This article is part of Bain's 2026 B2B Growth Agenda.

Explore the report

Volatility is no longer a passing shock; it’s the operating environment—reshaping commercial performance, widening the gap between plans and results, raising the cost of slow decision making, and letting a small group of winners pull away.

Most leadership teams started 2026 with both ambition and confidence. Bain’s 2026 survey of 1,125 global decision makers finds companies expect revenue growth rates to be 20% higher in 2026 compared with 2025. Ninety-one percent of respondents are confident their company will achieve its 2026 growth target.

That combination of higher aspirations and higher confidence sounds like a recipe for momentum, but history shows how volatility can shake even the surest plan. After all, it’s hard to hit a moving target. In January 2025, 86% of leaders surveyed were confident their company would achieve its 2025 growth target, but only 58% did (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

Volatility seems to be making it harder to know what will happen in 12 months, widening a confidence gap as more companies miss their targets even as their growth ambitions climb. From 2023 to 2025, the share of companies that fell short of their revenue target climbed from 33% to 42% (see Figure 2).

The ability to adapt in real time to market conditions is critical to meeting these goals.

Figure 2

Growth is a CEO and board issue

Volatility is what turns the gap between expectation and results from an uncomfortable statistic into a board-level risk. It’s not only that markets are changing. The pace of change is also accelerating and compounding. Eighty-seven percent of respondents say their markets are evolving faster or significantly faster than they did in the past (see Figure 3).

They point to five primary forces behind that acceleration: AI and automation, geopolitical shifts (including tariffs and regulatory developments), changes in customer buying behavior, new entrants and business models, and supply chain and cost pressure. Day-to-day, their top operating concern is managing pricing pressure, followed by navigating uncertainty and acquiring new customers.

Clearly, change is here to stay. Uncertainty is the new certainty, and organizations that don’t internalize that will fall behind. For CEOs and boards, the implication is practical: Planning cycles and sales motions designed for a stable world will increasingly fail, not because teams aren’t working hard but because the environment has moved on.

Figure 3

The sector view

Across sectors, volatility is a common factor, but it doesn’t land the same way everywhere. Pricing pressure and uncertainty are recurring themes, but different sectors “feel” volatility through different commercial pain points (see Figure 4).

• In healthcare and life sciences, managing pricing pressures stands out as the top-rated challenge for pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and medtech, paired with uncertainty and growth imperatives. Pharmaceutical companies operating in the US, for example, are grappling with pricing pressure from policy changes and ongoing scrutiny. These factors won’t abate in the near term, limiting the extent to which pricing can serve as a dependable growth lever.
• In financial services, the mix tilts toward uncertainty and the mechanics of modernization and execution: Revenue models in banking and insurance are highly sensitive to variables beyond management’s control, such as interest rates, currencies, and credit cycles, so it’s not surprising that market uncertainty is a top concern. For insurance, challenges around long-tail risk exposure helped to push market uncertainty into the top three. Banks, which are increasingly dependent on better client targeting and cross-selling for revenue growth, highlight analytics and AI effectiveness and go-to-market technology modernization as critical. At the same time, legacy infrastructure and fragmented data architectures are constraining execution speed and scalability across the sector.
• In technology, media, and telecom, several subsectors emphasize the fight to retain existing and win new customers. Software ranks acquiring and engaging new customers first, a reflection, in part, of how AI-powered capabilities are forcing the industry to change from traditional seat-based subscriptions to better proxies for customer value such as outcome-based measures. Both information services and software highlight customer retention and sales force productivity, and tech services combines uncertainty, improving salesforce execution, and customer acquisition.
• In advanced manufacturing and services, execution pressure is prominent, not surprising since demand in the sector is typically project-based, customized, and operationally constrained. Aerospace and defense and machinery companies, with long sales cycles, complex technology, and wins that strongly impact revenue, rank sales force productivity first. In logistics and transport, exposure to fuel costs, capacity imbalances, and geopolitical disruption explains the sector’s prioritization of market uncertainty. Among building products and materials respondents, organizational silos between sales, product, and supply chain operations that exacerbate inconsistency in pricing and fulfillment likely explain why silos and execution cadence are top challenges.

Figure 4

What companies are doing about volatility—and what leaders should do next

In volatile periods, it’s natural to pull the cost lever. But if cost is the only lever, volatility turns a short-term fix into a long-term slide. Leaders need to protect what drives growth, even as they reset spending.

That balance is showing up in commercial playbooks. Companies are tightening spend while doubling down on growth moves: sharpening the value proposition, broadening product and service portfolios, accelerating new offers, and using AI-driven tools and analytics to respond to pricing pressure faster (see Figure 5).

This is where the performance gap becomes strategic. Even amid today’s volatility, a distinct group of companies is pulling away. These winners—defined as companies above the upper quartile of revenue growth for their sector and region in 2025 and exceeding their gross margin targets—are growing 1.6 times faster than the average.

These winners treat differentiation as active work. They see maintaining a differentiated value proposition as requiring ongoing reinvention—and rank it as their top commercial challenge.

Figure 5

The volatility-ready commercial agenda

If volatility is the climate, the answer is not a single “volatility initiative” but rather a commercial system that can sense, decide, and act faster—without losing coherence.

Today’s B2B Growth Agenda focuses on four fundamentals, with AI as an accelerant:

1. Make your value proposition the decisive factor: Ensure real differentiation, communicate consistently, and refine it based on customer needs.
2. Capture the next customer with precision in pricing and targeting: Use behavioral signals, next-buy intent, and price for context while orchestrating execution across sales plays.
3. Get the most out of your commercial teams: Lift productivity through technology adoption, clearer manager roles, and targeted capability building.
4. Center AI on how you go to market: Redesign critical workflows end-to-end, build scalable data and tech foundations, mobilize teams with clear ownership, and validate impact to ensure repeatable value capture.

Companies can’t control what’s driving volatility, but they can control how fast—and how coherently—they respond. How quickly companies turn market signals into pricing, coverage, and execution decisions will determine their durable advantages, no matter what the market brings.

Read our 2026 B2B Growth Agenda

Download the PDF Explore the report

Explore the Report

• Volatility Isn’t the Storm. It’s the Climate

• Unclear Value Propositions Stall Growth

• B2B Growth Masters’ Formula for Repeatably Capturing New Customers

• The New Sales Productivity Equation

• AI Won’t Transform Your Go-to-Market Until You Transform the Work