Sustainability has entered a more pragmatic phase. Public debate may feel louder and more polarized, but inside B2B purchasing and selling organizations, sustainability is increasingly treated as a commercial variable: a way to win share, defend margins, and de-risk growth. In multi-industry surveys of B2B companies, revenue growth leaders overwhelmingly report that sustainability is already delivering positive business impact – and they expect that impact to strengthen over the next few years.
What’s changed is not just the “why,” but the “how.” The companies pulling ahead are moving sustainability out of corporate reporting and into their go-to-market engine – customer segmentation, sales plays, product value stories, pricing models, and incentives.
The demand shift is measurable: buyers are rewarding sustainable suppliers
Across B2B categories – from industrials and chemicals to construction inputs – buyer research points to an accelerating reallocation of spend toward more sustainable suppliers. Roughly half of surveyed customers say they already give more business to suppliers they view as more sustainable, and a clear majority expect to increase that shift over the next three years.
Importantly, sustainability is not just becoming “nice to have.” Buyers increasingly describe it as a mainstream purchasing criterion, rising toward the top of the decision stack and trailing only quality in some forward-looking views.
This is where many suppliers misread the moment. They assume sustainability demand is flattening because the external narrative has cooled. But buyer behaviour is moving in the opposite direction: the market is becoming more selective, not less.
The conversation is shifting from “how you operate” to “what you sell”
Another subtle but consequential change is where buyers place their attention. In recent buyer surveys, customers increasingly prioritize the sustainability of the products and services they are purchasing – the emissions and circularity attributes embedded in the offer – more than the general sustainability of the supplier’s own operations. That’s a major signal for commercial teams: differentiation is increasingly decided in product design, proof points, and value articulation at the offer level.
In practical terms, many buyers are asking questions like:
- “How does this reduce emissions in my value chain?”
- “What does it do to my Scope 3 footprint?”
- “Can I substantiate claims downstream with credible data?”
Suppliers that can answer those questions with rigor are turning sustainability into a competitive advantage. Suppliers that cannot are watching sustainability become a reason to lose bids – even when they have strong technical products.
Margin opportunity exists – but only when value is made explicit
A common myth is that sustainability is inevitably a cost centre. Buyer data suggests a more nuanced reality: many customers are already paying premiums for sustainable products, and willingness to pay can increase when suppliers connect sustainability to measurable performance outcomes, risk reduction, or compliance value. In one large survey, a majority of B2B buyers reported paying a premium in their most recent sustainable purchase; a meaningful share indicated willingness to pay more than a modest premium today, with that willingness rising over time.
The implication is not that every sustainable product earns a premium. The implication is that premium capture is a commercial capability, not a product label. Companies that treat sustainability claims as marketing language tend to struggle. Companies that quantify customer economics – total cost of ownership, avoided carbon costs, regulatory readiness, improved downstream claim-ability – are far more likely to defend price and expand margin.
Why many organizations stall: a “buy–sell gap” inside the commercial engine
Even as buyers elevate sustainability, many suppliers are not set up to sell it effectively. Surveys show that only a minority of sellers believe they have deep knowledge of customer sustainability needs. Suppliers also commonly misjudge which sustainability attributes matter most – overweighting some factors while underestimating customers’ focus on embedded emissions and value-chain impact.
Capability gaps show up at the front line, too. A significant share of suppliers report that their salesforce does not clearly understand how their sustainable products outperform conventional alternatives on carbon and the customer’s economic outcomes.
This gap is the real growth constraint. The challenge is less about having a sustainability strategy on paper and more about translating it into an everyday commercial motion: who to target, what to lead with, how to prove value, and how to price it.
What growth leaders do differently: four capabilities that turn sustainability into revenue
Across high-performing commercial organizations, clear best practices are emerging. They can be summarized in four reinforcing capabilities – each of which pushes sustainability from “compliance” into “growth.”
1) Embed sustainability into customer segmentation – not as an add-on, but as a core dimension
At minimum, leading teams develop a clear view of customers’ sustainability priorities, targets, and progress – spanning carbon and circularity, and increasingly broadening to concerns like water and biodiversity depending on sector context. They then integrate these signals into classical segmentation (industry, size, spend, profitability) to redefine where to play and how to win.
More advanced approaches pull together internal and external customer signals to build dynamic profiles and identify “high-conversion” segments for sustainable offers – often using analytics to spot where sustainability is most likely to change purchasing behavior.
2) Make sustainability a core selling point alongside performance and cost
In many industrial categories, the winning pitch is not “sustainability vs. performance.” It is “sustainability as performance” – translated into customer outcomes with the same rigor applied to specifications and price.
Leading sellers build a business case that quantifies how the offer helps the customer: meeting regulations, strengthening downstream consumer claims, and achieving internal targets – without forcing the buyer to do the modeling themselves.
A practical way to raise quality quickly is to standardize a small set of repeatable proof points:
- lifecycle impact (what changes in the customer’s footprint)
- operational impact (what changes in yield, downtime, safety, or scrap)
- compliance/claims impact (what becomes easier to certify or credibly communicate)
3) Equip the salesforce with tools, training, and incentives that make sustainability “sellable”
Revenue growth leaders outperform on commercial enablement: talent, marketing, and incentive systems that help teams hold consultative sustainability conversations.
At baseline, this includes training on how to open the conversation, what the sustainable offer set is, and which KPIs matter for customers. More advanced programs use digital tools to make sustainability fluency scalable – supporting sales teams with playbooks, targeted recommendations, and simple ways to articulate the customer’s business case.
4) Capture value from all sources – share, mix, retention, and price
Many organizations under-monetize sustainability by treating it as a defensive posture (“don’t lose the customer”). Leaders treat it as an offensive lever. They use sustainable offerings to gain share, shift into more attractive segments, improve retention, and earn price premiums where value is provable. In more advanced pricing models, they align price with the full value delivered – including, in some cases, the buyer’s internal carbon price.
The CEO agenda: moving from “sustainability strategy” to “commercial system”
For executive teams, the priority is not to add another sustainability initiative. It is to redesign the commercial system so sustainability becomes a repeatable growth mechanism. Three moves tend to unlock progress quickly:
- Make the offer strategy explicit. Define which sustainable offers matter, where they win, and what proof is required to sell them at scale.
- Build the value narrative and the value evidence. Convert sustainability from aspiration into quantified customer outcomes; standardize the artifacts that sales teams can actually use.
- Rewire incentives and governance. If sustainability is expected to drive growth, it has to show up in sales plays, training, pipeline rituals, and compensation logic – not only in reporting.
The companies that treat sustainability as a commercial capability – rather than a corporate function – are already seeing it translate into growth. As buyer priorities continue to evolve toward the sustainability of the offer itself, the gap between leaders and laggards is likely to widen, not shrink
