This episode is for you if you’re interested in the role of account management within an app development company. Tim Moore, account director at Sonin joined me. He shared:
- his experience of working in an app development agency
- what he believes makes a successful account manager in his agency
- the typical types of projects he gets to work on
- and he also talked through the process that they follow from initial concept all the way through to final app development.
This is a fascinating episode, I really enjoyed my chat with Tim, and I hope you get some value from it. Now if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, I’d love to ask you a huge favour. Would you please go and leave me a review on Apple podcasts? That means that the podcast gets seen by more people, and I’m able to help more people in the account management role in the creative agency. In order to leave the review, you’ll need to visit the above link via your mobile device, and be subscribed to my podcast.
Transcript:
So I’m delighted to welcome Tim Moore to the show. Tim works for a company called Sonin, and he’s gonna talk to you in a minute about what Sonin does. But the reason I invited him onto the show today was, I want to do a series of interviews with account managers and directors who have specific expertise and specific areas of specialism within the creative field. So today, I’ve chosen to speak to Tim because he has a lot of digital understanding. He’s been in the area for a long time, and I’ve asked him specifically to focus on app development. So Tim, welcome.
Tim 00:36
Thanks. Thank you.
Jenny 00:37
So would you mind spending a few minutes just talking about you, Tim, your experience? How long you’ve been at Sonin and what you do at Sonin and also what Sonin actually does?
Tim 00:46
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So my experience was actually sales. I kind of, I left University went into sales roles, various different things, started my own company. I ran a company in something completely different, in clothing, actually, yes, in ski and snowboard wear. And I sold that about 11 years ago, 10 years ago. And I came on board because I knew with Simon, because I knew the founder and he knew my background in sales. And so about nine years, I’ve been with Sonin for nine years now. And I came on board initially for a short period of time to do a bit of sales. I thought six months and set a few things up, for a startup. And then nine years later, I’m still here. Apparently I’m not allowed to leave now!
Jenny 01:39
I can imagine, I didn’t even know that about your background, that’s really fascinating. So in terms of the evolution of what you’ve seen over the years with Sonin, in those nine years, what did the company start doing? And what does it look like now?
Tim 01:52
Yeah, it’s interesting, actually, because we started, we were born out of a web consultancy, so websites. My MD, Paul, he saw an opportunity in apps. This was pre iPhone, though so the first apps we built were in a Nokia phone, and it was a, first app we built was a Nokia dating app that required Bluetooth, which is a bloody awful idea. You have to be within about a yard of someone and then you got a notification on your Nokia phone. So someone within a yard lights, you know, because they’d be standing next to you. So the iPhone came along and saved us as a business really, and an app development was a good path. But in the early days, we were in all honesty, we were unsure what we were, there was an argument say we were a digital marketing company and a website developer. And over the years, we’ve just focused and focused, niche, niche, niched. And now we can categorically say for the last few years, we are an app development agency. That’s what we do.
Jenny 02:47
Love it, very clear, very, very specific. And have you helped, before I dive into the rest of questions, have you found that that niche positioning has actually accelerated the business? Has it helped? And if so, how has it helped?
Tim 03:00
Yeah, yeah, dramatically helped. And it was something that I was completely wrong about. Because we do also build big web based systems, we do quite often the back end of an app. An apps very thin client, doesn’t do a lot. And there’s some really powerful stuff going on, on some servers somewhere. And we also get really heavily involved in ITand AR and VR and machine learning, all these exciting things. But in terms of how we present ourselves, we’re an app development agency and that’s a starting point for our clients. And I say I was wrong, I say to them we can’t be that focused with our messaging, people won’t contact us, that was absolutely wrong. The more we refined our message and who we were, the easier it became to to market us.
Jenny 03:50
Amazing. Well done. Okay, so I’m gonna probably pick up on the conversation around app development, because I’m eager to pick your brains on that. But first of all, let me ask you the question, what do you think makes a great account manager particularly in an in an agency like yours?
