SFCC·20-24Case file

B2B Commerce & Loyalty Portal

300,000+ business buyers had no self-service at all, and reps were spending more than 40% of their time on routine transactional work.

Role
Product Owner
Platform
Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Timeline
2020 – 2024
Result
300K+ buyers, live <9 months

Buy the platform, phase the product

Discovery & build

JTBD interviews with 30+ B2B buyers across three segments, plus VoC and NPS analysis, journey mapping, and competitor benchmarking. We chose Commerce Cloud over a custom build — roughly four months faster to market.

  • MVP — self-ordering and account view.
  • V1.1 — POS asset downloads.
  • V1.2 — equipment and rep scheduling.
  • V2 — loyalty plus Marketing Cloud.
  • V2.1 — contract review and monetization.

I later proposed and piloted sponsored placements and tiered access, repositioning the portal from a cost center into a revenue line.

An MVP instead of a billable build

The unpopular call

I chose to run the loyalty MVP on existing Pardot infrastructure rather than stand up a dedicated loyalty engine — which would have meant more billable build work for TCS — so we could validate usage before investing in new architecture.

It wasn't the popular call internally — I got pushback because it cost TCS billing — but I walked my team through the risk: rolling out unproven, revenue-generating architecture before validating usage would've been a bigger failure than the lost billing.

The Pardot MVP data is what justified the phase-two build.

Loyalty designed for the wrong buyer

The failure, owned

The first loyalty design borrowed the consumer points-for-spend playbook. It was wrong for B2B buyers who were already going to buy anyway. I paused the build mid-stream and redesigned every reward around an observable action — orders placed, merchandising images submitted, POS assets placed.

The loyalty program was designed around behavior change, not discounting. By rewarding the actions we wanted customers to take — self-serve, schedule, engage — we drove adoption without eroding margin.

Result

  • 300,000+ business buyers on the portal.
  • Live in under nine months.
  • 15% CSAT improvement.
  • ~18% repeat-order uplift.