Who owns the organisation’s client relationships?

Written by Liz Ashton from Symbioss

Most service business leaders will recognise this. The senior person you rate highly asks for a quiet word and twenty minutes later, they’ve resigned perfectly pleasantly.

You act, of course, and reassure the clients who will be impacted, but a few weeks later, two of them call to say that while they’ve been very happy with the work, they aren’t sure they will stay.

So no service failure or complaint, but a meaningful slice of your income looks like it’s preparing to leave.

What we discuss less

We seem to talk more about the risk of losing our main contact within the client, and less about this version of it, the person leaving being a colleague. It gets less attention because it is more awkward.

The risk sits on our side and the person creating it is someone we hired, promoted and now depend upon.

And it raises a question about who actually holds these client relationships, and then how you keep them when colleagues leave. Note when, not if. People retire, get promoted, get poached.

If the candid answer is that one person holds the relationship, you may want to consider how much of it is actually the organisation’s.

The better they are, the bigger the problem

In some ways, the more brilliant the client-facing person is, the bigger the issue. Their client relies on their judgment and way of working. Their history and approach cement the bonds. Very little of that is written down anywhere, and the better they are at it, the less anyone else is involved.

This is an argument for noticing that individual brilliance and institutional strength are not the same thing, and that the first can crowd out the second, although with some companies, it can be the other way around. The balance needs to be right between the trusted relationship of client, organisation and supplier, and between the people running that relationship.

The best evidence on this comes from US professional services, so this is a direction rather than a UK measurement. Decipher found in 2024, researching the US legal sector, that only about a third of the clients a departing senior person claims as their own actually go with them. That, however, is still a serious hole.

Why the usual fixes don’t fix it

Companies find two actions helpful, and neither works 100 per cent of the time.

The first is a tech solution. On the Legal Sales and Service Organisation’s figures (again US), more than 80 per cent of law firms have a CRM system and only 20 per cent rate it as effective.

Fewer than four in ten lawyers use it at all, and of those who do, just over 25 per cent use it regularly (LSSO, 2023). So the point is this: buying the platform and declaring the matter fixed doesn’t work.

The second is an employment contract with non-solicit and the more restrictive non-dealing clauses used.

A plain non-solicit can be nugatory where the client makes the first approach, because nothing has been solicited. Care is needed here because it’s never a good look suing a former employee when a client has moved with them.

So what do you actually do?

The problem is real. These are the three activities I would focus on.

1 Build a client relationship plan for your organisation, focusing on your key clients

This includes what the client does and is trying to achieve, where the value is and what would make them stay. One thing worth doing straight away: write down what you believe you add for that client, then ask whether they would describe it the same way.

Value only counts through their lens, not yours, a harder concept to get your head around than you think.

2 Make a succession map with your team, and act on it

For every client you cannot afford to lose, you want the current relationship holder and at least one other person who would hold it if your key person left tomorrow. Do something about the gap while things are going well, because once someone has resigned the introduction is seen as being more self-serving, and defensive.

Most organisations have no plan at all. A poll at a Legal Marketing Association session in April found 55 per cent saying their organisation had no succession plan, and another 23 per cent not sure (Passle, 2026). Again, this is US based.

3 Widen the relationships deliberately

Buying committees are the norm now. Forrester puts a typical B2B buying decision at 13 people inside the client organisation plus nine external influencers (2026). Obviously, company size will impact this, but the point being, clients are no longer relying on one contact making the decision of who the supplier should be.

What it costs, and why it is worth it

Yes, this additional action will cost resources and senior time, the scarcest thing you have. It means introducing a second person into relationships that are working perfectly well without one. I know this feels like solving a problem you don’t have. However, it’s far better to do this now when the relationship is working.

The reason that this is not frequently addressed is not that leaders disagree with it. It is that relationship breadth, contact coverage and succession risk are rarely measured until it’s too late.

There is one finding worth knowing. Davies and Ryals surveyed 209 organisations running formal key account management programmes, more than half of them in the UK and around 25 per cent in professional and financial services sectors. The more thoroughly these types of practices were built into the way the organisation worked, the better it did on all nine measures they tested.

The initial outcomes were at the client end, which makes sense. So, satisfaction, a stronger relationship and a willingness to invest alongside you. Then came the supplier benefits: your own revenue and margin and cost efficiencies. The supplier benefits were less predictable. So, it is worth doing, but may not deliver a quick return.

For many organisations, this is not necessarily a programme. It is a proper conversation about each client twice a year with a named second person for the clients you can’t afford to lose, and two to three introductions that would otherwise not have happened. It costs resources, but you will become more resilient as a consequence.

About the author

Symbioss helps B2B services companies optimise their client relationships by bringing a systematic commercial capability to the management of these valuable assets. Symbioss delivers these improvements using a tailored programme, incorporating the RelaValue System. If you’d like to talk about applying a more systematic approach to your client relationships, get in touch.