If you want more organic growth, focus less on the final steps of the deal and more on the full customer journey. That’s the message from the 1,125 commercial leaders who responded to our latest global cross-industry Commercial Excellence survey. Organizations with the fastest revenue growth and strongest margins—the “winners”—run a repeatable system across the journey, from presale through renewal.
Many organizations still don’t operate this way. For those that do, the payoff is material: Companies that execute four or more programmatic sales play best practices grow revenue up to 1.9 times faster than their peers (see Figure 1). And when it comes to winning a new customer, consistency matters.
Figure 1
Organizations executing successful sales plays grow revenue up to 1.9 times faster
Source: Bain Commercial Excellence Longitudinal Survey, January 2026 (n=1,125)
The decisive moments happen earlier than most teams think
Many companies concentrate energy where value is realized—late-stage negotiation—while underinvesting in the earlier steps that create value. In the survey, lagging organizations pointed to pricing negotiation as the decisive moment to win new customers. Winners focused much earlier, citing value-creation levers like customer experience and digital support (see Figure 2).
Figure 2
Winners are more likely to have a consistent sales narrative and to recognize the importance of early customer touchpoints—like digital experience—while laggards focus on negotiations late in the process
Note: Respondents selected value creation and realization touchpoints as a top-three factor
Source: Bain Commercial Excellence Longitudinal Survey, January 2026 (n=1,125)
When asked for the biggest barrier to clearly differentiating their value proposition, 49% of survey respondents cited core product or service differentiation.
Brand perception was most commonly chosen as the touchpoint with the greatest influence on winning, retaining, or expanding customers —ahead of price, fulfillment, and even sales rep responsiveness and relationship management (see Figure 3).
Figure 3
Winning new customers requires shaping perception early and reinforcing it through consistent end-to-end execution
Source: Bain Commercial Excellence Longitudinal Survey, January 2026 (n=1,125)
With generative AI and large language models increasingly mediating customer research—often eliminating clicks altogether—buyers are forming impressions earlier, and differently, than before, making early influence increasingly complex for marketers. Brand is back but harder than ever to win, requiring companies to invest in discovery, narrative, and presence well before the first sales interaction.
What winners do differently to capture new customers
1. Recognize that brand perception matters
It’s frustrating for a sales rep to start every cycle at the ground floor, explaining what the company does and rebuilding credibility. It's too late to wait until price negotiations to sharpen the value proposition. A buyer’s conviction about value forms much earlier.
Strong brand perception reduces “prove-it” work and lets sales teams move faster to value, boosting productivity. Winners treat the quality and clarity of the value proposition and brand narrative as operating requirements—clear from the start and reinforced across the journey.
The implication for CEOs and boards is that when you pursue new customers, brand isn’t just a marketing metric. It also increases sales productivity and speed to closing.
2. Replace instinct with structured, data-driven prioritization
One of the most avoidable mistakes in sales happens before the first meeting takes place: when the company selects whom to pursue.
Nearly one in five laggards has no formal model for prioritizing accounts, relying on legacy relationships and sales input (see Figure 4). Relationship-led prioritization depends on individual reps’ perception of what is important and can be inconsistent. Only 6% of winners use that approach. Instead, the vast majority of winners use a structured, data-supported approach to account prioritization.
In our survey, data-supported models using firmographics or spend-based approaches (such as total addressable market or share of market) are more common among winners (94%) than laggards (81%).
Figure 4
Rather than rely on individual rep judgment and instinct, winners take a deliberate, data-driven approach to prioritizing accounts
Source: Bain Commercial Excellence Longitudinal Survey, January 2026 (n=1,125)
To make structured prioritization usable at scale, leading companies build a single source of truth that includes
total addressable spend (TAS) at the customer or product level;
propensity-to-buy information based on historical sales performance; and
real-time intent and behavioral signals that indicate whether a customer is active in the market.
The goal is an aligned, account-level view of upside, built on reliable data and using AI to improve accuracy and spot opportunities. Done well, this helps teams focus on the highest-value accounts, improve productivity, and raise revenue per customer.
