We kept cutting the price. Customers still wouldn’t buy.

Tech Data had roughly 17% market share in Intel, and the obvious explanation was price. The obvious explanation was wrong. When I joined Tech Data, Intel was a surprisingly small part of the business.

For a brand that dominant in the PC market, our position as a distributor was weak: roughly 17% market share. Internally, the obvious explanation was that we simply were not competitive enough.

So we did what companies often do when sales are disappointing: we worked the price.

Customers asked for better conditions. We sharpened pricing. We made exceptions. We tried again.

And still, many of the orders did not come.

That was the point where the situation became more interesting.

Because if you keep improving the thing you believe is causing the problem and nothing changes, there is a good chance you are solving the wrong problem.

I started calling some of our largest customers directly.

Not to pitch them.

To ask a much simpler question:

“I’m giving you good pricing. Why aren’t you buying from us?”

The answer was remarkably consistent.

Customers were not buying CPUs in isolation.

They were building complete PCs and needed motherboards, memory, chassis, graphics cards and other components around them. If they bought the Intel processor from Tech Data but had to buy everything else from another distributor, they created more purchase orders, more deliveries, more administration and more shipping cost.

From our perspective, we were offering an attractive price on Intel.

From their perspective, buying Intel from us made the total transaction more complicated.

That distinction changed everything.

The apparent problem was price. The real problem was convenience and completeness.

We were optimizing one SKU while the customer was optimizing the entire buying process.

Once that became visible, cutting the price further made very little sense. We had to change the system around the product.

That meant broadening the components portfolio, adding the brands and categories customers were already buying elsewhere, and making Tech Data capable of supplying more of the complete system from one place.

It also changed how I worked with Sales.

Rather than Product Management deciding centrally what should be stocked and then asking Sales to move it, Peter Pieraert and the sales team became a direct source of market intelligence.

What are customers asking for?

Which products are missing?

At what price can you move them?

How much demand do you believe is there?

My role increasingly became to translate that demand into supply: find the vendor, negotiate the conditions, secure allocation, manage stock and make the economics work.

That created a very different commercial model.

We stopped thinking about growth as selling more Intel.

We started thinking about growth as removing the reasons customers had to buy somewhere else.

Over time, Tech Data moved from one of the smallest distributors in the category to roughly 50% market share across components, with Intel itself reaching around 50-60% share.

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