Still Running on Notebooks: What B2B Digital Transformation Gets Wrong

This article is based on a conversation with Scott McIntyre, Co-Founder of Infinite Green, a consulting company focused on customer experience, operational excellence, AI, and service delivery. Scott has spent his career working across operations, customer behaviour, process improvement, and complex technology-enabled change, including senior roles at Best Buy, Carlson Companies, and U.S. Bank.  

It also draws on the perspective of Sasha Siniouguine, Founder and CEO of Virto Commerce, whose work with enterprise B2B organisations focuses on the realities of digital commerce, platform adoption, and organisational change. 

1. INTRODUCTION
2. THE NOTEBOOK IS NOT THE PROBLEM. IGNORING IT IS.
3. RELATIONSHIP-BASED SELLING CHANGES THE ADOPTION EQUATION
4. MID-MARKET AND ENTERPRISE COMPANIES STRUGGLE DIFFERENTLY
5. THE SALESFORCE PATTERN: WHY BUSINESS-LED TOOL ADOPTION OFTEN BECOMES AN IT-PROBLEM
6. AI ADOPTION IS HAPPENING UNDER THE RADAR
7. THE AI RHETORIC-TO-REALITY GAP
8. WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE

At a recent Master B2B Mindshare Summit, Scott McIntyre and Sasha Siniouguine asked a simple question: do sales reps in your companies still carry notebooks?

Half the room said yes. 

For anyone outside mature B2B, that may sound outdated. For anyone who has worked with industrial suppliers, distributors, manufacturers, or sales-led B2B organisations, it sounds familiar. The notebook is not just paper. It is a working system. It holds product knowledge, account history, order patterns, pricing memory, customer preferences, and the kind of informal expertise that does not always live cleanly inside a platform. 

As Scott put it: 

“It made me think a little bit about how to replicate the notebook experience that these B2B sales reps carry around in their heads.” 

That sentence captures the real challenge. Digital transformation in B2B is not just about replacing manual processes with digital tools. It is about understanding why manual processes survived for so long in the first place. 

Technology may be ready; the organisation often is not. 

Many B2B companies have already invested in digital storefronts, sales portals, ecommerce platforms, CRM systems, product information tools, and automation. Yet the old ways of working persist. Orders still come through email, sales reps still call customers directly. Buyers still prefer conversations over portals. Internal teams still keep their own spreadsheets because they trust them more than the official system. 

We heard this repeatedly during the summit. When Scott asked companies how long it took to move from manual processes to digital adoption, the answer was rarely simple. 

“One person from a Coca-Cola distributor said, it’s been five years and we’ve got about 80% adoption in five years,” he said. 

That is the kind of timeline many leaders do not want to hear. Five years to reach 80% adoption can sound painfully slow when the platform has already been launched, the budget has already been spent, and the business case promised efficiency much earlier. 

But in mature B2B environments, this is often the reality. Adoption is not a switch. It is a long transition between trusted habits and new operating models. 

Scott’s and Sasha’s conclusion was practical: maybe the first goal should not always be to force every transaction through a digital ordering flow. Sometimes the more effective starting point is to digitise the resources around the order. 

“Let’s not focus as much on the order,” he said, “but focus on the resources that they may need to fill in the order later.” 

That distinction matters. A sales rep may not immediately want to replace a customer conversation with a portal. But they may welcome faster access to product information, contract terms, stock availability, customer-specific pricing, technical documentation, or order history while they are having that conversation. 

The best digital tools in B2B make the human layer better informed. 

One reason B2B transformation is slower than expected is that the sales relationship is not incidental. In many sectors, it is the business.

Scott described the companies at the summit as mature organisations with long histories. Their sales teams have been in place for years. Their customers are often mature companies too. These are not new digital-native buyers and sellers meeting through a clean online workflow. They are long-standing suppliers, vendors, sales reps, and customers who know each other personally. 

“They would much rather have a relationship-based conversation over the phone, talk about the orders and then place them later in the tool,” Scott said. “They want to have these calls because they’re friends.” 

That is why digital adoption can feel emotionally loaded. A portal may look efficient to leadership, but to a sales rep or customer, it may feel impersonal. It may even feel like a threat to the relationship that made the account successful in the first place. 

The adoption challenge is a question of enhancement. The goal is not to tell customers, “Here’s the ordering portal, go to town.” It is to introduce digital capabilities in a way that supports the existing relationship. 

“In B2B, digital adoption works only when people see the tool as an extension of the relationship, not a replacement for it. If a sales rep believes the portal takes them out of the conversation, they will resist it. But if it helps them answer faster, serve the customer better, and bring more context into the conversation, adoption becomes much more natural.”
- Sasha Siniouguine, Founder and CEO of Virto Commerce 

That means change management cannot be reduced to training. Training explains how the tool works, while change management explains why it helps, what it protects, and how it fits into the way people already sell, buy, and communicate.  

