Tonia Coletta spent fifteen years in the beer industry before she ever thought seriously about millwork. The skills she built there, listening to customers, managing stakeholder relationships, and translating product data into digital experiences, turned out to be exactly what Metrie needed when she joined five years ago. The categories are different. The underlying work, figuring out what customers need and building digital tools that serve those needs, is not.
Coletta is Director of Digital Customer Experience at Metrie, a millwork and moulding manufacturer and distributor based in Vancouver, Canada that produces and distributes baseboards, crown mouldings, and interior and exterior doors across the U.S. and Canadian markets. Her current focus is elevating customer experience through MyMetrie, Metrie’s commerce and customer portal, a project she describes with the kind of measured enthusiasm that comes from having already built the platform from scratch and understanding exactly what a more scalable and advanced solution needs to do.
I spoke with her at the B2B eCommerce Association’s Americas event in Scottsdale, where she had slipped away from the conference between sessions to visit Metrie’s Phoenix sales branch. That detail captures something about her approach: the digital strategy and the customer relationship are not separate activities.
Customer Portals: From Learning to Scaling
Metrie’s B2B commerce platform, called MyMetrie, launched five years ago with a focus on providing customers 24/7 digital access for day-to-day document management, pricing and ordering. As Metrie’s first step into digital self service capabilities, MyMetrie has served its purpose well, providing value to customers while giving the digital team room to test, learn, and understand what the customer base needed from a digital portal. The decisions as Metrie moves forward include natural steps and questions: How do we scale? Do we have the right technology in place? What is foundational and what drives customer experience?
“We were able to launch MyMetrie quickly with a platform solution that integrated directly with our business systems and workflows. We now have five years of experience, data, customer and sales feedback that is driving our future state technology and product roadmap decisions.” Coletta said. “Data combined with deeply understanding how to deliver value for our customers is how we’ll create trusted digital customer experiences.”
The framing reflects a maturity in how B2B digital leaders are approaching technology decisions. The first platform is rarely the forever platform. What matters is what the organization learns during that initial deployment and how clearly those lessons are incorporated into the requirements for what comes next. Coletta’s team has five years of adoption data, customer feedback, and operational experience to draw on as they build for the future. That is a meaningful advantage over starting from zero. For more on how B2B distributors and manufacturers are approaching digital transformation platform decisions, the B2B eCommerce Association has resources that go deeper on the evaluation and selection process.
Customer Adoption: COVID, Champions, and the Sales Team
MyMetrie.com launched during COVID, which turned an otherwise uncertain adoption environment into an unexpected asset. The disruption to traditional sales channels created genuine urgency around digital alternatives, and early adoption numbers reflected that.
“We saw really strong adoption the first couple of years. COVID was actually a great starting point,” Coletta said. “And then we saw adoption plateauing.”
What moved the needle after the initial surge was not a marketing campaign or a product improvement. It was the sales team. Coletta was direct about where the real leverage sits.
“It’s really about the sales team embracing digital and having champions within the commercial business. Once you have the sales team understanding how digital can provide added value to their customers and also to their own roles, that’s where the magic happens.”
She described seeing clear patterns in where adoption was strongest: the pockets of success tracked almost exactly to where Metrie had invested in onboarding, communications, relationship building and physical proximity. Having team members in the same branch as the sales team made a measurable difference. “Conversations in person help build trust. Questions get quick answers, feedback is captured in real time,” she said.
Metrie’s experience also produced something that most digital commerce teams are still looking for: a genuine internal champion who came from the sales world. An IT business partner who was involved in the original project moved into a sales role, bringing direct knowledge of both the platform and the sales experience with him. “He’s always available for a conversation on how best to drive usage or to provide critical feedback on feature enhancements” Coletta said. “Anytime we want to test or pilot, he’s the person we go to first.”
I mentioned during our conversation that I have been searching for a sales leader willing to speak publicly about how eCommerce has improved their work life, not from the eCommerce team’s perspective, but from their own. Coletta’s champion at Metrie sounds close to that profile. The industry could use more of them on stage.
The customer experience work that drives adoption in B2B commerce consistently depends on this kind of internal advocacy. The B2B eCommerce Association has covered the dynamics of sales and digital alignment extensively, and the pattern Coletta describes at Metrie, champions embedded in the sales organization, is one of the most reliable paths to durable adoption.
Fifteen Years in Beer: What Carries Over
Coletta spent the bulk of her pre-Metrie career in digital marketing for the beer industry, finishing with a stint on a global eCommerce team as major retail customers began building their own digital capabilities and demanding structured product data from suppliers. That last chapter is what pulled her into B2B eCommerce directly.
