If you’re leading a growing professional services firm, especially in technology or marketing, there’s a good chance your client relationships are more fragile than they look.
You may have strong NPS, an account team “owning the client,” and a delivery machine running hard. But underneath? Silos are growing. And they’re quietly eroding your execution, trust, and commercial potential.
The Hidden Risk of Siloed Growth
At the $15M–$30M revenue range, services firms often hit a wall where:
- Clients start to churn for mysterious reasons.
- Sales overpromises, and delivery struggles to keep up.
- Account Managers get stretched too thin, trying to fill gaps between functions.
What’s really happening? You’ve scaled functions, not relationships. And now, those functions are out of sync.
Too many firms assign “client health” to a single team: Client Services, Customer Success, or Account Management. But building strong, economic relationships isn’t a department’s job. It’s an organizational capability.
Client Success Is a Team Sport
When companies lean too heavily on account managers or client services to solve all client issues, they create dependency without leverage. These teams become human patch cables, bridging gaps between Sales, Product, Delivery, and Leadership, but burning out in the process.
Instead of acting as problem-solvers, account managers should be orchestrators. They should drive high-level alignment across functions, championing shared understanding, and ensuring a unified experience.
Think of them like Product Managers on the business side. Product managers don’t write code themselves but instead align teams around what needs to be built and why. Similarly, Account Managers must align the business around who the client is, what they value, and where they’re going.
What Breaks Down When You Don’t Orchestrate
When client execution is not cross-functional and orchestrated, here’s what breaks:
- Delivery teams execute in a vacuum, unaware of strategic goals.
- Sales teams push expansion at odds with delivery capacity.
- Client feedback never makes it to product or leadership.
- Leaders hear only anecdotal data, not real signals.
The result? Confusion, frustration, and preventable churn.
What High-Growth Firms Do Differently
Elite services firms treat client execution as a team sport with institutional memory. They build systems that:
- Ensure radical transparency across departments
- Use shared metrics to evaluate client health
- Institutionalize client context not in people’s heads, but in systems
- Empower Account Managers to orchestrate, not firefight
- Involve executive sponsors and functional leaders in ongoing client strategy rather than just QBRs
When everyone from Sales to Product to Delivery is singing from the same sheet of music, the client feels it. The relationship strengthens. And growth accelerates.
This Is the Shift That Professional Services Firms Must Make
If your services firm is scaling and you’re still relying on account management as your client safety net, you’re at risk.
The path forward is to break silos, institutionalize insight, and orchestrate the client journey across functions. This isn’t theory. It’s the operating model of the most successful, execution-oriented services companies.
If you’re interested in finding out more, see how Knownwell equips Account Managers to shine in every part of their role.
