The KPI that moves B2B digital transformation forward
Digital transformation in B2B has never been more urgent or more difficult to execute. Despite years of investment, roughly 70% of transformation programs still fail to meet their goals, and the reasons are rarely technical. Research shows the real blockers are organizational: misaligned incentives, siloed KPIs, and teams optimizing for their own scorecards rather than the overall system’s performance.
That tension is becoming harder to ignore. Buying teams expect faster responses, more digital touchpoints, and seamless movement across channels. Procurement functions are under pressure to cut costs and increase speed. New digital paths are maturing faster than most traditional commercial organizations can adapt.
Against that backdrop, one question keeps surfacing:
“What KPI actually pushes the organization to change?
”
Because until the business measures performance in a way that reflects how B2B buying really happens today, transformation will continue to stall.
And that’s where profit per FTE (full-time employee) comes in, not as a finance metric, but as the clearest way to reveal where value is created, where it’s lost, and where digital can unlock scale.
Why B2B needs a different lens on digital
Most transformation efforts fail because companies lack ideas, technology, or ambition. They falter because the organization remains aligned to legacy KPIs. Mid-level leaders, who make hundreds of day-to-day decisions that shape the commercial engine, are still measured on channel-specific results: field sales revenue, branch margin, web shop volume, inside-sales activity, EDI throughput.
As long as those metrics stay in place, silos will too.
The challenge is that this internal structure no longer reflects external reality. Buyers move fluidly between channels. They expect the convenience of digital with the expertise of a salesperson. They want rapid answers, transparent stock and pricing, and procurement workflows that don’t depend on phone calls or PDF attachments.
When each channel is measured separately, the customer experience becomes fragmented, and the organization invests unevenly, even when the market is clearly signaling where it wants to go.
Traditional channels look healthier than they are
Many B2B companies continue to rely heavily on gross margin to judge channel performance. It’s a familiar metric, but it hides the full cost of running each channel:
- FTE hours
- Branch infrastructure
- Local stock and logistics
- Licensing and tooling
- Operational overhead
When you add those costs, the picture changes. Traditional channels often consume far more resources per unit of profit than expected, while digital channels can deliver significantly more profit per FTE because they scale without adding headcount.
This is why profit per FTE becomes so helpful. It cuts through assumptions and makes the economic weight of each channel visible.
Profit per FTE is simple, universal, & hard to ignore
It evaluates how effectively your organization translates human effort into financial performance, which ultimately determines whether your commercial engine can scale.
When you compare traditional channels (including fully loaded FTE cost) with digital channels (including platform, tooling, and operational cost), a pattern usually emerges:
- Digital channels produce more profit per person.
- Traditional channels often rely on manual work that doesn’t scale.
- The gap widens as order complexity and volume increase.
Once leaders see this discrepancy, the conversation shifts. If the organization can only generate so much profit with human hours alone, something has to change in how work gets done.
What this looks like in practice: TIM S.A.
In technical wholesale, players like TIM (Poland) illustrate what happens when digital becomes the backbone of the commercial organization rather than an isolated channel. When TIM went full in on digital transformation the grew in three years from
From 24% digital revenue to 68%
From 300Mzł to 1.2B total revenue
From –1% to +10% EBITDA
From 20 to 100 customers per salesperson
All while maintaining the same 240 FTEs.
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68%
Digital revenue
-
1.2B
Total revenue
-
100
Customers per salesperson
They didn’t achieve this by launching a new webshop and calling it done. They modernized traditional channels: CRM, automated procurement and internal workflows, rebuilt data pipelines, deployed configurators, and stripped out manual steps across the commercial process. Each improvement increased the output of each person, not just that of one channel.
The result was a business that behaved more like a tech-enabled company — and the market rewarded it. Würth acquired TIM at a valuation that reflected their digital leverage, not just their product mix.
Why “Profit per FTE” works, especially now
Shifting to Profit per FTE does several practical things:
- Pushes leaders to rethink legacy processes
- Highlights inefficiencies that gross margin hides
- Encourages collaboration across channels
- Repositions digital as a shared responsibility
- Gives digital teams a mandate tied directly to profitability.
And as AI rapidly increases what one person can accomplish in a day, this metric becomes even more powerful. Productivity is no longer a function of headcount. It’s a function of how well you combine human expertise with digital leverage.
Digital transformation will accelerate either way. The question is whether internal KPIs will help or hold your organization back.
Profit per FTE is a simple way to align teams around the economic reality of modern B2B commerce and create the conditions for transformation to actually succeed.
