01. Copperberg Podcast
Episode 16
From Platform to Profit: Turning B2B E-Commerce into Commercial Impact
At some point, the conversation around e-commerce changes.
The challenge is no longer whether customers will use digital channels, but how those channels can contribute to broader business objectives and commercial growth.
02. CONTENT
In this episode of Copperberg Conversations on Manufacturing Matters, Justyna Zoltanska, E-Commerce Manager at Puratos, reflects on more than seven years of experience building and scaling digital commerce capabilities across international markets.
Inside the Episode:
- What Happens After E-Commerce Works: Why adoption and efficiency are only the first milestones on the path to commercial value.
- When Digital Becomes a Business Topic: How leadership expectations change as e-commerce matures beyond implementation.
- Leadership, Change Management, and Adoption: Why people and organizational alignment matter more than technology alone.
- Scaling Across Markets: How to balance global consistency with local flexibility while building capabilities across regions.
- The Future of Digital Sales: What a mature digital sales model looks like and the priorities leaders should focus on next.
Throughout the conversation, Justyna shares practical insights for digital commerce leaders looking to scale adoption, build organizational capabilities, and create greater business value through digital channels.
03. Speakers
Copperberg Conversations on Manufacturing Matters is your go-to podcast for candid discussions with the industry’s top thinkers and innovators.
04. Listen now
From Platform to Profit: Turning B2B E-Commerce into Commercial Impact
05. Transcript
Nina Roper Yearwood (00:55)
Hello and welcome to Copperberg Conversations on Manufacturing Matters. I’m your host, Nina Roper Yearwood from Copperberg, wishing you a great day wherever you’re tuning in from. In this episode, we’re putting the spotlight on B2B e-commerce in manufacturing.
Now, if you look across the industry today, e-commerce is no longer new. Most organizations have already adopted it across both new product and aftermarket sales. But what’s interesting and what you might be seeing in your own organization is that the conversation has moved on. It’s no longer just about having an e-commerce platform in place. It’s about what it actually delivers to the business.
And that shift is exactly what we will be exploring today. With me right now is Justyna Zoltanska. Hello, Justyna! Welcome to the show!
Justyna Zoltanska (01:52)
Hello, hello, thank you!
Nina Roper Yearwood (01:55)
It’s great to have you here! Justyna, you are a global digital sales and e-commerce leader with over seven years of experience, helping organizations scale digital channels and translate strategy into real business outcomes. You’ve spent the past seven years working at the intersection of digital sales and e-commerce, helping organizations move beyond basic online ordering towards something much more commercially impactful.
So currently you’re working at Puratos as an e-commerce manager. Let’s start there. Could you give us a bit of context on your role today and the world you’re operating in?
Justyna Zoltanska (02:30)
Yes, thank you for this warm introduction and hello everyone!
So maybe a couple of words about Puratos itself. So Puratos, it’s an international global group that offers innovative food ingredients for bakery, patisserie and chocolate sectors. We serve customers like artisans, but also industrial producers, retailers, and food service companies in more than 100 countries all around the world.
Nina Roper Yearwood (03:14)
Justyna, let’s just dive a little bit into your world. So could you just share a bit about, where you are in that whole thing and how your role has evolved over time?
Justyna Zoltanska (03:29)
Yes, well my role has evolved from a very hands-on execution, making sure that online buying is possible, so that means launching web shops in the different respective markets countries.
Today my work is much less about the platform and much more about how digital supports commercial value. So how the sales teams adopt it, how leadership interacts, engages with the digital, and also making sure that this is embedded in the everyday, day-to-day work of everyone.
Nina Roper Yearwood (04:10)
So from platform to impact. You’ve been part of this journey for a long time now, right? So almost a decade, if we round it up. When you look back, what has kept it interesting or perhaps even surprising for you?
Justyna Zoltanska (04:25)
Yes, well, when you’re having fun, time flies, right? So, yeah, but what kept it interesting is how the challenge shifts over time. So early on, it was about building and launching, where later it’s much more about change. So today it’s a lot about aligning people, processes, behaviors, strategies.
And what has been the most surprising for me is how little it is about technology and how much it is about change management and people, especially in B2B environments. I am originally coming from B2C e-commerce where it was much more about features, making web shops functioning in the most customer friendly way.
Today in B2B it’s much, well of course customers are still at the center of everything we do, but it’s a lot more about change management and people.