“In my last couple of years, we knew that we needed a plan for eCommerce as a lot of our Canadian customers were building their own eCommerce sites and needing product data and online expertise from us,” she said. “I really enjoyed those years – learning from a global team in more advanced markets and then get to build out the digital roadmap for Canada.”
The transition from beer to millwork might look like a significant pivot from the outside. Coletta’s experience suggests otherwise. The product categories are different. The customer dynamics, B2B relationships built on trust, repeat purchasing, and the need to be reliably easy to do business with, are not.
“The customer relationships and the stakeholder relationships that are needed to drive this kind of transformation, beer business is not that different from the moulding business in terms of what our customers need and how they want to work with their suppliers,” she said.
“I was able to translate a lot of those stakeholder relationship skills from beer to moulding pretty seamlessly, which surprised me a little bit, but it’s really about figuring out what their pain points are – ask what they need and listen. It’s a simple equation but then becomes complex behind the scenes when you need to solve for those pain points.”
That framing, simple equation, complex execution, is one of the more honest descriptions of B2B digital commerce work available. The principle of listening to customers and building for their actual needs is not complicated. The organizational, technical, and data infrastructure required to actually do it is.
Listening to Customers at Scale
Coletta’s approach to customer listening is structured and runs in parallel tracks. The Metrie business uses NPS, and then her team executes commerce surveys that go out to both customers and internal stakeholders, including sales desk reps and field sellers.
“We’ll send out surveys to pulse check on most valuable features, feedback, future capabilities,” she said. “We’ll survey customers first and then the commercial team to understand what they believe is most important and what they’re hearing from their customers too.”
The dual-track approach matters in distribution, where the sales team is often the closest point of contact with end customers and carries knowledge about customer needs that does not always make it back to the digital team through formal channels. By surveying sellers alongside customers, Coletta is building a more complete picture of where friction exists and what capabilities would genuinely move the needle.
This is particularly relevant as Metrie prepares for future capabilities. Customer and seller feedback gathered over years of portal operation provides the kind of real-world requirements data that no vendor briefing or analyst report can replace.
The Evolving Digital Role
Hired as a Digital Marketing Director, Coletta’s title and scope have shifted from digital marketing and commerce toward a broader customer-facing digital experience mandate, one that encompasses not just the eCommerce platform but the full arc of how customers and sales teams interact with Metrie digitally. “My role’s evolved to sharpen focus on customer- facing digital touchpoints and how we can deliver trusted and value adding experiences for our customers” she said.
That kind of role expansion is a pattern worth noting. As B2B organizations deepen their digital capabilities, the leaders who built those capabilities often find their scope growing to encompass customer data, sales enablement, and the digital touchpoints that sit upstream and downstream of the transaction itself. The B2B eCommerce strategy conversation is increasingly inseparable from the broader customer experience conversation.
On Being a Woman in B2B Digital Commerce
Coletta has spent her career, across beer and millwork, in B2B environments where women in digital leadership roles are still a minority. She did not offer a detailed account of specific obstacles, but her trajectory tells its own story: twenty years of building cross-functional influence in relationship-driven industries, navigating the internal politics of digital transformation in organizations where digital was not always seen as a core function, and doing so in two very different product categories.
The skills she emphasizes, stakeholder relationships, listening, translating customer needs into digital requirements, are the same skills that make digital transformation work in any organization. They are also skills that women often bring to these roles in distinctive ways, and they are the skills that tend to create durable change rather than just functional deployments.
The B2B eCommerce Association’s Women in B2B eCommerce program is building the community and visibility that practitioners like Coletta deserve. If you are a woman working in B2B eCommerce or digital commerce in manufacturing and distribution, the Women in B2B eCommerce LinkedIn group is an active space for connection and peer exchange. You can connect with Tonia Coletta directly on LinkedIn.
Looking Ahead
Advancing MyMetrie is the centrepiece of Coletta’s near-term work, but it is a means rather than an end. The goal is a more scalable foundation for customer experiences and commercial capabilities, driven by data and insights. Five years of learnings and successes have produced a clear picture of what those capabilities need to be. The task now is to build them.
What makes Coletta’s approach worth watching is the combination of customer rigor and internal relationship-building that she brings to the work. The surveys, the embedded team members, the IT-partner-turned-sales-champion: these are not accidents. They are the product of someone who understands that digital transformation in B2B is as much a human problem as a technical one.
“Metrie’s Centennial is in 2026 – that’s 100 years of trusted service with our customers,” she said. “Now we are now building for the next 100 years, and digital will continue to be a critical part.”
That balance, clarity of purpose, complexity of execution, is exactly what separates digital programs that deliver sustained value from those that launch well and then plateau.
Metrie is building for what comes after the plateau