Stacy Hanks on Getting Distributors to Adopt a B2B Portal, Earning Customer Trust, and Resetting Digital Expectations

From Amazon to SureWerx: Retail Instincts in a B2B World

Hanks has led digital commerce at SureWerx since 2021, where her work covers go-to-market strategy for both online-only and omnichannel sales, the company’s product information management (PIM) system, and its B2B distributor portal. Before SureWerx, she led digital commerce at The Master Lock Company, spent six years at Amazon, and started her career in outside sales and sales management in fast moving consumer packaged goods. That retail background, she said, helps her recognize patterns the B2B world is now meeting for the first time.

I’ve seen when the industry started really moving digital 10, 15 years ago in the retail space, how do we start thinking about how we prepare that and adapt that for the B2B space?
— Stacy Hanks, Vice President of Global Digital Commerce, SureWerx

Commerce Is Commerce: What a B2C-Like Experience Really Means

Hein opened with a trope he hears often in B2B eCommerce: companies say they want a “B2C-like experience” without ever defining it. His own definition is simple.

All that a B2C experience means is that it works for the customer.
— Jason Hein, B2B eCommerce Association

Hanks agreed and went further. A buyer making a purchase for a business has different cash constraints and inventory needs than a shopper buying a grill, she said, but the underlying behavior is the same.

Commerce is commerce. Like sales are sales.
— Stacy Hanks

That includes something as basic as a product photo. When she moved into the industrial hard goods space, she met the assumption that a lock does not need a picture. She disagrees, and Hein recalled an Amazon test from about 15 years ago in which a detail page with a primary image saw an 800 percent improvement in selection and add-to-cart rates.

We’re visual people.
— Stacy Hanks

Build What Already Works Offline

Hanks described how she set expectations when SureWerx first built its portal. Leadership wanted revenue quickly, and she knew the site could only reflect processes that already existed offline in a documented, scalable, repeatable form.

We can only build it if it exists offline today with a fully documented business process.
— Stacy Hanks

A customer survey told her where to start: customers wanted to look at products, see their price and inventory, review order history and invoices, and pay by credit card. She built those first. When leadership later asked about returns, quotes, and shortage automation, the honest answer was that those processes were not yet digitized. Hein described how he handled the same problem early in his career at a distributor, spending 18 months documenting workflows step by step.

You can’t build a system around them if they’re not written down.
— Jason Hein

A website can only be a reflection of what the company currently does well today.
— Stacy Hanks

For more on getting customers to use a new digital experience once it launches, see B2BEA’s B2B eCommerce Customer Adoption Framework.

Digital Results Are a Math Problem

Hanks and Hein spent time on how B2B companies think about failure. Traditional capital projects, such as a new facility or sales territory, come with years of planning and a strong cultural fear of missing the numbers. Digital works differently, Hanks said, because the outcome depends on inputs that can be measured and adjusted.

Your digital outcomes are usually a math problem.
— Stacy Hanks

She illustrated the point with two launches. SureWerx’s Canadian portal, launched in 2018, had plateaued at the same share of business for two to three years. After a rebuild with better search, customer hierarchy, a centralized PIM, and richer order history and invoicing, the share of business flowing through the portal grew 500 basis points (five percentage points) within three to six months. In the United States, where competition is stronger and buyers have more digital options, adoption moved more slowly. Customers who did use the portal grew faster than the business overall, so the experience was working. The missing input was awareness.

Forrester’s analysis of zero-click B2B buying points to buyers doing more of their research on their own, which makes that awareness work more important, not less.

Reframing the Portal as a Free Tool

Hanks had assumed outside salespeople would build awareness. When she tested that, she found their conversations focus on solution selling, new products, and end users, not on order history or pricing. The people who talk daily with customers about price and availability are inside sales and customer service, so she partnered with and incentivized those teams. She also changed the message.

We’ve got a free tool to help you get pricing and availability and place orders if you’d like.
— Stacy Hanks

Hein highlighted why the framing works: a customer who calls with a specific, tactical problem is the most receptive audience for a website that solves it.

Very specific, very tactical problems are the ones that people are most open in that moment to a website-based solution.
— Jason Hein

Signups rose sharply within two months, Hanks said, with new users arriving faster than she could process the emails. For a broader look at how the systems behind a portal connect, from pricing and inventory to product data, see B2BEA’s guide to the systems that power B2B commerce.

Trust, Discovery, and Lines Per Order

Once customers trust a portal for the basics, they start to discover more. Hanks heard from Canadian customers that they came for the products they always buy, then found new ones when their usual supplier ran out of stock. Hein tied that to his favorite metric.

My favorite metric that nobody else in the world measures, which is lines per order.
— Jason Hein

Each helpful suggestion, such as thread tape with a shower head or safety goggles with a welder, adds a line to the order and builds trust for the next one. Hanks pointed out that attachment items often carry a lower price, so the payoff is loyalty and a larger share of the customer’s spending rather than a single big sale. SureWerx built the relationships between products and their accessories and replacement parts in its PIM, so a detail page shows what fits. Hein said that depth of product knowledge is the whole point.

If you sent a salesperson to a new customer knowing as little about your product as your website does when the keyword search isn’t working, you’d fire that person in a week.
— Jason Hein

Why a Minimum Viable Product Is Not Enough

Hanks closed with a strong view on a popular idea. A minimum viable product (MVP) is the simplest version of a product that can be released to customers. She is comfortable with phased launches, but not with launching something barely there.

I don’t believe in digital MVPs.
— Stacy Hanks

You just don’t get a second chance with customers.
— Stacy Hanks

Hein added that buyer expectations keep rising. Six years ago, at the start of the pandemic, a site that let customers enter a part number and quantity felt like progress. Today, buyers expect to search the way they think, and the companies pulling ahead use digital as a differentiator. For the full set of platform considerations, B2BEA’s guide to selecting a B2B eCommerce platform is a useful starting point, and Harvard Business Review’s piece on healthier B2B relationships is a useful companion read on the trust Hanks describes.

Digital commerce shines a spotlight on your entire organization.
— Stacy Hanks

That spotlight is why Hanks sees digital leaders needing to carry the work further into the business, including finance and operations, rather than keeping it inside the website team. Growth in the sector is also moving fast, as Digital Commerce 360 reported when it covered how distributors kept growing sales through 2024 despite headwinds, and McKinsey’s 2024 research on how B2B winners keep growing is a useful companion read on what separates them.

What got us here is never gonna get us there.
— Stacy Hanks

About the Guest

Stacy Hanks, Vice President of Global Digital Commerce, SureWerx

Stacy Hanks is a global digital commerce and commercial leader with deep expertise in eCommerce, digital transformation, go-to-market strategy, and building scalable systems for growth across multiple industries. As Vice President of Global Digital Commerce at SureWerx, she has transformed digital capabilities across channels, technology, data, and customer experience, driving strong digital growth while helping organizations adapt to rapidly changing buyer behavior. Earlier in her career, she led digital commerce at The Master Lock Company and spent six years at Amazon. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

About the Host

Jason Hein is Vice President of B2BEA Academy and Global Director of Programming for B2B eCommerce World at the B2B eCommerce Association, where he builds and scales the association’s practitioner education offerings and leads the development of conference programming across B2B eCommerce World events in APAC, the Americas, and Europe. He also hosts the B2B eCommerce Show, where he talks with practitioners and technology leaders shaping how manufacturers and distributors sell online. With nearly 30 years of experience in B2B eCommerce, he also runs his own consulting practice, AcumentalB2B, helping companies fix underperforming B2B sites.