Based on Episode 153 of The Hard Truth B2B Commerce Podcast
For more than a decade, B2B organizations have invested heavily in digital commerce platforms, ERP upgrades, and CRM systems. And yet, one stubborn problem refuses to go away: customer adoption.
Across manufacturing and distribution, it’s still common to see organizations doing hundreds of millions in revenue with only 2–5% of orders flowing through digital channels. Teams assume adoption will come naturally once features are live. Sales reps default back to ERP screens they dislike but know. Customers continue emailing, calling, or texting orders despite “modern” portals being available.
The problem is not your tech stack. It’s an experience that the industry continues to underestimate.
Based on years of working directly with manufacturers and distributors, I’ve come to the conclusion that if B2B leaders want digital commerce to deliver ROI, adoption must be treated as the primary challenge, not an afterthought.
Why Customer Adoption Is Still So Poor
Most organizations don’t intentionally design against adoption. They just design from the wrong starting point.
A common pattern looks like this:
- Launch a new commerce platform
- Enable a set of core features
- Train internal teams
- Wait for customers to “move over”
Then adoption stalls, sales teams fear cannibalization, leaders struggle to quantify ROI, and ERP-centric processes feel too entrenched to change. Digital becomes “a channel” instead of the operating layer of your business.
The deeper issue is cultural. Many B2B organizations still view commerce as a side system — something customers might use, rather than the primary interface through which work gets done.
Until that mindset changes, adoption will always lag.
Don’t Treat Your ERP as an Experience Layer
One of the most revealing conversations I’ve had recently was with sales reps at a manufacturer running a modern cloud ERP. They had plenty of complaints about the system, slow order entry, poor search, cumbersome workflows. At the same time, they were surprisingly positive about the company’s eCommerce platform. That contrast matters.
ERP systems are critical. They are systems of record that manage inventory, accounting, manufacturing logic, and compliance. But they were never designed to be experience layers for customers or sales teams.
Commerce platforms and CRMs, on the other hand, are built for interaction. They are faster to change, easier to extend, and supported by large ecosystems of integrations. Do you want a better search? Better workflows? Faster experimentation? That’s where these platforms excel.
The opportunity many organizations miss is this:
Rather than forcing customers and sales teams to work inside ERP-driven workflows, organizations should let commerce and CRM platforms define the experience, with ERP operating quietly in the background.
A Counterintuitive Strategy: Force Digital First (Internally)
One of the fastest ways to expose adoption problems is also one of the most uncomfortable: require that every order flows through the commerce platform, even if sales reps place it on behalf of customers. This practice will help detect friction in the customer journey.
When all orders go through commerce, you might discover the following issues:
- Missing purchase order support
- Broken shipping logic
- Weak search and product discovery
- Gaps in quoting or approval workflows
Instead of guessing why customers don’t adopt digital, teams see exactly where the experience breaks down — because they feel the pain themselves.
Organizations that have done this successfully often start small:
- A newly acquired business
- A single product line
- A walled-off pilot group
The goal is to learn and continue enhancing the workflows. You will see immediate results in faster orders, cleaner data, better upsell opportunities.
Adoption Starts with Talking to Customers
One of the most overlooked steps in B2B commerce programs is also the simplest: ask customers what would help them buy more.
Stop assuming or running generalized surveys. Engage in conversations with your customers.
Ask them directly:
- “What slows you down when ordering?”
- “What forces you to call instead of self-serve?”
- “What experience do you wish you had elsewhere?”
They usually give remarkably clear answers.
In many cases, leadership teams discover that features prioritized internally don’t map to the obstacles customers actually face. Fixing the right five things often delivers more impact than shipping twenty new capabilities nobody asked for.
Customers may hesitate to be brutally honest with vendors. This is why third-party interviews can be especially effective. Create a safe space for the hard truths to come out.
One-Third, One-Third, One-Third: Design for How Buyers Actually Buy
McKinsey research consistently shows the following split in B2B buying preferences:
- One-third of buyers want full self-service
- One-third prefer remote, sales-assisted buying
- One-third still value in-person engagement
However, most manufacturers and distributors optimize almost entirely for the last group. This imbalance explains adoption struggles.
Customer-centric commerce doesn’t mean forcing everyone online. It means supporting all three modes within a unified experience. Buyers should be able to start digitally, escalate to a human instantly, and move between channels without friction.
When digital only works for “simple” orders, customers quickly learn when not to use it.
What High-Adoption B2B Experiences Actually Do Well
Across organizations that successfully increase digital adoption, several patterns repeat.
They invest in:
- Mobile-first workflows for field teams and on-site buyers
- Fast access to humans, including instant scheduling or escalation
- Scan-to-reorder capabilities using barcodes or image recognition
- Buy online, pick up at warehouse without calling or emailing
- Real-time visibility into order status and fulfillment
None of these ideas is futuristic. The technology already exists. What’s missing is urgency and prioritization.
When adoption is low, it’s rarely because customers don’t want digital. It’s because the experience doesn’t align with how they buy.
AI Won’t Fix Adoption, But It Can Accelerate It
AI is already reshaping B2B commerce. The most promising applications today:
- Proactive sales and service alerts based on buying patterns
- Intelligent escalation of urgent issues
- Real-time synthesis of customer feedback and product performance
- Faster product discovery through image recognition and natural language
AI’s real value is getting buyers to the right humans faster, with better context.
In B2B, time lost is trust lost.
Adoption Is a Leadership Problem
Customer adoption usually fails because it’s treated as a downstream outcome instead of a first-order objective.
When organizations understaff marketing and IT, underinvest in experience design, and expect platforms to drive behavior on their own, they get predictably negative results.
The companies that win treat commerce as a customer experience layer, not a channel.
You should design backward from how buyers operate today — not how systems were built twenty years ago.
Customer adoption isn’t the final step in B2B commerce transformation, but it’s the test that proves whether the transformation actually happened.
If you want to explore how experience-first commerce strategies drive measurable adoption and ROI across manufacturing and distribution, Zaelab’s work with B2B organizations offers a practical blueprint for what comes next.
See the full episode:
