Sezen Gürlek Kafaoglu is Senior Consultant in sourcing, procurement and vendor management at Leadout. In this blog, she explains why vendor management is one of the most underrated spaces in IT consulting.

The space nobody owns

Vendor management is one of those spaces that most organisations know they need, but few truly invest in. Technical teams focus on delivery. Commercial and legal teams close the contract and move on. And then what? A vendor is inside the organisation, performance is drifting, relationships are straining, and nobody has a clear picture of what is happening across the board. That gap is where Sezen works.

Sezen’s role at Leadout sits at the intersection of everything: strategy, operations, finance, and stakeholder relationships. She helps clients bring structure to their vendor ecosystems, from the moment a need is identified, through an effective and cost-efficient sourcing and onboarding, all the way to performance governance and, when necessary, vendor exit.

“It sits in the middle of everything. You need to coordinate, bring everything together, and act as a bridge between different worlds. When you take this role and create real value for your client, you feel really special.” — Sezen, Senior Consultant at Leadout

What makes this role genuinely interesting, according to Sezen, is that it requires you to act as a translator. You engage with technical leads who think in terms of delivery and with legal and commercial teams who think in terms of contracts. Neither group naturally thinks about vendor lifecycle. That is the job: to bridge those worlds and create a coherent, end-to-end picture.

What gets overlooked every time

The aspect clients most often overlook, Sezen explains, is what happens after onboarding: performance and relationship management.

Once a vendor is in place, many organisations shift their focus elsewhere. There is often no clear ownership, no defined governance structure, and no regular, structured evaluation of how the vendor is actually performing against expectations and business needs.

In practice, this means KPIs are not actively tracked, feedback loops are missing, and the relationship remains largely transactional rather than strategic. The problem only becomes visible when the organisation suddenly needs more from the vendor: faster delivery, flexibility, or stronger collaboration in a critical moment. At that point, the relationship is not mature enough to support those demands. What initially goes unnoticed turns into value leakage, additional costs, and underperforming vendor outcomes. That is when you hear: we should have put proper governance in place; we should have invested more in the relationship…

In Vendor Management, those elements are not an afterthought. They are built deliberately from the start, so that when those moments come, the organisation is not reacting, but prepared.

Read on below.

Where the impact becomes real

What Sezen finds most rewarding is the moment a client acts on something the team has built. Not because they have to, but because the value is clear and compelling.

This could be a sourcing strategy, a vendor selection decision, or a newly designed governance model. When the analysis is robust, the recommendation is practical, and the trade-offs are transparent, clients move forward with confidence.

In Vendor Management, those decisions do not stay on paper. They directly shape the vendor ecosystem strategy, relationships, cost structures, and how services are delivered. What was previously overlooked like performance and relationship management is now actively managed and embedded in the organisation. You start to see the shift: clients move from managing vendors reactively to extracting real value from them, at an optimal cost.

That is where the impact becomes tangible: you see client organisations operating differently, vendors responding more effectively, and outcomes improving as a direct result of what was designed.

And that level of visible impact is not something you find in every consulting role.

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