The cheap plastic of the phone receiver is starting to feel slick against my ear. It’s a feeling I know too well, a physical symptom of a conversation that isn’t real. On the other end of the line is a man named Mark, and he is telling me, in a voice that sounds just a little too practiced, that his experience with Apex Manufacturing has been ‘nothing short of stellar.’

Stellar. Who says that in real life? It’s a corporate word, a marketing word. It’s the kind of word you use when you’ve been prepped for a call. I’m supposed to be doing my due diligence, vetting a new potential partner for a critical component. This call is supposed to give me peace of mind, a green light from a trusted peer. Instead, every one of his polished answers makes the knot in my stomach tighten.

‘And their communication?’ I ask, trying to steer away from the script I can practically see him reading.

I want to ask the real questions. I want to ask if they ever shipped 13 days late and blamed it on a typhoon that never happened. I want to ask if the unit price mysteriously increased by 3 percent after the purchase order was signed. I want to ask if ‘proactive communication’ means a form letter sent out to 233 clients at once. But I can’t. It would be like asking a dinner guest to critique the host’s cooking while the host is standing right there, holding the dessert tray. Mark is a hostage to politeness, and to his ongoing business relationship with Apex.

Confusing Sales Tools for Truth

I’ll admit, with a certain degree of professional shame, that I used to be on the other side of this. Not as the coached referral, but as the one demanding them. I thought it was a sign of a thorough process.

I’d get my list, make my calls, hear the glowing reviews, and check the box. I confused a curated sales tool for objective truth. I learned my lesson the hard way with a supplier of custom-molded packaging, let’s call them FormPlast.

Their referral, a company in an adjacent industry, raved about them. They praised the precision, the quick turnarounds, the cost. It all sounded perfect. We signed a contract for an initial run of 43,000 units. The first 3,000 were flawless. The next 13,000 were a catastrophe. Warped edges, inconsistent material thickness, a failure rate of nearly 33 percent. When we dug into it, the truth emerged. FormPlast was a fantastic boutique operation. They were brilliant at small, high-touch orders. Their other clients, including the referral, never ordered more than a few thousand units at a time. They had never handled our kind of volume, and their equipment buckled under the strain. The ‘happy customer’ I spoke to told me the truth, but it was their truth, not mine.

The Broken System of Anecdotal Vetting

It’s a broken system. We’re trying to predict the future by listening to a story about the past, a story that’s been edited, polished, and approved by the very people we’re trying to vet.

I was complaining about this to a colleague, Aiden S., one of those quiet guys from the finance department who spends his days in the deep, dark world of inventory reconciliation. Aiden doesn’t care about stories. He cares about numbers. He lives by the simple creed that if the packing slip says 1,333 units arrived, and he only counts 1,323, then 10 units are missing and someone, somewhere, is wrong. He has zero tolerance for ambiguity.

I was halfway through my rant about the FormPlast disaster when he held up a hand. ‘Did you look at their shipping history before you signed?’ he asked. I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Their what?’

‘Their shipping history,’ he repeated, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Who they ship to. How often. How much.

He explained that every time a container of goods enters the United States, it generates a public record-a bill of lading. This document lists the shipper, the consignee (the buyer), a description of the goods, the weight, the container number, and more. For decades, this information has been available, a massive, unglamorous pile of data used by logistics professionals and customs brokers. But for someone vetting a supplier, it’s a treasure trove. By looking at a potential partner’s us import data, you are no longer listening to their curated marketing; you are observing their actual behavior.

This completely changed my approach. Forget the stilted phone calls. Now, the first thing I do is look up the data. A supplier might tell me they are a major player in the automotive sector. Their shipping history will either confirm this with a long list of shipments to well-known car manufacturers, or it will reveal they’ve only ever sent three small shipments to a single parts distributor in a different state. The data doesn’t lie.

A company might claim they have a robust, consistent production schedule. Their shipping records will show if they are sending out 23 containers every month like clockwork, or if their activity is erratic-a flurry of shipments followed by months of silence, a classic sign of production problems or financial instability. You can see their entire client list, not just the two or three they hand-picked for you to call. You can see if they work with your competitors. You can see if their other clients are premium brands known for quality, or discount retailers known for squeezing every last penny out of their suppliers. This is the real reference check.

Let’s go back to FormPlast. If I had looked them up, I would have seen a history of small, infrequent shipments. I would have seen that not a single one of their clients was operating at our scale. The data would have screamed that they were a small-batch specialist. The glowing referral was true, but the shipping history would have told me the whole truth, the context that mattered. It would have been a 3-minute search that would have saved us $373,000 and 3 months of delays.

I still get emails from my team asking if they should schedule calls with supplier-provided references. I wrote a very angry, detailed response to one just this morning, explaining why it was a colossal waste of everyone’s time. Then I deleted it. You can’t force people to see the light. You can only show them a better way to find the switch. So instead, I just sent back a link to the supplier’s shipping manifest and a simple message:

The curated world of online reviews and polished testimonials has trained us to seek out opinions, to trust anecdotes. But in the world of supply chain, where millions of dollars and your company’s reputation are on the line, anecdotes are dangerous. We need to stop asking for stories. The truth isn’t in what people say; it’s in what they consistently do. And what they do, month after month, container by container, is all right there in the public record, waiting for you to look.