Transforming Strategic Supplier Relationships into Competitive Advantage

Benefits of Working with an Intelligent Supplier

An Intelligent Supplier is dedicated to becoming a strategic partner committed to helping you achieve your organisational goals. By aligning with your strategy, supporting evolving objectives, demonstrating commercial trust and being a critical yet constructive partner, an Intelligent Supplier drives a collaborative relationship that has a greater chance of delivering more successful outcomes. This kind of partnership is further strengthened by an Intelligent Supplier’s ability to lead innovation, adapt contract terms, engage with client teams and showcase technical expertise, making them an invaluable asset to your business.

To capitalise on these benefits and foster a thriving supplier–client relationship, let’s summarise some of the actionable steps outlined in the series that will support you in achieving, fostering, and maintaining each of these behaviours.

1. Action Point: Aligning with (and Sometimes Challenging) the Client’s Strategy

An Intelligent Supplier collaborates deeply with a client’s strategy, not just aligning with it but also constructively challenging it to foster better outcomes. This proactive engagement often leads to innovative and effective solutions that drive maximum value from complex projects. Therefore, our recommendation is to openly and proactively share your business vision and objectives with your suppliers to cultivate this alignment, allowing them to have all the information they need, in order to provide insights designed to refine and enhance your strategy for greater success whenever possible.

2. Action Point: Supporting the Client’s Business Objectives (Including When They Change)

An Intelligent Supplier adapts to changing business objectives, adding value beyond the initial contract by helping the client to achieve broader or realigned goals. This behaviour demonstrates flexibility and a proactive approach, enabling the supplier to support evolving objectives and contribute to a dynamic partnership. To cultivate this trait, it’s important to embrace changes that drive better value and adapt contract terms and service delivery models accordingly. This approach ensures that both parties work effectively towards shared outcomes, maximising value and innovation in complex projects.

3. Action Point: Demonstrating Commercial Trust

An Intelligent Supplier builds trust through transparent dealings and integrity, doing what it says it is going to do when it says it is going to do it. They align their actions with the client’s interests. This behaviour fosters collaboration and creates a foundation for long-term success, enhancing the overall partnership. To develop and further grow this trust they establish and maintain open communication and transparency in pricing and terms, ensuring alignment on shared objectives. They also validate the fairness and equity of proposed costs and outcomes, particularly for out-of-scope activities. This helps build a foundation of mutual trust that enhances collaboration and project success.

4. Action Point: Being a Critical yet Constructive Partner?

An Intelligent Supplier serves as a constructive critical partner, challenging project goals and approaches to ensure alignment with the client’s objectives. This balanced feedback fosters a collaborative relationship, leading to better outcomes and greater project success. To encourage this trait in your suppliers, actively foster a ‘constructive critical friend’ relationship with them. Encourage them to conduct an independent analysis of project expectations and outcomes, and to offer innovative solutions and challenges to your approaches. This engagement ensures that solutions are often more robust, effective and aligned with business and organisational goals, improving a project’s chances of success. Based on nearly 600 complex project relationships, encouraging the supplier’s ‘critical friend’ behaviours can yield a payback of up to 11 times your investment in it.

5. Action Point: Leading the Innovation Journey?

An Intelligent Supplier leads the innovation journey by proactively proposing new ideas and inviting the client to participate in pilot projects. This collaboration drives continuous improvement and enhances the quality of the supplier–client relationship. To foster this trait, it’s important to actively participate in the innovation governance process with your suppliers. Your supplier should have a seat on your innovation board to assess, endorse, pilot and implement innovations generated collaboratively by both teams. This balanced contribution ensures thorough vetting of innovations, developing a productive and mutually beneficial relationship focused on achieving the strategic goals of your organisation.

6. Action Point: Adapting Contract Terms to Evolving Needs

An Intelligent Supplier and its client work collaboratively to adapt contract terms to evolving client needs, both parties recognising that rigid contracts often hinder progress in the achievement of goals. Intelligent collaboration supports regular reviews to ensure contractual arrangements align with changing business objectives and behaviours, creating a fair and equitable foundation for success. To achieve this, first reverse engineer your realigned business outcomes into the behaviours you need from both the supplier and your own team. Ensure these behaviours are translated into key principles that guide the revised contractual arrangements. For outsourced and managed services conduct at least biannual reviews, for major projects, conduct monthly reviews. The outcome from these reviews should be to reassess organisational and business outcomes and objectives, behaviours and KPIs. This is known as the ‘reshaping process’. It encapsulates all of the factors to be integrated into the written contract terms as needed. This dynamic approach enables the relationship to adapt to changing circumstances and objectives, enhancing project success and value.

7. Action Point: Client Engagement Function

An Intelligent Supplier recognises the value of engaging and collaborating with the client’s Intelligent Client Function (ICF) team, maintaining transparency and open dialogue to manage new ideas, innovations, issues and changes effectively. This collaboration ensures service delivery remains aligned with the client’s (potentially changing) business outcomes. To support this engagement, regularly review the supplier’s performance and innovations to provide constructive feedback to ensure alignment with your goals. This helps shape the service delivery to meet your strategic objectives, creating a clearer, more collaborative relationship.

8. Action Point: Evidencing Technical and Domain Expertise?

An Intelligent Supplier backs up their claims with proven results, showcasing technical and domain expertise through the outcomes they’ve delivered for other clients. This behaviour provides confidence in their ability to deliver quality services that meet unique needs. To ensure that you get the most from your supplier, it’s important to assess their service area domain expertise by rigorously evaluating their technical proficiency in the specific areas required by your organisation. This is to ensure they can provide innovative and effective solutions tailored to your unique needs and challenges, via a reliable partnership.

Conclusion

This series has explored the eight key behavioural traits that contribute to successful and maximum value supplier–client relationships, each of which contributes to the development of a collaborative, adaptable and innovative partnership, ensuring suppliers are not just vendors, but strategic partners committed and incentivised to help you achieve your goals.

By cultivating these traits, both suppliers and clients can build relationships that are dynamic, transparent and mutually beneficial. This alignment leads to greater value, improved project success rates and sustainable growth. Whether through aligning strategies, supporting evolving objectives or nurturing innovation, these actionable steps will help you build a foundation for lasting success in almost any strategic client–supplier relationship.

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Best Practice Group's resource centre provides a deep bank of knowledge, including regular blogs, and a number of free guides and resources that take go in-depth on many aspects of managing strategic supplier relationships.