Tim 04:05
Yeah. For us, I know, you obviously wanted to talk to me specifically about app development? I can’t help thinking it’s kind of universal. It’s understanding business. It’s understanding the client, their business, what they’re trying to do. All we’re trying to do is find value in what we do. Gone are the days, early days, people could call us because they needed an app. I remember a big pharma company, you’ll know well probably, called and said, ‘We need an app’. We said, ‘Great, what do you want it to do?’ And they’d say, ‘It doesn’t matter! We need an app!’
Jenny 04:34
Classic.
Tim 04:35
But those days are long gone, and everyone wants a return and we want to provide it. So that’s what keeps our clients coming back. And so the key for account management is understanding the business, their roadmap, their objectives, what they want, what they want to see by the end of the year, what we’re gonna see by the end of a project, understanding the business, understanding value. Those things are integral. I can’t imagine that’s much different from many other industries as well.
Jenny 04:57
I agree totally with what you said there Tim. I absolutely agree. It’s all about having that business acumen, that commercial understanding. And quite frankly, it doesn’t matter what you’re actually delivering at the end, as long as the problem that you’re solving is the right problem. So in order to do that, you have to have an understanding of the business, so you’re talking my language completely. So like, to your point about, you know, they used to come to us and say, ‘I want an app, I don’t quite know why, just do it’. What kinds of problems to clients come to you with now? Like, how do you, what did they see in your offer? What’s the conversation that’s had at that stage?
Tim 05:35
Yeah, I’d say why people come to us is quite varied. But the problems they have, they’re trying to solve, are universal. I read something a while ago, there’s only nine unique business problems, and I can’t list them but it was interesting to me. Yeah, I can’t remember who it was, but I remember thinking at the time, that’s true, you know, we get a lot of people come in. The type of products we build fall into two categories are either enterprise, back end, staff focused apps. So for big, big company, and you’ve got some logistics problems, or operational problems, or whatever it may be, and you’re looking for technology, you’re looking to technology solve that. Or they are customer facing ones, they’re marketing exercise to a point, they’re trying to increase sales or increase revenue. So we internally we say, make money or save money, there’s the two categories that people are looking to do. And so they’ll come to us because, we work with every type of industry, and they come to us, because they can’t communicate well enough. Most recently, a good example, everybody needs a way to communicate that isn’t in person. So they need to build in video chat functions into products or live chat, text chat things.
Jenny 06:56
Okay, amazing. And I love the way you’ve described that actually, this internal focused- saving you money, for external customer focus -making you money. I love that. That’s just so clear. So going back to the account manager role. So the key thing that an account manager has to have is an understanding of the client’s business, the commercial acumen. And then what value do you think the account management role can have within the agency?
Tim 07:21
Within the agency, well I see it very much is a bridge between the two. I did a talk a while ago on what I called the Bow Tie method, essentially, historically, account manager is sat with account manager. So you’ve got an agency behind you one side, all these people working away, and you’ve got a client all and you just communicate through one point. And I said, I like to flip it on its head and open lines of communication across the board and we do. Project managers talk to project managers. In our case, developers talking to client side development teams as well. More communication, the better. The value I see the account management bringing is an understanding, is essentially a representative on both sides with the client it’s a representative of the agency and with the agency, it’s representative of the client. So if I’m doing my job well, I understand the business objectives, what the client wants to achieve, where the return is going to be. And I also understand the technology to a point. I’m not technical, haven’t been, you know, a bit of a crash course nine years ago when I joined, but I understand what technology can do and how you can leverage it. And so somewhere in the middle of those two things, and being the conduit for both.
Jenny 08:33
You know, that’s a great point and I’d love to kind of pick your brain on this one. Because some agencies try to make a decision of whether they should have account management or not. And I know that depending on who you talk to, some people say, well, the account manager, they don’t have the technical understanding so how could they possibly hold a conversation with the clients? So I’d love to get your view on that. Because you said, I’ve got enough technical understanding, I did a crash course. So that’s obviously clearly important to an account manager in your industry, particularly. But talk to me about that kind of scenario. What are your thoughts on that?
