Here's the sentence I say more than any other: the companies that succeed at B2B digital commerce are not the ones with the best technology.
They're the ones with the best alignment.
I've been working inside B2B digital commerce for more than 20 years — at distributors, at manufacturers, at companies that got it right, and at companies that spent millions and ended up with a platform nobody uses. And the pattern is consistent enough at this point that I'd call it a rule: technology is rarely the constraint.
The adoption gap is the real problem
Ask most B2B executives about their digital commerce performance and they'll point to a number. Order volume, conversion rate, percentage of revenue through digital channels. The number is almost always lower than they expected when they launched.
The instinct is to fix the platform. Update the search, improve the catalog, add a feature the sales team asked for. Sometimes that helps at the margin. But it doesn't close the gap — because the gap isn't in the product. It's in adoption.
Customers aren't using the platform because nobody asked them to. Sales reps aren't promoting it because nobody gave them a reason to. Internal processes still route around it because they were never updated. The platform launched; the organization didn't change.
Why this keeps happening
The technology vendors have a strong incentive to tell you this is a technology problem. If the platform isn't performing, the answer is more features, a new integration, an upgrade. It's a clean story and it's easy to sell.
The harder story — the true one — is that digital commerce transformation is an organizational change project with a software component. Most companies treat it the other way around.
They hire a technology team, run a vendor selection, implement the platform, go live. Then they wonder why adoption is low. The answer is usually that the change management work — aligning the sales team, updating customer processes, building internal champions, communicating value to customers — never happened, or happened too late.
What the companies that get it right actually do
The distributors and manufacturers I've watched succeed at digital commerce have a few things in common, and none of them are technical.
They start with the customer problem. Not "we need a digital channel" but "our customers are telling us they want to order at 11pm and our sales reps can't pick up the phone." The platform solves a real, specific problem that the organization cares about.
Leadership is genuinely involved. Not as sponsors who approved the budget, but as people who understand what digital commerce is supposed to do and talk about it with the organization. When the CEO says "this is how we're going to serve customers better," the sales team listens differently.
The sales team is brought along early. This is where most implementations fail. Sales reps see a digital platform as a threat — to their relationships, to their commissions, to their jobs. The companies that succeed treat sales as a partner in digital commerce, not a bystander. That means different compensation structures, real training, and genuine recognition when digital orders flow from their accounts.
What to do about it
If your digital commerce platform isn't performing, the first question isn't "what's wrong with the technology." It's "what's wrong with the adoption."
Who in the organization is accountable for adoption, not just implementation? What's the sales team's relationship with the platform — are they promoting it or working around it? What do your customers actually know about it, and have you asked them what would make them use it more?
Those are leadership questions. They don't have technology answers. But they're the ones that determine whether your investment performs — or sits on a shelf with a low adoption number next to it.
The platform is the easy part. The org change is the work.