Respect, Trust and Loyalty
With increasing dependence on suppliers to deliver products, services, and even entire customer journeys, the way those suppliers are managed becomes a defining factor in business performance.
Motivating them to go beyond the contract is found in three timeless but underused levers: respect, trust, and loyalty. Embedding these simple principles into your culture and operations can transform supplier behaviour and, ultimately, the customer experience.
Respect
Respect is the first currency in any business relationship. In supplier management, it is often assumed but not always shown.
It is easy to spot when it is missing. Buyers who make last-minute meetings at short notice, demand urgent answers without context, or engage only during tenders do not appear respectful. Nor do those who treat suppliers as interchangeable vendors rather than collaborators.
Respect means listening to suppliers, giving them advance notice of changes, and honouring agreed timelines. It means including them early in planning cycles and treating their people, whether warehouse operators or account managers, as valuable professionals.
As we highlight in our online article It’s About the Supplier Experience, fewer than half of strategic suppliers believe that they are respected by their clients. That statistic should concern any business that depends on those same suppliers to meet its ESG goals, reduce time to market, or manage risk. Respect cannot be claimed, it must be shown.
Trust
Where respect is given, trust is built. In supplier relationships, trust creates commercial leverage. It leads to faster resolution of issues, earlier notification of risks, and more open dialogue around innovation.
Yet trust does not materialise by default. It requires systematic effort, especially across multiple stakeholders. A single buyer may run a relationship well, but if finance delays payments or operations shifts scope without notice, trust erodes quickly.
SRM governance exists not to control suppliers, but to create internal consistency that earns supplier confidence.
Organisations with strong trust indicators across their supplier base outperform their peers in time to market, issue resolution, and adoption of new technology. Trust is not a soft sentiment. It is a strategic asset.
Loyalty
Respect and trust are necessary, but not sufficient. True advantage comes when suppliers go beyond what is required. That is where loyalty plays a role.
Supplier loyalty is earned through long-term orientation, recognition, shared risk, and emotional equity. It is expressed when a supplier prioritises your urgent order ahead of another’s, shares a new idea with you first, or supports you through a difficult period not because they have to, but because they want to.
In consumer marketing, this would be called discretionary effort. In supplier management, we call it customer of choice benefits.
Customer loyalty and supplier loyalty
Supplier loyalty strategy
Ease of doing business
Emotional engagement
Tiered access and rewards
Feedback loops
Personalised communication
Customer loyalty strategy
Segment-based supplier engagement and treatment strategies
Voice of the Supplier (VoS) and 360° programmes
Strategic supplier benefits, early involvement, joint account planning
Respect, shared goals, cultural alignment, joint training and events
Simplified processes, fast decision making
Embedding behaviour
Organisations that move from “customer of choice” to “customer delight” understand that supplier behaviour is a mirror of their own culture. How suppliers engage externally is shaped by how they are treated internally.
Embedding respect, trust, and loyalty requires more than intent. It demands operational alignment.
Respect needs to be modelled from the leadership down. It must be visible in how executives engage, how problems are escalated, and how supplier success is celebrated.
Trust must be built into governance. Cross-functional ownership of relationships, visibility of performance, and agreed frameworks for risk, escalation, and collaboration are required.
Loyalty needs to be designed, not hoped for. This is done through tiered treatment models, recognition schemes, and shared KPIs that link supplier success to customer impact.
To operationalise these principles, organisations need explicit goals, measurable targets, and clear objectives. For example:
Goals: Build a supplier ecosystem that proactively contributes to customer delight.
Targets: Improve Voice of the Supplier scores by 20% in 12 months.
Objectives: Implement formal 360° feedback across strategic suppliers and embed outcomes into governance.
You cannot manage what you do not measure. Set KPIs for trust, responsiveness, collaboration, and innovation, and monitor supplier engagement in the same way you would customer retention.
The shift from managing supply to managing suppliers is profound. It changes the narrative from procurement efficiency to enterprise value, from cost saving to customer delight. It is no coincidence that organisations with mature SRM programmes report better performance in resilience, ESG compliance, and innovation.
Start with the experience you create for your suppliers because relationships are, in nature, what seems small can ripple far.
Mapping the customer journey: where and how suppliers impact your customers
To truly deliver value, procurement must shift its perspective outward. An effective way to do this is by mapping the customer journey and identifying where and how suppliers shape that experience.
This approach gives procurement a tangible framework to elevate its strategic role and is an effective tool for persuading executives to invest in SRM.
Step 1
Start with a basic visual journey that covers the stages a customer typically moves through: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Delivery, Use, Support, and Loyalty or Advocacy.
At each stage, identify key customer touchpoints. Then ask: how many of these are owned or influenced by suppliers?
Here’s how suppliers show up across the journey:
Marketing agencies: Influencing brand awareness and perception.
Logistics providers: Ensuring timely delivery of goods or services.
Product manufacturers: Contributing to product quality and consistency.
Customer service providers: Impacting after-sales experience through support and issue resolution.
Step 2
Once these influences are mapped, procurement teams can evaluate supplier impact more systematically by measuring influence on customer experience through key dimensions such as:
Quality: Supplier-provided components or services affecting the final product.
Time: Supplier delivery speed impacting customer experience.
Cost: Supplier costs influencing product or service pricing and perceived value.
Innovation
Supplier-enabled innovations that directly affect customer delight.
Step 3
Once this is done, build the picture further by:
Facilitating cross-functional workshops to map your organisation’s customer journey.
Overlaying supplier impact at each touchpoint and identifying which suppliers shape each stage and how.
Evaluating supplier performance using customer-centric metrics such as quality, time, cost, and innovation.
Using the output to build a data-led case for investment in SRM, supplier enablement, and experience management.
