For the past two years, B2B commerce executives blamed slow digital progress on missing executive support, small budgets, and weak technology. In 2024 that changed. Practitioners now report the CEO buy-in and the budgets they had been asking for, and the pressure has shifted to execution: showing short-term progress while delivering against a long-term strategy. This report, the second in the Master B2B digital maturity series, lays out how digital leaders are accelerating across four dimensions: digital tools, team culture, customer experience, and data and insights.
2024 is a new era for B2B digital
A survey of 159 executives makes the shift concrete. 94% say their CEO is supportive or very supportive of digital transformation, a marked change from the cautious spending of 2022 and 2023. 83% plan to spend more on digital in 2024 than the year before, and 79% say they are investing aggressively or very aggressively in technology that improves the customer experience. More money brings more scrutiny and more urgency: 64% say they need to demonstrate ROI faster than they did three years ago. Waiting is no longer an option, and practitioners will need to work closely with their CFOs to build a business case that balances short-term and long-term return.
The four dimensions of digital maturity
The Master B2B maturity model helps a company assess its digital maturity baseline and figure out where it stands across digital tools (how well it uses available 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 that meets customer demands), and data and insights (how much clean data reaches the business users who make investment decisions). Companies range from Stage 1, where leaders fear digital and treat data as a cost center, to Stage 4, where the CEO drives a customer-first strategy, business users work with low-code tooling and clean data, and real-time data powers one-to-one engagement. Knowing the current stage on each dimension is the only way to decide where the next dollar should go.
Digital tools
The question for digital tools is whether the company is taking real advantage of modern, composable technology, using it to make operations more efficient, and pointing it at the customer rather than at internal pet projects. Matt Swan, Technical Product Manager of Data Products at dental surgical supplier ACE Southern, moved to a composable platform after small website changes started taking three to four weeks. By offloading back-end complexity to the platform, a small team of five people working at most ten hours a week each could focus on the customer experience, build five reusable product templates, and import product data overnight instead of waiting on a workflow queue.
Andy Goodfellow, Chief Technology Officer at Zoro.com, framed the mindset shift directly.
If you think of IT or tech as a cost center or a risk, that’s a mindset that needs to change.
Andy Goodfellow, Chief Technology Officer, Zoro.com
Once tools are treated as an investment, a team can focus on the specific technology and talent it needs. For most companies just starting out, Goodfellow said, that begins with site search. The bottom line: a composable architecture gives the flexibility to adapt to changing needs and ship faster, and digital tools deserve to be treated as an investment rather than a cost center.
That often means getting more from the technology you already own before buying anything new.
Team culture
Culture eats strategy, and no digital transformation succeeds without a culture that embraces change. On a March 2024 Friday 15 podcast, Master B2B examined how Honeywell transformed itself, in part by cutting its number of ERPs from 2,700 to fewer than 1,000. The decisive factor was the CEO taking ownership, leading key meetings, and making hard calls.
That’s a strategic decision that must be made at the CEO board level. I don’t care how well you understand digital transformation. These change management issues are the big ones, and I don’t know who can solve them other than the CEO and the board.
Andy Hoar, co-founder, Master B2B
Practitioners can still drive culture from below. Theresa Kuske, former Digital Marketing Director at work gear manufacturer Ergodyne, led her team through the Master B2B maturity assessment, then created a Change Management and Digital team drawing from marketing, IT, and finance, with finance involved from the start. The team leveled terms and incentives across channels so they could see where customers actually wanted to buy, shifting the focus to company-wide growth rather than growth within a single channel. Steven Baruch, former EVP and Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at MSC Industrial Supply, stressed hiring for cultural fit, since skills can be taught but cultural alignment is hard to retrofit.
Customer experience
Every digital decision should run through the lens of customer experience, and the payoff is measurable. A 2022 McKinsey study found that companies improving customer experience raised revenue by 2 to 7 percent, profitability by 1 to 2 percent, and shareholder return by 7 to 10 percent. Yet the survey surfaced a gap between rhetoric and reality. 68% of respondents believe their site delivers a better or much better experience than competitors, but only 31% include customer satisfaction measures such as CSAT or NPS among their top five investment goals. Without measuring satisfaction, a company cannot know whether it is delivering the experience customers expect.
This raises a question we tackled in our predictions, namely who should own customer experience inside a B2B organization.
Ownership is the deciding factor, and Brian Beck argued on a March 2024 Friday 15 podcast that title matters less than structure.
Whoever is in this role has to have power to do something. Whether you call it Chief Digital Officer or Chief Experience Officer, it’s almost less important than the actual way the organization is structured.
Brian Beck, co-founder, Master B2B
Ellery Fisher, SVP and CIO of McKesson Medical-Surgical, builds the business case by speaking the CFO’s language, framing a digital investment the way a CFO already evaluates a physical asset like a warehouse, and tying it to measurable outcomes. His advice to digital leaders is to be the sherpa, bringing partners along rather than calling from the top of the mountain. Eric Rehl, VP of Digital Customer Experience at Schneider Electric, added two rules: do no harm by never making the buying experience more complicated, even when adding functionality, and make sure customer experience creates an advantage that drives strategy. Rehl also warned that transformation exposes a company’s internal complexity to customers, so unclean processes and data surface as lower conversion, more calls, and higher cost-to-serve.
Data and insights
Two questions define data maturity: is the data clean enough to execute customer and product strategies, and does that data reach the business users who make decisions? The survey shows progress with room to go. Only 44% say their product data is clean and ready for syndication, and only 47% have successfully made product data available to teams across the organization. For manufacturers especially, dirty product data caps the number of channels they can sell through, limits customer acquisition, and opens the door for vertical marketplaces to take share.
Gireesh Sahukar, VP of Digital at bakery ingredients manufacturer Dawn Foods, where half of revenue comes from eCommerce, described data as messy everywhere and cleaning it as a multi-year journey, while using AI for demand planning and forecasting from the factory floor outward and for session-aware product recommendations.
For more on where this is heading, see our latest thinking on AI in B2B.
Doug Topken, Director of Global eCommerce, CRM, and Digital Customer Experience at Ingredion, partners with finance early and leans on NPS, which resonates with CFOs, alongside concrete cost savings.
Cost savings can be handle time, customer service response times, shorter workflows, or fewer people touching a request. Cost savings does not mean reducing salespeople.
Doug Topken, Director of Global eCommerce, CRM, and Digital CX, Ingredion
The bottom line: build customer feedback loops to make data actionable, and agree as an organization on how to measure cost savings before claiming them.
Moving to the next stage of digital maturity
B2B companies do not all start at the same level across the four dimensions. The path forward is to assess where the organization stands on each, then calibrate the next steps: build a composable tech stack and treat tools as an investment, create cross-functional teams and hire for cultural fit, agree on a common definition of customer experience backed by fresh segmentation, and stand up customer feedback loops that feed real decisions. With budget and buy-in in place, the work that remains is execution.