Tim 09:08
Yeah, I mean, my clients aren’t technical generally. And they want real world solutions they want it described in a real world way, I’ve got this problem, how are we going to solve it? And I can, I just had a call just now with a new client and they were saying, here’s the problem we want to solve, we want to up communication and this is a problem. And the fact that I understand the technology say, ‘Okay, well, we could build a function that does this’, because I understand the capability and what we can achieve, I couldn’t go and build it for them. And I couldn’t advise our developers, and we’ve got blooming great devs that I can put in contact with their development team. That’s why I say I like to open the lines of communication. So everyone’s talking, they’re not trying to, I’m not passing on information and then passing it back and things get lost in the process. Their lead Dev, our lead Dev will have a long chat, and will cover any security questions, any technology, stack questions, any of that that I don’t fully understand that will happen anyway. But because I understand what we can do and understand the client, then that’s where I sit.
Jenny 10:17
That’s a great understanding, you’ve just explained it so well. I mean, so your skills are in the communication skills. And for someone perhaps thinking about getting into an app development company, in the account management role, it’s actually quite reassuring to think, well yeah, of course, the people that you initially talk to, at the client side, don’t have that deep level of expertise, or experience in technical understanding. But as the project progresses, you can then open up the lines of communication, as you say, introducing your Dev to their kind of technical person, etc.
Tim 10:52
Yeah, one of the big things I think I learned early on, because I came into the role and a big worry was I don’t know enough about technology and I said I went on a crash course, I just read for weeks and weeks before I started the role. I actually found an old notebook, which was reasonably embarrassing, because the type of things I was writing down with, were a little bit up in the air.
Jenny 11:11
Could you share something?
Tim 11:14
It was just wrong. In all honesty, it was just stuff I’d read and got backwards. We’ve got a great team here. That helped me early on. And in fact, I haven’t had to use a lot of it. And I think, now that you asked about values,
I think a real good value in an account manager, is understanding people and understanding how to pitch things. I’ve got clients that will actively avoid technology discussions. It upsets them, in all honesty, and they don’t want to know, they just want to know solution based real world results. And I’ve got some, we just had a new client, join a startup who has got a background in development. And he’s fascinated in it and really wants to know, and we’re doing some clever stuff with the new serverless technology and he’s really interested in. Great, but I’m not the man, so I set up a call with our lead Dev and him, and they’re happy that we’ve got it covered. You know, I don’t need to know it. I’m sure you say people coming in… I don’t see it as a barrier. It certainly hasn’t been for me.
Jenny 12:22
So it’s in your people understanding as well, that your ability to communicate well, I mean, you’re a fantastic communicator, but also to diagnose what’s needed. You know, let me do an assessment, let me gauge what kind of person we’re dealing with. And then you make it happen. So, again, fantastic skills for an account manager.
Tim 12:41
Yeah, I hope so. That’s what I aim to do yeah, facilitate. That’s largely it.
Jenny 12:46
So when you do start, talk us through. What happens at the beginning, like, where do you even start when you are going into an app project?
Tim 13:00
Yeah, it’s a huge amount of questions in all honesty, learning. So our process that we have developed over years, and things have changed quite dramatically, you know, in the way you build technology now, when we started 9, 10 years ago, we were still running projects, from a project management point of view, in a Waterfall method, a lot of research upfront, a lot of documentation, six, nine month builds where the client wouldn’t see anything until the end, all this stuff. And now, of course, we’re fully agile and it’s all about collaborative process and understanding. And so we start all of our our projects with a workshop that although is run from our head of project management, our head of design, and it’s about, but it’s focused on two things. It’s understanding business, understanding users, there are two parts to it. And for me, as an account manager it is fantastically useful, because I sit in a room, we invite stakeholders, anyone that wants a say in the product, and that normally is the group of directors, and they sit for a day and they tell us what the business is trying to achieve, how they’re trying to get there. And then we do some research, we do some focus groups so we understand the users whether that’s internal or external, because you face the same challenges. If it’s staff and you deliver a product they don’t want to use, they’ll find a way around it, they go back to WhatsApp or whatever it is, the process has to be the same. So when we start a project, it’s all about, the more understanding we can get the better. A little while ago, we’ve done a lot of work over the years in understanding where our value is, what our what our company values are, and we came to the conclusion that we want to build the right product. That’s our focus. And that sounds a little bit obvious maybe but there are a lot of agencies that will aim to build the most amazing thing you can imagine or the quickest thing or the cheapest thing, we want to do the right thing. So the right thing for the business and the right thing for the users. And the only way you’re going to start that process is questions and understanding. The more we understand the better, we can pitch your idea. And the better it is because the next part is then pitching a solution. And if we understand the user completely, that solution is going to end up at the right product, or certainly we hope.
