The Merry-Go-Round: Why the Global Compliance Industry Forgot How to Sell
I've seen this play out more times than I can count. You get the call. A vendor(recruiter) is hiring. The pitch is always the same: we have the best platform, the strongest marketing, the most supportive leadership team. This time it's different. This time you'll have everything you need to succeed.
You take the job.
Then week two arrives. The sales enablement isn't what they described. The marketing is thinner than the deck suggested. And the quiet pressure starts building almost immediately: work your network. Call your contacts. Let them know you're here now. So you do. Because that's the job. You reach out to everyone you've sold to, everyone you've built a relationship with over the years, and you tell them why this vendor is better, more capable, more aligned with what they need.
Eighteen months later you're at a different vendor. Same contacts. Same pitch. Different logo on the slide deck.
I've watched talented people cycle through 4, 5, even 6 vendors in a decade. Not because they couldn't sell, but because the industry gave them no other way to grow. And the clients on the other end of those calls? They know exactly what's happening. They take the demo anyway because they like you. Because the relationship makes evaluation feel unnecessary.
That's the merry-go-round. And it's quietly destroying trust across an entire industry.
This Isn't a People Problem. It's a Structural One.
The BD professionals caught in this cycle aren't the villains. They're responding rationally to incentives that reward short-term relationship extraction over long-term value creation.
The problem is structural. When an industry can't demonstrate clear, objective differentiation between providers, it defaults to relationships as the primary sales mechanism. And when relationships become the product, the only growth strategy left is to hire people who have them.
According to Forrester's 2025 B2B Buying Study, 68% of B2B buyers now prefer to conduct their own research before engaging a vendor, up from 53% in 2021. The modern buyer doesn't want to be sold to. They want to evaluate on their own terms. Yet the compliance and EOR industry continues to rely almost exclusively on relationship-driven outreach as its primary go-to-market motion, a strategy increasingly misaligned with how buyers actually want to buy. The result is an industry that grows by recycling relationships rather than earning new ones.
Who the Merry-Go-Round Actually Serves
Let's be honest about who benefits from this model and who doesn't. The vendor gets a short-term revenue bump when a BD hire activates their network. Existing relationships convert faster than cold pipeline. The board sees growth. Everyone moves on.
The BD professional gets a salary, a title, and the illusion of leverage, until the warm contacts dry up, performance pressure mounts, and the cycle repeats at the next vendor.
The client gets pestered. They receive the same outreach, from the same person, pitching a different product, every 12 to 18 months. They sit through demos they didn't ask for. They evaluate vendors they don't need. They waste procurement cycles on relationships they felt too polite to decline.
A 2024 Gartner report on B2B buying behavior found that the average enterprise buying group now spends only 17% of their total purchase journey actually meeting with potential suppliers. The rest is spent on independent research, internal alignment, and trying to filter signal from noise. The merry-go-round generates almost exclusively noise.
Why Companies Keep Falling For It
If the model is this broken, why does it persist? It persists, because buyers have no alternative framework.
When there is no objective, third-party evaluation of vendor capability, no scoring model, no structured criteria, no neutral shortlist, buyers default to the only signal available: trust in a person they already know.
And the merry-go-round exploits that trust perfectly.
Your former colleague calls. They seem credible. They have context about your business from the last time you worked together. The vendor they're representing sounds reasonable. You take the demo, maybe you even buy. Not because the vendor was the best fit but because the relationship made evaluation feel unnecessary.
According to LinkedIn's 2025 State of Sales Report, 89% of buyers say they are more likely to consider a vendor if introduced by someone they trust. The merry-go-round doesn't just exploit this statistic. It's built entirely on top of it.
The bias isn't a character flaw, it's human. But in a market as complex as global compliance, where coverage gaps, delivery failures, and misclassification risks carry real legal and financial consequences, buying on relationship alone is a liability masquerading as efficiency.
The Industry Isn't the Exception. It's the Rule.
It would be convenient to frame this as a compliance industry problem. It isn't.
The merry-go-round is industry agnostic. It shows up wherever three conditions exist simultaneously:
Products or services that are difficult for buyers to evaluate objectively.
Markets where vendor differentiation is unclear or overstated.
Sales cultures that reward relationship activation over pipeline creation.
Fintech. HR tech. Staffing. Consulting. Professional services. The same pattern emerges in every market where the product is complex enough to obscure comparison and the sales motion relies on personal credibility to bypass scrutiny.
What makes global compliance particularly acute is the consequence of getting it wrong. A misclassified worker in Germany. A missed statutory filing in Brazil. A payroll error in the Philippines. These aren't inconveniences. They're operational and legal events with real financial exposure.
In this environment, buying from whoever called you last isn't just inefficient. It's a governance risk.
The Fix Isn't a Better Salesperson
The instinct when reading this is to conclude that the industry needs better BD talent, people who build pipeline organically rather than mining their contacts. That would help, but it doesn't solve the core problem.
The core problem is that buyers have no objective way to evaluate vendors before engaging them. Which means the evaluation happens inside the sales process, where the vendor controls the narrative, selects the case studies, and manages the demo environment. That's not due diligence. That's a guided tour.
What the market actually needs is separation between the relationship and the evaluation.
The vendor your former colleague is now selling may or may not be the right fit for your expansion into Southeast Asia. Their coverage may be thin in the markets you need. Their delivery track record may underperform their sales pitch. Their financial health may introduce vendor risk you shouldn't be carrying.
You deserve to know all of that before you take the call. Not after.
Why KonduitHUB Exists
We didn't build KonduitHUB because the global compliance market lacks vendors. It has hundreds of them. We built it because buyers have no neutral way to evaluate them and the industry has no incentive to change that, because opacity is what makes the merry-go-round spin. Our scoring model evaluates every vendor across 22 structured criteria and 6 weighted pillars before a client ever sees a name. No vendor pays for placement. No relationship influences a ranking. The score is the score.
The result is a shortlist built on evidence, not exposure. On capability, not contacts. The merry-go-round keeps spinning because nobody built the off-ramp.
That's the only reason we exist.
Steven Fernandez is the Founder of KonduitHUB, a neutral vendor matching platform that helps companies identify and engage the right global compliance providers, free of charge to the company, with no vendor influence on rankings or placement.
Sources
1. Forrester Research: 2025 B2B Buying Study. Finding cited: 68% of B2B buyers prefer to conduct their own research before engaging a vendor, up from 53% in 2021. forrester.com
2. Gartner: B2B Buying Behavior Report, 2024. Finding cited: The average enterprise buying group spends only 17% of their total purchase journey meeting with potential suppliers. gartner.com
3. LinkedIn: State of Sales Report, 2025. Finding cited: 89% of B2B buyers say they are more likely to consider a vendor if introduced by someone they trust.business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/state-of-sales