In my almost 20 years of energy consulting, I have seen so many customers try to get the best price by sending pricing requests to as many people as possible. Sometimes it goes to 2-3 brokers and to many suppliers, all at the same time, in the name of getting the best price.
The problem is that this doesn't produce a better price, it produces the opposite. Suppliers and brokers talk all of the time and word gets out quickly that someone is "fishing" or "shotgunning" and instead of competing harder, they pull back. Nobody wants to invest real effort in a deal where a customer is not committed to anyone which drasitcally reduces the chance of winning.
The fix is to commit to a single advisor who runs a genuine competitive process on your behalf, across multiple suppliers, structures, and products. Customers who do this consistently get sharper pricing and better market coverage, because the person managing the process can coordinate and communicate across all of the suppliers, making the customers' lives acutally easier.
Why the shotgun approach backfires
Sending the same load to multiple brokers doesn't create competition, it creates noise. Suppliers can tell when the same request is landing on their desk from three different directions at once, and they respond by pulling back rather than sharpening their pencil. Meanwhile, every broker involved is doing partial work, because they know there is no loyalty or commitment from the customer. The result is thinner analysis, less useful market intel, and pricing that never gets as sharp as it would from someone who knew the business was actually theirs to win. Worse, they could get nothing at all. I normally do not respond to wild goose chases and spend time focussing on my loyal cusotmers, spending time on their needs rather than some tire-kicker.
The same problem shows up when companies go around the brokers entirely and send RFPs directly to suppliers at the same time they're shopping it through brokers. Suppliers and brokers talk to each other and they remember who does this. Once a request has come in from three or four different channels, the market starts to recognize the account as one that's always fishing rather than buying, and that reputation sticks. The next time you're out for pricing, suppliers quote you their defensive number instead of their sharp one, because they've concluded you were never going to commit to anyone in the first place.
When brokers and suppliers figure out what's really going on with an account, there's a lot of eye rolling. Everyone involved has seen it before, and everyone knows how it ends. It creates real friction on both sides, and the natural response from both is to stop trying as hard, because nobody wants to be the one who did the work while someone else closed the deal.
I've seen this from the other side
I've had prospective customers where I did everything right: ran a full market analysis, pulled a genuine spread of pricing, delivered intel they couldn't have gotten from most brokers, and walked them through contract structure and risk in detail. Then they took that work and shopped it around, or went straight to the supplier with the numbers I had built for them. They have that option but as they say "Fool me once....".
It happens most often on the small loads. A facility with a modest usage profile doesn't feel worth protecting a relationship over, so the broker gets treated as disposable. The irony is that small loads are exactly where an advisor relationship pays off the most, since no one else is going to put in real effort on a deal that size unless they're confident it's actually theirs.
Commit to an advisor instead
The better process isn't more brokers competing for scraps of your attention. It's one advisor who's genuinely accountable to you, and who has every reason to earn that accountability through results rather than volume. A few things worth insisting on:
- Choose someone who will run a full competitive process on your behalf, rather than simply quoting you their own book of suppliers.
- Confirm they're pulling multiple suppliers, multiple contract structures, and multiple products, not presenting one option dressed up as a shopping process.
- Let them own the supplier relationships so they can negotiate with real standing, rather than have every supplier assume they're one of five names in a race to the bottom.
- Hold them accountable for outcomes, not activity. You should still be seeing genuine coverage of the market, it's just being managed by one person who is on the hook for the result.
This is the idea behind how we work at GTI Energy Advisors. Working with one advisor doesn't mean fewer prices, it means more of them, and better ones, because the person running the process has real skin in the game.