Kristina Tonakanyan on Building B2B eCommerce in Hearing Healthcare: An Accidental Path, the Multiplier Effect, and Leading a Global Team

Kristina Tonakanyan is Director of Global eCommerce at Sonova, the Stäfa, Switzerland-headquartered hearing care group behind brands like Phonak, Unitron, and Hansaton, where she has spent nearly ten years building B2B commerce for a business that supplies hearing healthcare providers rather than end consumers directly. Based in the Chicago area, Tonakanyan came to the role after an earlier stint at a small, privately held manufacturer and distributor she found more or less by chance. Her conversation with B2BEA as part of the Women in B2B eCommerce series covered what keeps her in B2B after a decade, how she leads a team spread across regions and time zones, and the advice she gives women looking to grow into leadership.

An Accidental Path Into B2B

Tonakanyan did not set out to build a career in B2B. “It never went the way I planned it,” she said. Instead, she found a job at a small, privately held distributor and manufacturer, stayed on for an internship, and grew into leadership roles from there. The company she works for now is different from that first one, but the throughline is the same: supporting other companies, providing services to other businesses, and focusing on service innovation within manufacturing and supply chain.

She had some exposure to B2C earlier in her career, and it clarified what she wanted instead. “The B2B part was always more challenging and required more creativity to find new clients, to find your uniqueness to partner with companies,” she said. That extra degree of difficulty, rather than being a drawback, was the draw.

The Multiplier Effect That Made It Stick

Asked when B2B went from a job to a career she wanted, Tonakanyan pointed to a specific kind of moment: watching contracts, customers, and volume grow, and then tracing where that volume actually went. “You see how your impact gets multiplied,” she said. “You provide that service to the next company, that company provides service to another one or more people, and by supporting one company, you support many, many more other companies.” A part or service gets sold, gets installed in another part, and becomes a bigger product or service somewhere down the line. “It just feels really great that what you work on and produce and service and distribute is really then helping many more other industries, many more other companies, and especially people, as the end result,” she said.

That sense of B2B as an outreach multiplier, rather than a narrower transaction between two businesses, is what she keeps coming back to when she talks about why the work matters to her.

Order Visibility and AI in Practice

Tonakanyan's recent projects have focused on improving customer experience by developing digital tools and enterprise system changes that increased visibility and transparency into order status, a gap she knows is common across B2B, regardless of industry. That has meant addressing how customers are notified about deliveries and late orders, work she describes as both a significant investment of time and a real source of pride. 

On AI, Tonakanyan was an early adopter of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools and has since taken certification training to deepen her understanding of how to apply it at work, where her team also has access to internal generative AI tools. Her guidance to her team is specific: use AI to enhance and amplify a message, not to generate it wholesale. “I always say, create your own, use AI to enhance, amplify your message, and that's the best use for it,” she said. She discourages using it primarily to copy and paste finished content, and applies the same philosophy at home, where she has introduced her kids to AI as a way of building their own critical thinking and decision-making rather than outsourcing it.

Leading a Distributed Global Team Through Visibility and Credit

Tonakanyan describes herself as results-oriented - she finds where a company could make the most impact on revenue, sales, and customer experience. But she is clear that results alone are not leadership. “Leadership comes when you bring people along with you and help others grow around you,” she said. In practice, that means deliberately giving visibility to the people and teams doing the work, in front of the right stakeholders, and giving credit to whoever earned it, including colleagues who are less inclined to promote their own accomplishments. “Some are a little shy to speak about their accomplishments,” she said, and part of her role is bringing them the confidence to be seen.

Her leadership style is clear communication about where the team is going and why, consistent expectation-setting, and a willingness to have difficult conversations when they are needed, alongside the more ordinary discipline of small wins accumulated daily. Once a team is aligned on the problem it is solving and the benefit of solving it, she has found, buy-in and engagement follow, wherever people happen to be sitting.

Women in B2B eCommerce: A Decade of Breakfasts, and the Advice She Gives

Tonakanyan has attended industry women-in-B2B breakfasts at conferences for several years, on and off, and describes them as consistently some of her favorite sessions to attend. What strikes her is how much common ground exists among women who come from different manufacturing and distribution backgrounds. “Though we all come from different manufacturing and distribution backgrounds, pretty much most of us have the same challenges and same problems day to day,” she said.

Her advice to women entering the field centers on making impact visible and building range deliberately. “It goes back to solving real problems and really documenting and communicating the impact where it's appropriate and necessary,” she said. “Knowing your value and the knowledge and the uniqueness you bring to each table.” She encourages women to volunteer for exposure to functions outside their own, using the example of a marketer sitting in with a salesperson to see which materials actually get used in the field, or visiting a shipping department to check whether a brochure fits the way it was designed to. Those small, cross-functional details, in her experience, are often where the biggest process improvements are found, and where the case for a bigger role gets made. “Go learn something new within the company if you want to grow, if you want a new leadership role,” she said. “Growing your expertise in different things is actually good.”

Kristina Tonakanyan was interviewed as part of B2BEA's Women in B2B eCommerce series, a program dedicated to profiling practitioners, operators, and leaders shaping digital commerce in manufacturing and distribution. To connect with others in the network, join the Women in B2B eCommerce LinkedIn group. Upcoming Women in B2B eCommerce events will take place alongside major B2BEA gatherings in the United States, Australia, and Europe in 2026.