Written by Melvin Bosso with many thanks to Charlie Hart
The four kinds of account leaders
On the northern edge of The Hague, where canals cut through neat rows of brick houses, the suburb of Leidschendam was unusually quiet for a Saturday morning. Inside one of those houses, two men were making anything but quiet progress. Retired consultant Nanan Martin and his younger friend, account leader David Lung, were halfway through repainting the living room. Dust sheets covered the furniture like snowdrifts, the windows were cracked open to let the smell of fresh paint escape, and trucks hummed faintly on the distant A4.
“Can I ask you something from your consulting days?” David said, loading his roller. “Why do some account leaders give their clients lots of access to other partners, while others guard the relationship like a secret recipe?”
Nanan smiled. “You’ve just described the four kinds of account leaders I spent a career watching.” He dipped the roller into the tray again. “Look at this room and you’ll see all of them.”
“Imagine this wall is the client relationship,” he said. “Two things matter: how good the relationship is, and how often you’re actually in the room with the client’s real decision makers.” He drew an invisible cross with his roller. “High and low quality on the vertical, high and low frequency on the horizontal. You end up with four types of partners, and they behave very differently when it comes to opening the door for others.”
David stepped back, squinting at the wall as though he could see the matrix appear in the fresh coat of paint. “So who are the first group, the generous ones who always seem to bring more people in?”
“Those are the rainmakers,” Nanan replied. “They see the client like this whole house, not just this wall. Their relationship is strong, and they’re in the house a lot. They know they can’t paint every room alone, so they bring more painters.”
He told David about a global manufacturing client he had worked with years earlier. “We started with a small cost‑reduction project in one plant,” he said. “The lead partner could have kept it for himself and his little team. Instead, he pulled in a supply‑chain partner from Germany, a digital partner from the U.S., and even a tax specialist. The client suddenly realized we could help them with the entire operating model, not just that one facility.” Over time, the firm’s revenue with that client more than doubled, reflecting how rainmakers expand accounts by building connected networks and cross‑practice teams.
“These rainmakers invest intentionally in broad networks at the client,” Nanan said. “They build relationships with the CFO, COO, CHRO, heads of business units, anyone who shapes the agenda. When they bring colleagues in, it isn’t random. They curate the right expertise for the issue on the table. Because they’re confident in their own value, they don’t feel threatened by other partners. In their minds, if the house looks great, everyone wins.”
David nodded. “So those are the people always introducing ‘my colleague from operations’ or ‘my partner from cyber’ or ‘our expert from Brazil’.”
“Exactly,” said Nanan. “They’re expanding the surface area of the relationship every time they show up. Clients feel as if they have the whole firm behind them, not just one smart person with a business card.”
Opportunists, bench‑sitters and mis‑hitters
They moved to a corner that still showed the old paint. Outside, the Vliet canal glinted between houses, cyclists gliding past toward the historic locks in Leidschendam’s old centre. “Then you have the opportunistic leaders,” Nanan went on. “Their relationship is strong, but they only show up at critical moments, like when the CEO calls because the roof is leaking.”
He remembered another example, this time at a major bank. “The lead partner had a direct line to the CEO,” Nanan said. “Whenever there was a crisis, regulatory issues, system outages, reputational hits, he got the call. But outside those moments, he rarely engaged the broader executive team. He hesitated to involve other partners in case someone said the wrong thing or undermined his carefully managed trust with the CEO.”
“These leaders are very protective,” he explained. “They worry that bringing others into the room might confuse the client, or upset the one sponsor they really rely on. They’re not hoarding out of greed; they’re optimizing for safety. The problem is, safety caps growth. At that bank, we missed chances to help with data, risk, and HR because no one else really had permission to build their own relationships. When the CEO retired, the account shrank dramatically. It was like painting just the area you can reach from one ladder, neat and tidy, but the ceiling stays untouched.”
David rolled a patch near the floor. “What about the people who don’t share because…they don’t seem to have much to share?”
Nanan laughed. “You’re describing bench‑sitters and mis‑hitters.”
Bench‑sitters, he explained, barely see senior stakeholders at all. “Think of the partner who is technically the ‘relationship lead’ but spends most of their time buried in delivery on smaller projects,” he said. “They might have regular contact with middle managers, but they rarely get in front of the C‑suite. When a colleague asks, ‘Can you introduce me to the COO?’ they mumble something about timing not being right, or the client being too busy.” Many organisations still treat account management as a task assigned to a few people instead of an organisational mindset, which leaves these partners isolated and under‑supported.
