Stacy Hanks is Vice President of Global Digital Commerce at SureWerx, where she has led go-to-market strategy for pure play and omnichannel, the PIM, and the B2B distributor portal since 2021. Before that she led digital commerce at Master Lock, spent six years at Amazon, and started in outside sales and sales management in consumer packaged goods.

Jason Hein sat down with Stacy to ask what “a B2C-like experience” actually means in B2B, and what happens when a launch doesn’t hit the numbers the board was promised. Stacy’s answer is that commerce is commerce, and that digital results are a math problem: when the math doesn’t math, you go back to the inputs instead of calling it failure.

She walks through two launches of the same portal. In Canada, a rebuilt site with better search and PIM-driven product data grew the share of business coming through the channel by 500 basis points in three to six months. In the US, adoption lagged until she stopped pitching the portal as a website and started offering it as a free tool for price and availability, delivered through customer service and inside sales at the moment customers were already calling in.

They also get into why a website can only reflect what a company already does well offline, why Stacy doesn’t believe in digital MVPs, and why Jason’s favorite metric, lines per order, is really a measure of trust.

Key idea: a website can only be a reflection of what your company does well today.