The client keeps asking for a senior person to repeat my answer

I am the account lead for a client I have supported for eight months.

I run the weekly meetings, prepare the recommendations, and coordinate the internal specialists. The client contact is polite to me. He also asks for confirmation from “someone senior” whenever I give an answer he does not like.

If I say a request will take two weeks, he asks whether a director can confirm the timeline. If I explain that the data cannot support a particular conclusion, he asks to hear it from our vice president. When a senior colleague repeats my answer in nearly the same words, he accepts it immediately.

At first, I treated the requests as caution. The account is important, and I am younger than the client contact. I brought senior people into the calls.

That solved the immediate disagreement and taught him that my answer was provisional until a more senior voice arrived.

My manager sees the pattern but says client confidence matters more than internal pride. She suggests that I keep leading while inviting a director to “reinforce” difficult messages. The directors are supportive, but their presence changes the meeting. The client starts addressing them, and I become the person advancing slides for a conversation I prepared.

I do not need the client to admire me. I do need enough authority to perform the role the company assigned me. If every boundary requires executive confirmation, I am not leading the account. I am collecting questions for someone else.

I want my manager to state the authority explicitly at the start of the next review: I own day-to-day recommendations and delivery commitments; escalation is available for genuinely new risk, not for repeating an answer until the preferred one appears.

If the client asks again, I plan to say, “That is the team’s answer, and I am authorized to give it. If you have new information or want to escalate the business impact, we can do that separately.”

I am careful not to claim I know why he discounts my answers. The pattern could reflect age, title, habit, or a general preference for hierarchy. The effect is the same.

How would you rebuild authority after months of accommodating this pattern? When does bringing in senior support strengthen an account lead, and when does it quietly replace them?