Inform Pillar | Procurement Knowledge for SMB Buyers
5 min read
The Trust Gap Between You and Your Vendors is a Procurement Problem
Sylvia Luchian
Founder & Head of Procurement Practice
68% of people surveyed in the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer believe that business leaders deliberately mislead them.1 That’s not a comfortable number to sit with if you are a business owner who relies on external suppliers to deliver. Because here is the thing. Your suppliers feel exactly the same way about you.
The trust gap in commercial relationships runs in both directions. Vendors do not trust that buyers will honour the spirit of the contract. Buyers do not trust that vendors will deliver what they promised. Because neither side builds the structures to test those assumptions early, both sides end up operating in a low-trust transaction where the relationship degrades faster than it needs to.
Procurement is the profession that exists to close that gap. Not by making everyone feel warm and fuzzy, but by creating clarity, structure, and accountability on both sides.
The 2025 Trust Barometer found that trust in business leaders dropped sharply, driven by a perception that leaders prioritise self-interest over customer interest.2 That’s a direct reflection of the commercial experience many businesses have had with their vendors. Vendors who over-promise in the sales process and under-deliver in the contract. Suppliers who escalate pricing after the relationship is established. Service providers who are responsive before the deal is signed and absent after it is.
Sound familiar? The trust gap isn’t caused by bad people. It’s caused by bad process. When the procurement process doesn’t set clear expectations, doesn’t build in accountability mechanisms, and doesn’t create a framework for the relationship to be measured against, trust erodes because there is nothing to measure it against.
Key Takeaway: The trust gap between buyers and vendors is rarely caused by dishonesty. It’s almost always caused by ambiguity. Clarity of expectations, upfront and in writing, is the single most effective trust-building tool in any supplier relationship.
A low-trust procurement process has several recognisable characteristics. The scope of work is vague because nobody wanted the difficult conversation about exactly what was needed. The pricing structure is opaque because the vendor did not want to expose their margin and the buyer did not push. The performance metrics are absent because agreeing on them felt like creating conflict before the relationship had started.
Then, three months in, you have a disagreement. There is nothing in the contract to resolve it. Both sides feel wronged. The relationship that was supposed to be a long-term partnership turns into a dispute. This isn’t bad luck. This is predictable and it’s entirely preventable.
Key Takeaway: Vague contracts aren’t vendor-friendly. They are relationship landmines. Every unclear term is a future argument waiting to happen. Invest the time upfront to be specific, and you will save a significant amount of time, money, and goodwill later.
A high-trust procurement process does the opposite. The buyer knows exactly what they need before they go to market. The vendor knows exactly what they are committing to deliver. Both sides have agreed on how performance will be measured, what good looks like, and what the process is when something goes wrong.
The performance review is not a surprise. It is scheduled. The escalation pathway exists before the problem does. The 2026 Trust Barometer notes that employers who actively broker trust and create transparent structures are outperforming those who do not.3 The same principle applies in supplier relationships.
Key Takeaway: Structure is not the opposite of trust. Structure is what makes trust possible at scale. If your supplier relationships are running on goodwill alone, they are running on borrowed time.
The goal of supplier relationship management is not to extract maximum value from minimum spend. That’s a transaction. The goal is to create the conditions in which both parties benefit from the relationship continuing, which makes both parties invest in making it work.
When a supplier trusts that your business is transparent, pays on time, and gives them fair opportunity to raise problems, they bring their best people to your account. They flag risks early. They prioritise your work when capacity is constrained. They bring you ideas that make your business better. That’s the procurement dividend that most businesses never collect, because they are too busy managing low-trust transactions to invest in high-trust partnerships.
Key Takeaway: The best supplier relationships are ones where your vendor wants your business to succeed because it makes their business look good. That’s not luck. That’s procurement done properly.
1 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. 12.
2 Edelman Trust Institute 2025, 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, p. 14.
3 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. 18.
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.
