Justin Racine, a four-time CMSWire Contributor of the Year, is back on the brand side as chief digital officer at Geriatric Medical & Surgical Supply. He joins Dom Nicastro to talk about why B2B buyers expect the same emotional payoff as any consumer purchase, why generative engine optimization is worth chasing before the traffic shows up, and why digital employee experience is just as urgent as the customer-facing kind.
Host
Guest
Dom Nicastro
Justin Racine
Inside Our Conversation
Table of Contents
- A Full-Circle Return to the Brand Side
- Customers Who Don't Owe You Anything
- The Millennial B2B Buyer
- Betting on Generative Engine Optimization Before the Clicks Arrive
- Digital Employee Experience Is Half the Job
The Gist
- Back on the brand side: Justin Racine returned to Geriatric Medical & Surgical Supply as chief digital officer after six years in digital consulting, and he's spending his first weeks reconnecting directly with longtime customers.
- Price is table stakes, not the differentiator: Racine argues that emotional connection, not the lowest price, is what keeps B2B buyers loyal — even when the products are medical supplies bought at scale.
- AEO traffic is still thin: Generative engine optimization is drawing serious attention at Geriatric Medical, even though it's driving only a small single-digit share of traffic so far.
- Employee experience is part of the equation: Racine says sales reps buried in disconnected screens are as much a digital experience problem as anything customer-facing.
A Full-Circle Return to the Brand Side
Justin Racine is a few weeks into his new role as chief digital officer at Geriatric Medical & Surgical Supply, and he's calling it a homecoming. Racine worked at the company from 2014 to 2020 before moving into digital consulting, where he spent six years advising brands on ecommerce and customer experience strategy. Now he's back, working directly with the customers he used to advise from the outside.
"I grew up in this industry, if you will, in ecommerce and CX 16, 17 years ago," said Racine, a four-time CMSWire Contributor of the Year.
That history is shaping how he's spending his first 30 to 60 days: less on rebuilding from scratch, more on figuring out what's changed since he left.
"The amount of digital ordering and traffic has grown and still continues to grow," he said, pointing to EDI orders and self-service procurement as areas that have expanded well beyond what he remembers.
Customers Who Don't Owe You Anything
Racine's customers aren't consumers — they're buyers at long-term care facilities, nursing homes, pharmacies and medical equipment providers sourcing from a catalog of more than 30,000 items. But he pushes back hard on the idea that B2B purchasing is purely rational.
"Price is a table stakes. You can't be at the table if you don't have a price to be in the room," he said. What happens after that, in his view, is where the real competition lives.
That philosophy traces back to the top of the org chart.
"Our customers don't owe us anything. They don't owe us the opportunity to buy tomorrow, to the next week, to next year. That is something that they don't owe to us. They can choose to leave at any time," Racine said, citing a line his CEO has repeated for years.
The Millennial B2B Buyer
Racine's read on who's actually doing the buying reframes the whole conversation around personalization in distribution.
"The vast majority of people who are operating in the B2B world from a buying, purchasing, procurement standpoint, people we sell to are within that millennial cohort," he said — buyers who've grown up with consumer-grade self-service and expect the same from a medical supply distributor as they do from Amazon.
Betting on Generative Engine Optimization Before the Clicks Arrive
Racine is already investing in generative engine optimization, even though the payoff isn't showing up in the numbers yet.
"AEO and GEO, generative engine optimization, one and the same. They're both gonna be important. It's the next iteration of SEO for findability for sure," he said. Asked how much traffic is actually coming from answer engines today, his estimate was modest: "I think we might be in like the 4% or 5% range."
Digital Employee Experience Is Half the Job
Racine's mandate doesn't stop at the customer. IT, CRM tooling and internal data systems all sit under his purview, and he's explicit that piling on more dashboards isn't the answer.
"The worst thing that we can do ... is add more technology to a situation where someone has seven, eight, nine, 10 different screens. It's impossible," he said. The goal, instead, is consolidating around fewer core systems while feeding them better intelligence — so sales and customer experience teams aren't left guessing.