Jenny 15:26
Great, so you start with the workshop, then you do some, user kind of investigation. And then you pitch the kind of, the idea, the initial idea, and presumably to your point about it’s an agile process, what does that first step, that first stage look like?
Tim 15:44
So the workshop results in the prioritisation of features into a product, into an app. Here are the features that are going to get you the most value and we look to a release point as early as possible. So the business can start getting value back in all honesty. There might be a nine month development road plan but within the first four sprint’s there is a deliverable that you could put out and they could start getting value from it and why not? So after the workshop, and we deliver that prioritise sprint plan, commission it, the project managers start work with their project managers, some wireframing, some design bits and pieces before then into sprints. And we don’t even anymore design the whole product from start to end, we design the things that are going to affect the first few sprints because businesses change, that’s why the agile and working that way is so good, is that if in three months time the business has different requirements, something changes in the market, we’ve seen a few changes over the last couple of years, something changes, we can react immediately. The next sprint, which is in 10 days time, can now be this feature that’s more important. And the first part of that sprint is a wireframing session and some design work. So yeah.
Jenny 17:04
Love it, love it. This is really educational for me actually just to understand what your thinking is. Can you give me an example of what might change for the client in terms of, you know, hang on a sec, we’ve made a change or the business needs something else? What’s an example of something that would change?
Tim 17:22
Yeah, a good example is, a client that I’m working with at the moment, was working for a number of years, and they do repossession of cars, which doesn’t sound very romantic. But it’s an interesting business they have. And over the last year, the FCA, for example, came out said we can’t repossess cars this year. It’s COVID, people aren’t earning, you can’t now repossess cars. So the roadmap that we had, was very much there, they have a lot of process and protocol, it has to be quite, they don’t want to come to somebody house and steal their car away, it’s a very soft approach that they take. And they want their staff who repossess those cars to do it in a certain way. So the app that we’re building for them was about walking them through that process and a kind of smooth transition. Most of them are not contentious anyway. You’ve come to an end of an agreement with the bank, they’re employed by the bank, and someone’s coming to pick up the car that you don’t want anymore. So it’s fine. But there’s a really good example of it. Well, this is happening. But we know, we’re up for a tender for a couple of new banks that want to use us. So could we add these features in and spend the next few months building these features that will help us win those tenders you see. Now if we’d been on a six, nine month plan and it had all been planned, we said, well, we can’t really we were in build, we’ve designed the whole thing we know what we’re doing and where we are going. Tough. They came to us, we can’t repossess cars, can you pivot? Yeah. Within five days, we’re now working on the thing that they need.
Jenny 19:02
Amazing What a great example as well. Well done for bringing that out. That was fantastic. Do the clients ask you for measurement? Like, is it clear from the beginning of developing an app typically, that you have measures of success or measurable outcomes? Can you predict that far or is it really difficult?
