Your customer's future is changing. Is your positioning?
Most B2B companies know the product they sell to their customer. Few know the customer's strategy. When that strategy shifts and you miss it, your B2B positioning loses ground: the contract renewal stops being a formality and turns into a surprise.
The Standard, London. Photo by Raissa Pardini
The customer you knew no longer exists
Most B2B relationships are built around a product, a technical specification, an agreed price. The supplier knows the bill of materials, the delivery times, the tolerances. Knows the buyer, the quality manager, perhaps the plant director. Knows how the order works and how complaints work. This knowledge has held commercial relationships together for years, sometimes for decades.
These numbers come from large companies with structured ownership, dedicated committees, and formalised governance processes. In an Italian SME, the board meets four, six, perhaps eight times a year. The agenda often gets drafted the day before. The first hour goes to formal approvals, financials, compliance. The remaining time scatters across operational updates and urgent matters. Strategy, when it appears, gets the last twenty minutes: the ones when half the room has already mentally checked out.
The supplier who knows only one piece of the relationship is building on foundations that are moving. And usually realizes it too late: at the renewal, at the renegotiation, at the request for proposal that arrives with different specifications and a different tone.
The data that should keep you up at night
Forrester's State of Business Buying 2026 report, based on the Buyers' Journey Survey 2025, reports that 86% of B2B purchases stall during the process. 81% of buyers express dissatisfaction with the provider they choose, even in cases classified as successful purchases. Price matters less than commonly assumed. Buyers cite a lack of industry expertise, process rigidity, and the supplier's inability to understand their real priorities.
The same report adds a data point that changes the perspective. The typical buying decision now involves 13 internal stakeholders and 9 external influencers outside the customer organization. In groups of six or more, 94% of buyers say collective decisions deliver better outcomes. The latest McKinsey B2B Pulse reinforces the picture: 54% of B2B decision-makers are ready to abandon a supplier if the omnichannel experience fails, and interaction channels have grown from 5 in 2016 to more than 10 today.
These numbers tell a precise story. Your customer is a system in reorganization. If your commercial relationship rests on a personal connection with the buyer and on-time delivery, you are exposed to any internal change at the customer. The day that system decides to rethink its priorities, your contract is on the table.
From product knowledge to customer strategy knowledge
In the Italian manufacturing world, the supplier-customer relationship traditionally plays out on three levels: product quality, price, and logistics reliability. These are the three pillars supporting negotiations, vendor rating scores, and renewal decisions. They work when the customer's context remains stable.
When the context shifts, these three pillars stop being enough. The customer diversifying markets needs a supplier who grasps new specifications before they get formalized. The customer investing in sustainability needs a value chain partner who documents, measures, and certifies, in addition to producing. The customer rethinking their distribution model needs flexibility on lot sizes, timelines, and configurations that the current contract does not allow.
The supplier who knows the customer's strategy can anticipate these needs. Can propose before being asked. Can position as part of the solution instead of discovering, at the next request for proposal, that requirements have shifted and a competitor is already aligned.
The difference between a replaceable supplier and a supply chain partner plays out here: knowing where the customer is going, in addition to knowing where they are today.
Customer intelligence as a missing function
How many Italian manufacturing SMEs have a function, a process, or even a routine that systematically gathers and analyzes information on key customers' strategies? In our experience, very few. Information about the customer lives fragmented in sales team conversations, in emails, in informal chats at trade shows. Nobody collects it, compares it, or discusses it in a structured way. And it does not enter the company's decision-making moments.
The salesperson knows the customer is hiring a new operations director. The technical lead knows the specifications on the last project were different from usual. The owner heard at a dinner that the group is considering an acquisition. Nobody puts the pieces together. Nobody asks what this means for the commercial relationship over the next three years.
This absence of intelligence carries a cost that surfaces all at once, usually in the form of an unpleasant phone call: the customer has decided to review the supplier panel. Or has insourced the process. Or has moved volumes to a competitor offering a more integrated service. By then, it is too late to react. The customer made the decision weeks or months earlier, in a meeting you were nowhere near.
Building antennas on key customers
New antennas are needed. A strategic listening system on the customers that weigh most is needed. This runs through three concrete work streams.
First work stream. For each customer representing more than 5% of revenue, build an updated strategic profile at least every six months. The profile goes beyond volumes and margins, and answers precise questions: which markets the customer is investing in, which functions they are strengthening, which strategic challenges they face, how their business model is evolving, who really makes the decisions about your supply.
Second work stream. Bring this information into the company's decision-making moments. If next year's commercial plan does not include an analysis of the strategic trajectories of the top ten customers, that plan rests on assumptions that age every day.
Third work stream. Multiply contact points beyond the buyer. If the entire relationship with a three-million-euro customer runs through one person on your team and one person on the customer's team, that relationship is fragile by definition. Companies that withstand customer strategy shifts build multiple contact networks. Engineer talks to engineer, sales director talks to operations director, owner talks to management. When the customer changes course, information arrives through more channels and arrives sooner.
Your positioning is a function of your customer's positioning
McKinsey reports that 80% of long-term B2B value comes from existing customers. Acquiring a new customer costs five to twenty-five times more than retaining an existing one. Yet most B2B commercial organizations dedicate the bulk of their resources to chasing new customers and treat existing ones as an annuity to administer.
The paradox is that the annuity exists only as long as the customer maintains the same strategy. The moment it changes, the supplier who has not invested in deep understanding of that customer discovers the annuity was in fact an undeclared fixed-term contract.
The future of your market positioning is a direct function of your ability to read the future of your customers. If you do not know where they are going, you cannot know where you should be going. If you do not know, the competitor knows: the one who talks to the right people, reads the right signals, and shows up at your customer's table with a proposal that anticipates exactly the problem the customer was about to have.
Two futures, one choice
There are two ways to live a B2B relationship.
The first is reactive: the customer asks, you supply.
The second is intentional: you understand where the customer is going and you position yourselves to be part of their next step, in addition to their current step.
The first model works in stable markets with customers that do not change. That world is ending, if it is not already gone. The second model requires investment: time, people, listening routines, strategic synthesis capability. It requires that someone in the organization looks outward, toward the future of customers, while the rest of the team handles the present of deliveries. It is the same principle we discussed in recent weeks: the company's future needs dedicated time and structure.