The B2B Growth Divide: What Sets Winners Apart

As inflation tapered in 2024, many business-to-business (B2B) companies globally posted a strong year, with 54% exceeding their revenue growth targets and 14% achieving their targets. For 2025, companies expect 1.3 times revenue growth on average compared with 2024.

But beneath the averages, it’s worth exploring which characteristics separate outperforming from underperforming firms, as detailed in Bain & Company’s survey of roughly 1,300 senior commercial executives of major companies in 18 industries worldwide. We define winners as companies that achieved revenue growth above the upper quartile for their sector and region in 2024 and that demonstrated positive gross margin growth. We define laggards as companies that saw their revenue growth fall below the lower quartile for their industry and region in 2024.

Winners were able to deliver 2 times the average revenue growth for their respective industries in 2024, and they are even more confident of doing so in 2025.

At the other end of the spectrum, about one-third of respondents failed to deliver on their targets, so they have an opportunity to step up their execution. Overall, respondents said that the biggest challenges to their growth are improving salesforce productivity, managing pricing pressures, and modernizing and adopting go-to-market technologies.

Winners and laggards part ways when citing their biggest concerns in 2025: For winners, it’s using artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning effectively while laggards cite the challenges of navigating market uncertainty and managing pricing pressures.

Despite the varied industries and regions surveyed, we see common patterns among the top performers. They have built a growth agenda around four key themes that help the organizations achieve their ambitious growth goals.

They’re already harnessing AI to achieve business outcomes. The best companies have moved beyond pilots to scale up and realize meaningful value from AI, using it to achieve growth, pricing, and productivity targets. One B2B software executive surveyed calls AI a “force multiplier” for the go-to-market strategy, while a wholesale banker uses AI to improve sales plays and customer segmentation.

However, many companies still struggle to achieve sustained benefits from AI. Some lack the necessary data and technology stack foundations. Others fall short in effectively integrating AI into existing or reimagined business processes, which limits adoption. Winners, by contrast, build on a solid technology foundation because they tend to dedicate more of their budget to keep the foundations up to date.

They accelerate growth with outstanding sales play execution. We see a large gap in go-to-market execution, with 82% of companies saying that they run sales plays but only 21% actually realizing the full value of sales plays. Companies that ran a genuine Sales Play System^SM—one with targeted, repeatable go-to-market motions—were more likely to achieve their revenue targets in 2024 and posted 2.2 times the average growth rates vs. those that did not run such sales plays.

They expand profit margin through intelligent pricing. In 2024, more companies were able to pass through cost increases in their pricing as inflation stabilized. Looking ahead, many worry that their current strategies to raise prices may no longer hold up in a lower-inflation environment. Winning firms have increasingly turned to technology that enables more dynamic pricing capable of adapting to fast-changing conditions. They do so in a surgical way, segmenting customers to be more precise and strategic in pricing actions.

They invest to raise productivity over the long haul. Winners are raising their sales and marketing spending for 2025 to achieve greater growth and a higher return on investments. Specifically, they have focused investments on AI and automation, frontline employee coaching, customer segmentation, and marketing optimization. They also set multiyear targets to ensure that they can sustain productivity gains over time.

As tariffs tighten their grip on global commerce and more nations implement new protectionist policies in 2025, many B2B companies will have to adapt their growth strategies. Holding fast to the themes analyzed here—namely, AI-infused operations on a solid data and technology foundation, focused sales plays, dynamic pricing, and investments in long-term productivity—will allow commercial teams to succeed in the face of such seismic shifts.