Are you optimising compliance while your competitors optimise positioning?

Your sustainability agenda is probably busy right now.

CSRD deadlines are closing in. Reporting structures are being built. Data gaps are being chased. Governance discussions are filling the calendar. For many leadership teams, sustainability has become a large, urgent, internal exercise.

That's understandable.

But it's also where the mistake is being made.

While most manufacturers optimise compliance, a smaller group optimises positioning. That difference is already showing up in tenders. In preferred supplier lists. In market share.

CSRD changed the rules but not how most companies play

CSRD is mandatory. There's no debate about that.

For Swedish and EU manufacturers, the direction is clear: transparency, traceability, and accountability are now baseline expectations. Getting these wrong carries risk: regulatory, reputational, and financial.

So, organisations do what they've always done under pressure. They turn inward.

They treat sustainability as a reporting problem. A governance topic. A compliance programme to be delivered safely and efficiently. Something to "get through" so the business can get back to normal.

But CSRD didn't just raise the bar on disclosure.
It changed the commercial context companies now compete in.

And that's where the disconnect begins.

Sustainability has already entered the buying decision

Across industrial sectors, sustainability is no longer a soft value signal. It's becoming a hard purchasing criterion.

Research from Bain & Company shows sustainability is now one of the top three B2B purchasing criteria, and by 2028, buyers expect it to rank second behind only quality and ahead of price.

Large customers aren't asking whether suppliers care about sustainability. They're asking whether they can prove it, articulate it, and align it with the customer's own regulatory and commercial pressures.

In markets where products are comparable and price differences are marginal, sustainability increasingly breaks the deadlock. Early movers who frame it clearly and align it with customer needs are winning significantly more business. Nearly half of B2B buyers are already directing more spend to their more sustainable suppliers, up from 39% in 2024.

This isn't about virtue.
It's about risk reduction, supplier resilience, and future-proofing from the customer's point of view.

And customers don't wait for laggards to catch up. Half of B2B buyers surveyed by Bain plan to drop suppliers that don't meet sustainability criteria over the next three years.

When perfect compliance loses to adequate positioning

Imagine this. An industrial company spent eighteen months building a world-class CSRD reporting structure. Flawless documentation. Passed every audit. Internal teams aligned.

But they lose bids to a competitor whose reporting was adequate at best.

The difference wasn't sustainability performance. It was how it showed up in the commercial conversation. The competitor's pitch deck had one slide their team didn't: "How our sustainability roadmap reduces your Scope 3 exposure."

For context: Scope 3 emissions are the indirect emissions in a company's value chain including those from suppliers. Under CSRD and similar regulations, large buyers must now report these. That single slide told the customer exactly how partnering with this supplier would help them meet their own regulatory obligations.

That's positioning.
And it's beating compliance.

The gap between winners and losers here isn't technical capability. Most manufacturers are dealing with the same regulations. The same supply chain complexity. The same data challenges. The same cost pressures.

The difference is intent.

Some companies treat sustainability as a cost of staying in the game. Others use it to stand out within it.

One group optimises for internal assurance.
The other optimises for external relevance.

Compliance keeps you eligible. Positioning helps you win.

Inside-out sustainability thinking is holding leaders back

The default response to CSRD pressure is inside-out thinking.

Start with internal risk. Build internal processes. Optimise internal reporting. Measure success by whether the box is ticked and the audit passes.

The problem is that customers don't experience your reporting structure. They experience your offer.

They care about what sustainability means for delivery reliability, regulatory alignment, reputational safety, and long-term partnership. If your sustainability story lives only in reports and internal dashboards, it never enters the buying conversation.

Inside-out thinking feels responsible. It feels controlled.

But it misses how customers are making decisions.
And by the time that becomes obvious in lost bids, the gap is already open.

A small tangent (but relevant, we promise)

There's a peculiar dynamic happening in consulting right now.

CSRD specialists are booked solid. Reporting workshops are full. Governance advisors have waiting lists. The sustainability consulting market is expanding from $12 billion in 2024 to a projected $30 billion by 2030—driven almost entirely by compliance demand.

Meanwhile, positioning work often gets deferred.
"Let's get compliant first, then we'll think about how to compete with it."

It's like perfecting your factory operations while someone else redesigns what customers buy.

The machinery runs beautifully.
Customers moved elsewhere.

A better CEO question to ask right now

The most important sustainability question for CEOs today isn't:

"Are we compliant?"

It's:

"Where does sustainability influence customer choice and are we using it deliberately?"

That shift changes the agenda.

It moves sustainability out of the reporting function and into the commercial conversation. It forces clarity on which customers care, why they care, and how sustainability shows up alongside price, quality, and delivery, not separate from them.

It also exposes a hard truth: treating sustainability purely as compliance is a strategic decision. Just not one that tends to win.

Compliance is table stakes. Positioning is advantage.

None of this argues against compliance. CSRD matters. Getting it wrong is expensive.

But getting it only right internally is leaving value on the table.

The manufacturers pulling ahead aren't doing more sustainability work. They're doing different work. They're framing sustainability through the customer's lens. They're using it to reduce friction in buying decisions. They're making it easier for customers to choose them when everything else looks equal.

That's outside-in thinking applied to sustainability and it's exactly the shift many organisations are delaying.

The gap isn't ideology.
It's market share.

And the longer sustainability is treated as something to manage internally rather than compete with externally, the wider that gap becomes.

Where this leaves you

The question isn't whether sustainability will affect your competitive position.

It already does.

The question is whether you're optimising for it or leaving that advantage to someone else.