Sana Round Table: Change in B2B eCommerce April 2025

Sana Commerce very kindly asked me to speak at a dinner in Montfoort recently, over in the Netherlands. A room full of European B2B leaders, mostly manufacturers and wholesalers doing serious turnover ($ 500 M+). It was a roundtable, a proper chat, not a pitch, and I found that very pleasing.

What UK B2B Leaders Talk About When Selling Online

We were there to talk about change, scaling with technology, and sharing war stories. And you know what stuck out? While everyone’s talking about AI automating everything and the next shiny tool, the real conversations, the honest ones, were about the messy, practical graft of making B2B sales work online and just getting started on that journey.

The AI Hype Train is not real for B2B – yet

You see the headlines everywhere: “AI will revolutionise sales,” “The future is now,” “Leverage the latest breakthrough.” And sure, there’s potential in some of it. But sitting around that table with people running big, complex businesses, that wasn’t the focus. We talked about getting orders right, handling bespoke pricing, managing stock across multiple warehouses, and the headache of integrating systems not built to speak to each other. The gap between the marketing trickery and the operational reality is massive. Forget the jargon for a minute; the pressing issues are often far more fundamental than whatever acronym is being pushed this quarter – I’m looking at you, AI voice ordering!!

Thanks! You were very inspiring!!

ecommerce Lead / Unilever

Choosing Your Platform: It’s About Needs, Not Features

Selecting the right platform for B2B isn’t like picking an off-the-shelf website builder for a startup. For manufacturers and wholesalers, especially those with deep roots in systems like SAP or Dynamics, the platform isn’t just a shop window; it’s got to be an extension of your operational core. This means the primary consideration isn’t who has the most bells and whistles. It’s about which system genuinely understands and can handle your complex product catalogues, your intricate pricing rules that vary customer by customer, and critically, how it integrates seamlessly with your existing ERP. If it doesn’t talk properly to the system that manages your stock, your orders, and your finances, you’re just creating another silo, another problem to solve down the line. The pragmatic approach looks at the plumbing first. Does it connect? Can it handle the specific way you do business, the way you price, the way you fulfil?

The Unsexy Tools That Deliver Real Wins

I did my presentation on pragmatic tech selection, and then 20 pieces of tech to get you started. After we spent a fair bit of time talking about tips and practical tools that make a difference right now. And it wasn’t the bleeding-edge AI stuff that got the cameras out. It was things like clever ways to manage product data consistently across channels, practical methods for using Google Tag Manager, and integration tools & techniques that you can use without an IT team getting involved all of the time. These aren’t glamorous topics.

Getting your data right, automating routine tasks with straightforward rules, and making sure your systems pass information back and forth without human intervention where possible – that’s where you find immediate, tangible gains. The power isn’t always in the complexity of the tool, but in applying the right tool, however simple, to solve a specific, painful problem in your day-to-day operations. I always say technology is a language and not the story. We only use it to translate.

…thanks again for your inspiring presentation last week.

Global Ecommerce Direct / jacobs douwe egberts

Leading A Team Through the Mess

Putting new tech in or changing how customers order is a people problem. You can have the perfect platform and the slickest processes on paper, but if your sales team, your warehouse staff, and your customers aren’t brought along, it’s dead in the water.

This is where the conversation earlier in the evening with Josine Muurling from Bravely was spot on. She talked about navigating change and leading teams through transformation. Her point, about the human side of these big shifts, provided a solid foundation for my later points on choosing technology.

It ties back directly to what we discussed about change management – leading teams through transformation requires clarity, communication, and addressing their concerns head-on.

It’s easy to focus on the tech stack, but ignoring the human element is a sure path to failure. You need to explain the ‘why,’ provide the right training, and be patient as people adapt to new ways of working. A pragmatic approach considers the technology and the operational shift, but it puts just as much weight on the impact on your people and how you support them through it.

Very real talk

Sitting around that table at the Sana Commerce event, listening to business leaders dealing with the day-to-day reality of large-scale B2B operations, the message was clear. The real problems in some of these enterprises’ business live mainly in Processes and People, and not the Technology. Knowing where to start and what to look for are much harder than choosing the technology itself, yet people still look to the technology to lead their decision.

Once you have the processes and people right, though…businesses handling complex products and pricing structures, especially those tied into robust ERP systems, finding a platform that integrates deeply and handles that complexity natively is essential. That’s typically where a platform like Sana Commerce fits in – for those specific, complex ERP-driven environments where the web store needs to be a live extension of the back office, not just a separate front end.

Focusing on the fundamentals – getting your platform choice right based on operational needs, leveraging simple tools to fix painful process gaps, and crucially, bringing your people along with you – that’s where the real, sustainable progress happens in B2B online sales.

It was a real pleasure having you with us! Your talk was spot on and brought great energy and insight to the session. We’ve already had very positive feedback, and it truly contributed to the overall success of the event.

iris Sutherland / Sana Commerce