Boston May 19, 2026 – Anova Consulting Group, LLC is proud to introduce AI View, a new artificial intelligence–powered research assistant designed to elevate how clients interact with and analyze their data. Integrated directly within the platform, AI View brings advanced conversational capabilities to the dashboard, enabling clients to engage with their data in a faster, more intuitive way.
AI View functions similarly to a chat-based assistant, but with a critical advantage, clients’ program data is already securely embedded within the experience. This allows users to ask questions, explore findings, and generate analysis in real time without needing to manually search through reports or datasets. The result is a more dynamic and efficient way to uncover insights and better understand program outcomes.
“With AI View, we are delivering a quantum leap in how clients engage with their data,” said Richard Schroder, Founder & CEO of Anova Consulting Group, LLC. “This is a significant step forward in our platform technology, enabling faster, deeper, and more intuitive access to insights than ever before.”
With next-level chat functionality, AI View enables clients to quickly surface trends, compare results, and dive deeper into specific areas of interest. “We’re incredibly excited for clients to experience AI View firsthand,” said Heather Jenkins, Managing Partner and Head of Client Relationships at Anova. “We encourage clients to connect with their service teams to schedule a demo and training so they can fully leverage the power of this new capability.” This launch reflects Anova’s continued investment in innovation and its commitment to a robust product roadmap focused on delivering smarter, faster, and more accessible insights.
Boston, MA – May 7, 2026 – Anova Consulting Group, LLC is excited to announce a significant enhancement to the Competitor Battlecard section within its myView platform, designed to provide clients with deeper and more actionable competitive intelligence. These updates help clients better understand performance in head-to-head situations and identify opportunities to strengthen their competitive positioning.
The enhanced Competitor Battlecard now showcases all open-ended commentary related to competitors in direct head-to-head scenarios, giving clients richer qualitative context behind outcomes. In addition, a refreshed look and feel has been introduced, making it easier to interpret and navigate competitive data quickly and effectively.
Clients can now segment competitor data by both win and loss situations, as well as select any competitors with relevant data and drill down into results for a specific competitor. This added flexibility allows for a more precise understanding of performance dynamics across different competitive scenarios. A new “stack ranking” chart feature has also been added, clearly highlighting areas where clients outperform competitors as well as where they may be underperforming—providing a straightforward view of strengths and opportunities.
These enhancements are part of Anova’s broader commitment to continuously evolve its platform and deliver greater value through innovation. By expanding the capabilities of the Competitor Battlecard, Anova is equipping clients with more powerful tools to assess competitive positioning, refine strategies, and drive improved outcomes in their markets.
Anova Consulting Group is a leading advisory firm specializing in research-driven insights, stakeholder experience programs, and strategic consulting. Through proprietary tools such as the myView dashboard, Anova helps organizations centralize data, uncover actionable insights, and drive more informed business decisions.
2025 was the year of “we don’t have the budget for this.” So far, 2026 is the year of “Why are you worth the spend?”
Pricing Narrative
2025 was a year of extreme economic uncertainty. Anova’s research found many businesses were hesitant to spend when a new tariff or AI development could upend their entire strategy for the year. In our interviews, price objections were often blunt and budget-driven: respondents simply could not get internal approval for the expenditure, even if they liked the features or functionality of the product.
This year, however, the story has evolved beyond simple price sensitivity to a more nuanced – yet exacting – spend justification. In other words, vendors now need to make crystal clear their ROI – or they’ll be left on the curb.
In 2025, Anova’s programs heard a lot of: “We do not have this as part of the budget.” [i] In 2026, this has evolved to: “While higher engagement with [the product] would have made an easier case, at the end of the day, [ending the relationship] was a financial decision.”
What’s Driving This Shift?
While every buyer’s situation is different, the macroeconomic trends affecting the U.S. economy offer the key to this broader puzzle. Uncertainty has remained elevated since 2025, but buyers cannot afford to sit in a holding pattern forever. Vendor selections must be made and budgets set before tariff timelines and AI-driven disruption cycles reach renewal thresholds. Furthermore, a buyer’s competitors may already be moving — buyers don’t exist in a vacuum.
Buyers are responding to this dynamic – “I can’t wait forever, but things are still very uncertain” – by demanding crystal-clear value articulation from their vendors. The question is no longer just “can we afford this?” but “how quickly can we justify this and the associated risk?”
