Vendors
Are my tech vendors really working for me?
Tom Leyden · 30 March 2025
It happens slowly. You sign with a vendor because they solve a problem. Two years later, your roadmap is their roadmap, your renewal cycle is their renewal cycle, and you’ve quietly accepted whatever pricing model they put in front of you.
That’s not a partnership. That’s a vendor running your business by stealth.
Here are four moves to put you back in the driving seat.
1. Identify your strategic vendors
You probably have 30+ tech vendors. Two or three of them genuinely move the needle on your business outcomes. The rest are transactional. Treat them differently.
Strategic vendors deserve quarterly business reviews, joint roadmap conversations, and exec sponsorship. Transactional vendors deserve a procurement contact, a contract, and an annual price check. Mixing the two up is the most common mistake — you over-invest in suppliers who don’t matter and under-invest in the ones who do.
2. Get into your vendor’s product roadmap
If a vendor is strategic, you should know what they’re building 12–18 months out — and they should know what you need. The good ones run customer advisory boards, beta programs, and roadmap reviews. Ask to be part of them.
Two outcomes: their product evolves toward your needs, and you get advance warning of changes that affect you.
3. Negotiate renewals 6 months early — not 30 days
The single most expensive mistake in vendor management is letting the contract drift to within 60 days of expiry. From that point on, you have no leverage. The vendor knows you can’t feasibly migrate, and the price reflects that.
Diary the renewal conversation 6 months out. Walk into it with a credible alternative shortlisted.
4. Consolidate the long tail
Every transactional vendor has a hidden cost: someone in your team manages the relationship, processes the invoice, chases the support ticket. Multiply that by 25 suppliers and you’re burning serious time on suppliers who individually don’t matter.
Consolidate where you can. Two or three platform vendors covering ten capabilities each beats twenty point solutions, even if the platform’s feature for any single capability isn’t the best on the market.
If your vendor list feels like a patchwork that grew without a strategy, you’re not alone — most mid-market businesses we work with are in the same place. A vendor review usually pays for itself inside a quarter.