In 1923, Ecolab launched a single product: Absorbit, a carpet cleaning agent for hotels. Fast forward 100 years, and Ecolab is now a global leader in water, hygiene, and infection prevention, serving industries as diverse as hospitality, manufacturing, and life sciences in over 170 countries. Its products help sanitize the surfaces you eat from, clean the hospital laundry you sleep on, and keep entire industries running clean, safe, and compliant.
But with complexity comes a challenge: How do you transform such a vast, varied business into a seamless, modern digital experience — especially when your customers expect the ease of B2C but operate in B2B ecosystems?
The answer lies in what Ecolab calls its shift “from search box to intent box” a transformation enabled by a clear vision and powerful partners like Coveo and Deloitte Digital.
At Salesforce Connections 2025, Katie Yeomans, Digital Product Manager at Ecolab took the stage to share how their team, along with partners, are reshaping the future of B2B commerce by making every experience more relevant, efficient, and customer-driven.
Relevant Reading: From Search to Intent Box
The Vision: One Customer, One Company
Like most B2B companies, Ecolab doesn’t sell to one type of customer. Its divisions span institutional and industrial sectors, with over 50,000 SKUs in North America alone. From restaurants to pharmaceutical plants, customer behavior varies widely in what they buy, how they buy, and how they want to interact.
However, the digital experience was historically fragmented as Katie explains.
We had multiple systems, different experiences across business units, and a tech stack that had evolved through decades of growth. Our goal was to unify that and to put the customer journey first, not the complexity behind it.
The mission: one Ecolab, one experience. Whether a hotel manager is ordering disinfectants through a punchout catalog or a food safety rep is placing a recurring order on behalf of a client, they should all feel like they’re interacting with the same trusted brand rather than navigating organizational silos.
At the heart of this transformation is Ecolab’s ecommerce platform, Connect. Originally a basic portal, it has now evolved into a comprehensive sales enablement and self-service hub where reps can place orders for clients and customers can easily manage purchases and view insights. And, thanks to guest storefronts and punchout integrations, even procurement-heavy organizations can shop on their terms.
We don’t think of Connect as a channel, it’s a strategic enabler. It empowers sales teams, simplifies buying, and drives digital adoption.
The Strategy: Findability First
As Katie and team mapped the future of Connect, they focused on one critical insight: B2B buyers don’t want to search. They want to find. The digital experience has to adapt to how each buyer gets their job done. Unlike B2C, the goal isn’t engagement, it’s efficiency: helping buyers to complete the task quickly and move forward.
Whether it’s a sales rep on a job site or a procurement manager placing bulk orders, our users aren’t here to browse. They have a clear intent to buy, restock, or solve a problem. Our job is to get them what they need quickly and accurately.
That’s where Coveo enters the picture. With unified indexing, machine learning, and better insights to guide business decisions, Coveo gives Ecolab the tools to evolve beyond traditional search:
- Intent-aware experiences: Surfacing what users are likely looking for before they finish typing
- Personalized recommendations: Driven by behavioral data and AI, not static rules
- Cross-system visibility: Unifying content and catalogs across digital properties
- Analytics and automation: Allowing teams to improve performance without heavy IT lift
Coveo powers search and recommendations on both ecolab.com and Connect. It’s helping us move from a fragmented digital estate to a unified, intent-driven ecosystem.
The Execution: A Crawl-Walk-Run Roadmap
Despite the ambitious vision, Ecolab didn’t try to boil the ocean. The team, working with Deloitte Digital, followed a deliberate, iterative roadmap:
- Start with the core: Build Connect as a commerce-first experience with self-service tools and sales rep support.
- Expand capabilities: Introduce guest storefronts, order splitting, and punchout catalogs to meet varying buyer needs.
- Optimize search and personalization: Layer in Coveo’s relevance platform to reduce friction and surface the right SKUs.
- Unify the experience: Begin merging ecolab.com and Connect into a single, cross-functional front door.
The approach wasn’t to deploy everything at once. Instead, the team started with a single segment, gathered insights, and scaled gradually, removing friction in focused phases rather than overwhelming systems or teams. This methodical rollout was supported by true partnership: shared ownership, collaborative problem-solving, and a clear understanding of the scale required to deliver enterprise-grade personalization..
The Reality: Imperfect Data, Real Results
Relevance at scale often hits the same wall: messy data. Ecolab was no exception. With a century of mergers and acquisitions behind it, the organization’s product and customer data needed serious cleansing.
But Coveo enabled progress, even without perfection as Katie shares. “We didn’t wait for perfect data to get started. We worked with what we had, used Coveo’s health inspections, and made incremental improvements.”
Today, Ecolab’s teams use AI-driven insights to refine catalog health, prioritize SKUs, and decide which features to enable next. The result is faster roadmapping, more confidence in releases, and quicker time to value.
The Impact of Digital Done Right
Ecolab’s digital transformation is delivering measurable impact across revenue, satisfaction, and scalability.
Improved Search and User Experience
- 74% conversion rate from sales rep-assisted orders
- 50% conversion rate for self-service customer orders
- 80,000 monthly users on Connect
- $1.8 billion in measurable revenue in a single year
Higher Efficiency and Productivity
- Faster onboarding through punchout functionality
- Increased sales enablement with self-serve tools
- Shortened time-to-value for procurement-heavy clients
One Ecolab Experience, Built to Scale
- Unified storefront and checkout for U.S. and Canada
- Extensible platform architecture ready for global rollout
Together, these results validate the strategy: removing friction, surfacing relevance, and personalizing at scale works.
Partnering for Progress: Why the Right Team Matters
Transformation is more than the technology, it’s also about the people behind it. For Ecolab, that meant choosing partners who could match their scale and ambition.
Coveo supports us with full health inspections, recommendations, and even AI to clean some data. This was really ideal and easy for a project manager to get from zero to personalization.
Deloitte Digital brought critical integration capabilities and domain expertise; Coveo brought the AI-search intelligence that made personalization scalable. Together, they enabled Ecolab to move fast and with confidence.
The Future: One Platform, One Experience
Looking ahead, Ecolab is working to merge ecolab.com and Connect into a single digital front door — one that blends marketing, commerce, and customer service in an AI-personalized environment.
Future priorities include:
- Making the site transactional: Letting buyers “buy now” directly from marketing content
- Automating recurring tasks: Like autoship subscriptions and replenishment
- Implementing agentic AI: To serve as a digital buying assistant, recommending cross-sells and relevant actions
- Reducing time from intent to checkout: By predicting needs and streamlining navigation
It’s about anticipating what the customer wants before they search. That’s the next frontier, not just search, but intent-driven navigation.
Key Takeaways for Digital Leaders
Ecolab’s story is a playbook for enterprise digital transformation. If you’re leading B2B commerce at scale, consider these lessons:
- Start small, think big: Don’t wait for perfect data to get started, focus on one segment or use case, then iterate and expand.
- Personalize like B2C, deliver like B2B: Fast, relevant, efficient — with the procurement features customers demand.
- Unify platforms, not just pages: Your customers don’t care about your org chart. Build around their journey.
- Prioritize intent, not inventory: Use AI to connect needs to outcomes, not just clicks to SKUs.
- Choose flexible partners: Deloitte brought systems expertise; Coveo brought AI-search intelligence; both scaled with Ecolab’s ambition.
Relevance Is the New Requirement
As customer expectations rise and complexity grows, companies like Ecolab prove that personalization at scale isn’t just possible, it’s profitable. With the right roadmap, technology, and team, even a 100-year-old organization can make search feel effortless and commerce feel human.