Breaking Down Silos to Achieve Digital Success in B2B Manufacturing & Distribution
Among B2B manufacturers and distributors, the traditional approach to managing digital channels has been to treat them as standalone functions. However, if you attended B2B Online Chicago 2025, you may have learned that this approach creates unnecessary barriers to growth and digital success—so many barriers that it can start to become difficult to survive in the modern B2B marketplace.
The digitally native workforce has reached positions of leadership within the organization. According to a report by Forrester, 71% of B2B buyers are now millennials or Gen Z. Organizations can no longer afford to treat their digital strategy as separate, because these generations expect a seamless buying experience across every channel.
This article explores insights from the "Breaking Silos: Unifying and Aligning Marketing, eCommerce, and Sales Success” keynote panel discussion, revealing how organizations can break down barriers, orchestrate a unified strategy, and empower each team to work toward common goals.
The Root Causes of Organizational Silos
Most organizations have already taken steps to eliminate organizational silos, but this often takes the form of technology integration, data synchronization, and shared tools. However, they are still a significant problem.
According to a report by Harvard Business Review, Salesforce found that 70% of customer experience professionals and executives view "silo mentality” as the biggest obstacle to customer service.
To truly overcome silos, leaders need to first understand where they come from. Three of the most common instigators are fear, misalignment, and communication breakdown.
Fear-Based Resistance
The most significant barrier to organizational and team alignment often stems from deeply entrenched fear within sales teams.
As Emily Xu, Chief Digital and Information Officer at wholesale alcoholic beverage distributor Republic National Distributing Company, observed, sales teams frequently view eCommerce as "making their lives harder” rather than easier. This resistance typically manifests in three key concerns:
- Fear of replacement
- Commission loss
- Loss of customer control
These fears aren't unfounded in an industry context. Many B2B organizations operate with business models that have remained unchanged for 80 to 100 years.
The challenge becomes even more complex when considering that traditional relationship-driven sales models have been the foundation of B2B success for decades. Sales representatives have built their careers on direct customer relationships and personal service delivery, making the transition to digital-first feel like a threat to their professional identity.
Misaligned Incentives
Perhaps no factor creates more friction than misaligned incentives between departments.
Graham Thorsen, Vice President of Digital Product and Technology at global chemical ingredients distributor Univar Solutions, highlighted how individuals within sales teams prioritize performance-based compensation. For this reason, they tend to "hold onto transactions very tightly because they think that's the be-all end-all” of their role.
This mentality creates resistance to any system that might automate or streamline parts of the sales process or encourage collaboration between individuals and departments.
The compensation challenge extends beyond individual concerns to organizational resource allocation. When marketing, sales, and eCommerce teams compete for budget rather than collaborating on shared objectives, the result is suboptimal resource utilization.
Communication and Knowledge Gaps
Different departments often operate with specialized language and metrics, creating communication barriers that prevent effective collaboration. Marketing teams focus on lead generation and brand awareness, sales teams prioritize relationship building and deal closure, while eCommerce teams emphasize user experience and conversion optimization.
These communication gaps are compounded by information hoarding, where departments protect what they consider "proprietary” information from both external competitors and internal colleagues.
The result is a fragmented view of the customer journey where no single department has complete visibility into how buyers interact with the organization across all touchpoints.
Strategic Pathways to Team Alignment
Fostering collaboration between departments is a difficult task, but some B2B organizations have demonstrated that it’s both possible and can have lasting effects. Three of the most successful strategies include ownership by organizational leaders, data-driven decision-making, and integrating tools, channels, and processes across departments.
Leadership-Driven Commitments and "Evangelism”
Breaking down silos requires a commitment from executive leadership. As Janyl Mann, Global Vice President of Loyalty and Lifecycle Marketing at smart living technology manufacturer Snap One, emphasized, "If you do not have leadership alignment at the top between marketing, sales, and eCommerce, the path gets very difficult for success.”
This leadership commitment must translate into concrete actions that demonstrate the organization's dedication to digital transformation. Leaders can appoint or act as "evangelists” within the organization, helping team members across departments coordinate new efforts at collaboration and technology implementation.
Data-Driven Decision Making and Customer Journey Mapping
Effective team alignment requires replacing opinions and assumptions with empirical evidence about customer behavior and business performance.