Tim 19:23
It’s absolutely our aim, as I say about delivering value and delivering the right product is what we aim to do. So we build in what we call as a packaged product success. So from those early days, those workshops, we’re identifying a user journey. And we’re saying here are the pain points in your current user journey and here how we’re going to improve them. And we kind of come up with a hypothesis. This is what we think is going to improve, more people are going to be able to move from point A to point B, that’s going to reduce this cost. And that could be for a company recently that do industrial floor paints, for example, which doesn’t sound exciting, but it was really interesting product, it was about end customers getting quotes that they wanted and getting the support, they wanted to get to those quotes. Currently, it’s a manual, pick up the phone, and they wanted to do it through an app. So that’s, you know, we can really identify, currently you produce this many quotes, this many sign offs, this many things. With the app, we can monitor the same thing, how many can we get through. And we get so much more analytics, because in an app, your whole journey can be reviewed. How many times you’ve logged in, how many times you come back, how many times you press a certain button, all of those metrics are there to be gathered. So we do and then we produce a report monthly after the after the products go live to try and prove our hypothesis, we thought we’re gonna save you X amount. A good example is a student housing company. They came to us for something slightly different. If you thought about adding rent payments into the app and I said, I’m not sure people are going to use an app to pay their rent. We did some user research and students said, ‘Yeah, be happy to, it’d be be easier’. And I think that the first weekend that it went out there was over six figures went through the app in the first weekend of rent payments being available on an app, because there’s was an easy solution for them. So we aim to measurable.
Jenny 21:15
Amazing, can I ask a really silly question, and it’s just totally my lack of understanding, so if a company has already got a website, say that student housing, they’re already taking the payments on the website? Is it just the natural evolution that they would, you know, want the app as well? I mean, are there companies that just say that they want it web based? Or is it most companies nowadays, always have an app? If they’ve got any kind of processing?
Tim 21:41
It’s not silly, it’s a good question actually because sometimes the solution is web based. And we are open to that solution. And our aim to build the right product might mean no product at all. And we’re kind of okay with that because if we, in all honesty, our focus has always been about long term relationships. We’ve still got some clients we had from when I started nine years ago. That’s our focus. And if I build you something that isn’t going to give you a return, you’re not going to turn into a long term relationship, you’re going to go. So apps are really good at task orientated things, get in, get out, do a thing, check your bank balance, book a ticket – really good, because they focus, and they can also hold a lot of data about you. So they know where you are in the world, they know who you are, because you’re probably still logged in, all of those things are really handy. What they’re not so good at is things like browsing. So if you sell shoes, for example, you’re unlikely to go back to an app to browse to buy new shoes, you’ll probably go to Google and you’ll start a bit of a search, and you’ll go on to someone’s website. So it very much depends on what you’re trying to achieve, again, bit of a broken record, where the value is. And yes, sometimes it’s not.
Jenny 22:55
Interesting. Okay, so it wasn’t such a silly question, after all. So that’s, that’s really interesting. So again, it comes back to what you said at the beginning about understanding the client’s business, wanting to make sure that the solution is spot on for them. So that all makes sense. I had another question. It’s just gone out of my mind. Are you finding, I mean, you must have seen such an explosion in the number of apps we’ve seen in the last nine years? Are you finding it that more and more, it becomes more difficult for a client to actually get their users to use an app? Because I’m just thinking about my own experience of my iPhone? And how many apps I’ve got and I often find myself deleting the ones I haven’t used for ages. So I have my kind of go tos, like, I don’t know, the banking app or Amazon app, but it gets to a point depending on what the size of your phone’s like, that you’re trying to just, you know, filter them out? Have you found that you have to work harder nowadays to get an app to be actually used?
Tim 23:59
Not harder to be used, harder to be seen. When we started, you could put an app in the app store and it would get downloaded, guaranteed, now it gets lost. So harder for that. We have more data now to know that abandonment rates are quite high. And if you do get deleted, you’re very unlikely to get re installed. People won’t download again and try again. So you know something we preach a fair bit when we’re talking to clients that the initial experience has to be a good one. If it’s not the right thing people will delete and they won’t come back so that’s true. And and again, that’s why half of our workshop’s dedicated to that user, is there value for them? If there isn’t, you probably shouldn’t spend your money on building it because they’ll delete it and it will never come back
Jenny 24:43
A point about the users actually because you said that you do some user testing. And then once you have like, not the prototype but the the kind of phase one version with the minimal features, do you always have some kind of beta testing stage where you’ll choose a group to try it out or not?
