Transcript:

Welcome everyone to Friday 15 with Master B2B. I’m Brian Beck, joined as always by my co-host, Andy Hoar. We’re both wearing white today—so it’s a “white out” Friday—and yes, for those watching, I’ve got a bandage on my nose because I lost a fight with a sailboat. It was a fast, small 16-foot racer, and I tipped it over during a race last week. Not my yacht, unfortunately!

Anyway, we’ve got a great episode for you today. Let’s start with some breaking news: Home Depot is making another major move into the building supply space with a $5 billion acquisition of GMS, a key distributor of drywall, ceiling systems, and other specialty building products. You may recall they acquired SRS last year, and now the CEO of SRS—now leading Home Depot’s B2B side—says the GMS-SRS combination will provide more service and fulfillment options than ever for both residential and commercial pro customers.

Andy, what’s your take?

Andy pointed out that this is part of a broader trend. SRS was an $18 billion deal, and Lowe’s recently acquired ADG for $1.3 billion. Everyone’s chasing the “proumer”—that hybrid pro and consumer market. It makes you wonder why they didn’t do this sooner. Home Depot is now 45% B2B, and Lowe’s is around 30%. B2B customers tend to be more reliable, less price-sensitive, and more loyal. Retailers have historically shied away from B2B because of the perceived complexity—service expectations, fulfillment, etc.—but now they see they can bring strong digital customer experience capabilities to the table. Combine that with domain expertise from acquisitions, and you get one plus one equals five.

From a digital synergy standpoint, Home Depot has long been a leader in retail e-commerce. Their knowledge of omnichannel, BOPIS, and seamless cross-channel experiences is significant. Applying that to lagging distribution businesses makes this strategy even more attractive. And with the rise of marketplaces and dropshipping—plus Amazon’s growing fulfillment services—you don’t need to stock every SKU yourself anymore. The barriers are lower.

It’s clear we’ll be seeing more of this. Big retailers buying into B2B where it makes sense.

Now, onto our main topic: Is B2B e-commerce under-staffed?

This is a question we hear constantly. Forrester Research found that B2C retailers average one full-time employee for every $1.5M to $4M in e-commerce sales. Meanwhile, B2B enterprises average one full-time employee for every $10M to $25M. That’s a huge difference.

In my time running $100M+ B2C businesses like PacSun and Harbor Freight, my e-commerce teams had 60+ people. We had people across leadership, digital marketing, SEO, web merchants, UX/UI, operations, analytics, and more. In B2B, finding that kind of team structure is rare.

Andy noted that many B2B companies don’t even have functions like merchandising. They often mirror their field sales ratios and apply that same logic to e-commerce—”how many people do we need to support X dollars in sales?” But that thinking doesn’t work in digital. B2C didn’t start with sales reps. They started from scratch.

We ran a LinkedIn poll asking whether e-commerce teams in B2B were too small, too large, or just right. A whopping 88% said “too small.” No one said “just right.”

Isaiah Bollinger, SVP of Distribution at Zabeel, said B2B companies under-resource e-commerce because they view it as capturing existing revenue—not generating incremental revenue. In other words, it’s seen as a replacement channel, not a growth driver. That mindset makes it hard to justify bigger investments.

Andy added that this is also a result of legacy thinking. B2B companies often build forward from their current operations. But if you start instead from what the business should look like three years from now, and work backward, you’ll reach very different conclusions. Too many teams optimize for today’s needs instead of building for tomorrow’s growth.

Another insight came from our own research. When we asked our community whether they had a dedicated merchandiser—someone responsible for how products are displayed online—88% said no. And nearly half said they had no plans to add one. That’s stunning, given how foundational merchandising is in B2C.

Andy shared that this reminds him of a Forrester study he conducted, where only about 33% of B2B companies had a Chief Marketing Officer, compared to nearly double that in B2C. B2B historically saw marketing as a sales support function. So merchandising—if it existed—was focused on print catalogs, not digital experiences.

Emily Hansen Serrano, Director of E-commerce at Taylor Corporation, commented that B2B customers now expect a B2C experience. Companies need talent with retail e-commerce skills—people who know merchandising, personalization, and optimization. B2B teams may not even realize what they’re missing.

Of course, there are some practical reasons why B2B teams are smaller. They tend to have higher average order values and fewer transactions. A $100M B2B site might do a fraction of the transactions of a B2C site. B2B also benefits from repeat orders and established customer relationships. The content demands are typically lower, and there’s more integration with sales teams—sometimes making digital a secondary or supporting channel.

But as Andy emphasized, that doesn’t mean digital should be secondary. In fact, it’s increasingly the primary way customers engage. B2B companies haven’t fully embraced that shift.

And while marketing in B2B is often focused on enablement and retention, B2C e-commerce is acquisition-driven. You need teams fighting for visibility across Google, email, social, and more.

Understaffing can come at a real cost: lost revenue from self-service buyers, slower time-to-market, lower conversion rates, increased channel conflict, and market share losses to Amazon. If your site isn’t merchandised properly or optimized for search, you’re likely losing sales without even knowing it.

Andy added that heading into 2025, we might begin addressing this problem differently. Historically, the solution was to hire more humans. But now, with the rise of agentic AI, some of these functions might be automated or augmented. So maybe B2B’s smaller staffing model could be a hidden advantage—if companies leverage AI correctly.

We’re starting to see companies list AI “staff” alongside humans in org charts. Whether or not that’s real today, it could be the future. But in most B2B orgs today, it’s still just one person doing too much alone.

Before we wrap up, a few quick announcements: Friday 15 is brought to you by Master B2B Nexus—our premium advisory service for B2B e-commerce practitioners. It provides expert advice, peer networking, and premium research. You can learn more at masterb2b.com under the Nexus tab.

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Andy, any final thoughts for today’s Friday 20-plus?

No? Well done. Thanks everyone for joining us. We’ll see you next week on Friday 15.