More important than simply proving value, vendors need to prove it quickly. Speed to ROI has surpassed total ROI as buyers are facing increased internal pressure for value to be justified quickly. With uncertainty expected to remain elevated for the foreseeable future, buyers do not want to see long timelines to positive ROI – they need it quickly.
What Does This Look Like in Practice?
Across Anova’s client base and industries, the shift is showing up in concrete ways. Procurement cycles that once stalled on budget approval are now advancing – but with and more pointed questions about measurable outcomes. Finance teams are more involved earlier in the process. Legal and compliance reviews are tightening. And vendors who rely on relationship equity alone are finding it isn’t enough to close or renew.
Buyers are also making sharper trade-off decisions between cost and capability. A product that does more but costs more is no longer a straightforward upgrade model. It needs to demonstrate that the incremental investment pays off within a defined timeframe. Vague promises of “efficiency gains” or “strategic alignment” are falling flat. Specific metrics, benchmarks, and case studies tied to comparable use cases are increasingly table stakes.
How Do You Respond?
Vendors must articulate and demonstrate ROI proactively – especially in renewal and competitive situations. Transparent pricing and value storytelling are increasingly critical. The vendors gaining ground in 2026 are those who come prepared: with data, with customer proof points, and with a clear narrative connecting their product’s capabilities to the buyer’s specific business outcomes.
In 2026, the conversation has matured. Sales teams are no longer selling into a budget-constrained environment, but a confidence-constrained one. Buyers are looking for solutions that pay for themselves – and quickly. The sales teams that will win in 2026 will be the ones that can build clear, coherent, and compelling ROI narratives. The bar for value justification has risen, and it’s not coming back down.
[i] Quote from real Anova interview
[ii] Quote from real Anova interview
Boston, MA — Apriln15, 2026 — Anova Consulting Group today announced the launch of automated weekly interview delivery through its myView dashboard, introducing a more secure, efficient, and scalable way for clients to access completed interview insights.
The new functionality replaces the previous manual process of distributing interview transcripts via email, transitioning to a centralized delivery model that enables clients to securely access their data within the myView platform.
Beginning immediately, clients will receive a weekly email notification each Monday morning when interviews have been completed during the prior week. Rather than receiving transcripts directly via email, clients will be prompted to log into the myView dashboard, where they can easily view and download their interviews.
This approach ensures a more streamlined user experience while consolidating all program data, tools, and insights within a single platform.
By transitioning to an automated delivery model, Anova enables clients to access insights more quickly and consistently, reducing delays associated with manual distribution processes.
The centralized platform experience allows client teams to:
“We’re evolving to a more automated delivery model to give clients faster, easier access to insights so they can see what’s happening in real time, not weeks later,” said Anova Consulting Group. “By bringing everything into one place, teams can quickly explore the full range of data, tools, and answers available—making it easier to act, align, and drive results.”
In addition to improving accessibility, the new delivery model enhances data security by eliminating the need to send sensitive client information via email. All interview content is securely housed within the myView platform, ensuring controlled access and improved data governance.
This enhancement reflects Anova Consulting Group’s broader commitment to continuous improvement, operational efficiency, and innovation. The company’s product roadmap remains focused on delivering smarter, more secure, and more scalable solutions that improve how clients access and act on critical research insights.
Anova Consulting Group is a leading advisory firm specializing in research-driven insights, stakeholder experience programs, and strategic consulting. Through proprietary tools such as the myView dashboard, Anova helps organizations centralize data, uncover actionable insights, and drive more informed business decisions.
This blog is the fourth and final in a series exploring the top themes identified by Partner Andrew Cloutier dominating Anova’s voice-of-the-client research in 2026.
86% of global B2B buyers reported a purchase process stall in 2024. (Forrester) If your sales team is spending more time chasing decisions that never come, you’re not alone – and the forces driving this trend are only intensifying.
In our win/loss research, Anova tracks two types of variables: those faced by each individual sales team (their company’s unique buyer needs, specific platform features, industry-specific factors), and general trends encountered by every sales team no matter the industry or product. One of the general themes we’ve seen change the most in recent years is the speed of decision-making. Companies are taking longer and longer to select vendors, and increasingly, no solution is selected at all. Across our interviews, we’ve identified three drivers behind this shift.
1 – Greater Size of Decision-Making Teams and Deferred Accountability
Consider this, from a recent Anova interview: “We came together as a committee, and then the 47 did the final evaluation, and we presented it to our executive sponsors for approval.” Forty-seven people in a final evaluation – before it even reached the executives who could approve it. While 47 is an outlier, consider this quote from a media technology vendor’s client: “Decision makers include my team, Content Lab, along with our Customer Experience Planning and Optimization Group… our Behavioral Strategies and Planning group helps to drive our planning process. The Head of that organization is a peer to my VP and is also a key stakeholder and decision-maker around both the adoption, the use evolution, and investment in [client]. Ultimately, the CMO has a say as well.” That’s six distinct functions, with several levels of seniority, involved in the decision-making process.
Buying teams have grown substantially across industries. Depending on the source, the average now ranges from roughly 7 (CEB) to as many as 14–23 (Gartner). Anova’s research shows that more than half of sales processes involve third parties, and 67% reach decisions by consensus. In this environment, it’s increasingly difficult for sales teams to break through gridlock. When any one of a dozen stakeholders could have veto power — let alone when the goal is full consensus — it’s natural for decisions to stall.
2 – Data Overload
Technology has made it easier for buying teams to access information; firms like Gartner and Forrester provide detailed vendor comparisons across a range of industries, and AI platforms can surface research at a scale that was previously impossible. But access to more information has not made decisions easier. In many cases, it has made them harder.
When a dozen – let alone 47 – stakeholders each independently review sales presentations, third-party reports, and customer testimonials, they are going to reach independent conclusions – if they engage with the materials at all. Building consensus is difficult under any circumstances. Every additional piece of information layered into that process makes it exponentially harder.
3 – Macroeconomic Uncertainty
Global macroeconomic uncertainty has placed increased scrutiny on every budget dollar. AI disruption, a softening labor market, and geopolitical risk are new variables that buying teams must now factor into vendor decisions. Business uncertainty, while down from its 2023 peak, remains meaningfully elevated compared to pre-COVID levels. At the same time, many teams are being asked to do more with less, which raises the stakes on every spending decision and makes leaders more reluctant to commit without exhaustive evaluation.
When interest rates or tariff policy could shift rapidly, the instinct is to wait. And waiting, for many buying teams, has become the default.
Conclusion: How you can address slow decision-making among your prospects
When these three puzzle pieces are placed together, it’s clear why buying cycles are stretching longer and longer. More leaders are in the room with their fingers on the scale, each reviewing more data, with increased economic uncertainty thrown into the mix. Complexity isn’t going away – so the real question is how your team adapts.
Start by tightening who you pursue. Better prospect qualification means your salespeople spend their time where it’s most likely to pay off, not chasing committees that were never going to reach a decision. Next, push higher and broader. The further your team can build relationships up and across the decision-making chain, the less vulnerable you are to one sceptic in a room of 47 derailing everything. Finally, treat stalled and no-decision outcomes as a source for continues improvement. If you aren’t systematically learning from those lost cycles – through a formal win/loss program – you’re leaving critical intelligence on the table.
The sales teams winning in this environment aren’t the ones waiting for decisions to get easier. They’re the ones building the discipline to understand why deals stall and relentlessly closing those gaps.
Boston, MA — March 31, 2026— Anova Consulting Group, LLC, today announced the expansion of its Salesforce integration capabilities, further enhancing its ability to help clients efficiently manage and automate program data collection.
As part of this initiative, Anova has added dedicated Salesforce integration staff and continues to invest in expanding its technical expertise and platform functionality. These enhancements enable Anova to work more closely with clients to streamline workflows and automate the collection of program data directly within Salesforce.
The expanded capabilities are designed to reduce administrative burden, improve data accuracy, and create a more seamless user experience for clients.
“Our expanded Salesforce capabilities represent a significant step forward in delivering more efficient and automated solutions to our clients,” said Heather Jenkins, Managing Partner and Head of Client Relationships at Anova. “We encourage clients to connect with their service teams to explore how these enhanced integrations can be tailored to their workflows and help them maximize the value of their programs.”