Tim 25:02
Yeah, yeah, that’s absolutely the aim, it largely depends on our clients and what they want to do. The focus is always to try and test it. And we will take, ideally, and often the case, if we’ve done a focus group on the initial features and what we’re trying to build, once it’s built, we take it back to the focus group and check off that it is what they want, and they are going to use it. Some projects, we’ve been lucky enough to do some really quite large scale beta testing. We built an app for a insurance company, for a big car insurance company that was around, when you’ve had an accident, you open the app, and it walks you through the process of what you now need to do. And so it kind of hold’s your hand at what is the most stressful time, a really interesting discovery session for us because, we spoke to people, it is one of the most stressful times, you’ve just crashed your car. How do you want to be presented with information? And that was fantastic, because we actually got to set up some fake car crashes with the insurance company. So there’s a scene and you put someone in the car essentially, and said, right, you’ve just had this accident, here’s your phone, the app to the insurance company on the phone, go, what do you do next? And we got to run a full scale test for a couple of days and get the results out of that and see how they used it. That was a particularly good one.
Jenny 26:24
That must be quite exciting. So you get involved in all different types of industries and scenarios.
Tim 26:30
Yeah.
Jenny 26:30
Amazing. And in your role as account director, how much of it do you get involved in? You know, you said at the beginning, you’re very much there at the front end, you’re there at the workshop with the project manager and the head of design I think you said, but how does the role work?
Tim 26:51
I mean, I’m there throughout. I don’t know whether I’m slightly different because when I came on board with Sonin there was only a few of us, and so I’ve kind of moved through different roles within the company, always with the sales and looking after our accounts as the main part of it but putting in a project management function, and then employing people that could actually do project management, which is not me. So I’m potentially involved more than another account manager would be in certain things but because we work in an agile way, because we’re delivering, we aim to deliver something every 10 days, whether it’s some screenshots or a video walkthrough, whatever it may be, so our clients consistently see that we’re building what they want. And so I, as an account manager, I get to see that every 10 days, so from the workshop, post live with all of that success stuff I talked about, about how we monitor performance, it’s kind of the whole thing, really.
Jenny 27:53
Amazing. Okay, and to that point about continuing to catch up with clients, do you have any kind of quarterly business reviews or ongoing strategy sessions? Like, how does that work?
Tim 28:05
Yeah, absolutely.
Contact is key. The more contact I have with clients the more I understand them. People are, in general, quite polite. And if they’re not sure about something, they’ve seen something they don’t quite like they probably won’t say anything. And if they see it again, again they probably won’t. And then by the third time, they’re really angry, and they’re going to, you know, burn the house down. So if I’ve spoken to them within that period of time, then they’ll probably say ‘Oh that thing’ and we get to solve the solution together and it doesn’t escalate. So I do two things, I try and stay in contact as much as possible, and then put in some, essentially quarterly business review. Some clients, it’s more like a monthly and then it’s an update on more high level things. Again, back to business objectives. In the meantime, I try to take away their business objectives, look at the market, look at competitors, see what they’re doing, and provide some some value back to them. So that on those reviews, we’re kind of pointing to where they should go. That’s the aim.
Jenny 29:19
Some great value bombs there that you’ve just shared for other account managers in terms of Yeah, because you’re right, I mean, the more frequent you have those touch points, the more opportunity the client has to share any grievances or feed back to you. And then again, those ongoing forums that you have with those clients enable you to continue shining in their eyes, you know, because you are at the cutting edge of what’s changing, and all of that insight that you can provide not only about your industry, but also the client’s industry and other competitors, etc. So fantastic tips for account managers that might be listening thinking how do I you know, keep giving ongoing value, and what for you Tim, makes a really successful client, agency relationship?
Tim 30:05
I might repeat myself again really here, it’s the understanding piece.
I think it was the marketing director of Kellogg’s and it was, he was speaking at an event, and you may have seen it actually, but it was about new business. And someone said, as a salesperson, ‘How do I get to you, you’re the marketing director of Kellogg’s, I want to sell to you. How do I get to you?’ and he said, ‘Know more about my industry than I do. Know about my business as much as I do and have a fresh idea, have an add’. And that really stuck. And I kind of think the same for our clients is, know about their industry, know about their business and come with new ideas they haven’t thought of that will help them. And if I keep doing that, they’ll probably keep working with us.
