Ten years measuring the same question
McKinsey has spent a decade surveying B2B decision-makers about how they buy, how they prefer to be sold to, and what drives growth for their vendors. The 10th edition of the B2B Pulse Survey, published in 2026, is the broadest study yet: nearly 4,000 decision-makers across 13 countries, all circling the same underlying question that hasn’t changed — what separates the teams that grow from the ones that don’t?
This year’s answer is the clearest the study has ever delivered. The gap between leaders and laggards in B2B sales is no longer subtle. It’s not a nuance difference you can explain away with one good quarter. And according to the data, it keeps widening.
The gap that’s no longer debatable
The central number from B2B Pulse 2026 is this: 60% of self-identified leaders reported double-digit growth in 2025. Among laggards, that same figure drops to 21%.
This isn’t a marginal difference. It’s the difference between a team that ends the year clearly ahead of target and one that wraps up the fiscal year explaining why it didn’t get there. And what makes the data especially striking isn’t just the number itself — it’s that it emerges from a sample of four thousand decision-makers across thirteen countries. This isn’t one sector, one region. It’s the pattern that appears when you look at the B2B market at scale.
60% reported double-digit growth in 2025 — 90% report improved sales effectiveness.
21% reported double-digit growth in 2025 — 55% report improved sales effectiveness.
Two numbers telling very different stories about the same market, in the same year.
Omnichannel is the floor, not the ceiling
For years, the ability to sell across multiple channels was the indicator that separated the most sophisticated teams from the rest. That no longer applies. B2B Pulse 2026 confirms it clearly: omnichannel has stopped being a competitive advantage. It’s the minimum requirement to even be in the conversation.
Virtually every team competing in B2B today has multi-channel presence. They have outreach tools, video calls, email, LinkedIn. The channel no longer differentiates.
What does differentiate is how each team uses every interaction that happens across those channels. And that’s where the 35-point gap in sales effectiveness — 90% among leaders versus 55% among laggards — starts to make sense.
What the channel doesn’t explain
If every competitive team already has multi-channel presence, the 39-point gap in sales effectiveness has to come from somewhere else. The question the McKinsey data raises — though doesn’t directly answer — is what that variable actually is.
The pattern that emerges in high-growth teams isn’t that they have more channels, more reps, or more inbound leads. It’s that they have more context. Every conversation doesn’t start from scratch. The rep knows what happened on the previous call, what objections came up, what commitments were left open. The manager knows what’s happening in the pipeline before the review meeting — not after. The whole team isn’t depending on someone remembering to write the notes in the CRM.
That level of shared context requires systematically capturing what happens in every interaction — not just the ones someone decided to document.
The pattern behind the number
What the B2B Pulse data shows, when put in context with how high-growth teams actually operate, is a transition that’s been underway for a few years but became impossible to ignore in 2025: the best B2B teams stopped treating the conversation as an event that gets forgotten when the call ends.
For leaders, every interaction is data. The tone the buyer used when they asked about price. The objections that weren’t handled well. The commitments the rep made that no one followed up on. All of that exists somewhere after every call — what separates high-growth teams is whether that somewhere is accessible and structured, or whether it lives in the memory of whoever handled that account.
Every call is documented automatically. The manager reviews what actually happened in the conversations, not what the rep interpreted. Execution gaps are caught before they turn into lost deals.
Documentation depends on the rep writing it. The CRM reflects the edited version of what happened. The manager walks into the review meeting without real data about that week’s conversations.
Why the advantage compounds
A gap of this size between leaders and laggards doesn’t appear overnight. It builds iteration by iteration, quarter by quarter.
Teams that capture what happens in their conversations improve their playbook with real data. They spot the patterns that work before their competitors do. They ramp up new reps on actual sales situations, not generic role-plays built from memory. Each cycle that passes, they know a little more about how they sell well — and that advantage isn’t easy to copy.
Laggards, meanwhile, keep asking the rep to “make sure to update the CRM” after every call. The information that doesn’t get captured doesn’t disappear — it still exists in someone’s head. But in someone’s head it doesn’t scale, can’t be reviewed, and walks out the door when that person moves on.
What this has to do with every call your team makes
The gap McKinsey measured across 13 countries doesn’t live in channel strategy or commercial headcount. It lives in what each team knows — or doesn’t know — about its own conversations.
Knowing that 60% of leaders grew double digits last year is a market diagnosis. The question that follows is how much of what happens in your team’s calls this week is being captured, structured, and available for decisions — and how much is being lost when the Zoom closes.
Performy runs automatically across 100% of your team’s calls — not just the ones someone decided to review that week. Every conversation is evaluated against the same criteria, execution gaps are caught before they become lost deals, and the manager walks into the pipeline review with real data about what happened — not the version the CRM tells.