the overwhelming information landscape they have to traverse in order to make a decision.

3 Match your control systems to your channels

The evidence is crystal clear, there is no one size fits all solution when it comes to managing multi-channel sales systems.

Data collected by Christian Homburg et al for their study, Design and governance of multi-channel sales systems, shows that formal rules and procedures enhance performance in indirect channels, where companies sell their products through distributors, wholesalers, or retailers.

However, they actually damage performance in direct channels where companies deal with the end customers themselves.

Similarly, centralised decision-making boosts direct channel performance, but undermines direct channel results.

The lesson here is that sales leaders should stop implementing blanket governance approaches. Instead, they should start tailoring their control systems to your channel strategy.

4 Leverage the power of verification

Here’s a fascinating finding: when customers can independently verify your claims, it doesn’t make you weaker. On the contrary, it makes your stronger.

Research shows that verifiable claims build significantly more trust than unverifiable ones, even if those claims are about sensitive information like costs.

Smart sales organisations are redesigning their processes to actively encourage customer verification rather than fearing it. It may be counter-intuitive, but it works.

5 Win the backend battle

One of the key challenges that sales leaders face is that increased price transparency is compressing frontend margins across a wide range of industries.

Data published by Michael Ahearne et al in their paper, The future of buyer-seller interactions, shows that the real profit opportunities increasingly lie in backend revenue streams such as services, maintenance, and product add-ons.

Crucially, your success in capturing this backend value relies heavily on the trust you build during the initial sale.

This has significant implications for how your structure and incentivise your sales operations.

Stop compensating your sales teams based purely on frontend revenue and start rewarding them for creating backend value.

The evidence is unequivocal: the old playbook is dead. Sales organisations that cling to traditional approaches based on information control and product-pushing are facing extinction.

The winners in this new environment will be those who embrace transparency, reinvent their value proposition, and build their strategies around trust-based value creation. It is time to adapt or die.

This article is adapted from a research insights briefing paper published by the Sales Excellence Hub.

The Sales Excellence Hub will host the impact event, AI and human sales: The Chief Revenue Officer’s performance playbook, at the Scale Space in White City, London, on 9 September, 2025.

Further reading:

Why sales teams need to modernise and understand data analytics

Could your Christmas gifts change your behaviour?

Three ways to nudge customers to buy green products

Why marketing leadership needs to be agile and customer-focused

The Sales Excellence Hub was launched to strengthen connections between sales practice and research to improve the sales profession in the UK. It was founded by Professor Nick Lee and Dr Roland Kassemeier, of Warwick Business School, in partnership with the Institute of Sales Professionals and technology partner Akeron.

Nick Lee is Professor of Marketing and Assistant Dean for Research Culture and Environment. He is Co-Founder of the Sales Excellence Hub. He teaches Sales Excellence and Marketing on the Global Online MBA and Global Online MBA (London). He also teaches Sales Excellence on the Full-time MBA, Executive MBA, and Executive MBA (London).

Roland Kassemeier is Associate Professor of Marketing and Co-Founder of the Sales Excellence Hub. He teaches Sales Excellence on the Executive MBA and Full-time MBA and Customer Analytics on MSc Business with Marketing and MSc Business with Operations Management.