Most corporate supplier-diversity pages are a logo, a paragraph, and a dead inbox. Principal Financial Group's is unusually concrete. The company runs a program it calls Supplier Inclusion, it publishes a real registration form, and it has put a dollar figure on the door: a goal of spending $100 million with diverse suppliers in the U.S. by 2025, with a 2024 target of sourcing at least 5% of eligible U.S. spend (roughly $42 million across tier one and tier two) from diverse businesses.
That last detail matters more than the headline number. The 5% target is what a procurement team gets measured against. When you understand what they are being asked to hit, you understand what they actually want from you.
What Principal buysPrincipal is a Des Moines-based global financial services and asset-management company. Retirement plans, insurance, investment management. Its own page describes procuring "goods and services from a variety of businesses" without breaking out categories, so treat any category list as inference rather than gospel.
The practical read: a company this size spends on the things every large financial firm spends on. Professional and consulting services. IT, software, and managed services. Marketing, print, and events. Facilities, office, and travel. Legal and HR support. Data and research. If your business sells into corporate operations rather than to consumers, you are in the addressable set.
What it does not buy from a cold introduction is anything that looks like a sales pitch with no procurement context. The registration is the front door, not the close.
How registration actually worksPrincipal's Supplier Inclusion page is open registration, not invitation-only. There is a "Register now" button that takes you into a supplier profile form. This is the part founders get wrong: they treat the form as a contact request. It is a database entry.
Filling it out does not trigger a buyer to call you. It puts your company into the pool that sourcing managers query when a relevant need opens. So the job is to make your record findable and credible for the moment a category manager runs a search.
A few things that improve your odds:
- Be specific in every free-text field. Name the exact services, the NAICS codes, the certifications, and the named clients you can reference. "Marketing services" loses to "bilingual direct-mail production for regulated financial products, 50-state compliance."
- List your diverse certifications by issuing body and number. More on that below.
- Capture once, reuse everywhere. You will fill out near-identical profiles for dozens of corporations. If you build a clean master record of your business details, owner demographics, and documents, registration stops being a multi-hour chore. That is the entire premise behind CertifyAll and a structured supplier profile: enter it once, deploy it across programs.
Principal does not publish a dedicated supplier email address. Questions about the sourcing process route through the company's general service-and-support page, so do not burn time hunting for a buyer's direct line that is not posted.
The diversity-certification angleThis is where Principal is refreshingly explicit. The Supplier Inclusion program recognizes certifications from a specific set of bodies, and matching one of them is what flips your record from "vendor" to "diverse supplier" inside their tracking:
- NMSDC (minority business enterprise / MBE)
- WBENC (women's business enterprise / WBE)
- NGLCC (LGBTQ+-owned business)
- USPAACC (US Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce)
- Disability:IN (disability-owned business)
- NaVOBA (veteran- and service-disabled-veteran-owned)
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (for veteran validation)
- Other federal, state, or local government agency certifications
If you are not yet certified, get certified before you lean hard on this door. An uncertified minority- or women-owned firm can still register, but it will not count toward Principal's diverse-spend goal, and that goal is the lever moving procurement decisions. The NMSDC route is the most common path for minority-owned businesses selling into Fortune 500 financial firms; our NMSDC certification guide walks through the affiliate councils, the documentation, and the timeline.
One nuance worth knowing: third-party certification (NMSDC, WBENC, NGLCC) carries more weight with a corporate program than a self-attestation, because the corporation can report it to its own stakeholders without re-verifying.
The Tier-2 side doorHere is the path most first-time corporate suppliers miss. Principal's diverse-spend target counts tier one and tier two spending. Tier one is what Principal pays you directly. Tier two is what Principal's large prime vendors spend with diverse subcontractors and then report back up.
In plain terms: you do not always have to win a direct contract with Principal to be part of how Principal hits its number. If you subcontract to one of the staffing agencies, IT integrators, marketing firms, or facilities providers that already hold Principal contracts, your diverse spend can roll up into Principal's tier-two reporting. That makes you useful to two parties at once: the prime that needs diverse spend to keep its own contract competitive, and Principal, which needs the rolled-up total.
How to work it:
- Identify the large primes serving financial-services clients in your category. Ask whether they have a supplier-diversity or Tier-2 reporting program of their own. Most enterprise primes do.
- Position yourself as the prime's diverse-spend solution, not just a subcontractor. You are helping them report a number they are already obligated to chase.
- Keep your certification current and your reporting clean, because tier-two credit depends on documentation the prime can pass through.
Principal has also run a supplier-development pilot, pairing a small cohort of diverse suppliers with a business coach and a growth curriculum. That is a signal: the program is built around developing suppliers over time, not just transacting once. Showing up certified, registered, and easy to work with is how you get on the radar for that kind of relationship.
Put the pieces in orderThe realistic sequence is short. Get third-party certified by a body Principal recognizes. Register through the Supplier Inclusion form with specific, searchable detail. Pursue tier-two relationships with primes already inside Principal while you wait for a direct opportunity. Keep your profile and documents in one place so the next twenty corporate registrations take minutes, not hours.
Principal is one of dozens of corporations running an open, certification-aware supplier program with a public spending goal. If you want to see which other companies recognize your certifications and accept direct registration, the corporate program directory is a faster way to find the next ten doors than searching them one at a time.
