Suppliers are a stakeholder group that few organisations question deliberately. There is a contract, there are agreements on delivery and quality, and contact runs through procurement or through the department that manages the relationship. A separate conversation about trust then feels superfluous. That is a misconception. A supplier who feels dependent on your organisation rarely says what is really going on, and a supplier who knows that you can easily replace him also does not say what is really going on, but for a different reason. Both positions distort the picture that procurement or management has of the relationship.
The question behind this conversation is not whether delivery arrives on time. That is already measured in quality and performance indicators. The question that is missing is whether the supplier experiences your organisation as a party that keeps its agreements, that negotiates reasonably, and that makes problems discussable before they escalate. A supplier who hesitates to report a problem because nothing was done with the report last time is a supplier you are slowly losing without the contract figures showing it.
It is also relevant how suppliers compare your organisation with other clients. Not to compete on price or terms, but to know whether your organisation is known as a party with which it is pleasant to do business, or as a party that mainly guards its own position. That reputation determines whether the best suppliers come to you first or approach someone else first.
The conversation with suppliers works better outside the negotiation cycle. Anyone who asks how the relationship is experienced during a contract renewal gets an answer coloured by the interest at stake at that moment. A supplier who has just proposed a price increase answers differently than a supplier who has just completed a long collaboration without disputes.
It also helps not to question only the direct contact person, but also someone who is further removed from the daily relationship: an account manager at a higher level, or someone from the supplier's own chain. They are less cautious, because for them less is at stake in the ongoing contact.
The form of the question makes a difference. Asking about satisfaction yields little; everyone is reasonably satisfied as long as the invoices are paid. Asking about concrete situations — a moment when an agreement was not honoured, a moment when a problem was actually solved well — yields more usable answers than a general judgement.
The power relationship between client and supplier often determines the outcome of this conversation more than the quality of the questions. A small supplier who is dependent on you for a large part of his turnover will rarely voice criticism, not even in an anonymous question, out of fear that the source can still be traced. A large supplier who you need is freer in his answers, but also has less interest in maintaining the relationship if it does not suit him.
It also often turns out that suppliers weigh a small promise that is not kept more heavily than a large investment that fails to materialise. A supplier who was promised that a payment term would be adjusted and notices that this does not happen remembers that better than a supplier who knows that a large joint innovation is not going ahead due to external circumstances. The small promise feels personal; the large investment feels business-like. That difference is the reason why tracking commitments to suppliers is at least as important as tracking the contract itself.
What this conversation does not deliver is a statement about what the supplier truly thinks. It delivers what is said, and it delivers where that picture deviates from what procurement or management assumed beforehand. That deviation, and not the individual answer, is what this is meant for.
Suppliers are rarely the only stakeholder group where this kind of deviation occurs. Anyone who sets this up for suppliers will recognise similar patterns among municipalities and provinces where formal dependency influences the conversation, among financiers who mainly respond to what is not said, and among trade associations where collective interests blur the individual picture. A conversation with supervisory authorities who judge formally but signal informally also carries the same tension between what is said and what is thought.
This page describes why the conversation with suppliers rarely delivers what it should deliver, and what you should pay attention to in order to sharpen that picture. What is not stated here is a claim about what your suppliers think. We do not know that, until they say it themselves, in a survey that stands apart from the negotiation.
The Trust Baseline is the instrument that structures this conversation: an internal survey alongside an external one, where the difference between those two pictures is the first outcome, followed by a commitment tracker that holds on to commitments made to suppliers and a signal rhythm that makes repetition possible. This instrument is under construction. Anyone interested can sign up for the waiting list.
Mapping stakeholder relationships is work that partly consists of recurring, structurable tasks: drafting surveys, processing answers, signalling deviations. Anyone who wants to know which part of that kind of work can be taken over by AI can have that calculated with the work scan from FTE TO AI, which indicates per task where automation is realistic and where it is not.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.