When Stacy Hanks joined SureWerx as Vice President of Global Digital Commerce, she brought something the company needed and did not yet have: an operator’s eye trained on the full digital commerce ecosystem. She had spent six years at Amazon, followed by a run at The Master Lock Company, and arrived at SureWerx, a tip-to-toe safety manufacturer, with a clear-eyed view of what separates B2B digital experiences that convert from those that stagnate.
She also arrived with a philosophy that cuts against one of B2B’s most comfortable assumptions. “Commerce is commerce,” Hanks told me when we spoke at the B2B eCommerce World conference in Scottsdale. “People have a need, they identify that need, and they want to buy something.” The rest, she argues, is execution.
Hanks is one of a growing number of women who have built careers at the intersection of digital transformation and B2B manufacturing. Her story, and the practical wisdom she has accumulated across retailers, vendors, and industrial manufacturers, offers a detailed look at what it takes to move a complex B2B organization forward in an era when buyers expect more from every digital interaction.
Building the Portal, Market by Market
SureWerx, a Canadian-born company, went live with a B2B customer portal in Canada in 2018. For years, the platform delivered modest results. When Hanks joined, one of her first moves was a replatform of the Canadian portal, and the impact was immediate.
“We have been live in Canada since 2018 and just re-platformed,” Hanks said. “For the first time are starting to drive double-digit growth, where our old platform, we’d really been stagnant in what we were able to do there. So now we have a new search, we have new capabilities, and our customers are responding to that.”
The U.S. portal followed, and while adoption took time to build, the momentum became self-reinforcing. “As we’ve come online fully with all of our customers, the growth month over month, we’re delivering value and we’re seeing customers who have never purchased certain brands or types of products before experiencing those on our website and driving those purchases,” she said.
The portal strategy sits at the center of SureWerx’s broader digital transformation, which Hanks organizes around three pillars: go-to-market strategy for Amazon and pure-play eCommerce channels; B2B customer portals in the U.S. and Canada alongside a direct-to-consumer business; and Product Information Management, or PIM, which underpins syndication of product data across the entire business.
Why B2B Buyers Deserve Better Digital Experiences
One of Hanks’s most consistent arguments is that B2B organizations have used the complexity of their products and the captive nature of their buyers as an excuse not to invest in great digital experiences. She is unambiguous about where that reasoning leads.
“Nothing replaces a great buyer experience,” she said. “And I think that’s something in B2B, maybe we’ve said, oh, but they’re already our customers. That window is closing. We’ve got to raise the bar. We’ve got to have better search. We’ve got to help people with solutions.”
Her framing shifts the conversation from product catalogs to solution experiences. “What we’re doing in B2B is really end-to-end solutions,” she said. “And how do we keep doing that, how do we keep creating new tools or new ways of thinking about that, is really exciting.”
This shift has practical implications for content and imagery. At SureWerx, product photography had long defaulted to catalog-style images on white backgrounds. Technically correct, but increasingly out of step with what buyers actually respond to.
“We want to envision our workers,” Hanks said. “A buyer who might be buying traffic safety wear, they’re going to see people. They want to see people in their environment, like doing the job wearing it. You can put the picture of the safety harness on a white background, or you can put the person hanging off the side of a building or working at height, being protected. And that speaks so much more.”
The emotional dimension of B2B purchasing, often dismissed as irrelevant in a space defined by specs and procurement cycles, is something Hanks takes seriously. Customer experience in B2B is increasingly shaped by the same forces that drive consumer behavior. Buyers are afraid of ordering the wrong product. They need to trust that the specification is accurate. They respond to visual confidence and clarity. Ignoring those realities, Hanks argues, is not a strategy, it is a missed opportunity.
Data as the Foundation of Every Decision
Throughout our conversation, one theme surfaced repeatedly: the discipline of letting data lead. Hanks describes it as one of the most powerful advantages available to anyone working in digital commerce, and she uses it deliberately.
“So many people want to make decisions based on feeling,” she said. “Any good leader is always going to be able to make good decisions on feeling. But I get to make such better decisions because I look at that data. You can have a feeling and the data can prove you right or it can prove you wrong. And you’ve got to be sometimes willing to adapt to either one of those.”
She applies the same discipline to product taxonomy and search. B2B organizations frequently use internal shorthand for product names, terms that made sense to the people who built the catalog but may not match how buyers actually search. Generational differences compound the problem. As Hanks noted, organizations serving multiple generations of buyers may find that the same product goes by three different names depending on who is looking for it.
“What I love about digital commerce is, whenever anyone has a question, I don’t know, what does the data say? What does the search function say? Let’s look at our searches,” she said. “Did people even go to this page?”
This orientation toward measurement is also shaping how Hanks thinks about the next generation of B2B personalization. She envisions a near future in which portals can tailor the search and browse experience based on how long a buyer has been with the company, adjusting recommendations and product prioritization accordingly. “We put a stake in the ground and we start collecting data,” she said.
For a deeper look at how data strategy connects to digital transformation in manufacturing and distribution, the B2B eCommerce Association has covered this shift extensively.
AI, Generative Search, and the Content Rethink
Hanks is focused on a problem that many B2B digital teams have not yet fully confronted: generative AI is changing the way buyers discover and evaluate products, and the content written to rank in traditional search may not serve that new context well.
