A few years ago, I was on a conference panel in Chicago. About two-thirds of the way through Q&A, a CEO raised his hand and asked whether salespeople should be commissioned on e-commerce revenue from their accounts. My answer then — and it’s even stronger today — was yes. Without hesitation.

What happened next surprised even me. We might as well have canceled the rest of the session. Every question that followed was some variation of the same topic. The room had clearly been sitting on this frustration for a while.

Here’s the thing: somewhere along the way, organizations decided that because e-commerce was designed to automate transactions — and because it required significant investment — the two things needed to cancel each other out. That’s not likely to turn sales into the asset it could be for digital.

But commissions are just one piece of a larger challenge. The real opportunity in B2B digital is building what I call revenue workflows — intentional, seamless experiences that connect your e-commerce platform and your sales team in a way that serves the customer better than either could alone. Salespeople carry knowledge no platform can replace. The goal is to make sure that knowledge and digital amplify each other. Get this right, and your e-commerce site becomes what it should be: an extension of the sales relationship, available 24/7, that makes your reps more effective — not redundant.

Before you think about platform features, check your own house. These are the organizational issues that will undermine even the best digital investment:

Sales commissions. If all account revenue — online or offline — aren’t part of sales teams commission or incentive structure, you’re likely creating a built-in disincentive for the very people you need driving adoption. Your e-commerce platform is an organizational investment, no different than your ERP or CRM. Protect the ROI by keeping your sales team aligned with digital success, not working against it. Want to turn sales into the best ally? Build incentives into online orders.

Contract pricing not accurately reflected online. If customers suspect they can call their rep and get a better deal than what’s on the site, you’ve trained them to avoid the platform. Accurate, customer-specific pricing is a requirement in a digital-first B2B environment. Done right, it builds trust — and over time, that trust, combined with order history and self-service tools, naturally migrates more transactions online.

The relationship between a sales rep and their best customers is built on trust, knowledge, and reliability. Digital should reinforce all three — not undermine them. Revenue workflows are the intentional connections between your e-commerce platform and your sales process that make that possible. Below are the platform capabilities worth investing in if you want digital to do what it was always supposed to do: make your team more effective, and your customers more loyal.

CRM Integration

What you want: Salespeople completely connected to customer activity online — not as an afterthought, but as a core part of how they manage their accounts.

What you’ll need:

• Orders and customer interactions from the e-commerce platform feeding into the CRM
• A dedicated rep login role that allows salespeople to log in as their customers — without needing to ask for credentials, the same way customer service reps support customers today

Marketing Automation

What you want: A tool that connects the customer, the e-commerce platform, and the sales process — scaling the rep’s reach without requiring manual effort on every touchpoint.

What you’ll need:

• A marketing automation platform that can handle everything from abandoned cart to customer churn triggers, monthly supplier promotions, RFQ follow-ups, AI-driven product recommendations, and custom revenue workflows
• Note: To get the most out of automated product recommendations, you’ll need product relationships built into your product data — this is where data and sales enablement intersect directly

Quoting

What you want: A more seamless self-service quoting experience — for customers to initiate quotes on their own, and for salespeople and inside reps who spend inordinate time processing quotes manually to have an automated path forward.

What you’ll need:

• A platform that can replicate your offline quoting process — not just price, but the full structure and workflow
• The ability for customers to review quotes, reps to confirm or adjust, and orders to flow into the ERP just like any other transaction
• Quoting statuses that mirror your offline process
• Marketing automation integration — unfulfilled quotes are a natural and often overlooked sales follow-up trigger

Punch Out / E-Procurement

What you want: The ability for customers to connect their procurement system directly to your platform — meeting them where they already work.

What you’ll need:

• Ideally, connectors already built into your platform to major punch out networks
• If not, a custom integration point
• Keep in mind: EDI is point-to-point and harder to scale. Punch out is far more scalable — especially if your customers are already on one of the major procurement networks

Search & Findability

What you want: Customers who can find what they’re looking for on your site — every time, easily. One of the most consistent frustrations sales teams hear from customers is not being able to find product online.

What you’ll need:

• An honest assessment first — much of the time, findability is a product data problem. If your data isn’t configured to support search, fix that before blaming the search tool
• Type-ahead search with image support
• Search that can be configured and tuned as you learn how your customers actually search — and updated as you discover gaps

Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI)

What you want: The ability — particularly for distributors — to manage inventory at the customer’s location digitally. This should be a huge enablement opportunity in B2B.

What you’ll need:

• Customer-specific catalog creation
• Easy rep login as customer (ties directly to your CRM integration)
• Scanner integration — so whether it’s a rep scanning on-site or a customer self-managing, the workflow is seamless
• The ability for reps to access, review, and reconcile inventory on behalf of the customer

Subscriptions

What you want: Think of subscriptions like compound interest for your sales team. Every product on a subscription is time a rep doesn’t have to spend managing replenishment orders for frequently purchased items — freeing them up for higher-value work.

What you’ll need:

• The ability for customers to set up, start, and stop subscriptions on their own
• For B2B specifically, line-item level control is critical — customers need to be able to manage individual products within a subscription, not just the subscription as a whole

Amazon has commoditized the shipping of boxes. In a world where your customers can source product anywhere, what keeps them with you is the relationship — and the experience wrapped around it.

Digital doesn’t compete with that relationship. It amplifies it. But only if you build it that way intentionally — with revenue workflows that make your sales team more effective, not less relevant.

The manufacturers and distributors winning in B2B digital aren’t the ones with the most features. They’re the ones who made sure digital made their sales team better. That starts with the decisions above.