Why M&A and Growth Strategy Firms Should Skip the Platform Debate

Some consulting relationships are genuinely recurring: an ongoing advisory retainer, a standing steering committee. M&A and growth strategy work is often structurally different, tied to a specific transaction or strategic decision with a defined endpoint. A client might not need your firm again for two years, or ever, regardless of how the relationship went. Usage-based health scoring assumes an ongoing relationship to measure drift in; a lot of this work doesn't have one to measure.

For a deal-based practice, the real goal usually isn't renewal, it's referral and repeat engagement when the next relevant transaction or strategic decision comes up. That means the signals worth tracking are different from a subscription business: how the engagement actually landed with the client's leadership, whether the firm stayed visible to the client between engagements, and whether the firm gets called first the next time something relevant comes up, or has to compete for the introduction.

Track, per client relationship: the date and outcome of the last engagement, a partner's honest read on how it landed with leadership, whether there's been any deliberate contact since the engagement closed (not just a holiday email), and any signal about upcoming activity, a board conversation, a stated growth plan, that could lead to the next engagement. Review this quarterly at a partner meeting, focused specifically on dormant relationships that haven't had a deliberate touchpoint in six months or more.

For each client relationship, record:

• The date and outcome of the last engagement, so you know how long the relationship has been dormant.
• A partner's honest read on how the engagement landed with the client's leadership.
• Whether there has been any deliberate contact since the engagement closed, not just a holiday email.
• Any signal about upcoming activity, such as a board conversation or stated growth plan, that could lead to the next engagement.

The most common failure mode isn't a badly run engagement, it's silence afterward. A firm that delivers excellent work and then goes quiet for eighteen months until the next opportunity surfaces is easy for a client to forget, or for a competing firm to get in front of first. Staying lightly, genuinely present between engagements, a relevant article, an invitation to a firm event, a check-in tied to something happening in the client's industry, does more for repeat business than any scoring platform could.

Picture two client relationships that both closed a similar mid-market acquisition advisory engagement around the same time. In one, the lead partner stayed in touch quarterly afterward, sharing a relevant market note twice and attending an industry event the client's CEO also attended. Eighteen months later, when that client considered a divestiture, the firm was the first call.

In the other, the engagement closed cleanly, the invoice was paid, and the relationship went dormant with no deliberate follow-up. Two years later, when that client needed similar advisory work, a partner from a different firm happened to be the one who'd stayed visible through a mutual board contact, and got the call instead. The deal work itself was comparably strong in both cases. The difference was entirely what happened, or didn't, in between.

Neither outcome would show up in a usage-based health score, since neither client ever logged into anything at all during either relationship. The signal that mattered was entirely about deliberate, tracked follow-up, exactly the kind of thing a simple quarterly-reviewed list catches and a platform built for product telemetry never would, regardless of how configurable it is.

Some M&A and growth strategy firms also run standing advisory retainers alongside deal work, board advisory, ongoing strategic counsel. That recurring piece behaves more like the consulting relationships covered in Gainsight vs ChurnZero for Management & Strategy Consulting, where a lightweight relationship tracker still beats either platform absent real usage data. Route whichever tracker you build into Salesforce so dormant relationships surface next to the rest of your business-development pipeline, and use Gong on any client calls to catch early signals about upcoming activity. See Gainsight vs ChurnZero vs Salesforce for how that fits together.