Head of Consultant Relations

Lantern

2h•$225,000 - $275,000•Remote

About The Position

The Head of Consultant Relations will be responsible for executing Lantern's consultant relations strategy through named ownership of our major consulting and brokerage house relationships. This team both educates on the Lantern value proposition and differentiators for our surgery, cancer, and infusion care products, while simultaneously gathering insight and feedback to help Lantern continuously refine our messaging and support for our consultant partners. The team also partners closely with leaders from Sales and Client Success on relevant consultant-led client growth and expansion opportunities. Consultant Relations creates value primarily by being embedded in live deals and by building deep, durable relationships at both the national and local level — not by generating outreach volume on its own. The Head of the Consultant Relations team will continue to build out the account ownership model, metrics, supporting processes, and roles and responsibilities for the function based on business needs, and will be accountable for the success of the function. They are responsible for ensuring we build and execute on named account plans and coverage across the major houses, that escalations are routed appropriately so the team's capacity is focused on proactive relationship management, and that we have a regular cadence to report out on results against the plan to the Commercial Leadership Team. We recently completed a structured interview series across CR staff, sales leadership, and senior executives on the state of the function. The de-identified findings below are the starting point for this role, not a fixed set of answers — we want this leader's own point of view on how to act on them. Diffuse ownership is a live failure mode. Several interviewees independently described a “nobody owns [major house]” problem — large, high-influence consulting and brokerage houses with no single accountable relationship owner inside Lantern. Named-house ownership, with a cap of roughly 1–2 houses per person, is the model we're building toward. Escalation drag crowds out proactive work. CR's time has been disproportionately consumed by reactive escalation handling. Routing escalations outside CR is a near-term priority so the team's capacity goes toward proactive house management. Relationships build through deal involvement, not cold outreach. Trust with consultants compounds through being embedded in live deals — not through relationship-management touchpoints disconnected from the pipeline. Activity-based KPIs are broadly rejected. Top-of-funnel and activity metrics (meetings held, touches logged) were almost universally dismissed as the wrong way to measure CR, in favor of outcome- and relationship-health-based measurement. Coverage gaps are live, not hypothetical. Texas/Southeast and public sector/labor are both currently underserved segments and an active priority for this role to address. Team-based compensation has been the load-bearing mechanism preventing turf conflict between CR and core sales in the current hybrid model — an important constraint to preserve or deliberately redesign. CR-touched deals skew larger but win at a lower rate. We don't yet know whether that reflects a routing artifact (CR gets pulled into harder, larger, more contested deals) or an execution issue — an open analytical question this leader will be expected to help answer.

Requirements

15+ years of professional experience working with employer health care benefits, either in health and benefits consulting and/or in a client- or consultant-facing role within a health care solution/vendor.
Strong management experience with the demonstrated ability to build, mentor and lead a high performing team, and to foster a culture of continuous improvement, professional development, and accountability.
Deep relationships and credibility across one or more of the top consulting/brokerage firms, ideally from having already done a CR-type, consultant-facing role (not solely a background in consulting itself) — our experience is that this profile builds a network and sales instinct that a straight consulting-to-CR conversion often lacks.
Experience designing or operating a named-account or portfolio-ownership model — with clear accountability per account or territory — in a relationship-management or sales function.
Ability to influence client and consultant points of view and decisions with a thoughtful, data-driven perspective, supported by real-life experience.
Experience in consultative sales or business development.
Strong communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to confidently convey complex information and messages to a broad and diverse audience, both internal and external.
Clear understanding of the mechanics of self-funded medical plans and the relationships between health plans/third party administrators, health care providers, and plan sponsors.
Effective interpersonal skills with the ability to work independently and within a team environment, both externally facing and behind the scenes.
Comfortable working in a high-growth, fast-changing environment; organized, adaptable, diligent, and self-motivated.
Passion for Lantern's mission and collaborating with others.
Bachelor's degree required.

Nice To Haves

5-10 years as a health and benefits consultant within one of the top consulting/brokerage firms.
Strong analytical skills, including experience working with medical claims data to project savings/program impact.
Knowledge of the broader ecosystem of point solutions and health care disruptors selling to self-funded employers.
Experience building outcome-based (rather than activity-based) performance metrics for a relationship-management or sales team.
Ability to adopt a continuous improvement mindset and actively contribute to the processes and procedures of the larger Commercial team.
Experience in an early / growth stage business.

Responsibilities

Owning named house relationships: building deep, accountable relationships at both the national and local market level — with clear, named ownership of each major house, generally capped at 1–2 houses per person — allowing us to influence and educate the intellectual capital point of view while driving business referrals locally.
Staying embedded in deals: relationship value is realized by being part of live deals alongside Sales and Solutions Consulting — tailoring deal strategy and leveraging consultant/broker relationships to gain insight and influence decision factors — rather than through standalone outreach.
Developing content: in partnership with the product marketing and sales enablement team, specific to consultants in general and further tailored to each firm when relevant.
Educating the marketplace: building awareness around the category (surgery COEs and cancer support) and how to evaluate solutions in this space.
Growing the business: improving Lantern's win rate with each consulting/brokerage firm and the quality of opportunities they bring to the table, not simply the number of proposals generated.
Closing active coverage gaps: building out dedicated coverage in currently underserved segments, including Texas/Southeast and public sector/labor.
Managing escalations deliberately: partnering with Sales and Client Success so that reactive, non-strategic escalations are routed outside CR — freeing the team's bandwidth for proactive house management.
Identifying opportunities for improvement: both within and outside of the consultant relations mandate, and where appropriate, how to address them.
Establishing strong cross-functional relationships: by working closely with sales, solutions consulting, client success, analytics, clinical, marketing, network, member services and other related functions to ensure a “one team” approach.