Chain Store Guide

69% of B2B buyers still turn to a sales rep to validate AI-generated insights before they trust them. — Gartner Survey Finds 69% of B2B Buyers Turn to Sales Reps to Validate AI-Generated Insights, Gartner, Inc., May 20, 2026 Your prospect isn’t Googling you anymore. They’re asking AI instead. Forrester’s newly released The State of Business Buying, 2026 report confirms it: genAI searches are now where B2B buyers start, ahead of a traditional search engine.

Four months are left on the calendar, but that number is deceiving. Thanksgiving week is gone. The two weeks around Christmas and New Year’s are gone. For the retail and foodservice prospects your team is chasing, most of what’s left in between is gone too, since that stretch is their busiest operating season, not a lull. What’s left is not a quarter. It’s a handful of real swings at the plate. That would be manageable most years.

Email still beats almost every other channel for return on effort. However, the rules have changed underneath everyone’s feet, and a lot of B2B teams selling into chain accounts haven’t caught up. CAN-SPAM is still federal law number one, unchanged since 2003. What’s changed is everything layered on top of it.

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Twelve percent. That’s how many grocery shoppers said, back in 2017, that they bought a deli-prepared meal instead of going out to eat. Today that number is 28 percent, more than double, according to FMI’s Power of Foodservice at Retail 2025 report. Retail foodservice sales climbed to $52.1 billion over the past year, and 23 percent of shoppers say they’re stopping less often at fast food and fast casual restaurants because of it. This is not a pandemic hangover.

Back to school isn’t a September thing anymore. For a lot of families, it already happened, buses are running, backpacks are packed, and the summer routine fizzled out weeks ago. Sales and marketing teams selling into retail & foodservice chains are living through the same shift. They just haven’t clocked that it applies to them too. Start with the list, because everything else sits on top of it.

The retail robots market is on pace to hit roughly $21.7 billion in 2026. Restaurant chains are automating for a blunter reason: they can’t hire enough people to run the floor. White Castle runs its Flippy cooking robot across more than 100 locations. Chipotle and Buffalo Wild Wings are testing similar systems.

For decades, retail marketing has worked in one direction. The retailer decided what mattered, bought the ad space, and told shoppers what to think. That has quietly reversed. Now the shopper decides what’s exciting, posts about it, and the retailer watches to see what catches on before it commits. It’s a generational handoff as much as a marketing one, and it’s already changing who gets shelf space. Costco is the clearest example. It doesn’t pay a single influencer.

Somewhere on your prospect list right now is a name that no longer works there. Retail and restaurant chains change their people faster than almost any other industry in the country. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts median job tenure across all industries at 3.9 years, already a two-decade low. Retail trade sits well below that, at 2.9 years with most buyers changing jobs within 1-2 years.

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