Most B2B leadership teams I talk to are working harder than they should be on commercial performance.
Pipeline is not converting at the rate it should. Deals are slipping in ways that are hard to predict. Customers are renewing but expanding less. Forecasts are getting harder to defend, not easier. The CRO blames marketing. Marketing points at sales. Customer success watches the data and asks why nobody warned them. Each function is doing its job. The commercial result is still worse than it should be.
I do not think this is a people problem. I think it is a structural one, and most B2B businesses have inherited a structure that was built for a commercial environment that no longer exists.
This article is the start of a longer body of thinking we have published over the past few months. It sets out the structural argument, organises the twelve articles that extend it, and explains why we built Sales Engine the way we did.
The short version: marketing, sales and customer success are one commercial system in the customer’s experience, whether the business is organised that way or not. The leadership teams that organise around that reality are pulling ahead. The leadership teams that have not, are starting to feel the cost.
Three shifts have happened at the same time, and the combined effect has made the old way of running commercial functions structurally unsustainable.
The buyer has changed faster than commercial operating models. Forrester’s 2026 research shows 94% of B2B buyers now use generative AI in their purchasing process. Typical buying decisions involve 13 internal stakeholders. Buyers expect proof before commitment in a way they did not even three years ago. They use AI to validate vendor claims independently before committing. They check what current customers actually experience, not just what marketing says they should experience. The commercial behaviours that drove performance five years ago do not reliably drive performance now.
The value creation pressure has increased. For PE-backed businesses especially, multiple expansion is gone, cheap leverage is gone, and cost-out is largely done. Sales performance now carries more of the return burden than at any point in the last twenty years. The slack that used to be available when commercial performance underperformed no longer exists.
The cost of misalignment has become visible to buyers. When buyers can validate vendor claims against current customers in seconds, the gap between what marketing promises, what sales says, and what customer success can deliver shows up in real time. Misalignment that used to be invisible to the buyer is now a primary reason buyers walk away.
These three shifts compound. The buyer has changed. The economics have tightened. And the buyer can now see the structural inconsistencies that used to hide inside the business. The result is that the same commercial operating model that worked in 2019 is now producing measurably worse outcomes in 2026, and most leadership teams cannot quite explain why.
The reason is structural.
Three functions optimised against their own metrics will never produce one connected commercial result.
Marketing measures MQLs and pipeline contribution. Sales measures bookings and quota attainment. Customer success measures retention and NPS. Each set of metrics is internally coherent. Each team can hit theirs without the business hitting its overall commercial number. The metrics are designed to make each function look good in its own quarterly review. They are not designed to make the functions work together.
The handovers between functions are designed as transactions rather than joined-up commercial conversations. A lead becomes an opportunity. An opportunity becomes a deal. A deal becomes a delivery project. Each transition is a handoff in which one function passes the customer to the next, and the information that should travel with the customer often does not.
The tools reinforce the silos. Marketing automation lives separately from CRM. CRM lives separately from customer success platforms. Leadership teams ask for a single commercial view and get three reports stitched together.
The result is that the business cannot see itself as a commercial system.
Only as three functions producing three sets of outputs that the leadership team has to mentally integrate. In the customer’s experience, those three functions are one continuous relationship. In the business’s experience, they are three separate workstreams. That gap is where the revenue leaks.
Forrester’s research consistently shows that B2B organisations with poor alignment between marketing, sales and customer success lose more than ten percent of annual revenue to friction, dropped handovers and missed opportunities. Tightly aligned organisations generate substantially more revenue from the same marketing investment, with industry research often citing more than two times the contribution.
In the businesses we work with, the cost shows up in five recognisable places. Pipeline that does not convert at the expected rate. Deals that close on terms the business cannot deliver. Customer success carrying revenue risk no one named. Churn that is treated as a customer success problem rather than a system problem. And forecast accuracy that suffers because the functions tell different stories.
For PE-backed businesses, where commercial growth has to carry more of the investment thesis than it used to, ten to twenty percent of annual revenue is the difference between meeting and missing the value creation plan.
The economics no longer allow structural misalignment to be tolerated as a cost of doing business.
Across the cluster of articles below, our team has set out the structural argument from several angles. Each article addresses a specific symptom of the same underlying problem. Together they form a coherent commercial operating philosophy.
The starting point. What the buyer environment now looks like, why the old methodologies are breaking, and why the tooling category is still solving the wrong version of the problem.
The structural argument set out in full, and the operational failures that follow from it. Lucy’s article on the structural reason marketing, sales and customer success keep failing each other is the central piece here.
The PE-specific argument. Multiple expansion is gone. Cheap leverage is gone. Cost-out is largely done. Commercial performance now carries more of the return burden than at any point in the last twenty years, and the structural shift has implications across diligence, integration, portfolio methodology and value creation.
We built Sales Engine to address the commercial system as a system, not one function at a time.
The Commercial Performance Engine spans marketing, sales, and customer success because the customer experiences them as one. We are not a sales consultancy with adjacent capability in marketing and customer success. The connected commercial system is the proposition.
Most engagements start with the Commercial Performance Diagnostic: a forensic view of where the commercial system is working, where it is breaking down, and where the functional silos are costing revenue. From there, we shape the right combination of capability around the problem. Where leadership teams need senior commercial capability in place, we provide fractional CMOs, CROs, VPs of Sales and commercial directors. Where the work is broader, we run integrated growth programmes that take ownership of the commercial system end-to-end. When the business is ready, we support the permanent commercial hires the next phase of growth requires.
Underneath every engagement is CORD: our methodology built for the AI buying era. Collaborate, Outcomes, Refine, Deliver. CORD connects marketing, sales and customer success from the first conversation, with the customer inside the room. Three threads, woven into a single commercial thread that runs from the first marketing touch to the renewal conversation three years later.
The work is operational, not theoretical. The team is built from senior operators who have run the functions they now advise on. The methodology is built for the buyer environment that exists, not the one that used to.
If commercial growth is becoming harder to repeat than it should be, the natural starting point is the Commercial Performance Diagnostic. It gives leadership teams a clear, prioritised view of where the commercial system is strong, where it is fragile, and what needs to change first.
If you would prefer to read more first, Lucy Alligan’s piece on the structural reason marketing, sales and customer success keep failing each other is the central article to read. For PE-specific leadership teams, why sales now carries more of PE value creation is the right entry point.
The commercial system is one system in the customer’s experience, whether your business is organised that way or not.
The work is in building it that way before the cost of not doing so becomes the biggest line item on the board paper.
Steve Robinson is CEO of Sales Engine.
New to Sales Engine? Begin with the Commercial Performance Diagnostic.
