You are Bieke Vandenberghe, B2B marketing director of Verlinden Industrial Solutions, a Belgian maker and distributor of fasteners, seals and fluid-handling components. Your largest customer has given you until 1 September to plug into its procurement portal or lose most of its business. Before a euro of the board's €6 million moves, you have to say where Verlinden's advantage is really eroding.
The situation
Kortrijk, 11 March 2026. Verlinden turned over €184 million in 2025 at a 12% EBITDA margin. It serves 3,200 industrial accounts from a catalogue of 28,000 SKUs and employs 290 people: 64 in field and inside sales, and 38 applications engineers who specify the right part for each customer's machine. For six years you have built the company's marketing on one idea: customers do not buy fasteners and gaskets, they buy the certainty that the specified part will work.
The letter is from Hanssen Food Systems, which buys €14.8 million a year, 8% of revenue. In the third quarter it will move its purchasing onto a digital portal: suppliers that by 1 September cannot integrate through EDI or punch-out and show live stock and prices through an API will drop to a backup tier, capped at 30% of category spend. For Verlinden that would mean roughly €10.4 million a year less. Eleven other accounts, worth €41 million together (22% of revenue), have signalled through the CRM that they expect the same.
There are other signals. The win rate on competitive quotes has fallen from 41% to 33% in two years. Two pure-play online rivals quote in seconds, 6 to 9% below your list price. Only 9% of your sales are digital, against 28–35% in the sector; the board wants at least 28% within eighteen months. It has given you ninety days to bring a recommendation and a single budget to fund it: €6.0 million over eighteen months, with no top-up.