---
title: What your procurement process is doing to good vendors (and why it matters)
description: Enterprise procurement is designed to reduce risk and control cost. But the process it runs to achieve those goals often compresses genuine differentiation into a feature checklist, and the firm buying the technology ends up with the wrong outcome.
author: Declan Sheehy
datePublished: 2025-10-15
dateModified: 2026-04-28
url: https://www.oneblackwater.com/article-commercial-procurement-process-oct-2025.html
sameAs:
  - https://www.linkedin.com/in/declan-sheehy/
keywords: procurement, vendor selection, enterprise procurement, financial services technology, vendor management, RFP process, Gartner, B2B buying
schema:
  type: Article
  headline: What your procurement process is doing to good vendors
  datePublished: 2025-10-15
  author: Declan Sheehy
  publisher: One Blackwater Consultancy Limited
  about: [procurement, vendor management, financial services technology]
---

# What your procurement process is doing to good vendors

This is the second in a series on how commercial processes work in financial services technology. The first examined B2B price negotiation from the buyer's perspective. This one looks at enterprise procurement from the other direction: what it inadvertently does to the quality of buying decisions.

## The Central Problem

The central problem with most enterprise procurement processes in financial services is that they are optimised for the wrong objective. Procurement's mandate is risk reduction and cost control. Both are legitimate. But neither is the same as finding the solution that best solves the operational problem the business unit is trying to fix.

The moment procurement takes ownership of vendor selection, the business case gets compressed into a requirements document, and that document becomes a feature checklist. A feature checklist cannot capture context, cultural fit, implementation quality, or the difference between a vendor who will be a genuine long-term partner and one who will deliver the minimum required by contract.

## The Three-Vendor Problem

Requiring a minimum of three quotes is sound governance in principle. In practice, two of the three vendors are often there to satisfy policy rather than because they are genuine contenders. Sophisticated vendors know this and allocate less senior attention to processes where they believe they are benchmarking exercises. The buyer gets less useful information as a result.

## Gartner's Finding

Gartner's analysis of B2B buying journeys consistently finds that deals producing the best long-term outcomes are those where the buying organisation's internal champion had already built consensus and shaped requirements before formal procurement was engaged. When procurement defines requirements independently, they tend to reflect what can be measured in a scoring matrix rather than what the business unit actually needs.

## The Right Division of Labour

Procurement owns the governance process. The business owns the selection decision. When those two responsibilities are conflated, governance crowds out judgment, and the firm ends up with a vendor who passed the checklist rather than one who can solve the problem.