The 80% who failed are silent because of shame. The 20% who succeeded are silent because of strategy. The only people talking are the people selling.
The Myth of Vocal Success
We’re told that implementation success stories prove the model works. Conference stages are filled with them. Vendor websites showcase them. Analyst reports cite them.
But ask yourself: when was the last time you saw a case study that named the company, the methodology, the timeline, the internal resistance overcome, and the actual results — without a vendor logo attached?
The honest answer: almost never.
The Golden Majority
The 20% who succeed in enterprise transformation aren’t vocal. They’re strategically silent. I call them the Golden Majority — golden because their success is valuable, majority because within the successful cohort, silence is the norm.
Why would a procurement leader who just achieved 35% cost reduction broadcast the playbook to competitors?
Why would a CPO who successfully deployed AI-enabled sourcing explain exactly how they sequenced organizational readiness before technology?
They wouldn’t. And they don’t.
The Economics of Silence
The only people with incentive to talk are the people with something to sell.
What Passes for Evidence
Look closely at the “proof” the ecosystem offers:
Vendor case studies
- Company name anonymized or disguised
- Results presented without baseline
- Methodology credited to the technology, not the organization
- Published only when the vendor approves the narrative
Conference presentations
- Speaker often vendor-sponsored
- Q&A carefully managed
- Failures never mentioned
- “Lessons learned” means “what we’d tell the vendor to improve”
Analyst validation
- Based on vendor-submitted questionnaires
- Weighted by market presence (revenue), not implementation success
- Pay-to-play dynamics acknowledged but rarely discussed
Consultant thought leadership
- Frameworks presented as universal
- Client specifics removed
- Failures attributed to client readiness, not consultant methodology
The Acquisition Graveyard: Where Success Stories Go to Die
Even when implementation success happens, there’s another force that erases the evidence: acquisition.
Consider what happened to Nipendo — a company I called the “Wayne Gretzky” of procurement technology in 2014. By every measure, Nipendo represented successful implementation: stakeholder-centric design, dramatic process improvements, satisfied early customers who experienced “a 180-degree shift” in invoice management and supplier relations.
The timeline:
- January 2023: American Express acquires Nipendo
- February 2024: Israeli operations sold for $2 million
- July 2025: AmEx shuts down Nipendo operations entirely after extracting the technology
The early customers who would have been success stories? Their solution no longer exists. The practitioners who championed Nipendo internally? They look foolish. The methodology that worked? Absorbed into a vendor-centric platform that prioritizes AmEx’s network over practitioner outcomes.
This is technology strip-mining. The acquirer extracts the valuable technology, eliminates the stakeholder-focused team, and discards the evidence that the original approach worked.
The Satisfaction Paradox
The August 2025 analysis asked a simple question: Does client satisfaction increase or decrease after acquisition?
The answer: It decreases.
Coupa’s Hansen Fit Score dropped from historically high to 6.8/10 post-Thoma Bravo acquisition. The “perfect marriage of two trailblazers” became a private-equity-driven platform where implementation success plateaued at 65%.
Meanwhile, Zycus — which remained independent — maintained the highest score at 8.2/10. The correlation is clear: independence preserves satisfaction; acquisition erodes it.
(For the full analysis, see: Is Consolidation And ProcureTech Acquisition A Win For The Practitioner Customer?)
Why Early Customers Become Casualties
The cruelest irony: early customers create the very value that makes their vendors attractive acquisition targets.
They provide:
- Revenue validation
- Case study material (anonymized, of course)
- Product feedback that shapes development
- Market credibility
Then the acquisition happens, and those same customers become:
- Trapped by switching costs
- Subject to changed priorities
- Holders of solutions that drift from their needs
- Unwitting accomplices in their own dissatisfaction
This is why the Golden Majority stays silent. Even the 20% who succeeded can’t point to their success — because the company they succeeded with no longer exists, or has transformed beyond recognition.
(For the Nipendo case study, see: 2 Years Later: How Does Amex’s Acquisition of Nipendo Impact Ramp?)
The Watergate Tapes of Procurement
In 1972, Nixon’s White House installed a taping system to record conversations. Those tapes became the evidence that officials couldn’t erase — the receipts that proved what was denied.
The Procurement Insights Archives serve a similar function.
There’s an old saying: “He knows where the bodies are buried.”
In procurement technology, the bodies are the failed implementations, the acquired companies stripped for parts, the methodologies abandoned, the “success stories” quietly shelved.
I don’t just know where the bodies are buried. I kept a map.
- Nipendo documented in 2014. Acquisition in 2023. Elimination in 2025.
- Coupa’s trajectory from trailblazer to private-equity platform.
- Five technology waves — ERP, e-procurement, cloud, digital transformation, AI — same 80% failure rate across all of them.
