The Commercial World Has Changed. Have You?
Can I ask you a question? Think about your most important customer. Not your easiest customer. Not necessarily your biggest. The customer you really don't want to lose. Got them? Now...
How confident are they in you? Not how strong the relationship is. Not whether your last meeting went well. Not whether they take your calls. How much confidence do they really have in you and your business? And how do you know?
If I asked you to score that confidence out of ten... What would you give yourself? Eight? Nine? Perhaps even ten?
Now here's a harder question. What would they give you? Would it be the same number? And if it wasn't... Would you know why?
Think about your last few customer meetings. You've probably prepared well. You know your numbers.
You've talked about growth. Maybe you've presented innovation. Perhaps you've discussed pricing, promotional plans or the next twelve months. The meeting finishes. Everyone shakes hands. "Thanks. Good meeting." You walk away feeling reasonably positive.
But what does "good meeting" actually tell you? Did they believe your recommendation? Did they see genuine value? Did the other people influencing the decision agree? Did you make their business easier? Did their confidence in you increase?
Or... Did something happen in that room that quietly reduced it? Would you know?
Because customers don't usually tell us that. They don't finish the meeting by saying:
"Gary, I had 8.4 out of 10 confidence in you when you arrived, but you're down to 7.6 now."
They smile. They thank us. They move on. And so do we. Until something happens.
A promotion you expected doesn't materialise. A range review becomes more difficult. Your innovation doesn't get the support you expected. A competitor gets an opportunity. A conversation that used to happen with you... doesn't.
And suddenly we're asking: What changed?
But perhaps that's the wrong question. Perhaps we should be asking: When did it change?
Because those are two very different things.
McKinsey recently went out and spoke to nearly 4,000 B2B decision-makers across 13 countries. They wanted to understand how the way organisations buy is changing. What they discovered was fascinating.
I'll come back to that. But first... There's another change we need to think about.
Who actually decides whether your customer does more business with you? Is it really the person sitting opposite you? Or is it also... Procurement? Finance? Supply chain? Operations? Category? Digital? Senior leadership? People you've perhaps never met? People who weren't in your presentation? People who don't know you personally? People for whom that strong relationship you've spent years building carries considerably less weight?
So here's the uncomfortable question:
If your relationship disappeared from the equation tomorrow, would the commercial value you create be strong enough to speak for itself?
And there's another layer. We're surrounded by more commercial information than we've ever had. More dashboards. More customer data. More reporting. More analytics. More CRM. More market information. More AI.
So, shouldn't we be making better commercial decisions? Shouldn't customers understand our value more clearly? Shouldn't we understand them better? Shouldn't relationships be getting stronger?
And yet...
Why does winning business sometimes feel less predictable? Why can a relationship feel strong... right up until the moment it apparently isn't?
That's the part that started bothering me. Because confidence rarely disappears in one dramatic moment. It doesn't normally collapse.
It leaks.
One interaction at a time. One commitment that wasn't quite delivered. One recommendation that served us more than the customer. One piece of information that wasn't consistent. One person in our organisation saying something different from another.
One meeting where we talked about our priorities... rather than theirs. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that triggers an alarm.
Just... a little less confidence. Then a little less. Then a little less. Until eventually... we see the commercial consequence.
And here's where this gets really interesting. Remember that McKinsey research? Their conclusion was remarkably simple: The baseline for competing in B2B markets has shifted.
Their 2026 Global B2B Pulse found buyers now use an average of ten channels across the purchasing journey. And one of the leading reasons customers switch suppliers?
Inconsistent information across teams.
Think about that. Not necessarily price. Not necessarily product. Inconsistency.
Source: McKinsey — 2026 Global B2B Pulse
Accenture looked at the changing buying environment from another direction. They found 91% of B2B buyers use advanced AI in the buying process. And 85% say advanced AI has made it easier to understand and compare supplier content. The customer isn't waiting for us to bring them information anymore. They can interrogate it themselves. Compare it themselves. Challenge it themselves. And increasingly... do that before we've even entered the conversation.
Source: Accenture — B2B Customer Growth
Then Edelman and LinkedIn looked at who is actually influencing B2B buying decisions. More than 40% of B2B deals stall because of internal misalignment within buying groups. And 71% of these so-called hidden buyers say they have little or no interaction with sales.
Source: Edelman & LinkedIn — 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report
Different research. Different organisations. Different questions. But look at what's happening.
The customer has changed. The buying process has changed. The information available has changed. The people influencing the decision have changed.
And AI is accelerating all of it. Which brings us back to the question we started with.