Jenny 30:55
Love that and that guy that asked that question in the audience, he probably felt crushed at that moment, didn’t he? Because actually, the question was wrong. You know, how can I sell to you? How can I get to you? But actually, it’s more about what value can I bring to you?
Tim 31:09
Yeah, it was a really good lesson for me, because I think occasionally you get lazy and you think I could, you know, we’ve just done some interesting work in AR, I could go and pitch an AR app design. So I could call them up they’d want to do something in AR. Do I understand, have I spent the time, have I put the work in? Do I know their business? Do I know what they’re trying to do this year? Because you can burn relationships an awful lot quicker than you can make them.
Jenny 31:33
Absolutely 100% agree, because people buy for their reasons, not yours. You know, if you’re going in with your story, your your creds deck your ideas, but actually you haven’t diagnosed first, then you absolutely run that risk I think, I totally agree with you. So what advice would you give Tim, if someone’s listening to this and thinking, I love the sound of what Tim’s working on? How would I, what advice would you give to someone trying to get into the app development space, from an account management point of view?
Tim 32:05
For a company like ours that doesn’t specialise in an industry, some do, most I don’t think, I would say read as much as you can, understand business, how businesses work, what their objectives are. A CEO will release a statement at the beginning of the year, and tell everyone what they’re trying to do quite often, you can find the information out and the more you can understand business problems and how people are solving them, the better place you are to help solve them in a business like ours. Definitely read about technology, you have to love technology, I do. I love it. I love new technology, I love reading about new technology. Like I said, I’m not technical, I can’t do the work but I can see an opportunity in something. You know, over the years, a lot of things have been released, the Apple Watch came out and instantly you can see 10 things you could deliver for a client to help them, because you sit there and watch the cheesy Apple developer conference, reading and learning, reading about businesses, learning about technology, that’s the place I’d start.
Jenny 33:06
Brilliant. So do you typically attract the people that are kind of those early adopters to new technology? Can you say that most people that work there are of that kind of mindset?
Tim 33:17
Yeah, we employ for it. We employ, we want to see some people, some passion, you know, from our development team. If they’ve built their own thing somewhere, and they’ve got passion for it. Love it. And we have days throughout the year where we close the agency every day and do a Sonin Create where we give them a brief and they can go and build what they like. And the whole team’s involved, not just the Devs. So where if you thought, I’d be really interesting if you could do something with Bluetooth that, well we have, where when you get in the lift the coffee machine starts because they know who you are, because the app on your phone and the Bluetooth device, so a passion for technologies is quite key.
Jenny 34:04
Amazing. Do you have anything else like that? That sounds quite space age to me right now. But what other things do you have typically in your agency that kind of highlights how much you love the technology?
Tim 34:17
Well, the guys are always building their own products and bringing them in. So you know when when machine learning, artificial intelligence kind of started cropping up in a more achievable manner so you didn’t have to write your own AI. You could use IBM released Watson, which was their kind of off the shelf option. We’ve got a client that has the print design, so they’re a company that sell websites essentially to print designers so everything you buy is probably done by a design company that they then sell to the company that print it on that bit of fabric, another strange client. And they list 10s of 1000s of images weekly and people sit there and they press buttons. So you know, that is a floral print and it’s a this type of print. And the guy said, you know, we could do something with AI and we gave them a few days leeway. And they used IBM Watson and you sent it a bunch of images, and it sent you back those images tagged to say that is a floral print, because the machine learnt what it what we fed it, all the data we had, and it learned. And then we get to go back to clients who’ve haven’t done a thing, potentially save you hours and hours and hours.
Jenny 35:30
Wow, wow, wow, this is very compelling stuff, isn’t it? I mean, would you say that for most businesses, if they said to you, you know, Tim, help us kind of save money or make money, there would be some technological solution that would enable them to do that.
Tim 35:46
Yeah, yeah. I believe so. Yeah. I mean, sometimes, you know, we’re prepared that it might not be an app, which is largely what we do, like I said, and potentially something they could do in house you know, and we’re not averse to that either if they could develop whatever they have further. But, I said, there’s some core business problems, I think, if you have them, then I think, I believe you can fix them with technology.
