Why Your Best Clients Need a Relationship Manager
You know who your best clients are in terms of the revenue they bring in. Often, these clients engage your firm for multiple services, like audit, tax and advisory. Who “owns” that relationship at the client level?
An audit partner owns one relationship, a tax manager owns another and an advisory leader has their relationship with the client. Each service leader manages their piece well, but nobody owns the overall client relationship, and the client experiences a firm that feels fragmented. They get separate document requests and have different technology touchpoints. They have separate conversations that never connect back to a shared understanding of what the client is trying to accomplish.
This is a structural problem, and the answer is to appoint a defined relationship manager role for your top clients.
The difference between tenure and ownership
Firms often default to the team member with the longest tenure on an account as the de facto relationship owner. Tenure breeds familiarity, but familiarity isn’t the same as strategic ownership.
A true relationship manager understands the client's goals, priorities and pain points well enough to see how every service the firm provides connects to them. That requires working across service lines, coordinating internal and external resources and translating the client’s business objectives into a coherent firm strategy rather than a set of disconnected engagements.
This isn’t a byproduct of seniority, and firms that treat it that way end up with clients who have several point people and no one accountable for the relationship as a whole.
What does this cost your firm?
In an accounting firm, concentration tends to run higher than the firm’s leaders expect if they don’t measure it.
Firms that track revenue by client often find a small number of top clients account for a disproportionate share of the business. When a handful of relationships carry that much weight, the risk of losing even one of them grows accordingly.
A concentrated client base negatively impacts a firm’s valuation and signals risk to potential buyers. That concentration works against you in client retention. Your competitors pay close attention to your largest clients. If your top clients receive a fragmented client experience, you run the risk of someone else promising a better one, and your firm loses that revenue.
The economics run the other way when you get client retention right. Research from Bain & Company found that a 5% improvement in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%, depending on the industry.
Your top 25 clients are disproportionately expensive to replace and disproportionately profitable to keep. This makes the case for putting real structure behind those relationships rather than leaving them to chance.
Here’s how one Top 100 firm handles it
At one Top 100 firm we work with, the CEO’s top priority is meeting in person with the firm’s top 25 clients. These meetings go beyond “check-ins.” The CEO sits down with each client to understand their goals and pain points, then works to ensure the managing partner understands the client well enough to align firm strategy accordingly.
Those 25 relationships generate over half of the firm’s total annual revenue.
These meetings are a deliberate operating discipline, reflecting the CEO’s belief that the people running the firm need direct, current knowledge of what their most important clients need rather than a summary passed down through service line leaders.
A relationship manager role formalizes this discipline at scale so strategic client ownership doesn’t depend on one executive’s calendar.
Building the relationship manager role
The relationship manager for a top client sits above the individual engagements. They’re responsible for three things:
Understanding the client’s business and goals well enough to anticipate needs before the client raises them
Coordinating the firm’s internal and external resources so the client experiences one coherent team
Owning the client’s overall satisfaction and growth trajectory with the firm
The role requires enough seniority to work across service lines and enough client-facing skills to build trust at the level clients expect from people who understand their business beyond the compliance calendar.
Firm leaders must formally define the role, assign it deliberately and hold relationship managers accountable for outcomes at the client level.
Firms that skip this step manage services well but manage clients poorly. Your top clients notice the difference when someone owns the client relationship, and so will the firm’s growth numbers.
Do you want to connect with other Audit Leaders in the accounting profession to strengthen quality, consistency and collaboration across your assurance practice?
The Boomer Audit Leader Circle is a peer group of audit and assurance leaders from successful and growing firms who collaborate to address risk, enhance audit quality and modernize assurance services. Apply now to build trusted relationships with peers navigating the same regulatory, talent and client demands shaping the future of audit leadership.
Jon Hubbard is a nationally recognized consultant, keynote speaker and thought leader helping accounting firms drive strategic growth, enhance client relationships and develop future-ready leaders. As a Shareholder and Chief Growth Officer at Boomer Consulting, he leads several peer networks and serves as the Director of the Boomer Circle Summit, where firm leaders exchange ideas, share best practices and develop strategies to navigate growth and change. Jon is passionate about helping firms embrace change, leverage technology and create a culture of innovation.
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