# Michael Shields

Michael Shields shares practical procurement advice on supplier risk, pricing and negotiation, and helps sales teams understand how buyers evaluate vendors.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/michael-shields/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shieldsmichaeld
- LinkedIn followers: 27,112
- Topics: sales, procurement
- Based on 10 dated posts, latest 2026-10-07

## Summary

Michael Shields is most useful for clear, buyer-centered procurement explanations on supplier continuity, discount logic, and including procurement in sales planning.

- Best for: A vendor-risk, supplier-continuity, or procurement-intelligence brand targeting procurement leaders and sales teams.
- Not for: A sponsored product-demonstration series needing video, integrations, benchmarks, or verified enterprise procurement director leads.
- Check first: Ask about sponsorship terms, deliverables, delivery history, product demos, and audience composition.

### Takeaways

- A supplier's survival belongs in the buying decision, not just product fit.
- A discount should buy a specific concession, not settle the buyer's doubt.
- Procurement sees the deal earlier than sales does, and sales planning leaves it out.

## Main ideas

- **A supplier’s survival belongs in the buying decision, not just product fit**: Shields argues that procurement teams score features, expected outcomes, user experience, integrations and cost, but leave out whether the vendor will still be trading in twelve months. They describe this as a blind spot they have shared, not a warning aimed only at others. The cost of a vendor disappearing is not the licence fee; it is the work that stops while the buyer finds a replacement.
- **A discount should buy a specific concession, not settle the buyer’s doubt**: Writing as “Procurement Guy,” Shields compares discounts to credit cards: useful and sometimes necessary when used deliberately, damaging when they become a habit. Most discounts are unreadable to the buyer because a single percentage lumps together the reasons behind it. An unreadable price makes the buyer push harder rather than commit. They want each element tied to something the buyer gives in return, such as term length, timing or volume.
- **Procurement sees the deal earlier than sales does, and sales planning leaves it out**: Shields argues that procurement gets shut out of events like sales kick-offs, and that sellers are surprised by how much applies to their pipeline when procurement does lead a session. Buyers are not smarter, they say; the buying process has moved ahead of where sellers assume it starts. People inside that process hold information sales teams could act on across many deals at once.
- **Credit other practitioners and refuse to rank them**: Shields uses their own audience to point to other people’s work rather than positioning themself as the answer. The value to the procurement community, they argue, lies in the free templates, charts and frameworks practitioners share. A ranking would turn that shared effort into a contest.

## Work to read

- [When a vendor disappears: supplier continuity as a buying criterion](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shieldsmichaeld_not-going-to-lie-the-news-about-pulley-shook-activity-7510720779513298946-6Rn7)
- [Discounts are like credit cards](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shieldsmichaeld_procurement-guy-here-discounts-are-like-activity-7511037690172166144-0Gl1)
- [Why procurement belongs at the sales kickoff](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shieldsmichaeld_it-genuinely-surprises-me-how-infrequently-activity-7510338061881221120-juG0)
- [Credit where it is due: practitioners who teach procurement for free](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shieldsmichaeld_am-i-saying-that-tom-mills-tanya-w-and-activity-7511738319731441665-38Q5)

## Partnerships

Michael Shields posts original procurement analysis and commentary on LinkedIn, covering supplier continuity risk, the cost of undisciplined discounting, why procurement should be in the room at sales kick-offs, and recommendations of other procurement educators. The posts do not mention sponsorships or partnerships, and none has a rate card, media kit, sponsor policy, or disclosed paid arrangement. One post names and praises three practitioners—Tom Mills, Tanya W., and Simon Frost—and shares examples of their free charts, templates, and frameworks. It presents this as recognition but does not state whether there is a commercial relationship. For a brand planning a campaign, there are no published formats, specifications, or operational requirements to plan against, and no dedicated partnership or sponsorship inquiry route. The only contact point is their LinkedIn profile, a general professional profile rather than a partnership channel. Ask directly whether they accept sponsorships and what formats, specifications, and requirements they offer.

## Alternatives

- Simon Frost: If the campaign shifts from supplier continuity to AI adoption, Simon Frost is the closer starting point. Frost's posts offer a ready-made teaching structure, not just a topic list: a five-question agent framework covering what an agent is, what it can do in procurement, whether to buy or build, what it needs in data, context and permissions, and how much autonomy to allow. The skills post adds a second structured lesson: a poll showing procurement readers ranked category-management skills over category knowledge 81 to 19 percent, followed by the argument that AI closes knowledge gaps while stakeholder engagement, commercial judgement and critical thinking become more valuable. A brand selling AI procurement tools or running enablement sessions for a buying team can use the two posts as a session outline. Frost is also the better choice when the campaign needs a named training offer to attach to: the skills post closes on the Procurement Adventurer Academy and a February 2027 cohort.
- Justin Etkin: A better fit when the same procurement audience is being sold on AI cost governance rather than supplier continuity. Etkin's posts make a concrete operating argument: AI spend behaves like raw-material spend because token usage moves daily and pricing changes can outrun a two-to-three year renewal. Procurement therefore belongs in a role where engineering owns usage, finance owns the forecast and procurement owns the price. That is a sharper fit than Michael Shields for a brand selling procurement intelligence, price benchmarking or contract software, and for a campaign aimed at a team adopting a cost-visibility routine rather than a scorecard question. Etkin also offers something Shields's posts do not: a worked customer story with a number attached — Carta's procurement team finding an incremental 21 percent of savings after a vendor stopped moving — usable as a proof-shaped asset.
- Dave Miz: Only when the campaign shifts from B2B procurement to consumer-side pricing. Dave Miz's posts cover the same subject — discounts — at a different level of the funnel. For a DTC or ecommerce brand deciding where an offer belongs in a lifecycle email sequence, the welcome-discount argument is directly usable: placing a discount in the first email teaches a ready buyer to wait, while moving it to the fourth email and limiting it to non-buyers lifted revenue per email from $361 to $473 in one client's case. The post walks through a named brand's welcome flow as the example. That tested claim, with a before-and-after number, is a stronger asset for a campaign aimed at discount strategy than anything in the Shields procurement posts.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/