Jenny 36:14
Great point. And what other trends have you seen in the app space?
Tim 36:19
Trends in the app space? Well, I say most recently has been all about reducing human contact. So face to face interactions phasing out, with a video call now not in person and that’s been everything. That’s staff, people not in offices. So just in the last year, there’s been, everything we do has had a tinge of that, somewhere where people aren’t meeting, so now we have to, so that’s big. The other areas that we work in, that’ve come up over the last nine years that I’ve been doing it, is things like FinTech. So open banking has become a thing, you can now get access to your account data. So you can do some really cool things with that. We’re working in prop tech space as well. A lot of historical kind of industry is now looking to technology, looking to apps to help them because you got a whole host of residents in a property and you want to manage that, then an app where you open lines of communication, where you get to send images and text and communicate better is massively advantageous nesting that. So it’s in the digitalization of those historical kind of businesses, we’re seeing a lot of the moment Everyone thinks that every client I speak to says, ‘We’re so far behind’. But every industry is really, there’s a couple that are leading the way and the rest aren’t.
Jenny 37:50
Amazing. Yeah, I can imagine because they probably think, oh, we should have done this years ago or something. But you know, and actually, right, the pandemic has just accelerated everything, isn’t it? I mean, it would you say that you haven’t slowed down during this time, because out of most agencies, your services, particularly are…
Tim 38:10
Last year, in all honesty, when everyone kind of left their offices we did, and things slowed down. And then towards the end of last year, and certainly since vaccination things, and this year, it’s gone bananas, it really has. Everybody coming back realising that maybe they’ve lost the best part of the year. And as a business, they still need to achieve the same targets as they ever had. So yeah, all of our clients have been wanting to do more and our new clients coming in at a faster rate than we’ve seen before. And to try and use technology to solve some of the problems.
Jenny 38:43
I can believe that actually, in what you do. So this has been amazing, Tim, you’ve shared so many tips and values. So have you got any final words of wisdom for someone who’s in the account management role? And they are, thinking about working in the area of app development, any kind of thing that we haven’t covered that you think might be useful for them to know?
Tim 39:04
I don’t think anything I haven’t covered. I think, learning technology and learning the business. I think reading people is important. And I think observing people and understanding the different types of people is equally important. And I find technology is an odd one. It’s not something, you said that, it might be a silly question and you were kind of nervous to ask, and that is absolutely what I see all day. People are a bit scared and they don’t want to seem silly, and they think they should probably know it although they shouldn’t. So understanding people and trying to second guess the questions they want to ask that they’re not asking, seems quite important. People work with us on commission things if they trust us, of course and if they understand what we’re trying to achieve and if you can understand this objective, understand the technology, pitch the best thing in the world if people don’t quite understand it, and don’t really trust it, and they’re probably not going to sign off on it. So identifying what type of person you’re talking to, where your commonalities are, and how to present something to them is, I think it’s probably the third part of what I try and do. I’m certainly not an expert at it but I try and teach things at the level of someone I’m talking to.
Jenny 40:26
Do you know what, I’m so glad you finished off on that point because you’re so right. And I’m sure like me, you know, there’s that nervousness for looking silly and not being up to date enough. And what you just said was so funny. I see this all the time. So we’re not different. So for you to be in that position of first of all, spotting something and then tailoring your approach and making people feel really comfortable because I think that’s what you’re talking about really isn’t it, making people feel safe and understood. And absolutely, yeah, love it. Thank you so much, Tim. This has been brilliant. How people get hold of you if they’re interested in learning more about Sonin and what you do?
Tim 41:05
Yeah. Our website is sonin.agency. That’s us. Jump on there. And everything’s on there, all our contact details are there. And you can see some of the work we’ve done as well.
Jenny 41:16
Fantastic. All right. Thanks so much again, this has been absolutely brilliant. So maybe we can do a part two at some point.
Tim 41:23
I’d love to. I really enjoyed that. Thank you.
