Steven, we have accounts at Tech Data, Ingram, D&H and Synnex. Synnex is our favorite disty, hands down.
All four give us decent pricing (although the variations on some products can be amazing--Ingram's prices on cables stink,for example) and availability on the products that we buy regularly is usually good across the board.
I like that TD, D&H and Synnex allow us to pay invoices on-line. Ingram is odd-man-out here, offering a direct debit program (they automatically pull funds from your bank account when invoices are due) but while the others allow us to pick when to pay invoices, Ingram makes us write a check and send it snail mail.
While probably 80% of our orders are done via the disty web sites, it's still important that we have a sales rep who knows our account, knows our business and can jump in when the need arises. At Tech Data and Ingram our account is assigned to a "Small Business Team." That's OK, but there isn't anyone on the team who really knows what we do nor is there a specific person we can turn to for processing of a special request (demo pricing, for example). At one point, Ingram even "off-shored" our account with nary a word. Calls would be answered by an Ingram rep whose command of the English language left much to be desired. After telling Ingram that this needed to be fixed ("OR ELSE") they moved our account State-side once again.
At D&H our account was assigned to a sales rep who was worthless. He wouldn't respond to email, he would never return phone calls. Perhaps he was someone's nephew? After I complained loudly our account was assigned to a new sales rep who has been fantastic. But now she's out on maternity and the expected call of introduction from her fill-in never came, so we may be back to old patterns at D&H.
In a nutshell I think Synnex is doing well because they know how to take care of their customers. I wish they carried more products (including Blackberry and Adobe licensing) but perhaps one of the reasons that profits are up is that they only work with manufacturers who allow them to make a decent margin on what they sell???
