How McKinsey Got Your Deal

A few years ago, a friend of mine – Sarah – left the consulting firm where she’d worked for nine years.

She was senior at the firm.
Trusted.
The kind of employee who held it together when things got rough.
The partners had built half their delivery model around her.

When she left, they did the right things.
Wrote a generous LinkedIn post.
Brought her flowers.
Said the door was always open.

And then, like every firm does – they got busy with the next thing.

Sarah went on to become Head of Strategy at a mid-market portfolio company. Three years later, she sits on a $200M strategy budget. She personally decides which sub-firms get invited to bid, which ones get the pre-tender briefings, which ones she calls when she needs someone she trusts.

Last quarter, she had a $4M project that fit her old firm exactly.
Same vertical.
Same methodology.
Same problem they’d solved a dozen times in her years there.

She gave it to McKinsey.

McKinsey wasn’t better. McKinsey was THERE. Their Senior Account Manager had been building the relationship since Sarah moved companies.

Lunches.
Strategy sessions.
Sharing thinking.
Three years of deliberate showing up.

Her old firm hadn’t called her once in 26 months.

What’s sad about this situation is her old firm didn’t just lose Sarah.
They lost the NEXT ten years of her career.

The work she will send.
The peers she will recommend.
The intros she will make.
The firm she will eventually start – and who she’ll partner with on her first three deals.

Every one of those is a real revenue line item.
All lost.

None of this appears anywhere in the firm’s CRM.

Because Sarah isn’t a customer.

She’s an ex-employee.
An alumnus.
A relationship the firm has and COULD HAVE leveraged.

But they don’t COUNT it as a relationship.

Every professional services firm depends on more than its current customers.

You depend on alumni – who become buyers, referrers, partners, recruits.

You depend on advisors – who introduce you to firms you couldn’t reach yourself.

You depend on ex-clients – who left on good terms and could return.

You depend on prospects who said no – who say yes in three years when the timing is right.

You depend on partners – accountants, lawyers, fellow consultancies – who introduce you to half your best opportunities.

You depend on referrers – past clients, friends-of-friends, people who put their name behind you.

And you depend on each other – the partners and senior consultants whose individual networks BUILT the firm.

These are not customers.
They are the people your firm’s growth actually depends on.

Now look at your CRM.
It only tracks ONE type of relationship – Customers.

The rest are invisible.

Untracked.
Unmanaged.
Unmoved.

The work to keep those relationships warm is happening in someone’s head – or not happening at all.

Mostly, not happening at all.

There’s a name for it – the Relationship Blind Spot.

And it is the single most expensive blind spot in professional services.
It costs firms more than every paid acquisition channel they invest in combined.

You won’t see it in your dashboards.
You won’t see it in your pipeline.
You’ll see it in the deals that closed for someone else…
… and in the alumni who recommended someone else.

Sarah’s firm will probably never know what they lost.
Most firms don’t.

The first move is to recognize this Relationship Blind Spot.
And just NAME the relationships you depend on.
The ones your firm has but isn’t counting.