Nina Roper Yearwood (05:24)
That is quite interesting to unpack. I can’t help but think of a children’s story. They always started once upon a time. I wanted to ask you this from your perspective when you came in. If you go back to the beginning, what was e-commerce meant to be at Puratos? What problem were you trying to solve at that time?
Justyna Zoltanska (05:32)
So, well, at the very beginning, e-commerce was largely about efficiency. With e-commerce, we were reducing the manual work, we were reducing frictions, which is actually a natural starting point for many manufacturing companies.
But where I see the biggest mistake is where companies think that this is, when that part of the job is done, that the success will come by itself, which is actually not the case.
So at the very beginning it was about efficiency. Of course, with always underlying goal of making sure that the interactions with customers are customer friendly, because of course efficiency only matters when customer, when it improves customer experience. But today it’s no longer about efficiency, it’s about much more than that.
Nina Roper Yearwood (06:43)
So looking at it from where you stand today, so let’s just zoom out a little bit. Could you identify key maturity shifts from, as you said, launching the web shops to where you are today?
Justyna Zoltanska (06:59)
Yeah, well, there are a few, actually. The first one I can think about is the shift or the realization of the fact that adoption alone does not really bring impact.
So when I see maturity shifts is when we realize that digital start to touch other commercial topics. Like we influence topics like pricing, like supply chain and digital is not anymore a standalone topic, but it really shifts the focus from technology to commercial business impact. And that’s where I start to see maturity growing. So there is a second point.
But maybe the most important shift that I’ve noticed in my journey was when we shifted from this internal focus of success metrics to more customer centric view.
So instead of asking if the webshop works correctly, we started to ask much bigger questions on how can we support our customers? Are we actually solving the right problems and delivering what our customers expect from us, and how all of this can create additional value for our customers but also for us, of course.
Nina Roper Yearwood (08:25)
So Justyna, could you just give us a little taster of the questions that you’re getting today that you weren’t getting before? Because I think based on what you have outlined so far, the internal conversation has evolved, right? And you’re now bringing in some external output as well.
Justyna Zoltanska (08:46)
Yes, exactly. At the very beginning, we received many questions about how the webshop is working, much more platform related questions, how many people are using it, where today we shifted towards commercial questions such as how can we respond to customer needs through the digital solutions we are providing.
We focus more on understanding the customer journey and how digital can create value for them. How can we support the KPIs and the success matrixes from commercial point of view.
Nina Roper Yearwood (09:27)
So right now you’re actually no longer just interfacing with your sales team and the internal processes that come with building and launching a webshop. You’re also now looking at convincing your leadership at Puratos. So to say it’s almost like you already have a seat at the commercial table at Puratos.
With that shift in your role and your point of view, how is that changing the difficulties of the conversations that you’re having?
Justyna Zoltanska (10:11)
Yes, it’s a very valid point because indeed at the very beginning of the conversations that we’ve been having with the leadership was mainly to convince them indeed to find the right spot for digital and convincing them, selling the idea of digital. That is definitely no longer the case.
Today, the conversations we are having are much more about prioritization, the trades-offs, conversations about how digital can support customer retention, can support our strategies and bring really the extra value, the incremental value for the customers and for Puratus itself.
Nina Roper Yearwood (10:53)
You’ve really touched upon, I think, two interesting keywords, or three interesting keywords. So one is efficiency — you kept on touching upon that, I keep on hearing that. And the next one is incremental value. And I think it’s almost like a growth story as well, right? Of the influence and the role of e-commerce within an organization, any manufacturing organization.
Nina Roper Yearwood (11:23)
So my question would be now, what does that actually mean in practice when you do that?
Justyna Zoltanska (11:31)
Well, the maturity of e-commerce, like you already fully said, is a journey. So, like already mentioned, we started from efficiency, but having the orders going through the platform doesn’t necessarily create the additional value on its own. So there is, of course, an extra layer that needs to put on top of it so that the value is created.
How we started to understand that, it really changed everything. So it changed the internal conversations, but also the way how our customers used the different features that we have put in place on MyPuratos.
So incremental value comes through many small changes that happened over time, facilitating or giving the customers opportunity to find information faster, to have access to our solutions at any moment. This opens the full box of new opportunities that were not available before digital.
So we have really opened a new box of opportunities that then led us to additional incremental commercial value for us, but also for our customers because they really find the platform very useful into their day to day. They make it easier for them to do a business or to operate on their in their realities, which is also one of our biggest priority, right? The reason of existence, one of the reasons why we are there is to make, is to help our customers grow their business being more efficient but also growing further in their business. So that’s what we are trying to achieve also with the digital layer on top of other projects that we have.
