It's Not Just Your Team: The Research Backs Up the Poll

Our recent LinkedIn poll of 268 procurement professionals found something that, on the surface, looks like a contradiction: 57% of respondents are chasing cost reduction as their top goal for the next 12 months, while 49% say poor stakeholder alignment is the biggest thing standing in their way. Stakeholder engagement was also the single most-cited struggle (50%), yet stakeholder influence ranked dead last as a training priority (11%).

When we went looking for corroboration, in consultancy research, industry surveys and academic literature, the same pattern showed up everywhere. This isn't a quirk of our sample. It's a documented, industry-wide condition, and it's been building for a few years.

That is exactly why we built the Stakeholder Engagement Diagnostic. It turns the vague complaint of "poor stakeholder alignment" into a scored, repeatable picture of where a team currently sits across the five capabilities that separate trusted partners from transactional functions — executive mandate, stakeholder mapping, value framing, early engagement, and sustained value confirmation. Teams that complete it typically find the gap is narrower than it feels, but located in a different place than they expected.

The market-wide data says the same thing

The clearest confirmation comes from Deloitte's 2025 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey, now in its 12th year and drawing on more than 250 CPOs across 40 countries. Deloitte found siloed ways of working (57%) and competing priorities diluting focus (46%) were the top-ranked barriers preventing procurement from delivering value, ahead of talent gaps and technology constraints. Both are stakeholder problems wearing a process disguise.

Icertis' 2026 ProcureCon CPO Report puts a number on it too: 29.4% of procurement leaders cite weak stakeholder engagement as a top challenge, specifically the struggle to be involved early enough in decisions to demonstrate value rather than being brought in after the fact.

Tellingly, the same report finds supply continuity has overtaken cost reduction as the top procurement objective for 2026, for the first time in years, which suggests the profession's stated priorities are shifting even as the underlying relationship problem hasn't moved.

The CIPS Global State of Procurement & Supply 2025 report (280+ leaders surveyed) found influencing stakeholders is now the third-ranked skills development priority (43%), behind only strategic thinking (47%) and leadership (45%), and ahead of most technical categories.

Procurement leaders, in other words, already know this is where the gap is. The poll's finding that only 11% are actively training for it suggests a gap between what leaders say matters and what teams are resourced to build.

Training for the wrong fight isn't just our finding

Gartner's 2025 and 2026 Chief Procurement Officer research describes underdeveloped soft skills — stakeholder management, storytelling, negotiation, cross-functional collaboration — as a source of "invisible inefficiencies" that quietly erode value and credibility: rework, missed deadlines, supplier tension, stakeholder disengagement. Gartner's framing is blunt: AI and automation can transform the technical side of procurement, but they can't build trust, navigate ambiguity, or align stakeholders around a complex initiative. That must be a human capability, and one procurement teams choose to invest in.

This mirrors the poll almost exactly. Respondents put supplier and market strategy (39%) and spend analytics (33%) at the top of their training wish list — both real, defensible, easy-to-justify skills — while stakeholder influence trailed at 11%. The wider research suggests this isn't laziness or poor judgement. Influence is simply harder to define, harder to put a course label on, and harder to prove ROI on to a training budget-holder. That doesn't make it optional. It makes it the harder, more important problem.

The Stakeholder Engagement Diagnostic is designed to surface this exact mismatch. It scores a team's current stakeholder-influence capability against the maturity level the organisation needs, which is usually a more useful conversation-starter than another training-needs survey.

The gap between the leaders and everyone else

The Hackett Group's World Class Procurement research found that world-class procurement organisations are over four times more likely than their peers to be perceived by stakeholders as an integral, valued business partner, and more than twice as likely to be seen as an expert function — all while operating at lower cost. Deloitte's 2025 survey adds a sharper edge: what it calls "Digital Masters" reported 84% met or exceeded plan on internal stakeholder satisfaction, versus 59% of followers. Deloitte also tracked procurement's influence rising since 2023 in finance (72%), IT (71%) and operations (65%), but falling by 13 points in R&D — a reminder that stakeholder trust isn't won once and kept; it must be actively defended function by function.

