Six years ago, most procurement teams held the cards. Suppliers were plentiful, switching costs were manageable, and buyers could run a competitive process with confidence that the market would respond. That world is gone.
Since 2020, supplier behavior has changed in ways that don't always show up in dashboards or quarterly reviews. They show up in how negotiations feel, how proposals are structured, and how much harder it has become to create genuine competition around a contract.
We have spent the last few years running hundreds of competitive sourcing events across industries. From aerospace to FMCG, from transport to IT services. And I keep hearing the same observations from CPOs and Heads of Procurement. Not complaints, exactly. More like a quiet recognition that the rules of the game have shifted underneath them.
Here is what they are noticing, and what it means for anyone responsible for buying.
The negotiation balance of power has tilted, and it is not tilting back
The power shift from buyers to suppliers
Through the 2000s, procurement's cost-killing mandate was at its peak. Buyers held the leverage, and suppliers had little choice but to comply with whatever negotiation method was imposed, including poorly run reverse auctions that reduced complex sourcing decisions to a race to the bottom. RFQs went out, responses came back, and the machine worked because suppliers simply couldn't afford to say no. But starting around 2010, the balance began to shift. Markets consolidated, alternatives became scarcer, and procurement itself evolved toward innovation capture and value creation rather than pure cost extraction. By the 2020s, the transformation was clear: in this new ecosystem, the party that is most sought after is the one that defines the rules of the game.
Now, suppliers are more selective about where they invest their time. In some categories, particularly raw materials, specialty chemicals, and technical components, the number of credible alternatives has shrunk due to consolidation. According to a 2026 analysis from Aligned Negotiation, industry consolidation now means fewer viable options in many critical categories, and many strategic suppliers hold more leverage than the buyers they serve.
CPOs report that suppliers increasingly decline to participate in sourcing events they perceive as "fishing exercises." They want clarity on commitment before investing effort. One CPO I spoke with described it simply: "Our suppliers are vetting us now as much as we vet them."
This is not a temporary market fluctuation. It is a structural change in how suppliers allocate their commercial capacity.
The hidden margin capture for procurement
Between 2021 and 2023, procurement teams were flooded with price increase requests. Inflation was real, and many of those increases were legitimate. But something else happened during that period: suppliers discovered that buyers would often accept increases with minimal pushback, especially when supply was tight.
Roland Berger noted in their procurement research that suppliers started taking increasingly aggressive, sometimes irrational steps in pushing price claims, knowing that the fear of disruption would work in their favor. For many organizations, the muscle memory of challenging cost breakdowns had atrophied during the crisis years.
Now that raw material prices have stabilized in several categories, many CPOs notice that supplier pricing has not come back down proportionally. The increases went in quickly. The clawbacks are moving slowly, if at all.
This is the hidden margin capture that few procurement teams are actively tracking.
The Partnership Trap in B2B negotiations
Since the pandemic, the procurement world has embraced a stronger focus on collaboration with suppliers. A research also showed that supplier collaboration skyrocketed in priority for 88% of procurement leaders. And there is genuine value in this shift. Better relationships do lead to better outcomes, especially on innovation and risk management.
But some suppliers have learned to use the language of partnership strategically. "Let's find a win-win" sometimes translates to "let's not run a competitive process." "We value this relationship" can mean "please don't benchmark us."
Several CPOs told me they have seen suppliers invoke the partnership narrative specifically to avoid transparent price competition. One Head of Procurement in the industrial sector put it bluntly: "Our top suppliers started framing every negotiation as a 'strategic discussion,' which conveniently meant we stopped putting real pressure on pricing."
The lesson here is not to abandon collaboration. It is to recognize that collaboration and competition are not mutually exclusive. The best outcomes happen when both exist simultaneously.
What the smartest procurement teams are doing about it
The return of real competition inside procurement best practices
The CPOs who are adapting fastest are not going back to adversarial arm-wrestling. They are reintroducing structured competition into categories where it had quietly disappeared.
This means running properly designed eAuctions where applicable, not as a blunt instrument to beat suppliers into submission, but as a transparent mechanism that lets the market reveal its true price. When done correctly, with clear commitment to honor the outcome and well-designed lot structures, eAuctions consistently deliver 5 to 10% in additional savings beyond the best negotiated offer.
It also means using data to challenge cost claims. McKinsey's research on full-potential procurement emphasized that companies with precise cost breakdowns and focused negotiation strategies were significantly more effective at managing supplier price increases during the inflationary period. That discipline is even more critical now, as we enter a phase where clawback opportunities exist but require proactive effort to capture.
Trust the sourcing process
Relationships matter. Nobody serious about procurement would argue otherwise. But process is what prevents relationships from becoming complacent.
The most effective procurement organizations are building what Gartner describes as pattern-based sourcing workflows, processes that are structured enough to be repeatable and measurable, but flexible enough to adapt to different supplier contexts. According to their 2026 Procurement Outlook, nearly 28% of procurement staff time is still allocated to transactional sourcing work, which represents a massive opportunity for automation and reallocation toward strategic activities.
In practice, this means standardizing how competitive events are run, investing in tools that reduce the workload of managing multi-round negotiations, and making sure that every significant contract renewal includes a genuine market test.
The power of constructive tension during negotiations
Perhaps the most important shift is a mindset one. The CPOs who are thriving in this new environment have accepted that some level of constructive tension with suppliers is healthy and necessary.
This does not mean being aggressive or adversarial. It means being willing to challenge a price increase with data. It means running a competitive process even with a preferred supplier. It means being transparent about expectations while remaining fair about outcomes.
As Jacob Gorm Larsen wrote in his reference work on eAuctions, the concept of market-driven negotiation, where the market determines the outcome through competitive bidding, is fundamentally about letting competition do the heavy lifting that individual negotiation power cannot always achieve. In a world where suppliers hold more cards than they used to, that principle matters more than ever.
The supplier landscape has changed. The question is whether your procurement approach has changed with it.