He recalled a utilities client where the named account lead had not met the new CFO in over a year. “When we suggested bringing in our capital‑projects partner to help with a new build program, he resisted. Eventually we discovered he hadn’t even been invited to the steering committee meetings. He didn’t want another partner in the room because it would reveal how thin his relationship really was.”
“Mis‑hitters are different,” Nanan said. “They’re in the house all the time, but painting the wrong walls.” These partners can point to a calendar full of client meetings, but the conversations rarely touch the client’s biggest priorities. “I knew one who was famous for turning every meeting into a status update on old work. The client’s strategy had shifted to new markets, and he was still talking about last year’s process‑improvement project. He met them often, but he missed what actually mattered.” Poorly targeted, one‑sided updates like this eventually erode trust and make clients less willing to invest time.
“Those partners often resist bringing in others,” Nanan added, “because they think activity equals impact. From their perspective, ‘I’m always there, so things must be fine.’ But deep down, they’re nervous that if a colleague comes along and reframes the conversation around the client’s real agenda, the contrast will be obvious.”
“So in both cases,” David summarized, “limited access or low‑quality access means limited collaboration.”
“Right,” Nanan replied. “You can’t share a room you’re barely allowed to walk into, or where you’re known only as the person who paints the wrong color.”
They paused to look at the now‑even coat of paint. The low Dutch light poured in through the front windows, turning the fresh white into a soft silver. From the street, a tram bell rang on its way toward The Hague’s city centre.
The attic test and the three roles of a relationship leader
After a quick coffee break, they moved upstairs. David led the way into the sloping attic, where exposed beams framed a new skylight. Rolls of mineral wool insulation lay stacked against the wall; one section of the roof already had yellow panels fitted snugly between the rafters, like slices of cheese tucked into a sandwich.
“Now this,” Nanan said, pulling on gloves and a dust mask, “is the perfect metaphor for what happens later in a client relationship.”
They hoisted a thick slab of insulation toward the ceiling. “At the beginning, access is like this attic,” he explained. “It’s raw, a bit chilly, but full of potential. The more you insulate, meaning the more relationships you build across the client, the warmer and more resilient the space becomes.”
He pushed the insulation into place between two beams. “Rainmakers don’t just paint the visible walls,” he said. “They also work on the hidden structure: the quiet conversations with finance, risk, procurement, operations. They strengthen the whole envelope of the relationship, so it can handle storms, budget cuts, leadership changes, new competitors.” Well‑run account programs encourage this kind of cross‑functional engagement, treating client health as a shared responsibility across the organisation.
David reached for the next slab. “So when an account leader won’t give access,” he said, “it’s like insisting on doing the entire attic alone. They get tired, they cut corners, and there are always cold patches where the wind gets in.”
“Exactly,” Nanan replied. “And sometimes they’re up here with the wrong tools. Think of mis‑hitters: they’re hammering away enthusiastically, but using the wrong material, in the wrong place. Bringing in a colleague who really understands, say, data or supply chain is like calling the insulation specialist instead of guessing your way through it.”
They worked in silence for a few minutes, broken only by the sound of staplers, shifting boards, and the occasional creak from the ladder. The attic slowly transformed from a drafty storage space into something that might one day be a study or a bedroom.
Nanan finally stepped back. “You know the best test?” he said. “If you wouldn’t invite another partner into ‘your’ client the way you invited me into this renovation, something’s off. Either you don’t fully trust your colleagues, you don’t fully trust your client, or you don’t fully trust yourself.”
David looked around the attic, imagining it finished: a desk under the skylight, shelves along the wall, maybe a bike leaning in the corner, ready for weekend rides along the Vliet. “And if you get it right?”
“Then it starts to feel like this,” Nanan replied. “More hands, better job, stronger relationship with the homeowner. The house is warmer, the paint is smoother, and everyone who lives here feels the difference. The rainmakers figured that out early. The rest are still painting alone in half‑finished rooms, wondering why the house never seems to grow.”
At the end of the day’s work, as the attic in Leidschendam finally stopped echoing and began to feel like a real room, Nanan wiped dust off his gloves and looked over at David. “You know,” he said, “all this talk about who lets others into the client’s house leads to a bigger question: what does it actually mean to be a client relationship leader?”
David leaned against a beam, the skylight above them framing a slice of Dutch sky. “I’ve heard a dozen definitions,” he said. “But if you had to boil it down?”
