If your best rainmaker left tomorrow, what would happen to your pipeline?
Here’s a question that makes some marketing and BD teams slightly uncomfortable.
If your best rainmaker resigned tomorrow, what would happen to your pipeline?
Not just the opportunities they’re currently working on. What would happen to the relationships behind them? The clients who call them directly. The prospects they’ve known for 15 years. The introducers who automatically send work their way. The people they have coffee with who barely know anyone else in your firm.
Would those relationships stay with the business, or walk out of the door?
For a lot of professional services firms, growth still depends heavily on a small number of very well connected individuals. That’s a BD risk nobody enjoys talking about.
The problem isn’t having rainmakers
Most firms have them. The partner whose network seems endless. The director who can pick up the phone and get a meeting almost anywhere. They’re enormously valuable, and every business would like more of them.
The problem is what happens when too much of the pipeline depends on them.
It can create the illusion of a very healthy BD operation. Revenue is coming in, introductions are happening, opportunities appear. Underneath that, there may be very little structure holding it together. Remove one or two people and the picture changes completely.
Count the threads
Here’s a straightforward exercise you can run this month.
Take your top 20 clients by revenue, plus your five most valuable introducers. For each one, count how many people at your firm have had meaningful contact with them in the past 12 months, and how many people at their organisation you’re connected to.
Be strict about what counts. A meeting, a substantive call, working together on a matter, or hosting them at something all count. A LinkedIn connection, being copied into an email chain and sitting in the same room at a conference don’t.
Then score them.
- One to one. One person here knows one person there. This is a single thread, and it snaps easily.
- Narrow. Two or three connections, but all flowing through the same relationship owner.
- Broad. Multiple people on both sides, in different teams, with contact that doesn’t depend on any one individual.
You’ll usually find at least a few of your largest clients sitting in the first category. That’s the conversation worth having, and it’s much more powerful with a number attached than as a general worry.
You don’t need new technology for this. Contact records, matter and billing data, event attendance lists and a 15 minute conversation with each client lead will get you most of the way there.
Is it their relationship or the firm’s?
The count usually exposes something the firm already half knew.
If all communication flows through one person, all the client knowledge sits in their head and nobody else has meaningful contact, the relationship is vulnerable. That matters for succession. It matters if someone leaves for a competitor. It matters if responsibilities change. And it matters commercially, because one person can only see the opportunities they’re personally exposed to.
A partner who has known the general counsel for 20 years may have no idea what the operations director is worrying about.
Don’t wait until somebody is retiring
Succession is usually the moment firms start thinking about transferring relationships. A partner announces they’re going in 18 months and everyone starts asking who should be introduced to which client.
That’s late. Relationships don’t transfer because two people were copied into the same email.
A handover that actually works tends to run in stages over a couple of years. The successor sits in on meetings first. Then they lead a part of the agenda while the relationship owner is still in the room. Then they own a workstream or a specific contact outright, with the rainmaker available but not present. Then they lead, and the original relationship becomes one of several rather than the only one.
The practical version is simpler than it sounds. Pick two clients per successor. Agree who they’re being introduced to and by when. Put it in the client plan so it’s visible, and review it quarterly rather than mentioning it once a year in an appraisal.
This is also why rising talent needs to be at client meetings and industry events long before they’re expected to bring work in themselves. None of it diminishes the rainmaker. It makes the relationship stronger and, usually, larger.
Cross-selling builds resilience, not just revenue
Cross-selling is normally discussed as a revenue question. What else could we sell this client?
There’s a second benefit that gets far less attention. Every additional service line creates another set of relationships between the client and your firm.
A client who knows one person and buys one service is fragile. A client who works with three teams, knows six people and understands what else you do is a much more durable relationship, and considerably harder for a competitor to unpick.
So when you’re building the case for cross-selling internally, use both arguments. Some partners will engage more readily with protecting a key client than with the revenue upside.
The point isn’t to introduce everyone to everyone. It’s to find the genuine reasons to bring useful colleagues into a relationship, which usually means starting with something the client actually needs rather than a service you’d like to sell.
Add resilience to your pipeline reviews
Pipeline conversations focus on opportunities. What’s coming in, what’s it worth, what’s the probability, when might it convert. All useful.
Try adding one more column: how many people here have a relationship with the buying organisation?
A £500,000 pipeline concentrated around two individuals tells you something very different from a £500,000 pipeline supported by relationships across the firm. Same number, very different risk.
If you want a single measure to report, use the proportion of your top 20 clients sitting in that “broad” category, and track whether it moves over the year. It’s a slow number, which is exactly why it’s worth watching.
How to raise it without causing offence
This subject can land badly if it sounds like you’re questioning someone’s value or hinting they’re on their way out.
Frame it around the client rather than the individual. “If you were unavailable for three months, who would this client call?” is a fair question that most partners will answer honestly, because it’s really about client service rather than their loyalty.
It also helps to be clear about what you’re offering. You’re not asking them to hand relationships over. You’re offering to help them build the firm’s presence around a client they’ve spent years developing, so it survives holidays, illness, sabbaticals and eventually retirement.
Your best rainmakers are genuinely valuable, and marketing and BD should absolutely help them develop their networks. But part of your job is making sure those relationships belong to the firm as well as to them.
So take your best rainmaker out of the picture for a moment. What happens to your pipeline?
If the answer makes you nervous, you know where your next BD conversation needs to start.
Need help?
If you would like help with your marketing and business development, bringing on a marketing consultant with a fresh pair of eyes can make all the difference. I work with B2B businesses and professional service firms in London, Kent, the UK, and Europe, specialising as a legal marketing consultant. Please get in touch or book a free 30-minute consultation.
