The post-COVID business landscape has not just shifted. It has shattered.
Supply shocks, energy instability, geopolitical turbulence, and structural volatility have exposed something many commercial teams were reluctant to admit: traditional sales models were built on the assumption of a relatively stable baseline. In many sectors, that baseline no longer exists. And once stability disappears, the old sales logic of features, benefits, and projected returns starts to fail.
The business case itself has become a casualty of this volatility. In a world where supply chains can break overnight and price quotes for steel, concrete, or energy may only be valid for 48 hours, a spreadsheet promising 15 percent ROI is no longer automatically persuasive. Sometimes it sounds detached from the reality the customer is actually trying to manage.
That raises what I believe is one of the defining questions for modern B2B sales: why does a strong ROI no longer guarantee a closed deal?
My answer is that we are moving into a new logic of systemic value co-creation. In my latest research, I describe this as a shift away from selling a product or even a solution in isolation. Instead, it is about jointly creating measurable outcomes across an interconnected system of people, processes, partners, technologies, and constraints. Success is no longer about telling a stronger story. It is about engineering value through the lens of outcomes, risk, and impact.
From Theoretical Gains to Concrete Resilience
Traditional value selling rested on a simple equation: benefits versus costs.
But in a world of systemic fragility, buyers have traded their appetite for theoretical gains for a much stronger concern with reduced exposure. The question is no longer just, “How much will this improve performance?” It is increasingly, “How does this help us stay operational when things go wrong?”
That shift fits with what Professor Javier Marcos of Cranfield University has argued for years. As planning horizons collapse and assumptions around stable forecasts and fixed budgets weaken, customers increasingly prioritise resilience over abstract business cases. In other words, the buyer is no longer just buying improvement. The buyer is buying continuity under disruption.
I have also seen this reflected in the interviews behind this article. The changing nature of the sales conversation at organisations such as delaware and SAP captures the shift well. According to Bart Van Kerkhoven, clients are no longer primarily asking, “What is the ROI of this implementation?” They are asking a tougher question: “How will you help us achieve the outcomes we need while reducing risk across our organisation?”
That is a profound change.
Value is no longer judged only by the gains a seller can promise. It is increasingly judged by the confidence a seller can create that the solution will deliver results without introducing new vulnerabilities.
Across my interviews, one theme returned again and again: value is increasingly judged through the lens of risk and resilience.
Selling the Transformation, Not the Tool
This is why the era of the point solution is fading.
Many modern B2B deals are no longer isolated purchases. They are transformation programmes. They touch workflows, suppliers, logistics, systems, data interfaces, and internal decision-making. Customers are not simply buying a tool. They are trying to make a broader system work better.
That changes the salesperson’s role.
The traditional product expert is too narrow for this environment. What is needed now is a kind of system orchestrator: someone who can connect the offer to organisational change, stakeholder alignment, implementation risk, and operational reality.
The Komatsu example illustrates this well. Its Product-as-a-Service logic, including fleet-capacity-style models, reflects a broader commercial shift from CAPEX-heavy ownership to operational stability and flexibility. The value is no longer just the machine. The value lies in absorbing uncertainty, smoothing utilisation risk, and giving the customer a more resilient planning model.
I see the same logic in the move toward paid diagnostic engagements at Randstad Digital. Instead of waiting passively for an RFP, the seller helps define the business question before the buying process has fully crystallised. That is no longer classic solution selling. It is early-stage co-creation of the transformation path itself.
This also connects directly to Mads Winter’s thinking on Buyer Enablement. The salesperson’s role is increasingly to help customers understand how to buy in complex situations: clarifying trade-offs, sequencing decisions, lowering confusion, and making commitment possible.
Sustainability as the New Financial Gravity
Another shift that sales organisations can no longer ignore is the movement from sustainability as a branding topic to sustainability as a financial and strategic necessity.
The move from “doing less harm” to regeneration is no longer just moral language. It is becoming commercial language. The question is no longer only whether a company is efficient or compliant, but whether it contributes to the resilience and renewal of the ecosystem on which its future business depends.
