Procuring in unpredictable times...

Buyers and sellers alike - know this: “Trust takes decades to build but it breaks in a blink”. We’ve all spent years hammering out contracts, vetting suppliers, and mapping the market, only to see it collapse when a partner goes off the rails. “Nothing is as fast as the speed of trust,” Stephen M.R. Covey writes in The Speed of Trust—and nothing’s as fragile either. We’ve built CostBits to help you hold the line when it snaps.

Here’s the reality playing out right now on the global scene: a partner we’ve trusted for decades tears up every contract we’ve signed—no warning, just a void. They force terms so lopsided we’re stuck covering their margins while they rake it in, then bury clauses—supply halts, resale blocks, long-term control grabs—that tie our hands down the road. Covey calls it spot-on: “The opposite of trust is suspicion” —and HBR’s 2022 study agrees, with 58% of execs saying one misstep guts trust for years. 

The evidence piles up: Deloitte’s 2023 CPO Survey shows 67% of us lose supplier trust over data slips, gone in an instant. Gartner’s 2024 report finds 40% of us blindsided by mid-deal rewrites—contracts skewed against us without a heads-up. Korn Ferry’s 2023 pulse reveals 30% of us miss the fine print that hands suppliers leverage years later. 

A lack of trust forces a counterreaction from both friends and foes dragging our speed, spiking our costs, and leaving us exposed.

Trust can be rebuilt both in personal and business relationships - but it’s a very long journey and it takes focus, dedication and constant efforts. Covey nicely lines out the 4 Cores of Credibility - equally needed for both sellers and buyers:

• Integrity
• Intent
• Capabilities
• Results

If one part misses it - then there is little alternative to seeking other more trustworthy partnerships - even at a cost.

Being Procurement it is our job to ensure that we can always manage highly unforeseen events - even monumental events like one of our largest trading partners reeling back from global trade and building relationships with new leaders which would make them fail any basic supplier vetting process.

We need better tools - more mandate and a strong commitment from the entire organization to no longer rest our laurels thinking “It will stop - it’s just a whim”. But it is not - they burned the laurels and we have to act accordingly, building trust with new partners and ensuring that we have alternative suppliers that cannot be influenced by the whim of the latest newsreels.

See also our top 20 free advice for rapidly reducing supplier costs