How Sonos Elevated Its B2B Dealer Buying Experience

How Sonos Is Redefining the B2B Dealer Buying Experience

When most businesses think about ecommerce, the conversation naturally drifts toward the consumer — the individual browsing a product page, comparing prices, and clicking "add to cart." But for audio technology company Sonos, a significant and strategic portion of its business flows through a very different kind of buyer: the dealer. And until recently, that dealer experience lagged far behind what consumers enjoyed on the Sonos platform.

That gap is now closing — and the way Sonos closed it offers a compelling blueprint for any brand operating in both the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) spaces.

The Problem: A Tale of Two Ecommerce Experiences

Sonos has long been known for its premium wireless audio products. Its brand is well-established in both consumer and professional markets, but about a year ago, the quality of its ecommerce experiences for dealers and consumers were not at the same level. Consumers could navigate a sleek, intuitive online storefront. Dealers — the business partners responsible for buying and reselling Sonos products — were working within a purchasing portal that didn't match those same standards.

For a company ranked No. 244 in the Top 2000 Database of North America's largest online retailers by annual ecommerce sales, this inconsistency represented a meaningful business risk. Dealers are not passive buyers. They make repeated, high-volume purchasing decisions, and their satisfaction directly impacts Sonos's revenue, brand reach, and long-term growth.

James Massey, Manager of CRM Applications at Sonos, addressed this challenge head-on during a roundtable session on elevating the B2B buying experience at Salesforce Connections 2026, held on June 3 in Chicago. His insights reveal how Sonos approached the problem — and why the results speak for themselves.

Rethinking What a B2B Portal Is Actually For

According to Massey, the standard approach to B2B ecommerce tends to be transactional and feature-focused. Most businesses build their portals around products, pricing, and backend integrations — ERP systems, order management platforms, and the like. While those elements are undeniably important, Sonos decided to ask a fundamentally different question.

"What can we do to really elevate the dealer experience? What does a dealer need to buy more from us, grow their business, increase average order value?" Massey explained during his Salesforce Connections presentation.

This shift in framing — from "what does our system need to do?" to "what does our dealer need to succeed?" — became the foundation of Sonos's entire B2B portal improvement strategy. It's a small but profound reorientation, and it changed everything about how the project was scoped, designed, and executed.

Three Core Objectives That Drove the Transformation

Massey outlined three key objectives that guided Sonos's approach to improving its B2B dealer portal. Each one reflects a deliberate, experience-first philosophy.

1. A Phased Research-to-Implementation Approach

Rather than jumping straight into development, Sonos adopted a phased approach that began with deep research before moving into implementation. This methodical process helped align internal stakeholders across departments — a critical step in any complex B2B project where multiple teams have competing priorities and requirements.

By building consensus through research first, Sonos was also able to reduce risk. Decisions were grounded in evidence rather than assumptions, and potential friction points were identified early — before they became expensive problems to fix mid-build. For organizations managing large-scale ecommerce transformations, this kind of phased discipline is often what separates successful projects from costly overruns.

2. Deep Platform Integration Across CRM, ERP, and OMS

Sonos chose Salesforce B2B Commerce as its commerce platform, but the real power came from integrating it with its existing CRM, enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and order management system (OMS). This connected infrastructure created what Massey described as a scalable, unified dealer and partner experience.

When a dealer logs into the portal, they're not just seeing a product catalog. They're interacting with a system that knows their account history, understands their pricing tier, can process their order and track it in real time, and connects back to the business data that keeps inventory, fulfillment, and customer relationships in sync. That level of integration transforms a purchasing portal into a genuine business tool — one that saves dealers time, reduces errors, and builds trust through consistency.

For B2B brands evaluating their own digital commerce infrastructure, this integration-first mindset is a powerful lesson. Siloed systems create siloed experiences. Connected systems create connected — and loyal — partners.

3. NPS Data and Dealer Feedback as Design Inputs

Perhaps the most distinctive element of Sonos's approach was its commitment to using dealer feedback and net promoter score (NPS) data to validate design decisions throughout the process. Rather than relying solely on internal assumptions about what dealers needed, Sonos treated its dealer community as a design partner.

The results of this data-driven, feedback-informed approach were measurable and significant. Sonos increased its dealer NPS score from 17 to 29 — a jump that reflects a meaningfully improved relationship with its dealer network. NPS is a widely recognized metric for customer loyalty and satisfaction, and an increase of this magnitude in the B2B context signals that dealers are not just tolerating the platform — they're genuinely satisfied with it.

Why This Matters for B2B Ecommerce More Broadly

Sonos's story is a timely reminder that B2B ecommerce is not simply a less glamorous version of B2C. It has its own complexity, its own relationship dynamics, and its own success metrics. Dealers, resellers, and business partners have distinct needs that go beyond price and product availability. They need tools that help them do their jobs better — portals that function as extensions of their own business operations.

Too often, B2B digital commerce investments focus on backend capability and overlook the front-end experience that dealers actually interact with every day. Sonos flipped that script by starting with the dealer's perspective and building backward into the technology stack.

As more brands recognize that their B2B relationships are just as relationship-driven as their B2C ones, the Sonos model — phased research, deep integration, and continuous feedback loops — offers a practical and proven framework for raising the bar.

The Takeaway: Elevating B2B Is a Strategic Advantage

Improving a dealer portal might sound like an internal IT project. But as Sonos demonstrates, it's actually a strategic growth initiative. A better dealer experience drives higher order values, stronger loyalty, and a more competitive market position. When your dealers succeed, your brand succeeds — and that's a return on investment that compounds over time.

For any business operating in the B2B space and wondering whether to invest in upgrading its digital buying experience, Sonos's example makes a clear case: the answer is yes, and the methodology matters just as much as the technology.