“Three things,” Nanan replied. “Be an ambassador for the firm, be a trusted advisor to the client, and be the number one advocate for shared value creation.”
He picked up a stray strip of insulation, folding it in his hands as he spoke. “First, being an ambassador for the firm. Most partners think that means talking about their own practice or their own credentials. It doesn’t. It means helping the client understand the full range of value the firm can offer—capabilities, geographies, specialist skills, even points of view they haven’t asked for yet. Ambassadors translate the firm into the client’s language. They don’t say, ‘We have a great cyber practice.’ They say, ‘Here’s how our cyber team helped a company like yours get through an attack and come out stronger.’ They connect dots between the client’s agenda and the firm’s strengths, and they do it without turning every conversation into a sales pitch.”
David thought of a recent meeting where he had stayed narrowly in his own lane, even though he knew his firm had teams who could have solved adjacent problems. “So if I’m not helping the client see the bigger picture of what we can do,” he said, “I’m not really leading the relationship. I’m just managing my project.”
“Exactly,” Nanan said. “Second, a client relationship leader is the client’s trusted advisor. That phrase gets overused, but it’s simple: you help the client shape a winning agenda, not just deliver on today’s tasks. Trusted advisors are willing to talk about issues that haven’t yet turned into projects. They bring outside perspectives, challenge assumptions respectfully, and sometimes tell the client, ‘Don’t do this,’ even when it costs them work. They invest the time to understand the client’s politics, constraints, and personal stakes, so their advice is not only smart but also usable.”
He looked around the half‑finished attic. “Think of it this way: a contractor will ask which wall you want insulated and then do exactly that. A trusted advisor might say, ‘If you’re planning to turn this into a study, you’ll regret not adding soundproofing and extra wiring now.’ They think ahead on your behalf and aren’t afraid to say what you need to hear rather than what you want to hear.”
“And the third?” David asked.
“The third is being the number one advocate for shared value creation,” Nanan said. “That means you’re not just fighting for your firm’s revenue or the client’s discounts; you’re obsessed with outcomes where both sides win and can prove it. You care about the client’s success metrics as much as your own. You design deals, teams, and roadmaps that align incentives—fees linked to impact, joint teams, co‑authored business cases, shared risks and upside. You push back when work is scoped in ways that are comfortable for your firm but unlikely to move the needle for the client. And you push back just as hard when the client asks for things that will burn out your people or erode quality.”
He tapped one of the new insulation panels. “Shared value is like this layer in the roof. If you only care about your side, you’ll stuff material into your half of the cavity and leave gaps everywhere else. It looks full from one angle, but the room stays cold. When you’re a true advocate for shared value, you make sure the insulation runs clean and continuous from beam to beam. The house gets warmer, energy bills drop, and nobody argues about who owns which square centimetre.”
David smiled. “So being a client relationship leader isn’t about being the biggest name on the account chart,” he said. “It’s about being the ambassador who brings the firm to life, the advisor who helps shape the agenda, and the advocate who fights for outcomes that work for everyone.”
“Exactly,” Nanan replied, glancing around the transformed attic. “If you do those three things, inviting more partners into the client’s house stops feeling like a risk. It becomes the only way to finish the job properly.”
Written by Melvin Bosso with many thanks to Charlie Heart
On the northern edge of The Hague, where canals cut through neat rows of brick houses, the suburb of Leidschendam was unusually quiet for a Saturday morning. Inside one of those houses, two men were making anything but quiet progress.wikipedia+1
Retired consultant Nanan Martin and his younger friend, account leader David Lung, were halfway through repainting the living room. Dust sheets covered the furniture like snowdrifts, the windows were cracked open to let the smell of fresh paint escape, and trucks hummed faintly on the distant A4.
“Can I ask you something from your consulting days?” David said, loading his roller. “Why do some account leaders give their clients lots of access to other partners, while others guard the relationship like a secret recipe?”
Nanan smiled. “You’ve just described the four kinds of account leaders I spent a career watching.” He dipped the roller into the tray again. “Look at this room and you’ll see all of them.”
“Imagine this wall is the client relationship,” he said. “Two things matter: how good the relationship is, and how often you’re actually in the room with the client’s real decision makers.” He drew an invisible cross with his roller. “High and low quality on the vertical, high and low frequency on the horizontal. You end up with four types of partners, and they behave very differently when it comes to opening the door for others.” Research on rainmakers in professional services shows that only a small subset of partners truly excel at business development, and they stand out by how they connect clients and colleagues and create value through collaboration.paconsulting+1
David stepped back, squinting at the wall as though he could see the matrix appear in the fresh coat of paint. “So who are the first group—the generous ones who always seem to bring more people in?”