The summit also surfaced a second reality: mid-market and enterprise B2B companies often experience the same pain, but at different scales. 

In mid-market companies, the problem is often missing ownership. There may be no dedicated digital transformation lead, no formal change management structure, and no clear person responsible for connecting business goals with technical execution. Digital initiatives happen, but they depend heavily on a few motivated people. 

In enterprise organisations, the problem is usually too many stakeholders with different priorities. IT, marketing, sales, operations, finance, customer service, regional teams, legal, data governance, and external partners may all have a legitimate claim on the digital roadmap. 

Even where formal change management exists, the number of stakeholders can dilute its effect, because each function reads the same roadmap through a different operating logic. 

The result can look similar in both cases: slow progress, unclear accountability, and tools that are technically available but unevenly adopted. 

In both cases, the missing element is the same: a service layer that connects ambition to execution. Without it, even the best tools sit half-used. 

Scott described one of the most complex questions from the summit as: who owns the digital storefront? 

“Is it a business owner? Is it marketing? Is it a sales leader?” he asked. “The discussion was kind of all over the board.” 

Most people leaned toward business ownership, but that answer immediately created another problem. Business teams understand growth, promotions, customer needs, sales performance, and market pressure. But they do not always understand ERP structures, data dependencies, integration constraints, or technical feasibility. 

At the same time, IT understands architecture, data, stability, and system integrity, but often struggles to translate that into the language the business needs. 

“The business side is often not technical enough,” Scott said. “They don’t own ERP structures. They’re not intimate with how ERP works in their company.” 

This is the ownership gap that quietly kills momentum. The business owns the ambition. IT owns the consequences. Neither side can succeed alone. 

Bridging that gap is the core change management problem of B2B transformation today, and it is rarely treated as one. 

The ownership divide is not new. Salesforce can be an interesting early example of a pattern many companies still repeat today.

In many organisations, business and marketing teams adopted Salesforce because they needed better ways to manage customers, campaigns, sales activity, and marketing processes. They had budget, urgency, and a clear commercial problem to solve. But once the tool entered the organisation, technical questions quickly followed. Where would the data come from? How would it connect to existing systems? Who would maintain it? Who would govern the customer records? Who would make sure the platform worked with the rest of the enterprise architecture? 

Scott described the pattern this way: 

“Salesforce kind of turned the tides a little bit where the business teams were so in need of a marketing capability that they went out and bought Salesforce themselves. And then later IT said, well, what are you going to do with that thing? Who’s going to feed it with data? Where’s the data going to go?” 

The same pattern is now playing out across digital commerce, customer portals, automation tools, analytics platforms, and AI. A business team sees a capability gap and moves quickly to solve it. IT then has to connect the new tool to the wider system landscape, clean up the data implications, and make the solution operationally sustainable. 

The business buys speed. IT inherits complexity. 

In B2B, that complexity is especially difficult to clean up later. Pricing is account-specific. Product data is messy. Customer hierarchies matter. Contract terms vary. Approval workflows differ. ERP logic is deeply embedded. Sales teams work around exceptions every day. 

When ownership is unclear, companies lose time and build digital channels on top of unresolved operating questions. 

The recommendation here is to think less narrowly about the platform itself and more deliberately about the bridging role around it. 

“If you can appeal to being the bridger or a service in that discussion, you’d be highly valuable,”  

That “bridger” role connects technical feasibility with business value. It helps translate composable architecture into commercial flexibility. It turns ERP constraints into business trade-offs. It helps marketing understand data dependencies and helps IT understand why promotions, sales performance, and customer experience matter. 

As Scott put it: 

“Don’t think of Virto as a product. Think of Virto as a service.” 

The idea applies beyond any one platform. B2B transformation works better when companies treat digital change as a service discipline: technical alignment, data alignment, process alignment, organisational alignment, and ongoing support. 

AI was one of the strongest themes at the summit, although the conversation was more grounded than the usual executive-level discussion. The focus was less on futuristic shopping experiences and more on the work companies are already struggling to manage: data cleanup, product information gaps, search quality, pick lists, marketing copy, sales communications, code checking, security reviews, and repetitive internal processes. 

That is where these tools are starting to appear in B2B. Quietly. Unevenly. Often, without a formal program around it. 

In many companies, AI adoption is already happening through individuals or small teams that have found practical ways to make their own work easier. These are rarely company-wide transformation stories. They are pockets of use inside IT, operations, marketing, product data, or service teams. 

As Scott observed: 

“I think there’s pockets of people that are doing really advanced things with AI in companies that don’t get widespread adoption or knowledge of what’s happening.” 

