The B2B revenue risk nobody designed – and nobody owns
The version of revenue risk I see most often doesn't show up on any dashboard. It builds across functions, from decisions that look sensible in isolation, and by the time it's visible in the numbers, the causes are longstanding and pervasive.
Every function in the business is optimised for its own performance. But what actually keeps customers buying from you – nobody designed that. Nobody owns it. And in most manufacturing or industrial technology businesses, nobody is measuring it.
Most of the manufacturers I work with are asking some version of the same question: why is revenue harder than it should be? The business is performing well by every internal measure. And that's precisely the problem.
In 1975, British economist Charles Goodhart observed that when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a useful measure. [3] This notion is just as true more than five decades later.
What rarely gets measured in a manufacturing business is what a customer actually experiences dealing with you end to end.
It doesn't sit on any single team's dashboard, so it doesn't get owned – and what doesn't get owned, doesn't get designed.
Most of the time, when that customer journey is not designed, it just evolves organically.
Where revenue leaks before the first sale
Forrester's 2024 research, drawn from 16,000 B2B buyers, found that 86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process, and 81% of buyers end up dissatisfied with the supplier they ultimately chose. [1]
The disconnect usually lives in what prospects encounter when they try to buy – not in the product itself.
Gartner's 2022 B2B buying data makes a more specific point: buyers are 2.8 times more likely to complete a high–quality deal when the information from a supplier's website and from their sales team is consistent. [2]
Not 20% more likely. 2.8 times.
That's a conversion multiplier with nothing to do with product quality, price, or technical capability – only with what a prospect experiences across every interaction with the company, its people, and its brand.
I had a conversation with a leadership team who couldn't tell me where in their sales process prospects were dropping off. They knew the conversion rate wasn't what they wanted. They couldn't say whether the issue was a technical information gap, a pricing concern, a slow response at a handoff, or something else entirely. They weren't looking for more leads.
They were looking for visibility into a revenue problem they already had.
The signal you're not reading
Customers don't usually go quiet immediately. In the early stages of a problem, they raise it – they flag the friction, follow up on the issue, ask for the change. The silence comes later, after enough of those conversations have gone nowhere.
By the time a key account stops communicating, they've usually already stopped expecting anything to change; they're evaluating alternatives, not waiting for resolution. The relationship still looks intact. The revenue erosion has already started.
What gets removed when efficiency comes first
The pattern I've observed most clearly in manufacturing is what happens when that inertia gets removed – as it does in an acquisition or external investment.
Internal systemisation of service delivery tends to precede acquisition rather than follow it. The efficiency drive comes first. Standardised processes, centralised support, less direct access to account contacts or technical teams. The service experience changes. The relationship layer that previously absorbed friction quietly disappears.
When the acquisition or investment happens, the remaining goodwill and informal access that kept customers close tends to go with it.
What follows looks like post–acquisition churn. What actually happened started earlier, inside the business, as a series of individually reasonable efficiency decisions.
One CEO I spoke with recently told me he now reads internal systemisation in his suppliers as a predictive signal. He'd watched the same pattern play out three times: systemisation, then acquisition, then a deterioration in service that accelerated his evaluation of alternatives.
He described it as a self–fulfilling prophecy – not because the acquisition itself was the problem, but because by the time it happened, the customer experience had already shifted enough that switching felt like the rational move. He didn't wait for the acquisition. He used the systemisation as his trigger.
It’s one person’s observation, but the mechanism it identifies has broader relevance.
If sale is your goal, internal systemisation that improves operational metrics probably makes sense regardless of the CX trade–off. For most manufacturers, though, the efficiency drive isn't about exit – it's about running a tighter operation.
And that's where the risk is less visible: individual functions redesigning their own processes without anyone mapping what those changes mean for the customer. The damage isn't intentional. It happens in the gap between what each team is optimising for and what the customer experiences across all of them.
When the design is deliberate
The manufacturers who don't face this problem made a specific kind of decision. They built their commercial model around what the customer actually needed to run their own business – and the relationship stickiness came from that, rather than being the goal.
A real-world example: A traceability system built around what the customer actually needed – real-time stock visibility that fed into their own planning process – gives both sides something. The customer builds their operations around it - and depending on the product, their sustainability reporting too. The manufacturer gets fewer exceptions to handle and better visibility into how their product moves through the supply chain. Stickiness wasn't the goal - the manufacturer built around what the customer actually needed operationally, not around what was convenient internally.