This investment reflects Anova’s ongoing commitment to innovation and continuous improvement. By strengthening its Salesforce integration offerings, Anova continues to deliver powerful, user-friendly tools that enhance program effectiveness and provide actionable insights.
About Anova Consulting Group, LLC
Anova Consulting Group partners with organizations to design, implement, and optimize data-driven programs that improve outcomes and drive impact. Through innovative technology solutions and deep industry expertise, Anova empowers clients with the tools and insights needed to succeed.
Written by Research Analyst Jeffrey Cheng, this is the third in a series of blogs that will explore the four themes identified by Partner Andrew Cloutier driving the state of voice-of-the-customer research in 2026.
In many B2B markets, the ease of doing business has shifted from a secondary consideration to a decisive factor in purchase decisions.
Historically, Anova’s Win/Loss Analysis and Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs revealed a familiar story: vendors won because their product capabilities were stronger, their pricing more competitive, or their brand more credible. Friction in areas like onboarding or contracting was often tolerated if the perceived value justified the effort.
Today, that story is changing.
Across industries, buyers increasingly evaluate vendors through a different lens: How difficult will it be to implement, integrate, and manage this solution?
Win/Loss interviews show this concern surfacing repeatedly, often late in the buying process. Buyers may recognize strong capabilities yet still choose a competitor that feels easier to adopt. In many cases, that perception is shaped less by the product and more by how well the sales team anticipates and reduces friction throughout the journey.
Critically, these concerns are rarely voiced directly during active sales cycles. As a result, many organizations underestimate their impact. Anova’s research increasingly shows that many deals are lost not because the solution was weaker, but because the overall buying experience felt harder.
Understanding where this friction occurs, and how effectively sales teams can manage it, has become a critical source of competitive intelligence.
Why is Ease of Doing Business Growing as a Concern?
Enterprise purchasing has become significantly more complex. Decisions now involve cross-functional buying groups spanning procurement, legal, IT, finance, and operations. Each group introduces new requirements and risk considerations.
In this environment, the role of sales has evolved. It is no longer just about positioning value; it is about orchestrating a seamless buying process.
Sales teams must align stakeholders, anticipate objections, and coordinate internal resources to keep deals moving. Even small breakdowns can have outsized impact:
Individually, these issues are manageable. Together, they signal something more concerning: Working with this vendor will require effort. When buyers anticipate effort, they also anticipate risk.
Anova’s Win/Loss Analysis frequently surfaces this insight. Deals that are competitive on product and price can stall or fail when operational complexity introduces doubt, particularly when sales teams are unable to proactively simplify the experience.
The Rise of “Conversion Aversion”
In addition to the growing bureaucratic and procedural hurdles, an additional dynamic emerging as increasingly important in our Win/Loss programs is conversion aversion, or the reluctance organizations feel when switching vendors.
Change requires coordination across stakeholders and often demands political capital from internal champions. As a result, incumbent vendors frequently enjoy a structural advantage, even when challengers offer superior solutions.
While this has always been a concern in complex sales processes, increasingly this conversion aversion has become increasingly difficult to surmount – in part due to the dynamics described above.
Win/Loss interviews often reveal buyers caught between interest and hesitation. Buyers may express strong interest in a new solution while simultaneously worrying about the implementation burden. When sales teams do not address these concerns early and consistently, the status quo prevails.
This raises the bar for sales. Winning now requires more than a compelling value proposition. Sales teams must actively reduce the perceived cost of change by simplifying the path forward to align stakeholders early.
How Sales Teams Can Help Manage this Changing Dynamic
Your sales teams are on the front lines of this shift. They translate internal complexity into a coherent external experience, guiding buyers through evaluation while managing expectations and momentum.
Perspective is critical here: internal teams grow accustomed to established processes, while customers encounter them for the first time.
Ease of doing business is not owned by a single function. It is shaped across sales, legal, security, product, finance, and customer success. That said, sales teams are uniquely positioned to connect these functions and shape how buyers experience them.
Sales teams set the tone early by establishing expectations for stakeholders and surfacing risks before they become blockers. It also acts as the integrator, ensuring internal teams align to deliver a seamless experience.
When this coordination breaks down, customers feel it immediately.
