Your supplier list has a name and an email for each shop. Some of those people left two years ago.
You'll find out which ones on a Friday, on the job where you needed a number by Monday.
Why it decays invisibly
A dead contact doesn't announce itself. The email usually doesn't even bounce — companies keep addresses alive, forward them to a general inbox, or leave them in a mailbox nobody opens.
So from your side it looks exactly like a supplier who hasn't replied yet. Which is why it gets diagnosed as "they've gone quiet" rather than "that person left in 2024".
The decay is faster than people expect. Estimators and buyers move, shops reorganise, and the person who used to quote gets promoted to running the floor without anyone telling their customers.
The cheap audit
Once a year, an hour:
Go through the suppliers you actually use — not the whole list, the ten or so you send RFQs to. For each, confirm the name and email are still right, and get a second name.
Do it by phone. It's a two-minute call, it needs no reason beyond "just updating our records", and you'll be surprised how many are wrong.
Do it when nothing is urgent. An audit during a live job becomes a rushed hunt for anyone who'll pick up.
Get a second name, always
The most useful field on a supplier record is a second contact, and almost nobody has one.
It costs nothing to ask, it's a completely normal request, and it removes the failure mode: if the first person has gone, you have somewhere to go that isn't the general inbox.
Ask for a role as well as a name. "Estimating" is more durable than any individual.
The structural version
Auditing contacts treats the symptom. The cause is that an RFQ goes to a person rather than a company.
Anything that makes the RFQ visible to more than one person at the supplier removes the problem instead of managing it. If their whole team can see what you've sent, the person who left stops being a single point of failure — the request is still there, and whoever's quoting this week can pick it up.
That's a structural fix, and it's worth more than any amount of list hygiene, because it survives the next departure too.
What to keep, minimally
You don't need a CRM. Per supplier:
- Two names, with roles
- Direct email and phone for each
- What they're good at, in one line
- Their real lead time, as opposed to their quoted one
- The date you last confirmed the contact details
That last field is the one nobody has, and it's what makes the annual audit a ten-minute job instead of an hour — you only check what's gone stale.
The test
Pick three suppliers you haven't sent an RFQ to in six months. Email your contact there asking whether they're still the right person.
However many replies come back is the health of your list. Two out of three, you're fine. One, and you've just found out cheaply what you were otherwise going to find out expensively.