Transforming Vendor Relationships into Strategic Partnerships

I sat down with Kevin D. Wilde for this one. Former CLO of General Mills, GP Strategies advisory board member, and co-author of Power Up Your L&D Partnerships. He's spent a career on both sides of the client-vendor line, which makes him unusually credible on it.

The question we worked through: what actually separates a supplier from a partner?

Kevin's framing stuck with me. A supplier relationship is transactional. You reach out when you need something. A partnership means you're in the room before the need is defined, during the work, and after it ships. You've built enough mutual understanding that the other party can anticipate rather than just respond.

The stakes here are larger than they look. Organizations are outsourcing more of L&D every year, including strategy, delivery, and technology. If those relationships stay transactional, you're buying deliverables from people who never get close enough to understand your business. You get what you asked for instead of what you needed.

This piece covers the practical transition: how a supplier evolves into a partner, where the dynamic usually breaks down, how trust actually gets built, and how you measure whether it's working.

Worth reading from either seat. If you buy L&D services, it's about getting more from the money you're already spending. If you sell them, it's about why some clients renew for a decade and others disappear after one engagement.