Has our commercial capability changed at the same speed?
But there was one piece of research that really stopped me. Deloitte surveyed more than 1,000 executives from large global organisations operating complex supply chains. They compared how much trust executives thought customers had in their organisations... with what customers actually reported.
And they found a gap. Not 2%. Not 5%. 20%.
On average, executives overestimated customer trust in their supply-chain capability and performance by 20%. Deloitte called them potential "trust blind spots."
Source: Deloitte — Is Your Supply Chain Trustworthy?
And that made me think. What if we have the same blind spot commercially? What if we believe we're trusted... more than we actually are? What if we believe we're adding value... but the customer sees activity? What if we believe we're consistent... but different parts of our business are telling the customer different things? What if we believe we understand their strategy... but they don't see that understanding reflected in our recommendations? What if we believe we're a strategic partner... but they still see us as a supplier?
And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all: How would we know?
I've spent more than 30 years working on both sides of that commercial table. I've been the supplier trying to win. I've worked inside retail organisations making commercial decisions. I've led teams. I've negotiated. I've won business. And I've lost it.
And I know that feeling. You walk out of a meeting believing it went well. You think the relationship is strong. You believe you've created value. Then something happens that tells you... perhaps the customer didn't see it quite the same way.
I've been there. And I suspect many commercial leaders have too.
When I started putting all of this together, something struck me. Look at everything we measure in commercial business. Sales. Margin. Market share. Distribution. Pipeline. Forecast accuracy. Promotional performance. Availability. Inventory. Customer profitability.
We measure the outcomes relentlessly. But what about something that often exists before those outcomes?
Customer confidence.
How clearly does the customer understand what we bring? How consistently do we deliver? How much are we genuinely contributing to their business? And does the experience they receive from our whole organisation actually join up?
Because if confidence influences commercial decisions... and if confidence can erode without the supplier knowing... why wouldn't we want to understand it before the commercial result tells us?
And this isn't simply about being liked. Forrester's global B2B research compared organisations buyers trust with those they don't. Buyers were twice as likely to recommend trusted companies and nearly twice as likely to pay a premium to continue working with them.
Source: Forrester — The Trust Advantage for B2B Firms
Trust has commercial value. Which means customer confidence isn't a soft measure. It can influence preference. Recommendation. Retention. Value. Growth.
And that is ultimately why I created the Commercial Confidence Diagnostic.
Not because commercial teams need another assessment. They don't. And not because I believe a score somehow gives us all the answers. It doesn't.
I created it because I wanted to make something that is often invisible... visible.
To create a structured way for a commercial team to stop and ask:
How might our customers actually be experiencing us?
And to look at that through four dimensions.
Clarity. Do we genuinely understand what matters to the customer—and are our priorities clear?
Consistency. Do our actions repeatedly match what we say?
Contribution. Can the customer see how we're helping make their business better? And...
Coherence. Do our people, functions, messages and actions come together as one joined-up customer experience?
Because perhaps the opportunity isn't to become better at selling. Perhaps it's to become better at giving customers reasons to have confidence in us.
So come back to the customer I asked you to think about at the very beginning. The one you really don't want to lose. Imagine I could sit down with them tomorrow. Confidentially. No salesperson in the room. No relationship to protect. No need for them to be polite.
And I asked:
How clear is this supplier? How consistent are they? How much do they genuinely contribute to your business? How joined-up is your experience of dealing with them?
What would they say?
More importantly... would their answers match yours?
Maybe they would. That's valuable to know. But what if they didn't? What if there was one gap you couldn't see? One behaviour slowly weakening confidence? One part of your commercial approach that your customer experiences very differently from the way you intended?
Wouldn't you rather know now... than discover it in your next range review? Your next negotiation? Your next lost opportunity? Or when somebody else gets the business?
That's the invitation behind the Commercial Confidence Diagnostic.
Not: "Come and prove how good you are."
But: "Come and find out."
See what's working. See what isn't. See where perception and reality may differ. And identify where one deliberate change could strengthen the confidence your customers have in you.
Because you can't improve what you can't see. And you certainly can't protect something you don't know you're losing.
The commercial world has changed. The way customers research has changed. The way they compare has changed. The people influencing decisions have changed. The technology supporting those decisions has changed.
And the expectations customers place on suppliers have changed. Relationships still matter. Perhaps more than ever. But relationships alone won't be enough. So I'll leave you with the same question I started with. Think about that customer.
How confident are they in you? And this time... don't answer for them.
Ask yourself how you actually know. Because the commercial world has changed. Have you?
Gary Good
Founder — LeaderLegacy