What We Learned at B2B eCommerce World Americas 2025

The Novatize team attended B2B eCommerce World Americas 2025 in Scottsdale and met with experts from operations, sales, marketing, IT and finance. If you missed the event or if you were there and want a clearer structure for next steps, this piece summarizes the learnings we heard most often. We also made one common post-event mistake at first: not translating our best learnings into immediate action. The list below is our way to correct that and we are curious to see whether these points resonate the same way with your team.

“Our industry makes real progress when we align incentives across online and offline and treat commerce as one unified model. Collaboration with partners, clear KPIs, and disciplined change management are not ‘nice to have’, they are the work. Get those right, and growth follows.”
– François-Jérôme Gosselin, CEO Novatize

1. Customer adoption is the primary success indicator

Short-term success in B2B eCommerce transformation is often framed as new customer acquisition, yet the programs that sustain impact begin with adoption by current top customers. Early performance should reflect how effectively existing accounts complete priority tasks digitally, whether the platform meets their business requirements and whether the experience is reliable enough for repeat usage. When core customers adopt and see value, they become credible references and materially lower the cost of future acquisition, which is better treated as a medium-term outcome that follows strong adoption.

Executive actions
Set explicit customer adoption KPIs with clear targets and review them on a fixed cadence. Align P&L structures and incentives so online and offline channels do not compete but contribute to a unified commerce objective. Establish a fast feedback loop with top accounts to validate fit, remove friction, and confirm readiness before scaling acquisition.

2. Manufacturer and distributor collaboration creates measurable growth

Open information sharing between manufacturers and distributors improves speed, data quality, and service consistency. Visibility into tool usage and customer expectations shortens cycles and removes friction for buyers.

Executive actions
Hold a recurring working session with your best partners that shares demand and usage signals, compares process gaps, and ends with a short list of action items to better serve end customers together, with decisions, owners and timelines recorded so progress is visible to both sides.

3. Education drives adoption more than incentives

Discounts can trigger a first transaction; education creates durable behavior. Teams that treat enablement as part of the product see stronger adoption by customers and by internal stakeholders, especially sales and marketing.

Executive actions
Position sales and marketing as internal champions by giving early access, simple playbooks and visible recognition for digital wins, and leverage the B2B eCommerce Association Academy as a structured source of skills and training content for customer-facing teams.

4. AI readiness begins with people

Artificial Intelligence was a recurring topic, yet effective programs started small and human. According to the Deloitte Digital study presented at the event, 45% of B2B organizations already use AI within sales processes, most beginning with individual experiments that reduce manual effort and then scaling what works.

Executive actions
Choose one frontline use case to pilot and assign a clear owner to monitor developments and share learnings, ideally a junior team member comfortable with AI and tooling, and put AI usage and security policies in place first so the pilot runs within an agreed framework.

5. Digital leadership comes from practice and soft skills

Leaders who combine hands-on digital experience with communication, coaching and cross-functional influence move organizations faster; their credibility comes from doing and aligning people, not only from planning.

Executive actions
Create career incentives and promotion paths for employees who demonstrate concrete digital execution and strong leadership behaviors, and make these role models visible so digital talent can grow and attract peers internally.

6. Change management is the foundation of every transformation

Technology adoption scaled only where change management was explicit and funded; clear executive messaging, role-impact mapping, and steady communication reduced resistance and increased time to value.

Executive actions
Give change management an owner, a budget and success metrics such as training completion, time to first successful task for new users, and support ticket trends, and treat it as an ongoing product rather than a one-time announcement.

7. Digital enablement equals sales enablement

A quote heard often captured the mood: “By leveraging digital services for customers, you are enabling sales.” Digital is now a growth engine rather than a cost center. With the right structure and governance, ROI can appear within months. According to Deloitte Digital, 47% of B2B buyers now expect a self-service digital experience, which makes digital a core component of the sales model.

Executive actions
Involve sales deeply in process design and change, ensure the team agrees with the workflows, sees clear value, and is rewarded for digital behaviors and outcomes, because when sales believes in the process, customers follow.

8. Unified commerce is becoming the operating model

Unified commerce is moving from retail into B2B as a credible operating model. The premise is to run one commercial engine across channels — web, rep-assisted digital, punchout, marketplace, field sales, service — on a shared data and policy layer. For manufacturers and distributors, that means consistent pricing and entitlements by account, contract catalogs, live availability by ship-from, accurate lead times and a single source of truth connecting ERP, PIM, CPQ, CRM and eCommerce. We heard forward-leaning leaders in Scottsdale framing growth, cost-to-serve and customer experience through this lens: one set of rules, one inventory picture, one customer history, many buying paths.

Executive actions
Treat unified commerce as a trend to actively monitor: build literacy on the topic (training for commercial and IT leaders), establish light competitive and vendor watch, and be ready to stand up the governance and integration groundwork that will let you respond quickly as customer expectations evolve.

Moving forward

The conversations in Scottsdale indicate that the sector has shifted from questioning digital to operationalizing it. The sequence is consistent across leaders: measure adoption first, formalize collaboration with partners, make education part of the product, start AI where it removes manual effort and secure it with policy, elevate leaders who blend digital practice and soft skills, and fund change management with the same rigor as technology.