Nina Roper Yearwood (13:23)
And where does the salesperson sit? Because I imagine since you’re dealing with foods, it’s also a bit high touch because you’re dealing with ingredients that may spoil or things that has a certain sell-by date or use-by date. So can you just give us an overview of where the salesperson sits in that?
Justyna Zoltanska (13:46)
It also has been a shift actually in the role of the sales teams and very much impacted by the digital transformation that we have been through over the last years. Because of course the salespeople role is now, so we started much more on the transactional side, it was very much focused on transactions, where now it shifted towards more advisory role, more consultancy.
So the salespeople now because they are no longer focusing on the administration on the transactions, they have much more time, quality time with the customer. They can really sit together, they can advise the customer, they can have more deeper conversations on commercial strategies and therefore it’s also facilitating the salespeople to create value for customers and basically help the customers grow as well.
Nina Roper Yearwood (14:43)
Interesting points there, Justyna. So I can clearly see that your setup has grown by, you know, proportion to the importance of e-commerce to your customers and as well as to the people within Puratos. And I think as an operation grows, it also comes with growing pains, right? Could you just, you know, just give us an overview? Doesn’t need to be specific just to also paint a picture for our listeners what has become complex or challenging with this kind of growth. Because this is, to our listeners, this is all within seven years, right? And that is quite massive.
Justyna Zoltanska (15:30)
Yes, thank you. Well, that’s actually a very interesting question because, like you said, the complexity grows very quickly when you’re scaling on that speed. And especially around governance, prioritization, or even making it consistent towards all the countries, all the markets. So these are the challenges that we are facing. And it’s really directly translated into the scale and the speed in which we have been growing. So yeah, we have this complexity and it’s part of our day-to-day.
Nina Roper Yearwood (16:08)
Eating complexity for breakfast at Puratos. My question now is, and I think many manufacturers, especially the global operating ones, or even maybe if you just operate within Europe, because it’s still different countries that you deal with different markets.
Could you just share how you could balance the central structure where you have your, I don’t know, your planning and strategy, and then with local flexibility as well.
Justyna Zoltanska (16:39)
Yes, well, it’s definitely not easy. It’s one of the most difficult parts, to be honest. But what I think it’s a key to success is to have a very strong backbone, but still allowing enough flexibility, the local flexibility for the markets to adopt that into the local realities because we need to stay relevant, we need to answer to different customer needs that definitely are not the same from country to country. So we need to stay open, we need to listen, and we need to have that layer of flexibility.
And that is a balance that we are constantly calibrating so it’s not something that is once in place and it’s static. So every day this calibration between local flexibility and central standardization, it’s something that is part of our day to day.
Because what is important maybe to say is that of course, if you are too standardized, that will kill your adoption. But if you are too flexible, then you kill your scalability. So finding the balance between those two, it’s really important to achieve the scale at which we are at the moment, but also being really market specific and answering to the needs of the customers everywhere.
Nina Roper Yearwood (18:03)
That is a really great point that you make there, like the decision, the tough decision that you make between being kind of out of the box versus being bespoke.
So from your perspective, you deal of course with a lot of markets. What have you found works for building capability and training across different markets? Considering that we only have one Justyna.
Justyna Zoltanska (18:31)
Well, yes, training is very important. And of course, have teams here centrally that are fully supporting, also teams in the market that are working day to day to make our digital journey successful. But the training is also not one set event. It’s a continuous process. And we really put a lot of focus on trainings.
It is not to make everyone a digital expert because that’s not gonna happen. But what is important is that everyone understands how digital fits in their day to day. That is for us really important that everyone embeds digital into their day to day.
And when it comes specifically to the digital sales or the e-commerce teams, I personally invest a lot of time in coaching, mentoring, having a lot of one-to-ones with the local teams. But also I am a big believer in collective intelligence. So I’ve also created a community, a very strong community of local e-commerce experts. And we all come together once a month to discuss challenges, to share best practices.
And that is really inspiring because colleagues all the different parts of the world can come together and inspire each other, learn from each other.
So it has a very big benefit for them, but also for me because me having the central role sometimes takes me very far from the realities that our team is facing. So me being part of that community and listening to what our colleagues from all around the world have to say, what are their challenges that they face on a day to day is something that brings me closer to the market realities, which I really appreciate.
Nina Roper Yearwood (20:23)
Is it something that you really do regularly like monthly in your calendar?
