If you sell components, you have lost a deal to an AVL. You won the evaluation, the engineer liked the part, and then the conversation ended with a sentence that sounded final: we can only use approved vendors.
The 2026 Buyer Journey Study went looking for how solid that wall actually is. It turns out to be one of the most encouraging findings in the whole report.
Sixty-two percent of the 750 engineers surveyed operate under some form of AVL constraint. That number on its own sounds like bad news. The breakdown is where it turns around.
So the door is closed for one engineer in twenty. For everyone else, it opens — it just needs a reason.
Then the study asked the AVL-constrained group directly what would motivate them to push for approval of a vendor not on the list. Only 1.13% said they would not push at all. Which means 98.87% would.
Read that again, because it is a remarkable number for anyone whose forecast is haunted by approved-vendor lists. Nearly every engineer under AVL constraint is willing to go into a meeting and argue your case. They are not the obstacle. They are, potentially, your advocate.
Willingness is not the same as motivation, and the study is specific about what makes an engineer spend political capital on a new supplier. Among engineers who use an AVL, the triggers were:
Those top three are the same drivers that move engineers in the general switching question. The difference is the threshold. Cost has to be significant. Capability has to be unique. Supply has to be demonstrably more stable. "Comparable" and "competitive" are fine words for a homepage and useless inside an approval meeting.
Which is genuinely good news, because a higher bar is a clearer bar. You are not guessing at what to prove. You are being handed a list of six things, in priority order, by the people who will be making the argument for you.
Here is the finding that shows where this fight really happens. After an engineer selects a preferred component, AVL restrictions force a change only 1.65% of the time.
That looks like a contradiction until you see the mechanism. The AVL is not blocking parts at the purchase order. It has already shaped what was on the table weeks earlier, during research and evaluation. By the time the engineer makes a recommendation, the list has done its filtering quietly and upstream.
The study also found that 71.20% of engineers recommend the final choice, while only 30.67% approve the purchase. The recommendation is the engineer’s finishing line. Everything after it happens in rooms with procurement, quality and management — rooms your marketing does not enter unless the engineer carries it in.
Most vendor content is designed to persuade an engineer. Very little of it is designed to be forwarded by one. That gap is the single cheapest fix available to a component marketer this quarter, and it is a content project, not an engineering one.
Build a one-page, no-login, forwardable justification packet that contains:
Then make it findable without a form. A packet that requires a sales conversation to obtain is a packet that never reaches the approval meeting.
The AVL is not a wall. It is a process with a 98.87% participation rate. Engineers will make your case; they simply cannot make it out of a brochure and a spec table.
Win the technical evaluation and you have earned an advocate. Hand them the packet and you win the slot.
Every AVL figure in this post comes from the 2026 Buyer Journey Study, free to download in full. Get the study →
This research was conducted by EETech in partnership with SparkWire. The 2026 Buyer Journey Study surveyed 750 qualified professional engineers worldwide in May 2026. Margin of error ±3.6% at a 95% confidence level.
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