Manufacturing Buyers Demand More Value. Selling Capability Hasn’t Kept Up.
AI Summary
Manufacturing buyers now evaluate purchases against downtime, throughput, scrap rates, and total cost of ownership, with procurement, operations, and finance stakeholders all weighing in before a deal closes. Objective Management Group assessment data shows the average Selling Value competency score has barely moved in six years, sitting at 56% in 2025 versus 52% in 2020. The percentage of salespeople who are strong in the competency has grown more, from 23% to 35%, but that still leaves roughly two-thirds of the manufacturing sales force unable to reliably quantify business impact. This article examines why buyer expectations have outpaced seller capability, and what separates the organizations closing that gap from those still losing on price.
The Math Has Changed. Has the Pitch?
A manufacturing salesperson today rarely gets to lead with product specs. Procurement teams show up to the table already armed with competitive quotes, and the conversation has shifted from “what does it do?” to “what does it save?.“
That shift has teeth. B2B buying committees in industrial manufacturing typically route decisions through separate technical, procurement, and operations stakeholders, each applying a different lens to the same purchase before anyone signs off. Procurement and supply chain evaluate cost, contract terms, and total cost of ownership, along with whether the supplier will still be viable years down the road.1
Broader research backs this up. Nearly three-quarters of B2B buying teams experience unhealthy conflict during the decision process, and groups that reach genuine consensus are far more likely to rate the resulting deal as high quality.2 Procurement leaders heading into 2026 have said as much directly: the priority is shifting from lowest price to total cost of ownership, supplier performance, and long-term value.3
The buyer side of the equation has been getting more sophisticated for years. The question OMG’s data was built to answer is whether the seller side has kept pace.
Six Years of Data, One Flat Line
It hasn’t, at least not by much. The average Selling Value competency score among current salespeople has moved just one points in six years — from 57% in 2022 to 56% in 2025, according to Objective Management Group assessment data.4
Year | Average Competency Score | % Strong in Competency |
2022 | 57% | 33% |
2023 | 58% | 33% |
2024 | 55% | 31% |
2025 | 56% | 35%4 |
The middle of the table is where the story gets more interesting. The average score has essentially sat in a five-point band since 2022: 57% in 2022, 58% in 2023, a dip to 55% in 2024, and 56% in 2025.
This plateau lines up with a period when manufacturing buyers were becoming harder to sell to, not easier. Rising input costs, tighter labor markets, and ongoing supply chain disruption gave procurement and finance more reasons to scrutinize every purchase, not fewer. The competency that is supposed to answer those objections did not improve in step with the pressure to use it.
If the average seller’s ability to quantify value has been flat for half a decade, sales leaders can’t assume the skill develops on its own through experience or market exposure. It has to be built deliberately.
The “Strong” Number Tells a Different Story
Roughly two out of every three manufacturing salespeople are not strong at the one competency buyers are pressuring them hardest to demonstrate.
Most of the movement in this metric happened in a narrow band of already-capable performers gaining ground, while the bulk of the population, reflected in that stubborn average score, stayed roughly where it started.
This is a familiar pattern in OMG’s broader competency research. A similar dynamic shows up in Consultative Selling, where fewer than one in eight salespeople demonstrate strong capability and more than a third struggle outright. Selling Value and Consultative Selling are closely linked for a reason: a salesperson can’t quantify value they never uncovered in the first place.
A rising “strong” percentage can mask a stagnant middle. Sales leaders who track only the top-line average or the top-performer count risk missing that most of their team hasn’t moved at all.
Why the Gap Persists
Selling Value doesn’t operate in isolation. It depends on Qualifying to confirm the business problem is worth solving, Consultative Selling to surface the operational and financial pain in the first place and Reaching Decision Makers to make sure the ROI conversation reaches someone who can act on it. Weakness in any of those upstream competencies caps how well a salesperson can execute Selling Value, no matter how good their pricing tools or ROI calculators are.
This matters more in manufacturing than in most industries because the value case has to satisfy multiple audiences at once. An engineer wants proof of reliability. An operations leader wants uptime. A CFO wants payback period. A salesperson who can build a quantified case for one of those audiences but not the others will win consensus from part of the buying committee and lose it from the rest, which, per the consensus research above, is often enough to sink the deal outright.2
The training data supports a more optimistic read, too. OMG’s own research on training impact found that salespeople who received targeted development improved 24% in Selling Value, meaningful proof that the competency responds to the right kind of investment. The six-year plateau says less about whether Selling Value can be taught and more about how narrowly that training has been applied. The 24% improvement figure above shows the skill responds well to targeted development. Most organizations simply haven’t applied it broadly enough to move the average.
Closing this gap isn’t a matter of running one workshop on ROI calculators. It means shoring up the competencies that feed into Selling Value, not just coaching the value conversation itself.
What High-Performing Organizations Are Doing Differently
The organizations pulling ahead in manufacturing sales aren’t the ones with the most polished pricing decks. They’re the ones treating Selling Value as a coachable, measurable skill rather than an innate trait some reps have and others don’t. That starts with assessing where the gap actually lives, whether it’s in the ROI conversation itself, or further upstream in qualifying and diagnosing the business problem.
These organizations also build value cases with the full buying committee in mind from the start, rather than crafting one pitch and hoping it resonates with everyone in the room. They train reps to translate the same underlying data into different language for engineering, operations, procurement, and finance, instead of relying on a single generic ROI slide.
Finally, they track the competency over time the way OMG’s data does here, not as a one-time training outcome, but as a metric that should be moving year over year. A flat average score, even alongside a rising top-performer count, is a signal worth investigating rather than a number to file away.
Final Thoughts
The pressure on manufacturing sales teams to justify every purchase in business terms isn’t going away. It’s intensifying, as procurement functions get more sophisticated, and buying committees get more crowded. What OMG’s data shows is that seller capability has not intensified alongside it. Six years of Selling Value scores describe a skill that has inched forward, stalled, and inched forward again, rather than one that has kept pace with what buyers now expect.
The organizations that close this gap will be the ones that stop treating Selling Value as a sales training line item and start treating it as a coachable competency tied to specific, diagnosable weaknesses upstream. The data suggests there’s real room to move that average score, not just the top-performer count.
References
- New Perspective. (2026). B2B buying committee in industrial manufacturing. https://www.npws.net/blog/b2b-buying-committee-manufacturing
- Gartner, Inc. (2025, May 7). Gartner sales survey finds 74% of B2B buyer teams demonstrate “unhealthy conflict” during the decision process [Press release]. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-05-07-gartner-sales-survey-finds-74-percent-of-b2b-buyer-teams-demonstrate-unhealthy-conflict-during-the-decision-process
- Buying Station. (2026). What does 2026 have in store for procurement? Key trends, challenges and opportunities. https://www.buyingstation.com/2026-procurement-trends/
- Objective Management Group. (2026). Finding Statistics Tool. Average Selling Value Competency scores and percentage of salespeople strong in Selling Value Competency 2020-2025.