When Deirdre Peters joined Boston Scientific six years ago, the company was an $11 billion global medical device manufacturer with no online sales. That fact, which might have registered as a warning sign to some, struck her as an invitation. “My God, they don’t even know what they’re giving me,” she recalled thinking at the time. “This is an $11 billion company with no online sales.”
Peters, who goes by D, is now Director of Digital Experience at Boston Scientific, overseeing eCommerce, CRM systems, and sales enablement for a company that has since grown to nearly $20 billion in revenue, with a meaningful portion flowing through digital channels she helped build. The journey from that starting point to where the company stands today is a case study in how to bring B2B digital transformation to a regulated, relationship-driven industry, one sales council, one training session, and one pilot site at a time.
I spoke with Peters at the B2B eCommerce Association’s first Americas event in Scottsdale, where she had also moderated a panel earlier in the day.
The Greenfield Opportunity That Changed Everything
Peters came to Boston Scientific from Nike, where she had led the replatforming of Converse.com. Her background was rooted in B2C, and she brought that orientation with her into a fundamentally different environment.
“I first brought over this mindset that we would just take B2C and plop it in B2B,” she said. “And in a way, I’m really glad I was naive and thought that way because I was able to successfully build out a very B2C-like experience in B2B.”
The naivety, as she frames it, was productive. It meant she did not spend the early months talking herself out of what was possible. It also meant she quickly collided with the realities that make B2B digital transformation genuinely difficult: pricing sensitivity, channel complexity, change management, and the need to bring a distributed sales force along for the ride.
The pricing question was the sharpest early obstacle. “That was the hardest battle,” she said. “Do we show price on the site? How do you have an e-commerce site without pricing? At some point I need to know how much I’m paying for something.” The company’s commercial leaders ultimately resolved it. “It was our sales leaders who bought into the concept of eCommerce who said, we’re going to be transparent, and that’s who we are. And it’s worked out fantastically for us.”
Building Customer Adoption from the Ground Up
Once the platform decisions were made, Peters turned her attention to the problem that determines whether a B2B eCommerce investment delivers returns or collects dust: customer adoption. Her approach was deliberate and thorough.
“We put everything into customer adoption,” she said. “We did not leave anything to chance.”
The strategy centered on the sales force. Rather than treating sales reps as potential resistors of a digital channel, Peters brought them in at the beginning, forming sales councils as early as product development to review concepts and surface concerns. She hand-selected council members to serve as advocates within their regions and business lines. When it came time to launch, the sales team was not told to support the new portal. They had helped build it.
The framing mattered as much as the process. Peters gave sales reps a reason to want adoption, not just a directive to pursue it. “We said, you know, we’re launching through you. It’s a reason for you to go to a customer. It’s a reason to get in there and talk about a new product.” She also made the case for their own relief: “This is going to allow you to be the clinically trained rep that you are in cases with physicians and get rid of this burden,” referring to the constant interruptions that came from customers texting orders mid-drive.
The results of the pilot told the story. “We went from 12 customers to $220,000,” she said. “We couldn’t keep the lid on it.” Early adopters among the sales force shared anecdotes that became internal marketing material. One rep described a customer coming to him with a product they had discovered on the website that the rep had never thought to pitch. “That’s such a cool new thing,” Peters said. “I usually have to bring it to them.”
A full national launch followed, and the momentum has continued since. “You have to pinch yourself sometimes,” Peters said. “It’s been a tidal wave that we don’t want to stop. We couldn’t stop it.”
AI in a Regulated Industry: Where Caution Meets Curiosity
The conversation shifted, as most conversations in B2B digital commerce eventually do, to artificial intelligence. Peters is both genuinely curious about where AI will take the industry and clear-eyed about the constraints that make a regulated environment like medical devices a different proving ground than consumer retail.
“I think you’ll see it first in the D2C world where people are buying more through recommendations, whether it be ChatGPT or somewhere else,” she said. “What’s different is the complexity. We’re in a regulated industry, and you need to be accurate. We cannot afford to tell someone to use the wrong product or that a product is compatible with a device that it’s not.”
That constraint shapes how Boston Scientific approaches generative AI on its platform. Experimentation is happening, but the tolerance for error is low in ways that have no parallel in apparel or beauty. Accuracy is not a nice-to-have in medical device commerce. It is a compliance requirement.
Peters is also watching the broader question of how AI will reshape the commerce interface itself. “Are people going to even interact with a website anymore?” she asked. “I don’t know the answer to that, but I think we’re all learning together.”
Her practical instinct is to hold two things simultaneously: genuine attention to where the technology is headed, and an insistence on not abandoning what works in the present. “You can’t abandon your current experience. You need to make sure that’s optimized because that is your sales channel.” She draws a useful analogy: supermarkets still exist despite being a highly inefficient way to stock a pantry. Familiar experiences have staying power even when better alternatives emerge.
The nuance she brings to AI adoption, both ambitious and grounded, reflects a broader maturity in how B2B practitioners are thinking about digital transformation in complex environments. As McKinsey has noted, the industries that will see the most durable AI gains are those that invest in accuracy and data quality alongside deployment speed, a balance Peters understands well.
