BSI Builds a Unified Commercial Narrative to Move Beyond Transactional Selling

As BSI set its sights on bigger growth in complex enterprise environments, it needed a more consistent way to engage buyers across sales and marketing.

About BSI

BSI is a business improvement and standards company that partners with more than 77,500 clients globally across multiple industry sectors. BSI provides organizations with the confidence to grow by working with them to tackle society’s critical issues.

Key Takeaways

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Aligned sales and marketing on one commercial framework for how BSI engages buyers and communicates value.
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Clarified and operationalized differentiation so teams can stand apart from competitors—and from status quo.
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Equipped global teams with skills and reinforcement to lead buyer-first discovery and higher-value conversations.

The Challenge

BSI’s legacy commercial motion was built for a different sales environment: high volume, product-oriented selling, and a culture shaped by transactions and renewals.

But enterprise buyers don’t reward “here’s what we do.” B2B buyers want to know “here’s what’s changing, and here’s why it matters to you.”

That creates a specific problem for organizations like BSI.

When your portfolio spans standards, assurance, and advisory work, it’s easy for sales and marketing conversations to default to what you deliver instead of what the buyer is trying to prevent, protect, or prove. And in risk-driven enterprise accounts, the difference between “vendor” and “trusted partner” usually comes down to whether the conversation starts with the buyer’s reality or your capabilities.

BSI needed to shift:

  • From presenting to discovering
  • From product proof to enterprise impact
  • From inconsistent messages to a shared value story used across sales and marketing

In short: BSI lacked a consistent way to translate their expertise into buyer-relevant conversations, so sales and marketing could show up with one clear narrative across every buyer interaction.

The Turning Point

Jen Burns, Chief Commercial Officer at BSI, had worked with Corporate Visions in previous roles and saw an opportunity to build a unified approach that could scale.

Buyer expectations keep evolving. So BSI made a deliberate choice to establish a common framework for how teams communicate value, build the skills to execute it, and keep improving it over time.

As Jen put it: “It’s really important that we stay up to speed with what our buyers need, how we should be communicating about our value in the market, and ensuring [sales and marketing] have the right skills and techniques to help support the vision of our organization.”

Corporate Visions have helped immensely…making my team successful, helping our sales organization and marketing organization be successful, and ensuring that we’re engaging with our customers more successfully.
Jen Burns
Chief Commercial Officer, BSI

The Solution

BSI partnered with Corporate Visions on a multi-phase commercial transformation spanning sales skills, messaging, and enablement reinforcement.

BSI rolled out skills training programs designed to change what happens in key conversations with their buyers:

  • Master Discovery to uncover what matters most to buyers (and stop doing one-sided “walkthroughs”)
  • Elevate Value to improve executive-level conversations and connect solutions to business impact
  • Reinforcement and enablement to support adoption and consistency across regions

Messaging

BSI also tackled the challenge of differentiation.

Corporate Visions worked with BSI to sharpen their value proposition and translate it into a commercial narrative that sales and marketing could share—culminating in a focused story designed to elevate their commercial conversations from “audit services” to enterprise risk and resilience outcomes.

Reinforcement and Measurement

Rather than treating this as “training completed,” BSI put structure and rigor behind adoption in the field. Now the organization can track behavior change and build a defensible case for scale.

The Results

BSI’s quantitative impact studies are underway, but early indicators are already showing up in the places transformation starts: clarity, confidence, and consistency.

Sharper, More Confident Differentiation

One of the biggest partnership outcomes was making BSI’s differentiation practical—and usable in buyer conversations:

“We’re able to really tease out our true differentiation, what makes us unique, and how we stand apart from our competitors in the market, or stand apart from status quo…”

That last part matters: in many complex deals, “do nothing” is the real competitor.

A Shared Commercial Language Across Sales and Marketing

BSI is moving beyond traditional training events to shape how the organization shows up in the market—so what buyers read and what they hear sound like the same company with a clear message.

A Repeatable Model BSI Can Scale

By anchoring the work in their priority motions, BSI created a contained environment to define what “good” looks like—then replicate it as adoption grows and measurement proves out results.

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