“Those are the rainmakers,” Nanan replied. “They see the client like this whole house, not just this wall. Their relationship is strong, and they’re in the house a lot. They know they can’t paint every room alone, so they bring more painters.”
He told David about a global manufacturing client he had worked with years earlier. “We started with a small cost‑reduction project in one plant,” he said. “The lead partner could have kept it for himself and his little team. Instead, he pulled in a supply‑chain partner from Germany, a digital partner from the U.S., and even a tax specialist. The client suddenly realized we could help them with the entire operating model, not just that one facility.” Over time, the firm’s revenue with that client more than doubled, reflecting how rainmakers expand accounts by building connected networks and cross‑practice teams.kimtasso+1
“These rainmakers invest intentionally in broad networks at the client,” Nanan said. “They build relationships with the CFO, COO, CHRO, heads of business units—anyone who shapes the agenda. When they bring colleagues in, it isn’t random. They curate the right expertise for the issue on the table. Because they’re confident in their own value, they don’t feel threatened by other partners. In their minds, if the house looks great, everyone wins.” Studies of top rainmakers show that they reserve time for business development every week, track their outreach, and treat collaboration as a discipline, not a happy accident.paconsulting+1
David nodded. “So those are the people always introducing ‘my colleague from operations’ or ‘my partner from cyber’ or ‘our expert from Brazil’.”
“Exactly,” said Nanan. “They’re expanding the surface area of the relationship every time they show up. Clients feel as if they have the whole firm behind them, not just one smart person with a business card.” In firms that build a culture of shared ownership for client success, this kind of cross‑partner teaming becomes normal and strengthens loyalty over time.[grovaleulers]
They moved to a corner that still showed the old paint. Outside, the Vliet canal glinted between houses, cyclists gliding past toward the historic locks in Leidschendam’s old centre. “Then you have the opportunistic leaders,” Nanan went on. “Their relationship is strong, but they only show up at critical moments—like when the CEO calls because the roof is leaking.”kids.kiddle+1
He remembered another example, this time at a major bank. “The lead partner had a direct line to the CEO,” Nanan said. “Whenever there was a crisis—regulatory issues, system outages, reputational hits—he got the call. But outside those moments, he rarely engaged the broader executive team. He hesitated to involve other partners in case someone said the wrong thing or undermined his carefully managed trust with the CEO.”
“These leaders are very protective,” he explained. “They worry that bringing others into the room might confuse the client, or upset the one sponsor they really rely on. They’re not hoarding out of greed; they’re optimizing for safety. The problem is, safety caps growth. At that bank, we missed chances to help with data, risk, and HR because no one else really had permission to build their own relationships. When the CEO retired, the account shrank dramatically. It was like painting just the area you can reach from one ladder—neat and tidy, but the ceiling stays untouched.”
David rolled a patch near the floor. “What about the people who don’t share because…they don’t seem to have much to share?”
Nanan laughed. “You’re describing bench‑sitters and mis‑hitters.”
Bench‑sitters, he explained, barely see senior stakeholders at all. “Think of the partner who is technically the ‘relationship lead’ but spends most of their time buried in delivery on smaller projects,” he said. “They might have regular contact with middle managers, but they rarely get in front of the C‑suite. When a colleague asks, ‘Can you introduce me to the COO?’ they mumble something about timing not being right, or the client being too busy.” Many organisations still treat account management as a task assigned to a few people instead of an organisational mindset, which leaves these partners isolated and under‑supported.[grovaleulers]
He recalled a utilities client where the named account lead had not met the new CFO in over a year. “When we suggested bringing in our capital‑projects partner to help with a new build program, he resisted. Eventually we discovered he hadn’t even been invited to the steering committee meetings. He didn’t want another partner in the room because it would reveal how thin his relationship really was.”
“Mis‑hitters are different,” Nanan said. “They’re in the house all the time, but painting the wrong walls.” These partners can point to a calendar full of client meetings, but the conversations rarely touch the client’s biggest priorities. “I knew one who was famous for turning every meeting into a status update on old work. The client’s strategy had shifted to new markets, and he was still talking about last year’s process‑improvement project. He met them often, but he missed what actually mattered.” Poorly targeted, one‑sided updates like this eventually erode trust and make clients less willing to invest time.
