January 20, 2026 - Written by

  • Michael Gorham

    Director of Logistics and Supply Chain | Merkur

Boost your sales through strategic sourcing

Where does your company start when it’s looking to increase sales? It probably doesn’t knock on the door of supply chain leaders.

During the pandemic, supply chain managers were busy managing supply crises and focused on topics such as resilience and risk management. The inflationary pressures that followed swung the pendulum back toward cost management.

The turbulence of recent years in the supply chain has highlighted that managing it—particularly procurement—is not just about cost control, but also plays a role in driving sales:

  • Stay ahead of the competition with innovative, improved products.
  • Increase market share by ensuring stock availability.
  • Satisfy and retain customers with uncompromising quality.
Supply chain leaders integrate these key elements into their performance evaluation using balanced dashboards that include manufacturing performance and customer satisfaction indicators. It is essential to improve communication and ensure the entire organization understands that enhancing sales performance is built on solid supply chain management foundations. The supply chain team is ideally positioned, with a comprehensive view of the entire journey—from suppliers to consumers.

In this article, Michael Gorham, Logistics and Supply Chain Director at Merkur, shares key insights to help you boost your sales through strategic sourcing.

Sell at the most competitive price by purchasing at the lowest cost and collaborating to reduce expenses.

One of the most valued traditional skills of the procurement team is its ability to minimize costs. Securing raw materials and components at the lowest possible price enables offering competitive prices, which directly impacts sales. The buyer has several cost-reduction tools in their arsenal, such as partnerships, competitive sourcing (requests for proposals, commodity strategies), lifecycle management, target cost analysis, sourcing from cost-optimized countries, and purchasing consortia.

Stay ahead of the competition with innovative, improved products.

The supply chain team plays a key role in accelerating your product’s time-to-market. The faster the development cycle, the more sales you can capture and the better you can outpace competitors. Collaboration between engineering, procurement, and suppliers is crucial. The process begins with iterative, modular product development, involving the procurement team from the earliest stages and prequalifying key suppliers.

To learn more, check out the project completed with Dettson as part of a well-structured commodity management strategy.

Adopt a lean approach—eliminate waste and collaborate to speed up time-to-market, while investing in planning steps (comprehensive RFPs, supplier qualification) to avoid surprises that could jeopardize product launch timelines.

Increase Market Share by Ensuring Stock Availability

Capacity constraints affect our ability to produce and fulfill orders. These constraints can come from our production facilities, suppliers, or logistics network. Stock shortages lead to lost sales—something we simply cannot afford.

Supply chain leaders must play a key role in an integrated Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) process that aligns the entire organization. Collaboration and communication with suppliers and production facilities are essential to the success of an S&OP process, enabling the maintenance of adequate inventory levels.

Satisfy Customers and Build Loyalty Through Exceptional Quality

Upstream supply chain issues have consequences. Quality problems at our suppliers can impact our ability to produce or fulfill orders, leading to customer frustration.

In our rush to resolve supply chain disruptions, we may inadvertently create quality issues by accelerating validation and approval processes, reactively changing suppliers, or outsourcing/insourcing purchases.

Terms like “resilience” and “risk management” are often highlighted but can become buzzwords without real substance. True substance includes contingency plans to address disruptions (natural disasters, geopolitical events), supply chain diversification to reduce dependency on a single supplier or region, and the use of quality tools to qualify and improve suppliers and processes (APQP, FMEA, PPAP).

When even the best plans fail to prevent a problem and threaten to impact your customers, these tools and institutionalized problem-solving skills can be mobilized to quickly resolve any issue.

LEARN MORE: Supply Chain

How Can Merkur help you?

Merkur takes a comprehensive approach to product development, production, and supply chain management. We recognize the key role that supply chain leaders play—not only in cost control but also in driving revenue growth for our clients.

Our services for supply chain managers include identifying and selecting the right partners, managing structured RFPs and negotiations with appropriate terms (cost, quality, service), as well as overseeing supplier quality and corrective actions. Contact us.