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Hi all. Throughout this forum on some threads I've seen some people give pretty detailed insight into which seniors are the "rainmakers" and bring in deals, and which seniors tend to be weaker. I was just curious how y'all are able to figure those things out and know which seniors were responsible for originating the deals, on on the flip side, which seniors have been dead weight at their banks and haven't done a single deal in years. Is it just something you learn after spending a few years on the job through exposure?
Can only speak to my experience.
"Dead weight" MDs are fucking insufferable. Understandable considering how much pressure they're under to deliver but an absolute pain in the ass to work with. Lots of micromanaging, volatile and at least the ones I've worked with, lots of unnecessary work. When there is no strength or depth in a client relationship, the fallback for people like this is massive decks with every piece of analysis under the sun. I had one MD in particular who would sketch out like 60-80 slide decks and the days leading up to pitches would trash like 60% of the work.
The rainmakers I've worked with don't lean on massive presentations full of scenarios and analyses. They have really strong relationships and have a good pulse on what the client actually wants to see and what would win the mandate. A really good understanding of the business, and the landscape - who's buying who, who is writing checks, who would be the best fit as a target, the right partner as a financier or buyer, that sort of thing. There is one MD I work with now who generally takes at most 4-5 slides half of which he writes himself and walks out with mandates. Absolute baller.
There are two primary ways I believe:
First is word of mouth. Over time, certain big names consistently pop up in conversations and people just "know" who are the rainmakers. Big name MDs I can of think of as I type include: Skip McGee from Lehman/Barclays, Alan Schwartz from Bear/Guggenheim, Ben Lorello from UBS/Jefferies, Paul Taubman from MS/PJT, Aryeh Bourkoff from UBS/LionTree, etc.
Second is personal experience. There tends to be a negative correlation between amount of BS and how much dough a MD brings in. Rainmakers won't ask you to boil the ocean on a pitch, for example. Rainmakers tend to win sellside mandates via relationships and in person meetings, not on how pretty a deck looks.
I think what you're trying to ask is how people know so much about specific players in this industry, versus how do you tell the difference between an MD that sucks and one who balls out.
Same way people who habitually pay attention to sports news/gossip figure out who the key players are on each team. You look at enough press releases and work on enough syndicates, etc. and over time you get a pretty good sense for who the movers and shakers are within your neck of the woods. When people talk in extreme specifics about several different Senior Bankers at one group it is typically because they have direct experience working for that group, competing against that group or working across from that group (on the buy-side).
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