Leading organizations recognize this and treat ease as a strategic capability. They equip sales teams with:
Just as importantly, they invest in Win/Loss Analysis and Voice of the Customer programs to continuously identify where friction exists and how it impacts deal outcomes.
These insights are critical for sales leaders. They reveal where deals are being lost due to avoidable complexity, where enablement is needed, and where cross-functional alignment can improve win rates.
Over time, longitudinal analysis allows organizations to track whether changes are reducing friction and strengthening competitive performance.
Conclusion: Ease of Doing Business is the New Competitive Advantage
In many markets, product differentiation is narrowing. Buyers increasingly assume a baseline level of functionality across vendors.
The calculus behind choosing a new vendor has shifted:
Instead of asking, Does this solution work?
Buyers increasingly ask, How much work will this create for our organization?
Sales teams are the first to hear that question and the most responsible for providing answers. Organizations that succeed will be those that empower their sales teams to remove friction at every stage of the buyer journey, while aligning the broader business to support that effort.
Win/Loss Analysis and Voice of the Customer insights provide the visibility needed to do this effectively, linking buyer perception to revenue outcomes and guiding where to act.
Because in today’s B2B environment, being great is no longer enough.
You also have to make it easy.
Boston, MA — March 17, 2026 — Anova Consulting Group today announced a significant expansion of its myView dashboard, introducing a new suite of analytics and reporting enhancements designed to provide clients with deeper insights into win/loss research and sales performance.
Beginning with upcoming programs, the myView platform will include 11 new reports that deliver more comprehensive visibility into research findings, enabling organizations to better understand the factors influencing client decisions throughout the sales process.
The expanded reporting capabilities provide greater clarity into key elements of sales opportunities, including initial search criteria and the underlying reasons behind client choices.
The new reports are designed to help organizations:
Gain deeper insight into the factors driving win and loss outcomes
Better understand how buyers evaluate options during the decision process
Identify patterns in client preferences and selection criteria
Translate research findings into more informed sales and strategy decisions
The enhanced reporting experience is fully integrated within the myView dashboard, offering an intuitive interface that allows users to easily explore and interpret program results.
“These enhancements represent an important step forward in how we deliver insight and value to our clients,” said Heather Jenkins, Managing Partner at Anova Consulting Group. “The new analytics and reporting packages within myView empower our clients to see not just what happened, but why, and that understanding is central to driving meaningful business improvement.”
Jenkins added that the release is part of a broader innovation strategy.
“This innovation reflects our continued investment in technology and our robust product roadmap. We’re committed to developing tools that make it easier for clients to access, visualize, and act on their data, enhancing the overall value of our partnership.”
The introduction of these new reporting capabilities underscores Anova Consulting Group’s ongoing commitment to strengthening the power, flexibility, and analytical depth of the myView dashboard. Additional enhancements are planned as part of the company’s continued focus on delivering advanced analytics, usability, and actionable insight to clients.
Anova Consulting Group is a leading advisory firm specializing in research-driven insights, win/loss analysis, and strategic consulting. Through advanced analytics and proprietary tools such as the myView dashboard, Anova helps organizations uncover the drivers behind client decisions and translate research into actionable strategies that improve business performance.
This blog was written by Cameron Chambers.
As leaders in the Win / Loss industry, we work closely with sales and revenue leaders to help them understand why they win, lose, and retain clients. In nearly every executive conversation we are having right now, one topic dominates: AI.
As this new technology sweeps across every industry, expectations have shifted almost overnight. Prospects and existing clients alike are no longer simply evaluating vendors on the quality of their services or expertise – they are increasingly demanding robust technology capabilities, specifically clear AI roadmaps as part of the baseline. In many verticals, AI has become less of a differentiator and more of an assumption.
Sales leaders are feeling this pressure directly. They are being asked not only how their teams perform, but how their systems, processes, and partners are leveraging AI to drive better results.
These new “table stakes”, however, are presenting new challenges for both buyers and sellers.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Win / Loss research. On the surface, AI tools present intriguing opportunities for automation and scalability. Large language models can summarize interviews instantly, detect patterns across mountains of buyer feedback, cluster themes at speed, and generate polished deliverables in a fraction of the time traditional workflows require. For revenue teams under pressure to do more with less, the efficiency gains are undeniable.