That is why I find the work of Philip Kotler, Christian Sarkar, and Jef Teugels increasingly useful. Their work through the Regenerative Marketing Institute and the Regeneration Journal moves beyond narrow sustainability language and asks a tougher question: does a commercial system merely reduce harm, or does it actively contribute to the resilience and renewal of the wider ecosystem? That is exactly the direction in which I believe modern sales and marketing need to evolve.
But this shift is also being enforced by the financial sector. The ING Belgium case shows how ESG has become a genuine risk-pricing mechanism. Banks are increasingly weaving ESG exposure into risk assessment, financing conditions, and cost of capital. Once ESG becomes part of risk pricing, it stops being a communications issue and becomes part of the customer’s financial reality.
For me, that creates at least three levels of commercial maturity:
Defensive: managing ESG compliance, reporting, and audit exposure.
Resilient: redesigning supply, circularity, and dependencies to reduce disruption risk.
Regenerative: creating solutions that improve the wider system over time and generate net-positive effects rather than merely less damage.
Sales teams that cannot speak credibly across those levels will increasingly struggle to stay relevant.
The AI Paradox: Human Trust as Infrastructure
At the same time, AI is rewriting the commercial landscape.
Product knowledge is being commoditised. Comparisons, plans, recommendations, and content can now be generated at speed. The salesperson’s old role as information gatekeeper is disappearing.
But that does not make the human role less important.
AI can generate options, compare specifications, and summarise alternatives. What it cannot do is create commitment inside a fractured buying group. It cannot align competing stakeholders. It cannot read the emotional and political dynamics behind a risky decision. And it cannot replace the trust people still need before they make a leap.
That is why I believe we are facing a paradox: as information becomes infinite, sensemaking becomes the true differentiator.
In complex buying environments, the salesperson’s role is increasingly to reduce cognitive load, structure the decision, and create trust infrastructure around the purchase. This is exactly why personal credibility matters so much. As Eiso Bleeker has argued, personal branding becomes trust infrastructure: credibility attaches to the advisor and often travels faster than corporate positioning.
This is not a soft side issue. It is becoming a hard commercial capability.
The Unicorn Skillset: Mastering Ambiguity
All of this points to a different kind of commercial professional.
The systemic era requires what I would call an adaptive, entrepreneurial consultant: someone with high ambiguity tolerance. That means the ability to guide customers through volatility, regulatory uncertainty, market fragmentation, and internal complexity without relying on a fixed roadmap.
That stands in sharp contrast with the more traditional technical profile, what some organisations would recognise as the classic “blue profile.” Technical expertise still matters, of course. But in environments of rapid change, technical certainty can easily become a trap if it prevents people from acting while the situation is still unfolding.
I have seen this in cases such as Oleon, where technically strong profiles can fall into a firefighting reflex when faced with continuous volatility. They keep searching for certain answers in an uncertain world, and that can stall the sales process.
By contrast, leaders such as Jonathan Berte of Robovision represent a different logic. Rather than selling one rigid answer, they move toward more adaptive capabilities, what Jonathan has described as more of a “LEGO box” of workflows than a fixed package. That mindset fits perfectly with the broader move toward co-creation and flexible commercial design.
Conclusion: From Persuasion to Engineering
Modern B2B sales is no longer mainly a discipline of persuasion.
It is increasingly a discipline of value engineering across systems.
Success now depends on the ability to align outcomes, reduce systemic uncertainty, and integrate resilience and regenerative impact into the heart of every deal. The winning salesperson is no longer the one who argues most forcefully for the product. It is the one who helps the customer make sense of complexity, manage risk, and move toward a more stable future.
That is why the traditional sales pitch increasingly sounds like noise.
The future belongs to those who can provide something rarer: a credible signal of stability.
And that leads to the blunt question at the heart of this discussion:
Is your sales team genuinely reducing your customer’s risk, or are they just another source of uncertainty in an already volatile world?
