A better standard for vendor behavior.
Your firm has earned the relationships in your book. In a market where a BOR can be lost over any missed moment, the experience your vendors deliver is either the reason a client stays or the opening a competitor is looking for. Every vendor you introduce carries your firm's brand into rooms your team will rarely witness.
Every touchpoint is an interaction with your firm's brand.
Vendors are vetted on what they sell. Security. Compliance. Outcomes. They are rarely vetted on how they behave across the full surface area of a client relationship: the conversations, handoffs, operational moments, and edge cases that accumulate across the lifespan of an account.
That surface area is larger than most firms map. Every one of these is a moment where vendor behavior shapes your client's experience of your firm:
Each of these is a moment where a client's impression of your firm either holds or slips. At the scale of a book, the accumulation of those moments is where retention is decided. In a market where competitors are actively prospecting your relationships, the vendor experience across these touchpoints is either a moat or an invitation.
Make the vendor experience a firm-level asset.
Your firm already sets a bar on vendors. Security reviews. Compliance attestations. Data-handling policies. Those matter. None of them prevent a client walking because of how a vendor behaved in a room your team was not in.
And the vendors you place are not yours alone. They work across dozens of brokerages and advisory firms, each with different expectations. Without a behavioral standard your firm can require, the baseline a client experiences is set by a vendor's other relationships, not by yours.
We contribute to early work on standards that evaluate how vendors behave across the moments that shape client perception: sales calls, implementation, customer success, renewal. Every person a vendor puts in front of your client, whether a sales rep, implementation lead, or customer success manager, operates as an extension of your firm's brand. When their behavior is consistent across your vendor ecosystem, clients get a coherent experience that reinforces why they chose your firm in the first place. When it isn't, you get variability you cannot manage from the top, and a competitor's pitch lands on more receptive ground.
What this does for the firm.
A vendor ecosystem that behaves consistently does three things for the business:
- Stabilizes the book. A consistent vendor experience reinforces the reason clients chose your firm. BOR conversations get harder for competitors to open, not easier.
- Protects renewals. When the experience after the sale matches the promise made during it, renewal season is a predictable conversation, not a defensive scramble.
- Differentiates the firm. In a saturated market, a consistently high bar across every vendor introduction is a reason clients stay and a reason prospects switch to you.
Start a conversation about your vendor ecosystem.
If your firm is thinking about vendor consistency as a competitive advantage, we would rather talk with you than at you. Tell us how you think about client experience across your vendor ecosystem, and what a real standard would have to attest to for it to be useful on your desk.