And we agree – when applied correctly, AI can meaningfully augment Win / Loss programs and business intelligence efforts. For example, Anova uses various AI tools to elevate our efficiency in analyzing data and spark new insights.
In our experience, however, efficiency is not the same as execution – and automation is only as strong as the foundation beneath it.
In practice, many organizations are trying to layer AI-driven insight on top of sales ecosystems that are built on an inconsistent foundation. Widespread CRM data completeness and accuracy issues create a shaky base on which to build. Opportunity fields are missing or outdated, even contact information is inaccurate. Loss reasons are vague or entered for internal optics rather than the truth. Competitive intelligence is captured unevenly. Deal context often lives in unstructured notes, or nowhere at all.
AI does not solve these problems. It amplifies them.
This is the core challenge: AI can accelerate analysis, but it cannot independently validate whether the underlying inputs reflect reality. Even as new tools continue to improve and the frequency of hallucinations declines, our experience has been clear – it remains essential to fact-check and sanity-check all AI-assisted output, especially when insights are being used to inform strategic decisions at the executive level.
Compounding this is the growing ability of LLMs to quickly and cheaply generate content that passes the “eye test”. AI-generated summaries can sound credible. Reports can look polished. Themes can appear coherent. But when AI output is produced faster than the underlying sales discipline required to support it, organizations risk confusing speed with truth and volume with value.
And this raises a deeper question for Win / Loss programs specifically – one we regularly challenge leadership teams to consider: even if AI enables us to generate more data, more reporting, and more analysis than ever before, does that align with what your sales leaders need?
Sales and product leaders are already overwhelmed with information. The goal is not to provide ever more output, rather it is to deliver prioritized, actionable insight that drives better decisions and better execution. True client centricity is about clarity, focus, and guidance on what to do next.
Before organizations ask:
They must first ask:
From our vantage point as a third-party Win / Loss consultant, before layering AI onto your sales data, the priority must be strengthening your CRM hygiene and foundational discipline. In the AI era, automation is becoming ubiquitous. But trusted insight – especially in high-stakes B2B sales and Win / Loss situations – still depends on fundamentals: clean data, structured processes, human judgement, and an unwavering focus on turning analysis into action.
In a world where AI is the expectation, disciplined execution is what earns trust.
Boston, MA — February 24, 2026 — Anova Consulting Group today announced the launch of year-over-year analytics capabilities within its myView dashboard, enabling clients to compare quantitative and qualitative research insights across multiple years in real time.
The new functionality allows organizations to track program performance over time, identify emerging trends, and better understand how stakeholder perceptions evolve from one research cycle to the next. By providing longitudinal insights directly within the myView platform, the enhancement supports more informed decision-making and strategic planning.
With the introduction of year-over-year comparisons, clients can now analyze historical research data alongside current results, providing a more comprehensive view of program performance and market dynamics.
The new capability allows organizations to:
Evaluate changes in satisfaction levels and key decision drivers across program cycles
Benchmark strengths and opportunities for improvement from one year to the next
Identify emerging trends and shifts in stakeholder perceptions
Support strategic planning with deeper longitudinal insight
By consolidating multi-year insights within a single interface, the myView dashboard simplifies complex analysis and makes it easier for clients to understand how their programs evolve over time.
“These enhancements represent an important step forward in how we deliver real-time insights and value to our clients,” said Richard Schroder, Founder and CEO of Anova Consulting Group. “Year-over-year analytics empower our clients to move beyond a single snapshot in time and instead see how performance, perceptions, and competitive dynamics evolve—helping drive meaningful business improvement.”
Schroder added that the release reflects the firm’s ongoing technology investment.
“This innovation reflects our continued investment in technology and our robust product roadmap. We are committed to developing tools that make it easier for clients to access, visualize, and act on their data—enhancing the overall value of our partnership.”
The addition of year-over-year analytics is part of Anova Consulting Group’s broader commitment to expanding the capabilities of the myView dashboard platform, providing clients with deeper analytics, greater transparency, and more powerful tools for understanding stakeholder feedback and research outcomes.
Anova Consulting Group is a leading advisory firm specializing in research-driven insights, stakeholder experience programs, and strategic consulting. Through advanced analytics and proprietary platforms such as the myView dashboard, Anova helps organizations transform research data into actionable insights that support better decision-making and long-term business improvement.
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