Why strong relationships are the secret to successful vendor management

Effective vendor management hinges on cultivating genuine relationships both within organisations and with vendors, enabling proactive problem-solving and strategic advantage beyond contractual obligations.

Steve Jeffery is Managing Partner at VRM Gurus, applying nearly 30 years of vendor and supplier management expertise to help organisations drive innovation, reduce risk, and realise measurable value. Formerly Principal Advisory Director at Info-Tec...

Why Relationships Make or Break Vendor Management

Vendor Management isn’t a formula. It’s people working with people.
Many organisations think vendor success lies in SLAs, KPIs, templates, and the contract. Those are important because we need structure and governance in our vendor relationships. But that’s not what makes Vendor Management successful.

What really drives vendor management success is the quality of the relationships you build, inside your organisation and with the vendors who support it. Without those relationships, everything else becomes more challenging, complex, slower, and a lot more reactive than it needs to be.

Why? Because no contract clause, dashboard, presentation, spreadsheet, or SOW can predict or resolve every issue or concern. But people can. When relationships are strong, you get from the vendor collaboration, early insight, flexibility, higher quality, influence, and lower total cost over time.

External Relationships: How You Really Know What’s Going On
Your vendor relationships aren’t just about meetings and scorecards. They’re real connections with the people who actually make things happen.
Behind every vendor deliverable, timeline, or commitment is a person trying to get it right. When you build transparency, trust and open communication with them, you learn things you’ll never see in a computer, spreadsheet, or presentation, like:

• Shifts in the vendor’s internal priorities or competitive advantage long before they show up in their roadmap.
• Early signs that commitments or timelines are slipping – the kind you only catch in tone and behaviour, not status reports.
• Struggles to secure or assign the right resources to your account – a warning that your work may get deprioritised.
• A slow, quiet erosion in quality and delivery that hasn’t triggered SLAs but absolutely deserves attention.
• Opportunities to do something faster, cheaper, or smarter that only surface when someone trusts you enough to say, “There’s a better way.”

These things don’t show up in formal reports or presentations; they show up in conversations. And when those conversations are honest, transparent, and healthy, your vendors are much more likely to identify issues proactively at degradation before failure, bring profitable and collaborative solutions, and genuinely try to help you succeed.

Internal Relationships: The Part People Don’t Talk About Enough
Just as meaningful – and often ignored – are your internal relationships.
Vendor managers work with many teams: procurement, finance, operations, research and development, information technology, manufacturing, legal, customer-facing areas, compliance, and leadership. If you don’t have trust and communication inside the organisation, you won’t have the context you need to manage the vendor relationship effectively.

Internal relationships help you understand:

• What the business truly needs vs. what’s written in the RFP or statement of work.
• What the real risks are, the ones people don’t escalate until it’s almost too late.
• How work actually flows operationally, not just how it’s diagrammed.
• What constraints teams are fighting through – capacity, capabilities, budget, tech debt, internal, politics.
• Who must be pulled in immediately when a deliverable, milestone, or service starts to go “off the rails.”

These relationships also make escalations smoother. When internal teams trust you – and each other – problems get handled faster, decisions happen at the right level, and everyone stays aligned instead of pointing fingers.

The Real Heart of Vendor Management
At the end of the day, Vendor Management works when the relationships work.
Not because of a formula, not because of a template, and definitely not just because “the contract says so.”
It works because people communicate, anticipate, collaborate, and fix things before they break.
When you build strong internal and external relationships, your Vendor Management Program becomes more than oversight – it becomes a true strategic advantage.
It’s human. It’s practical. It’s proactive.