According to Emily Xu, her team demonstrated the power of data-driven insights by conducting extensive field visits and observing day-to-day interactions between sales teams and customers.
This front-line observation revealed critical insights that would have been impossible to discover through traditional reporting. For example, the team discovered that customers often wanted to place orders outside normal business hours and during peak vacation periods.
"That gives us a data point, but also potential value-add,” she said. "It suggested we could offer our customers a tool to use when our sales team isn’t there.”
The most successful organizations develop measurement frameworks that track two key categories of metrics:
- Lead indicators (customer adoption, platform stickiness, monthly active users)
- Business outcomes (revenue increase, volume growth, churn reduction).
These metrics provide the foundation necessary to build confidence across all functional teams and demonstrate the value of collaboration.
Cross-Functional Communication Structures and Technology Integration
Structural changes in how teams communicate and collaborate are essential for sustaining team alignment beyond initial implementation.
At Snap One, leadership established that digital initiatives must sit on the highest-level goals and objectives, ensuring that cross-functional collaboration isn't treated as optional but as essential to business success.
"After a while, sales and marketing leadership got together and collaborated,” said Mann. "It was a partnership that started at the top. Every Monday over the last five years, we’ve had what we refer to as a ‘One Team Call’ between sales and marketing to discuss sales wins, performance, and strategy.”
Future-Forward Considerations for Team Alignment
The digital transformation journey doesn't end with breaking down silos—it requires continuous adaptation to emerging technologies and evolving market demands. Organizations must prepare their newly aligned organizations to prepare for the customer of the future.
Here are some of the most important suggestions from the panelists.
Implementing AI to Empower Teams and Customers
Artificial intelligence and automation technologies offer significant opportunities, such as the following:
- Enhance human capabilities rather than replace expertise
- Provide expert guidance and recommendations to non-specialist staff
- Automate routine tasks while preserving opportunities for relationship building
- Enable personalized experiences at scale through customer segmentation
However, organizations must approach these technologies as enhancements to human capabilities rather than replacements for human expertise.
Graham Thorsen noted that AI can help teams become "smarter” by providing insights and recommendations that would be difficult for humans to generate manually.
In chemical distribution, where front-line employees may not be chemists, AI can help provide expert-level guidance to customers. It can also enable sales representatives to focus on relationship building and complex problem-solving.
The key to successful AI implementation lies in ensuring that automated systems enhance rather than replace the human connections that remain central to B2B relationships. Organizations should focus on using AI to eliminate routine tasks while preserving opportunities for meaningful human interaction and relationship development.
Prioritizing Personalization at Scale
Future-oriented organizations are leveraging customer data, AI, and first-hand knowledge to create personalized experiences that were previously impossible to deliver at scale.
Emily Xu highlighted the opportunity to build "super hyper-personalized experiences” for both customers and sales teams by combining AI with customer segmentation data. This level of personalization extends beyond simple product recommendations to potentially include:
- Customized pricing
- Tailored communication preferences
- Individualized service delivery options
- Personalized digital portals and storefronts
- Real-time access to salespeople
The alignment of marketing, sales, and eCommerce teams becomes crucial for delivering these personalized experiences consistently across all customer touchpoints.
Improving Data Management and Reporting to Stay Ahead of Regulatory Compliance
Finally, regulatory compliance is becoming increasingly complex, with governments requiring organizations to share real-time transaction data and detailed product origin information, in some cases. Organizations must ensure that their alignment efforts include compliance teams from the beginning rather than treating regulatory requirements as an afterthought.
This includes preparing for increased government regulation and reporting requirements, which will likely expand beyond tax compliance to include supply chain transparency, environmental impact reporting, and data privacy protection. Teams that work in silos will struggle to meet these evolving requirements effectively.
The Path to Alignment and Collaboration
Breaking down silos is less a technology rollout than an organizational commitment. Anchor the initiative in executive priorities, surface customer insights through data, and reinforce cross-functional habits until they become culture.
Every improvement—faster quotes, cleaner content, unified reporting—earns trust and creates momentum for the next.
In an era where 80% of B2B transactions touch digital channels, alignment is not merely efficient; it is critical. Manufacturers and distributors that act decisively will meet rising buyer expectations, energize their teams, and claim a durable competitive edge.
To learn more, don’t miss B2B Online Atlanta 2025. It’s happening from November 17th to 19th at the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia. Get your tickets today.