Passing on Relationships #1: The Issue
A couple of years ago, I attended a retreat for all of the new partners at a consulting and accounting firm. The CEO packed a lot of wisdom about the ways to be a successful partner into a twenty-minute, before-dinner speech. I have been turning one bit of advice over in my mind ever since. “Some of you know that when you started on one of my accounts, I always told you to make the client forget my phone number. And some of you did service the clients so well, that they did forget all about me. Now it’s time to encourage the people working on your accounts to make the clients forget your phone number.”
The CEO was addressing one of the perennially difficult aspects of selling professional services and building a practice, the safe transfer of a relationship between a client and a professional to someone else within the professional’s firm. Firms and their senior professionals need to do this for several reasons:
- Retirement: Most obviously, you can’t take a client with you into retirement—at least not if you truly mean to retire. Helping the firm keep your client will help it earn the money it will need to buy out your share of the ownership.
- Upgrading: You will sometimes develop an account that is not the most strategic use of your attentions. Turning the account over to someone else allows you to move on to bigger things.
- Specialization: Fewer people are good at developing new accounts than are good at managing and expanding existing ones. Smart managers of professional firms do all they can to keep the “finders” finding. To have the time for it, finders have to turn over existing accounts to minders.
- Organization Designed for Growth: Some firms build this kind of specialization into their organizational design. Partners mind accounts. To become senior partners, they must pass on these accounts to new partners and then go out and bring in new clients.
The process is commonly referred to as “handing off of a relationship,” a description so inaccurate, it can do harm. A relationship exists between two people and is the product of time spent together, of sharing thoughts and experiences. I cannot give my relationship with a client to you, even if the client were willing, because you weren’t there when the client and I shared those thoughts and experiences. The best that I can do is introduce you to the client and get out of the way while you and she share thoughts and experiences, so building your own relationship. Because “handing off” suggests something simple that I can do for you, it may lead you to sit around and wait for something to be given to you. It will never happen.
The words used by the CEO are much more accurate. I can set you up to meet my client one or more times, but then it is your responsibility to service her so well that she forgets my phone number. Rather than handing you something, it’s then my job to get out of the way, to disappear while you develop your own relationship with the person. How strong that relationship becomes has nothing to do with me, as long as I don’t interfere. It’s up to you and the client.
In a subsequent posting, I will provide some suggestions for doing this.