The economic landscape in early 2023 presented B2B leaders with a paradox: tech giants were laying off workers en masse while service sector companies were staffing up, resulting in a net addition of 517,000 jobs in January despite 103,000 layoffs. Against this backdrop of uncertainty, practitioners debated whether to invest aggressively or rationalize existing capabilities.
The strategic context
Amazon laid off 18,000 employees, yet remained twice the size it was in 2019. Boeing announced plans to hire 10,000 engineers while simultaneously cutting 2,000 positions in HR and finance. This dissonance extended to IT spending forecasts, where firms like Gartner and IDC trimmed projections they had issued just weeks earlier.
Despite the uncertainty, one trend remained clear: marketplaces were growing at seven times the rate of overall B2B commerce. Amazon Business was expected to double its GMV by 2025. The question facing practitioners was whether to chase these expanding channels or shore up existing investments.
The debate format
Team Double Down featured Riccardo Caruso, VP of E-commerce at Cepheid, and Michael Schultz from commercetools. Team Hunker Down included Steven Javor from Schneider Electric and Chris Baltusnik from Owens Corning. Both teams brought practitioner experience from large manufacturers navigating the same decisions.
Round 1: Technology capability investment
Team Double Down argued that buyer expectations were accelerating and companies could not afford to pause. Michael Schultz framed the pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and geopolitical tensions as wake-up calls that companies should not ignore.
Riccardo Caruso offered a concrete example of the change in technology options. In 2016, deploying a monolithic e-commerce platform required a year-long project. His team literally camped in a windowless war room. Four years later, when the business grew to a billion dollars, they faced a costly replatforming exercise. By contrast, his recent deployment at Sephid using composable commerce took months, not a year, and would not require replatforming in the future.
In 2016, I did a deployment. The best in class was a monolith. It took us a full year locked in a war room without windows. Fast forward to last year, with composable commerce, we rolled out order management in two to three months. In six months we were live with e-commerce.
Riccardo Caruso, Cepheid
Team Hunker Down countered that the pandemic should have prompted investment two years ago. Steven Javor challenged whether companies had optimized the investments they already made. He noted that his company raised prices four times in the past year, questioning whether technology was getting cheaper.
Chris Baltusnik argued that most companies utilize only a small percentage of their existing platforms. At his previous company, he asked every vendor for capabilities presentations and discovered opportunities to grow a buy-now-pay-later program from $4 million to $10 million using functionality they already owned.
If you went back and looked into all those vendors, all those platforms, all that technology, you would only be utilizing a very small portion of it. We repurposed technology we already had and found new revenue streams.
Chris Baltusnik, Owens Corning
The audience voted 75% in favor of doubling down on technology investment.
Round 2: Hiring and staffing
Riccardo Caruso made the case that great talent is only available during downturns. When times are good, capable people are busy doing great things elsewhere. Crises create opportunities to acquire talent that would otherwise be unattainable.
Michael Schultz added a caveat about selectivity. Many of the laid-off workers came from companies pursuing legacy technology approaches. Bringing in people who perpetuate legacy thinking defeats the purpose of hiring during a downturn.
Chris Baltusnik pushed back strongly, noting that companies hiring aggressively during downturns are the same companies conducting mass layoffs months later. The cycle damages employee morale and trust. He argued that companies do not need to wait for downturns to find talent; they simply need to wait for the next round of layoffs from a Google or Amazon.
These companies hiring during down economies are the same companies having mass layoffs three or four months down the road. When you are doing that with employees, you are messing with people’s livelihood.
Chris Baltusnik, Owens Corning
Steven Javor pointed to the promises companies make to younger workers about training and career advancement. Adding new hires while failing to deliver on those promises to existing employees creates dysfunction. Schneider Electric focuses on enabling and upskilling existing employees rather than constantly adding to the headcount.
Riccardo clarified that his position was not about mass hiring but building a strong core of senior talent who could then manage augmented resources. The audience voted in favor of ramping up hiring to capture available talent.
Round 3: Channel expansion vs. optimization
Michael Schultz cited McKinsey research showing that eight in ten B2B leaders find omnichannel selling more effective than traditional methods. Five years ago, omnichannel meant offering four or five channels. Today, 72% of B2B companies sell via seven or more channels, and all of them grew market share.
Riccardo Caruso emphasized meeting customers where they are. In 2016, he joined a company where customers loved the products but hated buying from them. That was a channel problem with serious competitive implications.
Steven Javor explained that Schneider Electric maintains an authorized distributor strategy, selecting partners carefully. Onboarding a new partner takes a year to ensure proper content, training, and digital enablement. The company funds partners through programs that reward digital excellence rather than simply listing products.
Chris Baltusnik drew a distinction between exploring new channels and aggressively expanding into them. His previous company at Goodyear had Walmart as a major customer and was evaluating Amazon and Costco. But aggressive expansion risked damaging relationships built over a decade.
Do I want to expand into new markets? Absolutely. Do I want to do it aggressively? Absolutely not. We do a lot in our roadmap before we actually go into said channels. Aggressively going into those channels could mean pissing off a customer base we spent 10 years growing.
Chris Baltusnik, Owens Corning
The audience voted in favor of developing new channels over optimizing existing ones.
The verdict: Double down wins, but nuance matters
Team Double Down won all three rounds, but the debate revealed that the choice is not binary. The moderators synthesized three practical takeaways from both sides.
First, economic uncertainty provides permission to rationalize technical debt. Whether a company ultimately invests in new capabilities or not, taking stock of existing investments and eliminating what is not working is a defensible use of the moment.
Second, hiring should be selective but aggressive within that selectivity. The talent pool is exceptional, but bringing people into a dysfunctional environment or making promises that cannot be kept creates more problems than it solves.
Third, channel optimization cannot be ignored even when pursuing expansion. Many companies are underperforming in channels they already serve. Basic issues like missing product images and poor content plague B2B websites and marketplace listings. Expanding into new channels before fixing fundamentals compounds the problem.
The debate also surfaced a distinction between doubling down and moving forward versus settling and slowing down. The hunker down argument is not about standing still; it is about extracting maximum value from existing investments before making new ones. Whether that framing changes the calculus depends on each company’s specific situation, capabilities, and appetite for risk.