The ecosystem doesn’t just silence success stories — it actively destroys the evidence through acquisition, consolidation, rebranding, and analyst amnesia. Magic Quadrants don’t track what happened to last year’s “Leaders.”
The Archives are the counter-record. 18 years. 3,000+ articles. The strands no one else retained.
That’s why the pattern is visible. That’s why the thesis holds. That’s why the tapes matter.
The Archive Moat: Why Phase 0 Works
This depth of archive isn’t just historical curiosity. It’s the reason the Hansen Fit Score is accurate and Phase 0 works.
The methodology is only as accurate as the evidence behind it.
Vendor case studies are curated. Analyst quadrants are paid. Consultant frameworks are theoretical.
The Archives are documented reality — which is why Phase 0 can assess organizational readiness with confidence. It’s not guessing. It’s pattern-matching against 27 years of mapped outcomes.
This is the moat. It’s one-of-a-kind because no one else kept the tapes. And it’s unassailable because it can’t be replicated — only accumulated over decades.
The Trust Consequence
Practitioners figured this out.
When the RAM 2025 assessment tracked trust levels from 1995 to 2026, the pattern was unambiguous:
- Consultant/SI trust: 83% → 20%
- Analyst trust: 80% → 25%
- Fellow practitioner trust: 28% → 90%
The inversion is complete. Practitioners now trust each other more than they trust anyone selling to them.
But here’s the paradox: the practitioners they trust most — the Golden Majority who actually succeeded — aren’t talking either.
What the Silence Tells You
If the current ecosystem worked, the 20% would have reason to share. Publications would feature detailed methodology breakdowns. Conferences would include sessions on “what we did before we bought the technology.”
Instead:
- Vendors control the narrative
- Consultants protect their IP
- Analysts protect their revenue model
- Successful practitioners protect their advantage
- Failed practitioners protect their careers
Everyone is protecting something. No one is teaching.
The Exception That Proves the Rule
In 27 years of documenting procurement transformation, I can count on one hand the implementations where:
- The organization was named
- The methodology was documented
- The results were independently verifiable
- The failures along the way were acknowledged
- No vendor was controlling the story
Two examples:
Department of National Defence (1998): The RAM deployment achieved 97.3% delivery accuracy through Canada’s SR&ED government-funded research program. Named. Documented. Exposed to independent audit. No product to sell — just methodology proven in the field.
Commonwealth of Virginia eVA Initiative: One of the largest public-sector e-procurement implementations in North America. Named. Documented. Results tracked over time. A case study in what organizational readiness looks like at scale — and what happens when the methodology is public-sector transparent rather than vendor-controlled.
That’s why academics still reach out about work from 1998. That’s why the eVA model remains a reference point.
Real evidence is that rare.
The Question for Practitioners
If you’re in the 20% who succeeded, ask yourself:
What would it take for you to share — really share — how you did it?
And if you’re in the 80% who struggled, ask yourself:
Would you trust a success story more if it came from a peer who had nothing to sell?
The silence of the Golden Majority isn’t malicious. It’s rational. But it perpetuates a system where the only “evidence” comes from people with revenue targets.
The Path Forward
Phase 0 exists because the ecosystem won’t teach itself.
The Hansen Fit Score exists because vendor RFPs won’t assess organizational readiness.
The RAM methodology exists because no one else is documenting what actually predicts success.
The Archives exist because no one else kept the tapes.
The Golden Majority will stay silent. That’s their prerogative.
But the 80% deserve a framework that explains why they failed — and it wasn’t because they picked the wrong vendor.
The silence is golden for those who succeeded.
For everyone else, it’s expensive.
What’s your experience? Are you in the Golden Majority — and if so, what would it take for you to share?
Case Study Links:
-30-
Procurement Insights
The Silent Golden Majority: Why the 20% Who Succeed Rarely If Ever Talk
Posted on January 4, 2026
0
The 80% who failed are silent because of shame. The 20% who succeeded are silent because of strategy. The only people talking are the people selling.
The Myth of Vocal Success
We’re told that implementation success stories prove the model works. Conference stages are filled with them. Vendor websites showcase them. Analyst reports cite them.
But ask yourself: when was the last time you saw a case study that named the company, the methodology, the timeline, the internal resistance overcome, and the actual results — without a vendor logo attached?
The honest answer: almost never.
The Golden Majority
The 20% who succeed in enterprise transformation aren’t vocal. They’re strategically silent. I call them the Golden Majority — golden because their success is valuable, majority because within the successful cohort, silence is the norm.
Why would a procurement leader who just achieved 35% cost reduction broadcast the playbook to competitors?
Why would a CPO who successfully deployed AI-enabled sourcing explain exactly how they sequenced organizational readiness before technology?
They wouldn’t. And they don’t.
The Economics of Silence
The only people with incentive to talk are the people with something to sell.