That kind of advantage is considerably harder to replicate than price or product capability, and it tends to be invisible to competitors until it's well-established.
The map you’re missing
Customer journey mapping is the tool that makes the gap visible before something external forces the issue.
Manufacturers know the underlying logic from the production floor: value stream mapping starts with the customer and works backwards through the process to identify waste and misalignment. The same thinking applied to the commercial relationship reveals where internal design decisions – made for perfectly good internal reasons – are creating friction, confusion, or attrition that nobody intended.
The customer journey in a B2B manufacturing business has two distinct parts. The first is the buying journey – how a prospect moves from identifying a need to signing an agreement. The second is the usage journey: everything that follows. Project delivery, logistics, technical support, invoicing, contract renewal, the conversations in between. Most manufacturers have some visibility over the first. The second is where most relationship value is created or quietly destroyed – and in most manufacturing businesses, it's the part that has never been mapped.
Peer–reviewed research in Industrial Marketing Management (2023) makes the structural point directly: the usage journey spans every function that touches the customer post–sale. No single team owns it, which is exactly why it tends to drift. [8]
Lemon and Verhoef, writing in the Journal of Marketing in 2016 in what has become the foundational paper in this field, [4] argue that delivering a coherent experience across the full journey requires integrating information technology, service operations, logistics, commercial teams, and human resources. No single function is uniquely responsible for it. That's not an observation about poor coordination – it's a structural feature of how customer experience works in complex B2B businesses. The implication is that a CJM tool owned only by marketing or a service team is, by definition, incomplete.
When businesses have applied end–to–end journey design across their commercial processes, the outcomes are documented. McKinsey's case study of a B2B manufacturer that identified three critical journeys – scheduling inquiry, delivery, and quality resolution – and redesigned its processes around them produced a 4% increase in gross profit and an 8% improvement in pre–tax profit. [5] McKinsey's broader B2B research shows journey–led investment reducing customer churn by 10 to 15% and improving win rates by 20 to 40%. [6] The retention economics are plain: recovering the revenue value of one lost customer requires acquiring three new ones. [7]
Where to start
The gap between internal performance and customer experience doesn't close on its own. Left unexamined, it widens – until something external forces the issue.
The diagnostic doesn't require a transformation programme or an outside consultancy to begin. Here are three places any leadership team can look immediately:
Map the buying journey from the customer's end. Take the highest–revenue prospect segment and trace what they actually encounter from first contact to signed agreement – every touchpoint, every information gap, every handoff between internal teams. Ask honestly how much of that was designed, and how much just accumulated.
Find out where pipeline is dropping off. Not the overall conversion rate – the specific stages where qualified prospects go quiet or choose someone else. Without that visibility, the revenue problem is being managed without the information needed to locate it.
Ask project delivery and service teams where customers most often follow up unprompted. Not formal complaints – the calls, the emails, the messages asking for an update that should have come already. That pattern identifies where internal processes are producing customer friction that nobody intended, usually in places nobody would think to look first.
The gaps that show up as revenue problems were inadvertently designed in, not caused by external conditions. The customer journey map doesn't fix them. It tells you where to look.
I work with New Zealand manufacturers navigating exactly these commercial capability questions - particularly companies with strong technical foundations looking to scale. If this resonates, I'd welcome a conversation.
I also send a fortnightly update with commercial insights for manufacturing leaders – sign up here if that's useful.
Sources
Forrester Research. The State of Business Buying, 2024. December 2024. forrester.com
Gartner. B2B Buyer Survey, 2022.gartner.com
Goodhart, C.A.E. (1975). "Problems of Monetary Management: The U.K. Experience." Papers in Monetary Economics, Reserve Bank of Australia.
Lemon, K.N. and Verhoef, P.C. (2016). "Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer Journey." Journal of Marketing, 80(6), pp. 69–96. doi.org/10.1509/jm.15.0420
McKinsey & Company. "Case Study: Building a Customer–Centric B2B Organization." October 2020. mckinsey.com
McKinsey & Company. "Finding the Right Digital Balance in B2B Customer Experience." 2017. mckinsey.com
McKinsey & Company. "Experience–Led Growth: A New Way to Create Value." March 2023. mckinsey.com
Purmonen, A., Jaakkola, E., & Terho, H. (2023). "B2B Customer Journeys: Conceptualization and an Integrative Framework." Industrial Marketing Management, 113, pp. 74–87. doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2023.05.020
