Ask a purchasing manager what keeps them awake at night and you will rarely hear “unit price”. You hear a version of the same sentence, phrased a dozen different ways: the line has to keep running.

I have interviewed a lot of buyers over the past decade for my research, and this is the most consistent thing I have found. Savings get you a good annual review. A stoppage gets you a very different conversation with the board. Continuity is not one priority among several for most purchasers but the floor that everything else stands on.

So here is the uncomfortable question. If continuity is the thing you care about most, how much of your actual supplier conversation is about it?

What the numbers say

QIMA’s 2026 Global Sourcing Survey, which draws on the experiences of more than 1,000 businesses with international sourcing networks, found that the average company now maps 60% of its supplier network, up from 53%. That is real progress. And yet only 18% report full end-to-end visibility. Four out of five buying organisations are making continuity decisions with a partial map.

The same survey found that 79% of supply chains expect costs to be a major disruption in 2026, and that 43% shifted sourcing locations during 2025. The map is changing faster than most organisations can redraw it.

Sit with that for a moment. Your top priority is the thing you can see least clearly.

Your supplier can see what you cannot

Here is what I find strange about the way most buyer-seller conversations are structured. The person sitting across the table often knows exactly the part of the chain you have never mapped. They know which of their own inputs is single-sourced. They know their tier-two supplier has been quoting longer lead times since spring. They know the plant in question runs at 95% and has no slack for your rush order in November.

They know all of it. And in a great many relationships, nobody ever asks.

When I was still cooking, mise en place was not a nice-to-have. You did not discover at seven in the evening that the fish had not arrived. You found out at ten in the morning, because you had a relationship with the person who brought the fish, and that person told you things before you had to ask. That relationship was worth considerably more than the three cents a kilo you might have saved somewhere else.

Procurement has exactly the same dynamic and usually far less of the conversation.

Why buyers hold back

Buyers have reasons for not opening up about continuity risk. If you tell a supplier you have no alternative source, you have told them something useful about your negotiating position. If you tell them the launch date is immovable, you have handed them leverage.

I understand the instinct. I also think the arithmetic has changed. The cost of an information gap that hides a disruption is now much higher than the few points of margin that gap protects. A supplier who does not know that a particular component is critical to you will not prioritise it when their own capacity tightens, not out of obstruction but out of simple ignorance.

This is the balance I write about in The Buyer’s Balance: What your customers want to share with you (Owl Press, 2025). Equilibrium in a B2B relationship is not a matter of both parties being pleasant to each other but of both parties holding roughly the same picture of what is going on, so that each can act sensibly on it.

Three questions worth asking this quarter

If continuity is genuinely your top priority, put it into the conversation rather than into a clause.

Where is your own single point of failure? Not yours as in your company. Theirs. Most suppliers will answer honestly if you ask in a way that does not sound like the opening of an audit.

What would you need from us to hold our lead time if your capacity tightened? Usually the answer is a forecast, or earlier notice, or a commitment they can plan against. Often it costs you nothing at all.

What have you told other customers that you have not told us? Slightly cheeky. Very revealing.

None of these show up on a supplier scorecard. All three of them do more for continuity than another paragraph about liquidated damages.

The consistency point

A supplier who tells you about a problem three weeks early is worth more than one who never has problems on paper. Predictability beats brilliance. A vendor who performs at eight out of ten every single time is far easier to build a business around than one who swings between ten and four.

And if you want that from your suppliers, you have to be that for your suppliers. Consistent forecasts. Consistent feedback. Consistent honesty about what you actually need and when.

Your top priority deserves more than a paragraph in the contract.

---

Bert Paesbrugghe is associate professor of sales management and purchasing strategy at IESEG School of Management and author of The Buyer’s Balance: What your customers want to share with you (Owl Press, 2025), ISBN 9789464778908. More at evaluationshub.com/book.

Source: QIMA, 2026 Global Sourcing Survey: From Disruption to Opportunity (2026), based on responses from over 1,000 businesses with international sourcing networks. qima.com