Why B2B Is a Wide-Open Field for the Next Generation
Peters made a point during our conversation that I have been thinking about since: B2B< eCommerce, precisely because so much of it is still being built, is a more opportunity-rich environment for digital professionals right now than consumer retail.
“The fun is really in B2B,” she said. “In B2B, it’s just a wide open field. It’s greenfield. A lot of times you could be building the very first online experience and I think there’s a lot of fun in that.”
She contrasted that with where D2C currently sits: highly optimized, intensely competitive, with thin margins and limited room to make a transformative mark. The scale of what she encountered at Boston Scientific made her point clearly. An $11 billion company with no online sales presence is not an anomaly in B2B. It is a description of where a significant portion of the manufacturing and distribution sector was, and in some cases still is.
“We’re almost $20 billion now and have a good portion going through eCommerce,” Peters said. “The opportunity was massive. And still is. We’re just at the beginning of our journey. We’re changing an industry. We’re changing the way people think, the way people buy.”
The Human Layer: Empathy, Change Management, and Digital Experience
One thread that runs through Peters’s work, from the sales council model she built to the way she thinks about AI recommendations, is a consistent orientation toward experience. Not just the technical architecture of a platform, but how a real person feels when they interact with it.
“I do bring everything back in my life to experience at the end of the day,” she said. “We are human, and we do want the best experience and we want the best product. You can’t ever lose sight of that.”
That perspective shapes how she thinks about change management, which she deliberately reframes as commercialization. “No one likes to be change managed,” she said. “So we look at it as commercialization. We say, how is it that we can train our customer, our sales rep, to do a new way of doing business that’s easier for everyone?”
The distinction is not merely semantic. Change management implies something being done to people. Commercialization implies value being delivered to them. At Boston Scientific, the approach of involving sales teams early, training them thoroughly, and giving them tools that genuinely made their work easier produced a launch environment where internal advocates did the work of scaling adoption. The product sold itself because the people closest to the customer had already bought in.
This is a pattern that holds across industries. Research from Harvard Business Review on organizational change consistently points to frontline buy-in as the most reliable predictor of successful rollouts, a finding that Peters arrived at through practice rather than theory.
On Being a Woman in B2B Digital Commerce
Peters was candid about the experiences that have shaped her perspective on gender in professional environments. She described an early moment at Nike, in a vendor partnership meeting, when she was shushed. “I was like, what? It was so shocking I don’t even really know how I reacted in the moment.” She offers it not as a defining wound but as a data point, something that happens, and something the industry is moving past.
“What I find empowering about being a woman in this space is that women bring different perspective, and we bring diversity of thought and maybe a more empathetic approach to things,” she said. “And I think that’s really key in topics like change management where you really need to be an empathetic leader and understand the other point of view.”
Her advice to women earlier in their careers is direct: stop apologizing, own who you are, and build each other up rather than competing for the single seat sometimes available at the table.
“Own being female, own being a girly girl if that’s you,” she said. “Be comfortable with yourself and know that you bring a lot of value and perspective to the table and just own that. Run with it.”
On the question of women supporting each other: “Make two seats and build each other up. I’m not going to claim I’ve always done that. I’m a competitive person. I want to be successful just as much as anyone else. And I don’t know that I always saw that. So for women, especially if you’re a young woman coming up in the industry right now, build each other up. It’s absolutely the way to success, by helping each other.”
I mentioned a pattern I have observed across generations: the cohort above Peters learned to fit themselves into existing structures; the generation below is questioning the structures themselves. Peters found it encouraging. “The younger generations are coming and they’re like, no, I am who I am and I know what I’m talking about.” She sees that confidence as a gain for everyone, not just for women. “It’s beyond B2B. How do we help each other out? How do we all become more successful by building each other up? There’s plenty of pie to go around.”
The Women in B2B eCommerce Community
Peters values the community that the B2B eCommerce Association has built, in part because she remembers what it felt like to not have one. “Only 6 years ago, I had no one to turn to,” she said. “The community you guys are building here is incredible. You’re just finding people who are in your industry who you can have an honest conversation with and< share your trials and tribulations and what’s worked for them. That’s everything.”
That spirit is central to the B2B eCommerce Association’s Women in B2B eCommerce program, which exists to create the kind of peer connection and knowledge exchange that Peters describes. If you are a woman working in B2B eCommerce, or a digital leader interested in connecting with others navigating similar terrain, the Women in B2B eCommerce LinkedIn group is a growing community built for exactly that.
You can connect with Deirdre Peters directly on LinkedIn.
Looking Ahead
Peters’s trajectory, from a company with zero online sales to one of the more sophisticated digital commerce operations in the medical device sector, is a reminder of what the greenfield opportunity in B2B actually looks like when someone with the right combination of experience, pragmatism, and people-sense takes it seriously.
“Things are moving really fast and they’re not incremental to what we’re doing right now,” she said. “They’re very transformative. None of us have the answer, but it’s moving fast and we’ve got to get on board.”
The answer, for Peters, involves staying curious, staying connected to the community, and never losing sight of the human being on the other side of the transaction. “We’re changing an industry,” she said. “We’re changing the way people think, the way people buy. And it’s just really cool to be a part of.”