“We got so good at writing features and benefits and, you know, what does it mean, what’s in it for me, how does this actually help you,” she said. “But now we’ve got to almost go back and change that content because that’s going to be the answer to AI. It’s that solution-driven search.”
Her team is already tracking how SureWerx products appear in generative AI results across platforms, analyzing what decision attributes the models use to make recommendations, and building that intelligence back into the company’s content strategy. “How do we get in that conversation? How do we ensure that our products are being recommended?” she said. “I spend a lot of time searching for our products and asking questions of different AI platforms and seeing, are they recommending us?”
This is a concrete, operational response to a challenge that many organizations are still treating as theoretical. As we’ve been seeing, B2B companies that integrate AI into their commercial operations early are positioned to build compounding advantages in discovery and conversion. Hanks is not waiting for the strategy to mature before acting.
What Makes B2B Different, and What Does Not
One of the more useful reframes Hanks offers is the idea that B2B and B2C digital commerce exist on a spectrum rather than in separate categories. The products are different. The sales cycles are different. The product data complexity is often far greater. But the underlying human behavior, a buyer with a need, searching for the right solution, wanting to feel confident in the decision, is consistent.
“Commerce is commerce,” she said. “People have a need, they identify that need, and they want to buy something. It’s my long way of saying it’s totally different, but exactly the same.”
She also made a point that seasoned B2B practitioners will recognize immediately: PIM is a universal pressure point. “I always talk about my favorite thing in coming to these events, you can just look at someone and go, ‘PIM!’ And everyone goes, ‘Oh!'” she said. “Because sometimes in your organization you’re trying to talk about PIM and people are like, I don’t really know what PIM is. Versus here, everyone knows why, especially in the B2B space where PIM is so important.”
Yet the complexity of B2B product data, the variables around materials, sizes, screw lengths, certifications, and configurations, means that solutions cannot simply be lifted from D2C playbooks. “My PIM is not going to be the same as someone else’s PIM,” Hanks said. “Nor should they be.” The overarching challenges may rhyme, but the implementations require judgment and context. B2B eCommerce strategy requires that kind of nuanced, organization-specific thinking.
On Being a Woman in B2B Digital Commerce
Hanks was recognized in 2025 as B2B eCommerce Leader of the Year at the B2B eCommerce Industry Awards Americas, a distinction that reflects both the results she has driven at SureWerx and the visibility she has built across the industry. She is candid about what it has taken to get there, and about the dynamics that women in B2B still navigate.
“I feel very strongly for women overall in digital commerce,” she said, “because I think everyone started from zero at the same time. Women are really good at digging into something they don’t know. If no one else wants to work on it, I’ll take it, and I’ll get it. And so you have incredible women who have mastered so much of this business.”
She is also direct about the challenges. “You can never take things personally,” she said. “Don’t ever allow that imposter syndrome. You have a skillset. If you’re confident in your ability and you back it in data, you can talk the talk and walk the walk.”
On the question of sponsorship, Hanks offered a perspective that challenges conventional wisdom about how women advance in male-dominated industries. “I am where I am today because throughout my career I’ve had extremely strong male sponsors,” she said. “People that just treated me like an equal, and brought me into the room, gave me opportunities where if our leader wasn’t there, they’d say, ‘Stacy, you run this meeting.'”
She goes further, arguing that directing women exclusively toward female mentors can unintentionally limit their access to the rooms where decisions are made. “Validity and credibility is sometimes owned by the men in this world,” she said. “Having that male leadership can help position a female, especially someone earlier in their career, give them the confidence to engage, have honest dialogue, and be able to prove themselves.”
Representation in these conversations matters. As McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace research has consistently found, women in senior leadership roles remain underrepresented in many industries, and B2B manufacturing is no exception. Seeing leaders like Hanks navigate these environments on their own terms, not by conforming to a prescribed style but by building credibility through results, is exactly the kind of representation that matters for the next generation entering the field.
“Females can come in with that growth mindset and really bring a new perspective in that B2B space,” Hanks said. “My personality is like, nothing’s going to hold me down.”
The Women in B2B eCommerce Community
Conversations like this one are part of what the B2B eCommerce Association’s Women in B2B eCommerce program is designed to surface. The program exists because the informal knowledge exchanges that Hanks describes, the hallway conversations, the candid assessments of what actually works, rarely happen in structured settings. The goal is to create space for them.
If you are a woman working in B2B eCommerce or a digital leader interested in connecting with peers navigating similar challenges, the Women in B2B eCommerce LinkedIn group is an active community built for exactly that.
Stacy Hanks is a model for what it looks like to build something meaningful in this space: methodically, with data, with confidence, and with a clear sense of where the industry is going. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
Looking Ahead
When I asked Hanks what surprised her most about the pace of change in B2B digital commerce, she paused and then smiled. “I really am in the wrong career if I’m surprised about that,” she said.
She is not surprised. She is paying attention, building infrastructure, training her team, and asking the questions that position SureWerx to respond quickly when the landscape shifts. That posture, curious, data-anchored, and forward-looking, is what distinguishes the practitioners who are building durable capability from those who are reacting to it.
The B2B buyer experience is being redefined. The organizations that understand that, and invest accordingly, will be the ones worth writing about.