You are Priya Raval, four days into the job of Commercial Director at Thornbury Industrial Supplies in Coventry, UK. Your three largest customers have just announced that from 1 October they will buy only from suppliers who can sell to them electronically. In three weeks you must tell the board, on one page, whose revenue you will defend first.
The situation
Thornbury distributes maintenance, repair and operations products — fasteners, abrasives, protective equipment, power tools — to 6,400 accounts in UK manufacturing, construction and the public sector: £148 million of revenue in FY2025. It sells through 95 long-serving field reps, who hold the relationships and negotiate most of the pricing. There is no shared customer-record system: the pipeline lives in notebooks and spreadsheets. The website takes 11% of orders.
On 6 March a letter arrives signed by three customers worth £19 million between them, 13% of revenue. From 1 October they will require a catalogue their purchasing systems can call, real-time stock and delivery dates, self-service reordering and a working link between the two companies' software. Thornbury can do none of the four. Some £22 million more of mid-market customers have already asked your area managers what the company intends. The largest account, worth £9 million, holds a clause that lets it move business at short notice, and its buyer has cited it twice in eight weeks.
The board has approved £4.5 million over eighteen months; the full build your predecessor scoped was costed at about £7.8 million. A February audit found 18 of the 95 reps digitally confident and 41 openly against any system that "gives away my accounts": reorder commission is about 55% of their variable pay. You have spent twenty-two years in industrial distribution and have never run a technology build.