The distance between having a documented commercial process and having one operationally alive is one of the most predictive gaps for growth in industrial B2B. The distinction matters because most executive committees believe they are in the first group when, operationally, they are in the second.
Bain published in 2025 its commercial excellence study with a figure that warrants attention. 82 per cent of analysed companies declare executing formal sales plays, that is, structured sequences of commercial activity designed to move opportunities through the funnel. Only 21 per cent extract the full potential value of that execution. Those that do extract it grow 2.2 times more than the median of the sector.
The asymmetry between declaration and execution is not unknown. What is distinctive is the magnitude of its impact. A company that actually executes what it says it executes grows at twice the sectoral median. The difference is not explained by better product, better market or better team. It is explained by executive discipline in the daily operation of the commercial process.
A second figure from the same study identifies the origin of the problem. 70 per cent of companies fail to integrate their sales plays with the CRM or with their revenue technology. The operational consequence is that the commercial manual lives in training presentations, while the daily system the sales rep uses records something else. When manual and system fall out of alignment, the system wins, because that is where performance is measured and remuneration is calculated.
The structural pattern in mid-sized industrial companies is recognisable. Commercial leadership designs a process. The general manager approves it. Marketing reflects it in templates. Internal training teaches it to the team. And yet, in daily operation, the sales rep keeps closing as before, because the CRM does not require documenting the new process stages, incentives do not reward compliance and management does not audit execution.
The reverse, observed in companies that do extract value from their sales plays, requires three simultaneous conditions. The commercial process is integrated into the CRM with mandatory stages and required fields to advance. Sales-team remuneration incorporates process compliance, not only outcome. Commercial leadership audits the quality of execution weekly, not only the volume of the pipeline.
For general management, the implication is organisational. The transformation of the commercial process is not a project of the commercial area. It is a leadership project requiring coordination between sales, IT, human resources and finance. Without that coordination, the manual is updated periodically and the daily system remains intact.
The standard objection is that tightening process discipline reduces the sales rep's flexibility and, with it, their capacity to adapt to specific customer situations. The objection conflates two planes. Discipline applies to the opportunity-management process, not to the conversation with the customer. The sales rep continues to adapt their discourse. What they cannot adapt is the internal documentation or the progress reporting, which are the levers of commercial governance.
A second implication concerns team rotation. Imposing discipline on an existing commercial process generates tension with those who benefit from current informality. Some departures, voluntary or otherwise, usually accompany the transition. Anticipating that tension and managing it is part of the cost of transformation, not its unexpected side-effect.
The double growth that separates companies with live sales plays from those that only have them documented is one of the available share levers with the best effort-to-return ratio. And one of the least addressed in most sectoral strategic plans.