Soda Publishes Research Showing B2B Relationship Management Exceeds Biological Limits of the Human Brain

Soda publishes research that argues the gap between what B2B teams are asked to remember and what the brain can hold is biological, not behavioural.

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, August 17, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Soda (getsoda.app), a relationship memory platform for customer-facing teams, has published a research paper arguing that modern B2B sales and customer success roles now routinely exceed the brain's capacity to maintain meaningful customer relationships. The paper, "The Cognitive Ceiling: Why Relationship Management Doesn't Scale," is available on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19639256) and SSRN.

The paper draws on four established findings from cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology to make the case that the gap between what companies expect of their customer-facing teams and what those teams can deliver is not a matter of effort, training, or methodology. It is biological.

An account executive managing 40 accounts with an average of 8 stakeholders each is attempting to maintain meaningful relational context on 320 people. Research by Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford, validated across a dataset of six billion mobile phone calls, puts the brain's ceiling for meaningful relationships at roughly 150. The inner layers are tighter still: approximately 5 people in the closest circle, 15 in the next, and 50 in the wider close network. An AE's account book alone consumes more than twice the total budget before colleagues, family, or friends are counted.

Three additional constraints compound the problem. Nelson Cowan's revision of George Miller's working memory research established that active working memory holds 3 to 5 meaningful items at any given moment, meaning a rep can only hold full context on a handful of accounts at a time. Hermann Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve, replicated in 2015 by Murre and Dros, shows that unreinforced information degrades substantially within 24 hours. And research by Gloria Mark at UC Irvine found that regaining deep focus after an interruption takes up to 23 minutes. A 2021 study by Qatalog and Cornell University put the recovery cost of a single application switch at 9.5 minutes.

The paper argues that these four constraints do not act independently. They compound across a working day. By the fifth or sixth call, working memory is saturated across multiple competing contexts, earlier conversations have entered the steepest part of the forgetting curve, and each transition between accounts carries a measurable cognitive cost. The information most consistently lost across all four constraints is the same: the personal, non-transactional detail that makes a customer feel known.

The commercial stakes are well documented. According to Salesforce, 88% of B2B buyers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products. PwC research found that 32% of customers will walk away from a brand they love after a single bad experience. And market data from G2 indicates that 44% of B2B churn occurs because customers feel underserved or unvalued.

"The conventional response to thinning customer relationships has been to ask reps to try harder. Document more. Log more. Adopt another framework," said Lloyd Rayner, founder of Soda and author of the paper. "But asking the same brain to do more of the same is not a response to the problem. It is a restatement of it. We published this research because the problem is being treated as a performance issue when it is a biological one."

Soda, whose founder authored the research, is building the solution. Rather than asking reps to remember more, Soda quietly observes their customer interactions and uses those observations to build a Living Customer Profile, one that captures the relational context the paper describes and keeps it current as the relationship develops. The company calls this relationship memory. Further detail is available at getsoda.app/living-customer-profiles.
"The Cognitive Ceiling" is available for download at zenodo.org and ssrn.com.


About Soda
Customer-facing teams learn more about their customers in a week than their CRM will ever reflect. The context from calls, the details from research, the things people said that mattered but never got logged. Soda captures it without anyone stopping to write it down and keeps it in a living profile that stays current as the relationship develops. Soda is a relationship memory solution for customer-facing teams.

Lloyd Rayner
Soda
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