Research, synthesized for operators.

The report asks one question — why business cases succeed or fail in 2026 — and answers it in four parts, followed by a section on counter-evidence and a full bibliography. Its starting point: 86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process (Forrester, The State of Business Buying, 2024).

1. How B2B software buying works now — larger and more conflicted buying groups, buyers who research more and talk to sellers less, and procurement and finance acting as decision-makers.
2. Why business cases fail — the CFO veto pattern, stakeholder requirements that contradict each other, spreadsheet governance and the cost of inconsistent ROI claims.
3. What separates cases that survive — methodological rigor (TEI, the Five Case Model, Phillips ROI), explainability, the AI authenticity problem and post-sale value proof.
4. What it means for sales teams — five operational shifts, from treating the business case as a standalone deliverable to tying it to post-sale measurement.

Read The State of B2B Business Cases 2026

The report is a synthesis to read end to end. If you only need individual figures for a deck or business case, two companion articles collect them with a primary source for each:

• Value Selling Statistics 2026: B2B Benchmarks — buying complexity, rep-free buying preferences and sales-experience figures.
• Cybersecurity Business Case Statistics 2026 — breach cost, detection time and risk reduction, cited to IBM, Gartner and Forrester.

For ValueNova's own arguments about what teams should do in response, see the value engineering whitepapers.

ValueNova Research publishes original synthesis on how B2B software actually gets bought — why purchases stall, what buying committees require before they commit budget, and how value engineering has to adapt in response.

Each report consolidates the most reliable findings across the analyst base — Forrester, Gartner, McKinsey, NIST, and spreadsheet-risk research from Raymond Panko and the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group — and organizes them through a single question rather than summarizing each source in turn. The research period reviewed spans 2022 onward, with priority given to work published in 2024 or later.

Every figure is traceable. No claim appears without a verifiable third-party source, named inline where it is used and listed in full in the bibliography.

Disagreement is named, not smoothed over. Where sources conflict — and on buying group size, stall rates, and AI adoption they conflict substantially — each report says so explicitly and explains why the numbers differ, rather than quietly selecting the most convenient one.

Nothing is gated. No form, no email capture, no download wall. Charts are published under CC BY 4.0 with a downloadable chart pack, free to reuse with attribution.