Sabrina Williams on Building B2B eCommerce in Telecom Distribution: Data, Digital Adoption, and an AI Use Case Worth Watching

Sabrina Williams has spent more than two decades at the intersection of marketing and technology. As an eCommerce leader at Power & Tel, the Piperton, Tennessee-based telecommunications infrastructure distributor founded in 1963, Williams manages the digital commerce program for a company that supplies the fiber cable, connectivity, and network components that make telecommunications networks run.

From Marketing into eCommerce: Finding the Right Niche

Williams came to eCommerce from marketing, where work in branding, customer experience, and visual communication gave her a foundation that turned out to be unexpectedly well-suited to digital commerce. "We were back then, probably 25 years ago, just starting to get into eCommerce," she said. She joined the eCommerce team and never left.

What kept her there was a niche she identified early: the space between the visual, marketing-oriented side of the work and the technical orientation of the IT team. "I have found a nice niche right between the two groups. Technical enough to talk to the IT people, but still in touch enough with the marketing side and the visual side, and knowing the importance of usability and colors and things like that."

Selling Infrastructure Online: Digital Adoption in a B2B Telecom Market

Shifting buyer behavior toward online ordering has required patience. "There is a slow adoption rate," Williams said. "There is a younger group coming in that appreciates eCommerce and how they can order the same materials that they can get by calling on the phone. But there are still a lot of people who need to call on the phone and send emails. Plus we sell a lot of configurable items that aren't suitable for online ordering."

Her goal for the year was to grow Power & Tel's eCommerce customer base by 8%, and she hit it ahead of schedule. Google remains the primary driver of inbound traffic, and Power & Tel has begun appearing as a cited source within Google's AI-generated answers for certain products.

Data as the Enduring Challenge

"At the heart of it all, data is still the key, and trying to build our data is always important and it's always a struggle," she said. The data enrichment teams Power & Tel works with are now using AI to improve item descriptions. But Williams is clear-eyed about the limits. "If it's using bad intel, then it spits out bad intel," she said.

An AI Use Case Worth Watching: Quote Request Triage

The company uses AI to filter inbound quote requests, separating legitimate leads from the volume of requests that are not — attempts to acquire and resell high-value items, requests for commodity materials like copper-containing products that fall outside the intent of the request form, and submissions that have nothing to do with the company's business.

"We've started using AI to weed out all the junk so that the good stuff coming in is more reliable and the salespeople can focus on that," Williams said. It illustrates something that gets underweighted in conversations about AI in B2B commerce: some of the most durable value comes from improving operational precision, not from transforming customer-facing experiences.

The Personality That Fits the Work

"You've got to be able to look at 20,000 items over and over again, looking for the gaps," she said. "You've got to have strong attention to detail, obviously. But you have to like to dig into research." "Balancing the boring with the fun stuff is how I do it. As long as it's not all boring, it's fun."

Women in B2B eCommerce

"Power & Tel is a women-owned company. I appreciate that," she said. "I have been lucky to have had a lot of good role models over the years that are strong, successful women." Access to female leadership, she believes, has shaped her professional experience.