Away From Home growth is now almost entirely price-driven. Volumes are flat or falling, and the outlet universe has shrunk by around 9,000 sites since 2019. Suppliers are competing for a smaller pool of business, while operators are under greater pressure to justify every purchase.

Similarly, a purchase decision no longer sits with one person. The average B2B buying committee now involves 13 internal stakeholders, with ‘hidden buyers’ in finance, legal, and procurement holding ~50% of total influence. These decision-makers arrive later, and far better informed, than ever - only engaging with sellers when they are around two-thirds of the way through their journeys, armed with independent research and AI-augmented recommendations. 

Today, Away From Home suppliers can no longer rely on their old peer-to-peer relationships for stability, let alone growth. To succeed, they need complete visibility of the customer journey.

Everyday disconnect between marketing and sales 

The biggest growth opportunities in foodservice and on-trade are often lost, not because demand is missing, but because sales and marketing teams are working from different data, different priorities and different versions of the truth. 

The most common story is that the two teams hold different records of the same customer. Marketing focuses on generating engagement from a campaign list, sales focuses on generating revenue from its own accounts, and the CRM holds a third version neither fully trusts. Nobody decided this - It has simply accumulated over time. 

Day to day, the disconnect looks like this: a lead can reach sales with a name and a form fill but no history, so the rep opens from nothing. Yet the lead has been reading the brand's marketing content for months. That rep can then learn something valuable on the call but it stays in their head, or their notebook, and never reaches the marketers planning the next campaign. The result is disconnected decision-making, inconsistent lead follow-up and missed opportunities to convert demand into growth. 

Customers and prospects experience the disconnection more vividly still. 

Instead of a seamless progression, the buying journey can feel like being handed from one company to another. They can spend weeks researching menu innovation and guest experience - and then the first sales conversation opens on cost per serve. They’ve already told the supplier a great deal about their business priorities through what they read and responded to. But if none of that reaches the person who calls them, they’re forced to repeat themselves - and the deal soon stalls.

So, what needs to change? 

Creating a unified customer journey 

When it comes to customer data, marketing often holds the behavioural half: who is engaging, with what, how often and how that is changing. Sales holds the contextual half: who actually decides, what the operator said rather than what they clicked, where the brand sits against the competition and why deals were won or lost. Yet each half is close to useless without the other. 

A genuinely shared view begins with an agreed definition of the customer. It collects data on the entire operator group, rather than the contact who filled in a form. It provides visible engagement history visible to sales and visible outcomes to marketing. And it holds valuable information on the wider Away From Home market, not only the supplier’s existing customer base. 

At Omne, we see a unified commercial journey as having four stages:

• Know: A trusted view of the market, the customers and the prospects - enriched, deduplicated and agreed across teams.

• Reach: Using that information to build precise audiences and relevant journeys, connecting first-party data to paid media, CRM and content.

• Win: Shared intelligence that determines where sales spends its time, while operators who do not need a sales conversation continue through a journey that stays relevant to them.

• Measure, learn and improve: Connecting activity to outcome so that the next decision is better than the last.

And the final step that knits these stages together? A platform that brings together customer data, engagement activity, CRM journeys and sales outcomes for comprehensive sales-marketing alignment. 

Turning relationships into revenue   

Omne Connect is Omne's fully managed customer growth service. It carries 400,000+ enriched operator profiles across 20+ sectors, with 70+ outlet-level attributes including spend, cuisine, group structure and social signals. And it brings this intelligence together into one accessible view, to create a deeper, more actionable understanding of the customers that matter.

Importantly, Omne Connect helps foster a truly connected business culture. With shared visibility of customer behaviour, opportunity progression and commercial impact, sales and marketing can prioritise the same opportunities, coordinate activity more effectively and make better decisions faster together. 

It’s one of the most effective ways to strengthen existing foodservice relationships while opening the door to new opportunities.

On 30 September, we'll explore how brands in the Away From Home channel can better connect customer intelligence, marketing and sales to drive growth in our online webinar, Winning More of the Operators That Matter.  

Register here.

1. Simon Stenning, Future Foodservice 2026, January 2026. UK market £104.3bn in 2025, forecast £106.0bn in 2026; outlet universe 253,268, down roughly 9,000 since 2019. Licensed copy held internally; no public URL.