Meet Diego: The Conversation That Decides Whether You Keep the Account
Diego Martínez is the easiest meeting on your Tuesday calendar, and the one you are most likely to misplay.
He is the Chief Coffee Officer of Banyan Coffee Co., a 203-store specialty chain in Singapore. He is 48, Colombian, and he travels six months of the year - to farms in Colombia, washing stations in Ethiopia, cooperatives in Yemen. He builds the relationships that put a particular variety of bean in a particular Banyan cup at a particular price. Most of the company's competitive edge runs through him.
He also has a relationship with Marco Visentin - your former colleague, your firm's former partner on this account, the man who built it over four years and left for a competitor six weeks ago. Marco understood Banyan's soul, the briefing memo says. Marco sat with Diego in airport lounges between sourcing trips and talked about coffee the way coffee people talk about coffee. He understood what Banyan was, not just what Banyan sold.
You are not Marco. You will never be Marco. The temptation to either claim Marco's relationship or to pivot away from it as fast as possible is enormous, and both moves will cost you the meeting.
What you are walking into
This is the scenario After Marco, available free throughout June on RolePlays.ai. You are a senior consultant at Sun Consulting on the day your firm finds out whether it keeps a $4.2 million account.
The setup, in one paragraph: Banyan is PE-backed by Nordwind Capital in Stockholm. The board reviews vendor relationships every four years, and the next review is in six weeks. Three firms are in the frame. Marco's new firm, Meridian, is one of them. You are flying to Singapore for four back-to-back meetings - the Head of Store Operations, Diego, the CFO, and the Board Chair. Your Managing Partner's last line in the briefing email is the one you remember: Tuesday is not a pitch meeting. If you treat it as one, we will lose the account.
The scenario is built on the Trust Equation - Credibility plus Reliability plus Intimacy, divided by Self-Orientation. Each of the four meetings stress-tests a different part of that equation. With the CFO it's credibility and self-orientation under fee pressure. With Operations it's reliability. With the Board Chair it's an explicit pitch invitation you have to decline.
With Diego, it's intimacy.
Why intimacy is the hardest one to get right
Most senior consultants underuse intimacy. The word itself sounds out of place in a partner-track conversation. So consultants either skip it - "Hi Diego, thanks for the time, let me walk you through our point of view" - or they perform it. That must have been hard. We're so sorry Marco left. Both moves are observably bad. The first dismisses what is actually in the room. The second turns Diego's loss into a moment of corporate empathy theater.
Diego will not say much about Marco. He probably will not say his name. What he will do is bring coffee into the conversation in a way that invites you in or shuts you out, depending on whether you can travel with him. He will mention a particular farm. A particular harvest. A relationship that has taken eight years to build and that he has been thinking about because he was just there last month.
Most consultants will hear that and look for the angle. Interesting - how is the geopolitical risk affecting your sourcing strategy? That's a reasonable question. It's also a self-orientation move. The Trust Equation reads it instantly: you took something Diego cared about and converted it back into something Sun Consulting can sell against.
The harder move is to stay where Diego is for a beat longer than feels comfortable. To ask about the farm. To listen to the answer. To resist the pull to make it useful.
A different way of saying this: Diego will tell you who he is in the first three minutes. Whether you hear him decides whether the next thirty are real.
The other three meetings
Aisha Ong runs store operations. She is 42, eight years at Banyan, and the meeting before yours - the one she had with Marco's team six weeks ago - ended with a commitment that was not kept. She will not raise it directly. She will test you on whether you make precise, kept, follow-through-able commitments, or whether you hand-wave like the team before you.
Henry Lim is the CFO. Twenty-two years in finance, six of them Big Four. He has read the engagement letter. He has read the deliverables. He is the one who will probe whether your last $1.8 million produced anything you can defend with a number. He will, at some point in the conversation, offer you a discount on the next phase. Taking it is the wrong move. Refusing it is also the wrong move. The third option is the only good one.
Annika Lindgren chairs the Board. Stockholm PE, Operating Partner at Nordwind, 51. She will be brief, friendly, and at some point in the conversation she will explicitly invite you to pitch. Pitching is what loses the account. Declining the pitch is what saves it - if you can decline without sounding evasive.
Four meetings. Four trust tests. The same person walks into all of them, with twenty minutes for each one, and the question the AI feedback answers at the end is not "did you save the account." The question is: at which moment did you make the move that would have saved it, or the move that would have lost it.
What this is and is not
This is not a sales-training scenario. It is not a pitch coaching exercise. It does not test whether you can present your firm's value proposition cleanly. It tests whether you can sit with what is in the room when an account is bleeding trust and a board is six weeks from a decision.
That makes it the right scenario for senior consultants on partner track. For account leaders inheriting a relationship someone else built. For practice leadership teams who have ever watched an account walk away and asked, in the post-mortem, exactly where the trust collapsed.
It also makes it, if you have never quite forgiven yourself for a relationship that left when you weren't looking, a useful 20 minutes.
Try it in June
After Marco is free throughout June on RolePlays.ai. Twenty minutes per meeting, four meetings in the scenario. You can do them across a week or back-to-back on the same evening.
Diego is in the second room.
If your firm wants this kind of practice built around your own accounts - your own difficult conversations, your own trust equation under your own kind of pressure - we'd love to talk.