The B2B Experience: What We’ve Learned So Far
When we started The B2B Experience earlier this year, the goal was simple: to close the gap in actionable insights between sparse annual winter conferences by giving digital leaders a place to talk honestly about what transformation really feels like.
Over the past ten months, we’ve spoken with sixteen digital leaders who have delivered change in B2B, people who have fought resistance, built momentum, and learned the hard way about what it takes to move complex organisations forward.
We’ve recorded more than twenty hours of conversation: moments of clarity, frustration, laughter, and hard-won optimism. Different backgrounds, sectors and roles, but a familiar rhythm ran through every story, and four truths kept resurfacing. Not theories, but patterns carved from experience.
1. Change begins when you stop looking away
The first truth is uncomfortable. Change starts when people can no longer look past what their customers are actually living through.
Many guests described the same turning point, the day they brought the outside world inside. A screen recording of an online journey that went wrong, a ridiculous product image, a recording of a buyer’s call for help, a story from a front-line colleague that made everyone in the room fall quiet.
That moment of recognition is powerful. You can negotiate with data; you can’t negotiate with a customer’s frustration. It takes courage to show those truths, to risk being the one who unsettles the room, but that courage is what shifts the conversation.
It’s the instant when strategy becomes real, when improvement stops being optional.
Transformation rarely begins with a grand plan. It begins with a mirror and the courage to look squarely at what it reflects.
2. Beneath every broken experience lies broken data
If there’s one thread that connects every conversation, it’s data — not glossy dashboards, but the quiet, messy kind that underpins everything.
Again and again, people spoke about the hidden damage caused by small inaccuracies: missing images, conflicting specs, prices that don’t align, systems that refuse to talk to each other. When that happens, trust dissolves faster than any marketing can rebuild it.
One guest called data “the oxygen of digital commerce.” When it’s clean, you barely notice it. When it’s polluted, everyone starts coughing.
What struck us was how personal this topic became. No one bragged about fixing it; they spoke about the relief of finally being able to rely on their own information. That quiet persistence, to keep fixing what’s unseen and uncelebrated, may be the most underrated form of leadership in digital transformation.
Data isn’t a side project. It’s the silent measure of whether customers can believe you. We treat it like plumbing, boring until it floods the house.
3. The thirst for ROI is a form of resistance
Most organisations love a business case — it feels disciplined, objective, and safe. And when times get tough, the desire for guaranteed results delivered quickly intensifies.
But several guests admitted that this thirst for ROI can easily become the slowest form of resistance, a respectable way of saying no, or at least not yet.
They told stories of initiatives that stalled under the weight of analysis, while opportunities slipped away.
The irony is that the real return only becomes visible after you begin. Until then, progress depends on conviction and a shared sense of purpose.
Again and again, people reframed the question: not What’s the ROI? but What’s the cost of staying the same?
That simple shift often changed everything, from defending the case for change to feeling responsible for it.
It reminded us how progress in B2B so often depends on something unmeasurable: courage disguised as pragmatism, the willingness to move even when the numbers can’t yet prove you right.
4. Complexity kills momentum
If there was one universal frustration, it was complexity — the slow, well-intentioned enemy of progress.
B2B organisations are built for control and reliability. Those strengths can become shackles when the goal is to move quickly.
Several leaders described brilliant ideas that died in committee, roadmaps that collapsed under their own weight, teams that lost belief as the process grew heavier than the purpose.
The most successful stories shared a common discipline: the art of subtraction. Knowing what to leave out. Protecting clarity. Deciding faster, trusting earlier, simplifying until action became possible again.
It takes persistence to hold that line, to keep simplicity alive in cultures that reward complexity. But the leaders who manage it create momentum that lasts.
Simplicity isn’t naïve. It’s radical. It’s the point at which big ambitions become real.
The human reality
Reflecting on all sixteen conversations, we realised the real story isn’t about digital at all. It’s about people — their patience, their persistence, and their ability to bring humanity into systems that were never designed for it.
Many of these discussions circled the same quiet truth: technology doesn’t create progress, people do. The platforms, the data, the tools — they’re amplifiers. If the human foundations are weak, technology just makes the cracks appear faster. Again and again, what separated the success stories from the stalled ones wasn’t the quality of the technology, it was the depth of empathy in the people using it.
Courage, persistence and empathy were the constants: courage to face the truth; persistence to fix what’s broken; empathy to bring people with you.
Our guests don’t sound like visionaries. They’re people who’ve learned to keep going. They tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. They fix the unglamorous things. They build trust one decision at a time. And that, perhaps, is the quiet revolution happening in B2B right now.
As the community gathers for Bold B2B eCommerce in London and B2B Online Europe in Berlin, these lessons feel more relevant than ever. Because the future of B2B won’t be written in code or strategy slides, it will be written in conversations. Honest ones, between people who care enough to change what’s in front of them.
Watch, listen and subscribe to episodes of The B2B Experience here.