Inform Pillar | Procurement Knowledge for SMB Buyers
5 min read
Do You Know Whether Your Suppliers Believe You Trust Them
Sylvia Luchian
Founder & Head of Procurement Practice
70% of people worldwide are now unwilling or hesitant to trust someone whose values, background, or approach differs from theirs.1 That’s not a statistic about politics. That’s a statistic about how your business is making purchasing decisions right now.
When trust retreats into insular circles, procurement follows. You stop evaluating new suppliers properly. You over-rely on the ones you know, and not necessarily have a relationship with. You treat unfamiliar vendors with suspicion before they have had a chance to earn your business. You lean on Ai to do the filtering for you without being clear on the engineering propping up that structure. The result is a supplier panel that looks increasingly like a comfort blanket rather than a competitive advantage.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer describes a global retreat into what it calls insular circles of trust.2 People are narrowing their world to smaller, familiar groups that reflect their existing views. This dynamic is showing up in procurement. Buyers default to known suppliers not because those suppliers are always the best option, but because engaging with unknown vendors feels riskier than it used to.
The procurement consequence is real. When you stop properly evaluating the market, you stop getting competitive pricing. You stop accessing innovation. You stop building the kind of supplier diversity that protects your business when one relationship goes sideways. Familiarity isn’t the same as value.
Key Takeaway: Defaulting to known suppliers feels safe. It’s not the same as buying well. Audit your supplier panel and ask honestly: are these relationships here because they deliver the best outcome, or because they are comfortable?
The 2025 Trust Barometer found that trust has shifted from formal institutions toward personal networks.3 People trust their immediate colleagues, their industry peers, and their own direct experience far more than they trust brands, vendors, or institutional claims.
What this means for supplier relationship management is straightforward. The formal RFP response matters less than your direct experience with the salesperson. The vendor's published case studies matter less than the reference call you have with a peer in your industry. The contract terms matter, but the relationship that underpins them matters more.
Procurement done properly builds trust infrastructure. It creates the structured touchpoints, the performance reviews, and the escalation pathways that give both sides of a supplier relationship enough visibility to trust each other even when things go wrong. Which they will.
Key Takeaway: Build trust into your supplier relationships deliberately. Structured check-ins, shared performance metrics, and clear escalation processes aren’t administrative overhead. They are the foundation of a relationship that holds when something breaks.
A business that manages its supplier relationships well does four things consistently. First, it’s clear about expectations before the contract is signed, not after. Second, it reviews performance against those expectations on a regular schedule, not just when something goes wrong. Third, it gives suppliers the opportunity to raise problems before those problems become crises. Fourth, it treats the supplier relationship as a two-way street.
Your suppliers talk to each other. If your business is known for late payment, for moving goalposts, or for treating vendors as interchangeable, that reputation circulates. The best suppliers will deprioritise you. Play silly games, win silly prizes.
Key Takeaway: Procurement isn’t something you do to suppliers. It’s something you do with them. The businesses that get the best from their vendor relationships are the ones that behave like partners, not just buyers.
D1 Advisory works with small and medium businesses making significant purchasing decisions without in-house procurement expertise. One of the most common patterns we see is a business that has outsourced its trust entirely to familiarity. They have been with the same supplier for years. They do not go to market. They do not benchmark. They assume loyalty is being rewarded.
Sometimes it is. Often it’s not. Supplier pricing for loyal customers who never test the market drifts upward. Service levels relax. Innovation stops flowing. The relationship that felt like a strength becomes a liability. Trust in a supplier relationship needs to be earned continuously, not assumed permanently.
Key Takeaway: If you have not tested your supplier market in the past two years, you do not know whether your current relationships represent value. You are operating on faith, not data.
1 Edelman Trust Institute 2026, 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer: Trust Amid Insularity, Edelman, New York, viewed 15 May 2026, https://www.edelman.com/trust/2026/trust-barometer, p. 4.
2 Edelman Trust Institute 2026, 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, p. 5.
3 Edelman Trust Institute 2025, 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer: Trust and the Crisis of Grievance, Edelman, New York, viewed 15 May 2026, https://www.edelman.com/trust/2025/trust-barometer, p. 8.
Procurement is trust brokering in commercial form. When done properly, it creates the conditions under which buyers and suppliers can exchange value with confidence.
Small and specialist suppliers are operating in a more economically precarious environment than three years ago. Their costs have risen. Margins have compressed.
When a vendor relationship goes wrong, it rarely feels like a commercial dispute. It feels like a betrayal. You were promised something.
