This is the first installment in the Master B2B digital maturity series. At the Master B2B Summit in May 2023, more than 75 practitioners were asked where they planned to invest their next dollar. The answers varied, but the better question turned out to be how a company knows where to invest. To answer it, Master B2B built a four-stage maturity model, grounded in research with more than 100 B2B buyers and 100 B2B sellers, that helps a company assess its digital maturity across four dimensions and chart a path to the next stage. There is no right stage to be in, and a company can sit at different stages on different dimensions.
How the maturity assessment works
B2B eCommerce is forecast to reach 3 trillion dollars by 2027, per Forrester Research, so firms need every competitive advantage across customer experience, technology, people, and operations. The model scores four dimensions: digital tools (how well the company uses technology to streamline operations and improve experience), team culture (how fully the organization, including sales, has embraced digital), customer experience (how much it builds functionality around customer demands), and data and insights (how much clean data reaches business users). For each line in the worksheet, a company assigns one to four points, then totals the score by dimension: 7 to 10 points is Stage 1, 11 to 17 is Stage 2, 18 to 24 is Stage 3, and 25 to 28 is Stage 4. Companies that improve over time share five traits: they move data and tooling into the hands of business users, put customer needs ahead of internal priorities, eliminate friction in the purchase journey, treat digital as at least an equal partner to the traditional business, and build a flexible technology stack that grows with them.
Stage 1: Leadership has not yet embraced digital
The word that defines Stage 1 culture is fear. Past digital experiments get cited as proof that change does not work, often from a founding family member or from sales leadership worried about the effect on relationships. In the 2023 Master B2B surveys, 23% of organizations had no or few employees in dedicated digital roles. These companies either have not built digital functionality or are just implementing a platform, and they often hand the first decisions to IT, which is a mistake because effective eCommerce has to be customer-focused rather than internally focused.
Data is treated as a cost center here, and that is costly: 63% of respondents named data cleanliness as the biggest impediment to eCommerce growth, yet hygiene investments get deferred year after year. The path out is to evangelize small wins to the CEO, ship one piece of functionality customers have asked for, and recruit internal change agents, who often sit in customer service, accounting, or supply chain. As Brooke Logan, Director of Product Management at 22 billion dollar automotive distributor Genuine Parts Company, put it, the focus should be on the basics first, understanding major customers’ biggest pain points, then solving one problem for many customers based on impact relative to effort.
Stage 2: Building the team and integrating systems
Stage 2 companies have accepted that eCommerce matters but face hard decisions about how much to invest and whether the leader who launched the effort can take them further. Moving from Stage 2 to Stage 3 is often the toughest transition because it usually means hiring digital talent from outside, and 62% of sellers said a lack of qualified eCommerce team members was a significant barrier to growth. Sam Schwartz, VP of eCommerce at 300 million dollar concrete products manufacturer Jensen Precast, described needing specialists in analytics, UX, search, and merchandising rather than generalists as the team matures. Bringing in an outside leader also creates cultural friction around compensation bands and flexible work, and companies that want this talent need to be willing to rethink those norms.
Moving beyond legacy systems starts with clean data, and getting product data ready for AI is where many companies stall.
On technology, legacy back-office systems like the ERP often hold companies back more than any eCommerce tool, and 60% of sellers said they would be looking for a new eCommerce platform within 24 months. Data starts to come out of silos, though the bigger shift is moving decision-making power from IT to business users through self-service analytics. Sales buy-in is decisive at this stage: 51% of buyers research online before buying offline, so the sales team can either accelerate maturity or bog it down in zero-sum fights. The fix is to pay commissions on online orders and publicly praise reps who embrace digital.
Stage 3: Crossing the chasm to a digitally driven organization
At Stage 3, a company has adopted a wide set of eCommerce best practices, expanded into new channels, and built a culture that sees digital as enhancing the offline business. A significant share of revenue now comes from eCommerce, customers see real-time order status, salespeople have a 360-degree view, and team members pull and analyze data on demand. The culture welcomes ideas from every corner, especially from front-line service and sales reps, and operationalizes customer feedback into how digital work is prioritized. The report points to Amazon Prime, which began as a suggestion-box idea from a software engineer, as an example of why those channels matter.
Teams of roughly 20 to 40 people start experimenting with AI tools like ChatGPT, with examples ranging from writing email marketing copy to data cleanup during acquisitions, as Beacon Building Products’ Tim Lavinder described at a Master B2B Summit. Clean data becomes the enabler for distribution and customer experience: 60% of buyers said insufficient or inaccurate product information was their biggest frustration with online buying, Gartner reports that 40% of businesses miss objectives because of bad data, and 77% of companies said they would invest in data cleanup that year. Experiences also begin to harmonize across channels, with 69% of buyers saying gathering information online themselves was superior to talking to a sales rep before a work purchase, which requires consistent cross-channel pricing and shared visibility into offline orders.
Stage 4: The CEO drives a customer-first digital strategy
The elite set of Stage 4 companies thrive in three areas: a modern, often composable architecture that scales and ships quickly, a culture where the whole team understands how digital and physical channels work together to grow revenue, and active use of AI to scale operations cost-effectively. Above all, they align technology and team to customer needs. Some use digital to launch new revenue lines, as global manufacturer Bosch did by adding Bluetooth tracking to its tools and then selling asset-tracking software on top of it.
This culture is driven from the top. Steve Baruch, former EVP and Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at 3 billion dollar equipment distributor MSC Industrial, stressed that strategy can take input from across the business but cannot be delegated.
I’m not saying that strategy couldn’t and shouldn’t be a team sport, because you do want to get that input from as close to the ground as you can. But you cannot delegate strategy.
Steve Baruch, former EVP and Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, MSC Industrial
Amazon is the benchmark buyers measure against. Amazon Business generated 35 billion dollars in annualized sales in 2022, and only 33% of sellers said their current technology could provide an Amazon-like experience. The hardest task at this stage is fighting complacency, and one question helps reinvigorate a team: what is one change we can make that will have a 10x impact? Few companies find the next 10x thing on demand, but they can build a culture that runs constant small experiments, celebrates wins, and learns from failures.
The bottom line
Once you have established your baseline, the next step is taking your digital strategy to the next level. Most companies that take the assessment land at different stages across different dimensions, and that is expected. The point is to know where the organization stands today and to see a roadmap forward. The one certainty is that a company sitting at Stage 1 across the board will not survive standing still, because customer expectations are too high and competitors are investing too heavily. Digital success now begins and ends with the CEO, since digital is transforming every part of the business and senior leaders can no longer push responsibility for it down the chain.