B2B Sales Transformation Is No Longer About Choosing Between Digital and Human

The real issue is not whether B2B sales should be digital or human. The real issue is whether customers can move through trust, clarity, and momentum without friction.

McKinsey's 2024 B2B Pulse Survey shows just how far buyer behavior has evolved: customers now use an average of ten channels in their journey, and preference is split roughly into thirds between in-person, remote, and digital self-serve interactions. More than half want a seamless omnichannel experience, and many are willing to switch suppliers when the experience across touchpoints is poor.

That changes the ambition of sales transformation completely. It is no longer enough to add channels. You have to orchestrate them.

In practical terms, that means marketing, sales, enablement, CRM, pricing, service, and customer success can no longer operate like adjacent departments with loose handovers. The growth engine is the journey. The moment a prospect experiences inconsistency, repetition, weak relevance, or internal fragmentation, commercial trust starts leaking out of the system.

The companies winning in this environment are not just "more digital." They are more coherent. Bain's 2025 Commercial Excellence work found that top B2B performers delivered twice the average revenue growth of their industries in 2024, while also outperforming on gross margin growth. These winners were more effective at deploying AI and related technologies as force multipliers for sales, pricing, and productivity, and at executing targeted, repeatable sales plays.

Bain also found that many lagging firms still struggle with salesforce productivity, pricing pressure, and adoption of go-to-market technology.

This is exactly where AI now becomes interesting. Not as a futuristic extra, but as a practical accelerator across the seller journey.

McKinsey notes that 19% of B2B sales organisations are already implementing gen AI use cases, with another 23% experimenting, and that data-driven commercial teams combining personalized experiences with gen AI are significantly more likely to increase market share. Their more recent work on profitable B2B growth through gen AI shows why: AI can improve prioritization, battlecards, research synthesis, next-best actions, and multiple steps across the deal cycle.

But technology alone still does not fix sales. Bain reported in 2025 that 70% of companies struggle to integrate their sales plays into CRM and revenue technologies. That is a brutal but useful reminder: transformation fails when the playbook lives in PowerPoint while the daily work lives somewhere else.

So what does modern sales transformation really require?

A journey-first view of growth.

An omnichannel model that feels seamless to the buyer.

Commercial plays that are specific, repeatable, and measurable.

Managers who coach execution, not just inspect dashboards.

Technology that supports the motion instead of complicating it.

And a sharper understanding that trust is built across the whole system, not in one heroic sales conversation.

At Transformery, we see the strongest sales transformations happen when organisations connect commercial strategy with customer reality and execution discipline. Not just more tools. Not just more leads. Not just more activity.

A better system for winning.

Because in modern B2B sales, growth does not come from choosing between human and digital.

It comes from making them work together.