“Those partners often resist bringing in others,” Nanan added, “because they think activity equals impact. From their perspective, ‘I’m always there, so things must be fine.’ But deep down, they’re nervous that if a colleague comes along and reframes the conversation around the client’s real agenda, the contrast will be obvious.”
“So in both cases,” David summarized, “limited access or low‑quality access means limited collaboration.”
“Right,” Nanan replied. “You can’t share a room you’re barely allowed to walk into—or where you’re known only as the person who paints the wrong color.”
They paused to look at the now‑even coat of paint. The low Dutch light poured in through the front windows, turning the fresh white into a soft silver. From the street, a tram bell rang on its way toward The Hague’s city centre.wikipedia+1
After a quick coffee break, they moved upstairs. David led the way into the sloping attic, where exposed beams framed a new skylight. Rolls of mineral wool insulation lay stacked against the wall; one section of the roof already had yellow panels fitted snugly between the rafters, like slices of cheese tucked into a sandwich.
“Now this,” Nanan said, pulling on gloves and a dust mask, “is the perfect metaphor for what happens later in a client relationship.”
They hoisted a thick slab of insulation toward the ceiling. “At the beginning, access is like this attic,” he explained. “It’s raw, a bit chilly, but full of potential. The more you insulate—meaning the more relationships you build across the client—the warmer and more resilient the space becomes.”
He pushed the insulation into place between two beams. “Rainmakers don’t just paint the visible walls,” he said. “They also work on the hidden structure: the quiet conversations with finance, risk, procurement, operations. They strengthen the whole envelope of the relationship, so it can handle storms—budget cuts, leadership changes, new competitors.” Well‑run account programs encourage this kind of cross‑functional engagement, treating client health as a shared responsibility across the organisation.linkedin+1
David reached for the next slab. “So when an account leader won’t give access,” he said, “it’s like insisting on doing the entire attic alone. They get tired, they cut corners, and there are always cold patches where the wind gets in.”
“Exactly,” Nanan replied. “And sometimes they’re up here with the wrong tools. Think of mis‑hitters: they’re hammering away enthusiastically, but using the wrong material, in the wrong place. Bringing in a colleague who really understands, say, data or supply chain is like calling the insulation specialist instead of guessing your way through it.”
They worked in silence for a few minutes, broken only by the sound of staplers, shifting boards, and the occasional creak from the ladder. The attic slowly transformed from a drafty storage space into something that might one day be a study or a bedroom.
Nanan finally stepped back. “You know the best test?” he said. “If you wouldn’t invite another partner into ‘your’ client the way you invited me into this renovation, something’s off. Either you don’t fully trust your colleagues, you don’t fully trust your client, or you don’t fully trust yourself.”
David looked around the attic, imagining it finished: a desk under the skylight, shelves along the wall, maybe a bike leaning in the corner, ready for weekend rides along the Vliet. “And if you get it right?”wikivoyage+1
“Then it starts to feel like this,” Nanan replied. “More hands, better job, stronger relationship with the homeowner. The house is warmer, the paint is smoother, and everyone who lives here feels the difference. The rainmakers figured that out early. The rest are still painting alone in half‑finished rooms, wondering why the house never seems to grow.”
Would you like a separate short sidebar after this story that lists 5–6 concrete behaviors partners can adopt to “invite more painters into the house” for use in workshops or training decks?
Tò
- Not all account leaders are equal: rainmakers build frequent, high‑quality relationships and invite colleagues in, while opportunists, bench‑sitters and mis‑hitters either protect access, lack access, or misuse it, capping the growth of the account.
- True growth comes from sharing the client: partners who orchestrate multi‑disciplinary teams, introduce specialists and broaden contact across the client organisation create larger, more resilient relationships than those who “own” a narrow sponsor.
- Fear limits collaboration: some leaders hoard clients out of insecurity, over‑reliance on one sponsor, or worry about colleagues outshining them, while others mistake activity for impact and resist bringing in people who could reframe the conversation.
- Relationship health is like renovating a house: painting visible walls is not enough; strengthening the “hidden structure” through many cross‑functional relationships insulates the account against leadership changes, budget cuts and competitors.
- Being a client relationship leader means three things: act as ambassador for the whole firm, serve as trusted advisor shaping the client’s agenda, and be the top advocate for shared value so both client and firm win and can see the impact.
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