When a distributor loses focus on its relationships with core customers and suppliers, the company opens a door to competitors, new and old. It's often not a case of mistreatment as much as benign neglect or not keeping up with shifting needs at the customer.

Increasingly, new competitors from different product sectors have found some good growth in other distributors'back yards with tangential products. And in some cases they can pick up some of the longstanding business that wasn't in their core by packaging a better value proposition. But too often distributors tee up those opportunities and don't recognize that it's happening.

That model is at full force as more cross-channel competition grows, and consolidators look to package as much volume as possible into their ...