CIPS found a related pattern on proximity to power: the share of procurement leaders with a direct line to the CEO has roughly doubled year over year, and a quarter of purchasing directors now hold a permanent board seat. Read alongside the stakeholder-alignment data, the implication is straightforward: the organisations closing the influence gap are the ones getting closer to where decisions get made, not the ones with the most sophisticated category strategy.

The measurement blind spot

Our poll's most unsettling number wasn't the 49% citing stakeholder alignment. It was the 5% who said their biggest barrier was an inability to sustain savings once delivered. We suspected that wasn't good news so much as evidence that most organisations simply never check.

The research backs the suspicion up. Analysis cited by procurement technology researchers (drawing on McKinsey's work on procurement-led transformation) found the average savings pipeline loses roughly a third of its estimated value in planning and another 20% in execution, meaning close to half of projected savings never reach the P&L. Realisation rates for straightforward rate reductions with strong compliance typically run 85 to 95%, but drop to 70 to 85% where indexation or FX exposure is high. If savings routinely leak at that scale, and organisations aren't going back twelve months later to check, then a 5% self-reported problem rate isn't a sign of discipline — it's a sign that no one is measuring.

What the academic literature adds

Outside the consultancy surveys, the academic record has been making a version of this argument for years. A study in the Strategic Journal of Business & Change Management, examining public-sector procurement at a Kenyan university, found that stakeholder participation and top management support were significant, measurable drivers of procurement process efficiency — not soft context around it. A UK healthcare-sector study published via the National Library of Medicine found that procurement decision-making was shaped as much by relational and political dynamics between departments as by formal data or process, a finding echoed in a broader Oxford Academic review of how policy-driven procurement outcomes get delivered inside organisations. None of this is new territory academically. It has simply taken the profession longer to treat it as core capability rather than a people-skills afterthought.

Where does your own team sit?

Our original poll found a split picture on maturity: roughly 30% of respondents described their team as reactive and transactional, 28% said continuous improvement was embedded, and the bands in between — early strategy, collaborative, data-driven — were thinner than expected. That's not a smooth bell curve. It's two clusters, pulling apart.

We see the same split in our own client work, and it tends to trace back to a small, specific set of gaps rather than one big one. In practice, five things separate the teams that are trusted partners from the teams still fighting for a seat: whether there's a genuine executive mandate in place before an initiative starts, rather than being assembled after resistance shows up; whether stakeholders — budget owners, decision makers and blockers — are properly identified and mapped at the outset of a category or project, not reverse-engineered once something stalls; whether the team understands what each stakeholder values and can frame outcomes in those terms rather than procurement's own; whether engagement is planned early enough that stakeholders own the result instead of simply receiving a decision; and whether anyone goes back afterwards to confirm the value was delivered and sustained, which is exactly the measurement blind spot discussed above.

Diagnosing which of those five is the binding constraint for a given team, rather than guessing, is usually the fastest way to convert "poor stakeholder alignment" from a vague, 49%-of-respondents complaint into a specific, fixable plan.

A practical way to turn the research into a plan

Reading the research is useful; knowing which insight applies to your team this quarter is what changes behaviour. The Stakeholder Engagement Diagnostic is built to close that gap. It takes the five patterns above — executive mandate, stakeholder mapping, value framing, early engagement, and value confirmation — and scores each one so the team can see whether the binding constraint is influence, process, measurement, or alignment. That score becomes the basis for a 90-day plan rather than another round of stakeholder complaints.

Most teams complete the diagnostic in under ten minutes. The output is a maturity profile mapped to the same research-backed dimensions discussed here, plus a shortlist of the highest-leverage actions based on where the score is lowest. It is deliberately practical: the goal is not a report, but a clear next step.

So what does the combined picture say?

Put the poll and the wider research side by side and the conclusion holds up: procurement's next competitive advantage isn't a better category strategy or a sharper dashboard. Those matter, but they're solving a problem the data says isn't the binding constraint. The binding constraint, repeated across Deloitte, Gartner, Hackett, CIPS, ProcureCon and a decade of academic literature, is whether procurement has built enough credibility with the people who control budgets and priorities to get its strategies implemented at all.

The question worth asking isn't "how do we improve our analytics?" It's "how do we earn the right to be in the room when decisions get made?" The research, and now our own poll, both point to that being where the real work is. The Stakeholder Engagement Diagnostic is the fastest way to answer that question for your own team — and to turn the answer into a plan.