Justyna Zoltanska (20:28)
Yes, yes, indeed, we do it monthly. Of course, it’s an online gathering every month and yeah, we do it already for the last six years almost. So it has been really put in place from the very beginning and that’s also how it makes not only how we build capabilities, how we build expertise, but on the other hand it also helps with engagement, right?
So people are engaged and that also helps us to go through the change process that we need to drive within the company. So it has two benefits. On the one hand, expertise building, but also this bonding, team building and building the engagement, the ownership is also very important success factors that I’ve been observing over the last years.
Nina Roper Yearwood (21:17)
Monthly meetings across six years of different markets. That’s a lot of ideas to work with, Justyna. So I think the challenge now isn’t a lack of inputs. And I think right now it’s almost the opposite. How do you decide what to focus on and what to consciously leave aside? Maybe let’s pin that for the next time.
Justyna Zoltanska (21:40)
Yeah, well, you have touched a very sensitive topic because indeed we have a lot of good ideas and this is actually the hardest part because there is always more ideas than the capacity we have.
So, for me, successful teams should learn on how to say “no” intentionally. Because it’s even to good ideas, which is of course very hard. But it needs to be intentional and if this idea does not really serve or support the current maturity level at which you are or the current objective that you want to achieve, then you have no other choice than then say no, which doesn’t mean that the idea will not come into place later on because we had many of those cases. But intentionally, intentional no, it’s one of the hardest parts, but the most important part of a success, I would say.
Nina Roper Yearwood (22:41)
Wow, yeah, because I think I heard this saying something about when you say yes to one thing, that’s actually saying no to more than a hundred things.
And I think, Justyna, at this point now, we are about to wrap up this conversation. I just want to ask you to put on your e-commerce expert hat. From your perspective, what would a more mature or successful digital sales model look like over the next few years?
Justyna Zoltanska (23:14)
Well, it’s not an easy question to answer because as we see the speed at which technology evolves and digital evolves today in this fast moving world, it’s not easy to predict. But I will maybe take the question a bit from a different angle because what digital success means to me is when it starts to become a natural part of business conversations.
So it’s not about the technology, it’s not about specific strategy on how we embed technology, but it’s really to become part of day-to-day life of our business development teams, of our business strategies, and then when it comes natural to people, when it’s not really a silo anymore. So I hope that we can play that role for the company. The company has a very big ambition to grow in the coming years and I hope that digital will be one of the most important levers to achieve that growth.
Nina Roper Yearwood (24:19)
Fantastic! And I think at this point now what’s left is some inspiring words as well from you because you’ve had a head start seven years and that is including the pandemic. that has, you you’ve seen quite a lot in your journey as an e-commerce leader. What advice would you give to other e-commerce leaders driving digital commerce within their organizations?
Justyna Zoltanska (24:46)
Well, I would say do not start with technology because technology is the enabler but it’s not what will make you a success.
Focus on people because the digital adoption doesn’t happen through technology, it happens through people. So people should be central part of whatever digital journey you will step in.
And also what is very important, I think, is to stay consistent and to have the vision and to stick to that vision. Because like I already said before, this world is changing so fast and it’s so easy to lose focus and to deviate from the journey or to deviate from the north star that you’re aiming for.
So stay consistent, invest in people, focus on people and change management. Give it a time because change doesn’t happen overnight and use technology more as a support to your journey and not as a central part of your digital transformation in sales.
Nina Roper Yearwood (25:47)
Wow, really great words there! Patience and focus. Justyna, what you’ve shared today really brings that e-commerce journey to life. You’ve colored the pages of e-commerce and our understanding of it. So thank you! From putting e-commerce in place to making it work as a real commercial lever, as you’ve said, across the business.
So now, for listeners who’d like to continue the conversation or connect with you directly, where’s the best place to find you?
Justyna Zoltanska (26:17)
Well, you can find me, of course, on LinkedIn. There on my profile, you can also find some contact details which you can use. And I’ll be happy to engage in further conversations with anyone who would like to further share best practices or challenges. Because although many come from different industries, usually in B2B e-commerce, we are all facing same challenges. So I’ll be happy to engage in further conversations. So everyone is welcome to contact me through LinkedIn.
Nina Roper Yearwood (26:49)
Perfect! So to our listeners, we’ll also be adding Justyna’s profile on our show notes.
Justyna, thank you again for sharing your perspective! It’s been a really insightful conversation. And to everyone listening, thank you for tuning in to Copperberg Conversations on Manufacturing Matters. This is Nina Roper Yearwood. Until the next one!
Justyna Zoltanska (27:11)
Thank you for having me! Bye-bye, it’s been a pleasure!