3. Build a Sales Play SystemSM and run it with discipline
The greater the number of smart sales tools a company deploys, the stronger its results. But coordination is critical: Lagging companies cited misalignment between sales and marketing as a top barrier to spotting and capitalizing on customer buying signals. And our research shows that marketing, sales, and product teams work closely together in high-growth companies. A Sales Play SystemSM reinforces this coordination, functioning as a repeatable, data-driven operating system that aligns teams to pursue high-value opportunities, streamlining sales and accelerating measurable commercial results.
In our survey, revenue growth rises when companies deploy one or more sales play best practices, climbing 1.2 times when one is deployed, to 1.4 times with two, 1.5 times with three, and 1.9 times for companies adopting four or more best practices.
Key components of a strong Sales Play System include:
Strategic approach to selecting the right sales plays to prioritize based on real-time feedback. Ahead of a major operational restructuring, a global manufacturer needed a more systematic way to deliver sustainable growth to stakeholders. Over reliant on repeat business and hampered by weak forecasting and ad hoc coaching, the company lacked a consistent engine for generating opportunities.
The turnaround began with disciplined sales play prioritization—scoring plays based on readiness, value, and time to impact— alongside sales and marketing capacity. Using a quantitative scorecard, the company quickly focused resources on the highest-return plays and unlocked millions in new sales.
Data-driven identification of the right target customers based on their likelihood to buy and total addressable spend. A B2B distributor struggling to deploy sales capacity effectively built a comprehensive, account-level view of its customer universe, integrating third-party data to estimate total addressable spend; likelihood to buy; and opportunity type by product, region, and channel. By focusing sales teams on the highest-return opportunities and tailoring outreach accordingly, pilot regions increased incremental revenue by 20%, identified more than $250 million in near-term opportunity, and achieved positive ROI within six weeks.
Sales narratives anchored in a clearly defined value proposition. To accelerate aftermarket growth, a European industrials company reoriented its commercial organization around sales plays with clear, data-backed value propositions tied directly to customer needs. Repeatable plays linked defined customer problems to differentiated outcomes, replacing fragmented, product-led selling with a consistent, customer-centric commercial story.
By leading with customer impact rather than product features or price, the company ensured value was top of mind throughout the sales process and long before any pricing discussions. As a result, proactive outbound bookings grew from 0% to 30% of total bookings, lifting revenue growth 40% above target. The company estimated that 70% of new bookings would not have occurred under its prior approach.
Win-room coordination between go-to-market and product teams. After six quarters of booking declines, an enterprise software company established a cross-functional “win room” to centralize decisions, align teams, and track results. This governance model enabled the company to design and launch 23 coordinated sales plays with shared ownership across functions. Early results included a $40 million pipeline, and the company now believes it has built a scalable model for sustaining growth.
Prescriptive plays with persona-specific sales and marketing collateral. A chemicals company struggling to generate a high-quality pipeline identified 18 high-potential sales plays and built persona-specific collateral for the top 4 as a pilot project. This included outreach cadences, call guides, message maps, competitive battlecards, and objection-handling tools, supported by coordinated digital marketing campaigns targeting the same priority accounts. Results were immediate: brand-new prospective revenue equivalent to about 30% of the pipeline typically generated in a similar period, a potential increase in incremental growth of approximately 3%–3.5%, and double to triple the advertising click-through rates.
Revenue tech and customer relationship management (CRM) that are effectively integrated with sales play activities. Integrated revenue technology and CRM systems make sales play execution more consistent and scalable—identifying priorities, guiding execution, improving coordination, and providing real-time feedback. Next-generation platforms, increasingly powered by agentic AI, boost productivity by automating low-value tasks while helping sellers focus on actions that drive the greatest customer value.
Companies that understand the importance of brand perception, prioritize with data, and run disciplined sales plays earn new customers long before the final negotiation. The winners in our survey make that system repeatable through a structured operating rhythm. Their goal: to build a commercial engine that supports coordinated execution, and execution that leads to growth.