One example from the summit involved an employee using multiple AI agents to support data cleanup, code checking, site reviews, and security-related work. The use case was highly practical. It improved real work and showed how far ahead individual experimentation can be compared to the official organizational roadmap. 

The problem is that these experiments often stay invisible. 

When employees discover that the technology helps them finish work faster, they may not rush to share it. In some organisations, revealing a productivity gain does not lead to more support or better tooling. It simply creates more expectations. The person who found a useful shortcut may become the person everyone asks for help, without being given time, budget, or recognition for that role. 

Scott described this dynamic bluntly: 

“They don’t want to be AI champions, they want to actually use the tools.” 

That sentence points to a larger cultural issue. Many companies say they want innovation, yet they give employees little reason to surface what is already working. If a person saves five hours a week with AI, the organisation should want to understand how. Instead, employees may worry that they will be rewarded with more work, more internal questions, or the unofficial responsibility of training everyone else. 

This is where hidden productivity becomes a missed opportunity. The company may already have relevant AI use cases inside the business, but no structured way to find them, validate them, support them, or scale them responsibly. 

Sasha Siniouguine sees this as one of the real readiness gaps in B2B AI adoption: 

“AI adoption often starts before the organisation is ready to manage it. People experiment because they have real problems to solve, but if the company does not create a safe way to share those experiments, the knowledge stays hidden. The opportunity is not only to introduce AI tools, but to build the trust, governance, and education around them.” 

The companies that benefit most from AI will be the ones that notice these small internal experiments early and treat them as signals. Somewhere inside the organisation, someone may already have found the first practical use case. Leadership just needs a better way to hear about it. 

The other side of hidden AI adoption is the gap between executive ambition and daily work. 

Leadership may announce that AI matters, but employees are often left without the basics: approved tools, practical examples, training time, or permission to experiment. Scott described the pattern clearly: 

“They don’t help them out at all. They don’t give them tools, they don’t give them teaching, they don’t give them education, they don’t carve out a time of day.” 

That gap matters because most employees are already overloaded. They are managing customer questions, fixing data issues, formatting spreadsheets, moving information between systems, and keeping existing processes alive. Asking them to “learn AI” in the abstract will not change much. 

The technology becomes useful when it is tied to a task they already recognize. 

Scott gave the example of HR teams manually copying, pasting, formatting spreadsheets, and preparing files for different service providers. AI could help with that work almost immediately, but people need to see the application in their own context. 

“Once you show them and once they get a taste of it, it’s really quite powerful,” Scott said. “But it’s kind of like one person at a time.” 

That may feel slower than the company-wide AI transformation many executives imagine. In practice, it is how adoption often begins: one team, one workflow, one frustrating task made easier. 

The path forward for B2B digital transformation and AI readiness is rarely about adding another tool. Most organisations already have plenty of technology. What they need is a practical model for helping people adopt it, govern it, and use it in the context of real work. 

Scott’s strongest recommendation is to think in terms of gaps: between IT and business, ERP and the digital storefront, pricing logic and customer experience, executive ambition and employee reality. 

“We bridge all those gaps,” Scott said. “The people gaps, the process gaps and the technology gaps, ownership gaps.” 

That is where meaningful transformation starts. Digital change has to connect the operating model behind the business with the tools placed in front of customers, sales teams, and internal users. 

• For digitization, that means recognizing the value of existing relationships and designing tools that make those relationships easier to manage. 
• For ownership, it means creating a clear bridge between technical feasibility and business priorities, so the roadmap does not get stuck between commercial ambition and system constraints. 
• For AI, it means moving from broad urgency to practical use cases, education, tools, and time. Employees need to see how these tools help them with the work they already have, from cleaning data to preparing content, formatting spreadsheets, improving search, or reducing repetitive handoffs.
• For leaders, it means being honest about the distance between the boardroom version of transformation and the ground-level version. It also means treating change management as a continuous discipline throughout implementation and after launch. In B2B, transformation fails when nobody owns the change, when sales teams feel pushed aside, when IT is brought in too late, and when AI is declared important while employees are left to experiment between meetings.  

As Sasha Siniouguine puts it: 

“The companies that move forward are usually the ones that stop treating adoption as the final step of implementation. Adoption is the work. It requires ownership, communication, and a clear connection between the technology and the way people actually run the business.” 

The companies that make progress are the ones willing to work with reality as it is. 

The notebook still exists. The relationships still matter. The ERP is still complicated. The hidden AI users are already there. 

The question is whether leadership can build the trust, ownership, change management practice, and service model needed to turn scattered effort into real transformation. 

If your organisation is trying to turn digital ambition into real adoption, start with the gaps: ownership, process, data, and the daily work your teams still manage manually. Virto Commerce helps B2B companies connect platform capability with the change management, technical alignment, and service model needed to make transformation stick.