About The Cost of Selling

We exist to diagnose a question few in B2B articulate with precision: why does selling keep getting more expensive?

Every dollar a B2B company spends to sell a product carries hidden friction — in sales reps typing orders manually, in catalogs showing wrong prices, in integrations that stall every new platform, in channels that fight each other, in implementations that never end. These costs don't show up in the P&L with the right name. They show up in the margin that evaporates.

In this publication, we diagnose each one of these frictions with depth. We don't talk about product. We don't sell software here. We articulate the problem with greater clarity than the reader would on their own — because that's exactly what our clients expect from us in every conversation: diagnosis before prescription.

About CWS Platform

CWS Platform is the B2B commerce platform for distributors, wholesalers, and manufacturers — orchestrating sales portals, ERP integrations, PIM, and B2B e-commerce into a single flow that makes every transaction faster and cheaper. Founded in 2012 in São Paulo, today headquartered in Itajaí/SC, Brazil, with international operations, CWS evolved from an award-winning B2B marketplace (Canal da Peça) into today's SaaS platform. Serves global public clients including Würth, Grupo Unimil (John Deere ecosystem), and Leo Madeiras.

CWS Platform's public identity is "Be agentic. Orchestrate commerce." — orchestrating commerce end-to-end, with intelligence that operates within the flow.

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The experience behind the analysis

"The Cost of Selling" doesn't come from theory. It comes from fourteen years implementing B2B commerce inside real operations — the path CWS Platform has taken since 2012.

For more than half of those fourteen years, the team already numbered over 110 people. The large projects mobilized twenty to thirty professionals across disciplines, over roughly twelve months — spanning more than twenty workstreams: data, strategy, product cataloging, integration, customization, scope definition, and technology.

That work happened where B2B is hardest. Many of the largest brands in the automotive parts sector came through here — projects that demanded highly complex technical cataloging, prepared for public-facing portals. There were more than five projects with large distributors running over a hundred delivery points — two of them past a thousand, in decentralized operations — and more than ten projects cataloging over a hundred technical items each.

Integration ran through the market's largest ERPs and CRMs — often both at once: SAP (including SAP CRM), Oracle, TOTVS (Protheus and TOTVS CRM), Salesforce, RD Station, among dozens of others — and reached down the long tail: hundreds of small retailers integrating via spreadsheet. It's the full span of Brazilian B2B — a market whose difficulty is structural: tangled logistics across a continent-sized country, one of the world's most complex tax regimes, dense legal requirements, and deal-making that still runs on relationships. We worked it from the multinational enterprise down to the shop still running on Excel. Public clients include Würth, Grupo Unimil (the John Deere ecosystem), and Leo Madeiras. The sectors were agribusiness, automotive, parts, chemicals, grain, and construction — verticals where the catalog is technical, inventory is distributed, and integration is the line between selling and stalling.

But much of what we know doesn't come only from what shipped. It comes from knowing the clients' stories — including the hundreds of projects that were planned, thought through in depth, and that, for one reason or another, stalled or were pushed to later. Sitting with dozens of large companies to understand why a B2B project stalls is often where you learn the most about where money leaks. There were thousands of hours debating solutions with clients — large and small — and hundreds of hours with investors seasoned in technology, business, legal, and strategy, plus digitalization consulting for investment funds.

The founders' real achievement wasn't just starting. It was bringing together people with sharp reasoning and heterogeneous skills — sector knowledge, technology, finance, mechanical engineering — and getting those repertoires to operate as one. Coming from investment banking and M&A, and investors themselves with thousands of hours in that role, the founders bring the financial lens; but it was precisely the mix of different disciplines that made it possible to cross such varied projects and reach solutions for problems that rarely fit inside a single specialty. That's why, here, a B2B problem is read for what it is — cost, friction, and process — before it's treated as a software problem.

If you operate outside Brazil, that's exactly why this matters. A market this demanding forces solutions that hold up under pressure most others never face — so the patterns we learned here tend to travel well. The logic that untangles a Brazilian B2B operation is, more often than not, the logic that makes B2B commerce faster and cheaper anywhere.

Today we're a leaner team of about seventy people, with intelligence operating inside our own processes and technology. It's also where we're looking: a more efficient B2B commerce, with intelligence that operates within the flow. But the reading stays the same: we live each project to understand the pain before proposing the way out — and to unlock value safely.

When this blog diagnoses where money leaks in the B2B funnel, it isn't guesswork. It's what we saw, measured, and diagnosed — project after project, including the ones that never left the drawing board.

About the authors

Articles published here are written by CWS Platform executives — Vinícius Dias (CEO) and Bruno Lucchesi (International Expansion), who helped plan, win, and deliver some of the largest projects in CWS's history — and guest authors when the topic calls for another perspective. In some posts, content is co-created with AI following rigorous editorial methodology, always with human review before publication.

How to read this publication

We organize content around eight pains of B2B commerce — pains we hear every week from CEOs, CTOs, CFOs, and commerce directors. Five of these pains sit on the cost of selling axis (attracting customers, managing catalog, processing orders, retaining customers, selling with margin). Three sit on the transformation blocker axis (integration, channel conflict, implementation that never ends).

You can navigate by pain (category), by persona (CEO, CTO, CFO, CMO, Commerce Director, COO, End User, Legal/Procurement), or simply subscribe to the newsletter to receive the week's most relevant analyses.

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How to cite us

If you're a journalist, researcher, analyst, or building analysis that uses content from this publication, feel free to cite. Preferred format:

"According to analysis by The Cost of Selling, the editorial publication of CWS Platform, [insight or data]." (URL)

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