A twelve-page ESG questionnaire arrives at a supplier from a department they have no relationship with, asking about concepts they have never encountered, with no explanation of why or what happens if they ignore it.
It will be forwarded once and then forgotten. That is not a supplier problem.
Four changes that move the response rate
- 01
Ask twenty, not two hundred
Rank by spend and by the emissions intensity of what they supply. Twenty responses covering most of your upstream spend beats two hundred requests returning six.
- 02
Ask for specific things
Not 'complete our questionnaire'. Instead: how many kilowatt-hours and how many litres did your facility consume last year, and can you attach a bill. A finance manager can answer that in an afternoon.
- 03
Attach it to procurement
A request arriving with a renewal or purchase order gets answered. The same request sent by the sustainability team in isolation frequently does not.
- 04
Explain the consequence honestly
Where a supplier cannot give real figures, you have to estimate from spend — and that estimate is usually less favourable than their real number. That sentence does more work than any amount of sustainability framing, because it serves their interest rather than yours.
And the ones who still cannot
Most of them, in year one. Use a spend-based estimate, label it as one, and record the basis against each figure so your disclosure can state how much of Scope 3 is supplier-reported and how much is estimated.
That ratio improving year on year is a better story than a flat number, and it is one you can actually tell. What you must not do is silently omit a category because the data was hard — it is the most visible gap in any Scope 3 disclosure and the first thing a reviewer looks for.