Soda says B2B relationship management has outgrown the brain

Soda has published research arguing that modern B2B sales and customer success teams are being asked to remember more customer context than the human brain can sustain. The paper says the problem is biological, not behavioral, and points to a product built to capture that missing relationship memory.

Why it matters: - Soda's research argues that customer-facing teams are losing important relationship context because the human brain has hard limits on memory, attention and recall. - The paper says those limits now collide with the size and pace of modern B2B accounts, where missing personal details can weaken customer experience and raise churn risk.

What happened: - Soda published a research paper, "The Cognitive Ceiling: Why Relationship Management Doesn't Scale," on Zenodo and SSRN. - The paper argues that the gap between what B2B teams are expected to remember and what the brain can hold is biological, not behavioral. - Soda founder Lloyd Rayner said the company published the research because the problem is being treated as a performance issue when it is a biological one. - The paper is available for download at Zenodo and SSRN.

The details: - The paper cites Robin Dunbar's work at the University of Oxford, validated across a dataset of six billion mobile phone calls, to put the ceiling for meaningful relationships at roughly 150 people. - Dunbar's model also places the inner circles at about 5 close relationships, 15 in the next layer and 50 in a wider close network. - An account executive managing 40 accounts with an average of 8 stakeholders each is tracking context on 320 people, which the paper says exceeds that relationship ceiling. - The paper cites Nelson Cowan's revision of George Miller's working memory research to argue that active working memory can hold only 3 to 5 meaningful items at once. - It cites the 2015 replication by Murre and Dros of Hermann Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve, which showed that unreinforced information degrades substantially within 24 hours. - It cites Gloria Mark's research at UC Irvine showing that regaining deep focus after an interruption can take up to 23 minutes. - It also cites a 2021 Qatalog and Cornell University study that found the recovery cost of a single application switch at 9.5 minutes. - The paper argues these constraints compound across the workday, especially by the fifth or sixth call, when earlier conversations are already fading and each account switch adds cognitive cost. - The information most likely to disappear is the personal, non-transactional detail that makes customers feel known. - Soda says its "Living Customer Profile" is designed to capture that relational context and keep it current as customer relationships develop. - More detail is available at Living Customer Profiles.

Between the lines: - The research frames relationship management as a systems problem, not a coaching problem. - That framing supports Soda's product pitch: if the brain cannot reliably hold all the context, software has to do the remembering. - The commercial argument is reinforced by buyer-experience data cited in the paper, including Salesforce's finding that 88% of B2B buyers value experience as much as products. - The paper also cites PwC research saying 32% of customers will leave a brand they love after one bad experience, and G2 data showing 44% of B2B churn comes from customers feeling underserved or unvalued.

What's next: - Soda is positioning its platform as the operational answer to the cognitive limits outlined in the paper. - The company says its system observes customer interactions and uses those observations to build a living profile without requiring reps to manually log every detail. - Soda is also promoting the research as a downloadable paper on Zenodo and SSRN.

The bottom line: - Soda's core claim is simple: B2B teams are being asked to remember beyond biological capacity, and software must carry more of the relationship memory burden.