What Passes for Evidence
Look closely at the “proof” the ecosystem offers:
Vendor case studies
Conference presentations
Analyst validation
Consultant thought leadership
The Acquisition Graveyard: Where Success Stories Go to Die
Even when implementation success happens, there’s another force that erases the evidence: acquisition.
Consider what happened to Nipendo — a company I called the “Wayne Gretzky” of procurement technology in 2014. By every measure, Nipendo represented successful implementation: stakeholder-centric design, dramatic process improvements, satisfied early customers who experienced “a 180-degree shift” in invoice management and supplier relations.
The timeline:
The early customers who would have been success stories? Their solution no longer exists. The practitioners who championed Nipendo internally? They look foolish. The methodology that worked? Absorbed into a vendor-centric platform that prioritizes AmEx’s network over practitioner outcomes.
This is technology strip-mining. The acquirer extracts the valuable technology, eliminates the stakeholder-focused team, and discards the evidence that the original approach worked.
The Satisfaction Paradox
The August 2025 analysis asked a simple question: Does client satisfaction increase or decrease after acquisition?
The answer: It decreases.
Coupa’s Hansen Fit Score dropped from historically high to 6.8/10 post-Thoma Bravo acquisition. The “perfect marriage of two trailblazers” became a private-equity-driven platform where implementation success plateaued at 65%.
Meanwhile, Zycus — which remained independent — maintained the highest score at 8.2/10. The correlation is clear: independence preserves satisfaction; acquisition erodes it.
(For the full analysis, see: Is Consolidation And ProcureTech Acquisition A Win For The Practitioner Customer?)
Why Early Customers Become Casualties
The cruelest irony: early customers create the very value that makes their vendors attractive acquisition targets.
They provide:
Then the acquisition happens, and those same customers become:
This is why the Golden Majority stays silent. Even the 20% who succeeded can’t point to their success — because the company they succeeded with no longer exists, or has transformed beyond recognition.
(For the Nipendo case study, see: 2 Years Later: How Does Amex’s Acquisition of Nipendo Impact Ramp?)
The Archive Moat: Why Phase 0 Works
This depth of archive isn’t just historical curiosity. It’s the reason the Hansen Fit Score is accurate and Phase 0 works.
The methodology is only as accurate as the evidence behind it.
Vendor case studies are curated. Analyst quadrants are paid. Consultant frameworks are theoretical.
The Archives are documented reality — which is why Phase 0 can assess organizational readiness with confidence. It’s not guessing. It’s pattern-matching against 27 years of mapped outcomes.
This is the moat. It’s one-of-a-kind because no one else kept the tapes. And it’s unassailable because it can’t be replicated — only accumulated over decades.
The Trust Consequence
Practitioners figured this out.
When the RAM 2025 assessment tracked trust levels from 1995 to 2026, the pattern was unambiguous:
The inversion is complete. Practitioners now trust each other more than they trust anyone selling to them.
But here’s the paradox: the practitioners they trust most — the Golden Majority who actually succeeded — aren’t talking either.
What the Silence Tells You
If the current ecosystem worked, the 20% would have reason to share. Publications would feature detailed methodology breakdowns. Conferences would include sessions on “what we did before we bought the technology.”
Instead:
Everyone is protecting something. No one is teaching.
The Exception That Proves the Rule
In 27 years of documenting procurement transformation, I can count on one hand the implementations where:
Two examples:
Department of National Defence (1998): The RAM deployment achieved 97.3% delivery accuracy through Canada’s SR&ED government-funded research program. Named. Documented. Exposed to independent audit. No product to sell — just methodology proven in the field.
Commonwealth of Virginia eVA Initiative: One of the largest public-sector e-procurement implementations in North America. Named. Documented. Results tracked over time. A case study in what organizational readiness looks like at scale — and what happens when the methodology is public-sector transparent rather than vendor-controlled.
That’s why academics still reach out about work from 1998. That’s why the eVA model remains a reference point.
Real evidence is that rare.
The Question for Practitioners
If you’re in the 20% who succeeded, ask yourself:
What would it take for you to share — really share — how you did it?
And if you’re in the 80% who struggled, ask yourself:
Would you trust a success story more if it came from a peer who had nothing to sell?
The silence of the Golden Majority isn’t malicious. It’s rational. But it perpetuates a system where the only “evidence” comes from people with revenue targets.
The Path Forward
Phase 0 exists because the ecosystem won’t teach itself.
The Hansen Fit Score exists because vendor RFPs won’t assess organizational readiness.
The RAM methodology exists because no one else is documenting what actually predicts success.
The Archives exist because no one else kept the tapes.
The Golden Majority will stay silent. That’s their prerogative.
But the 80% deserve a framework that explains why they failed — and it wasn’t because they picked the wrong vendor.
The silence is golden for those who succeeded.
For everyone else, it’s expensive.
What’s your experience? Are you in the Golden Majority — and if so, what would it take for you to share?
Case Study Links:
-30-
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