Welcome to Episode 56. I chatted to the author of ‘The Art of Client Service‘, the legend that is Robert Solomon.
If you haven’t listened to his previous episode, number 46, I’d highly recommend you go back and have a listen because we talked about so many things relating to the account management role, including:
– why there are fewer account managers doing more with much less experience
– why some people believe the account manager role is becoming extinct
– and why often the work of great account management isn’t recognised.
In this episode, Robert shares what to look for when hiring a great account manager, what he says to people who think the role of account manager is easy, and how to get respected by your colleagues as an account manager.
And he shares some fantastic tips for how to manage challenging situations, which he’s brought to life by telling a couple of his own account management stories. As an account manager, I think you’ll find this both informative and entertaining.
If you haven’t bought his book, please go and grab a copy of the updated third edition of The Art of Client Service, so many people in account management have found this book highly valuable.
I’d also like to remind you that my next Account Accelerator training programme starts on 15th March 2022. The programme helps those in agency account management with a systematic approach to adding more value to your existing clients and growing the accounts in nine weeks. You join a group of peers in other agencies where you can share best practice, you get group coaching from me, as I walk you through the different strategies, plus access to an online programme so you can go through the content at your own at your own pace. So if you’d like a quick 20 minute call to see if it’s the right fit for you or your agency team, send me an email to jenny@accountmanagementskills.com or book a call here.
Transcript:
Jenny 00:02
So, Robert, a very, very warm welcome back. Thank you so much for coming back.
Robert 00:08
Thank you for having me, Jenny. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Jenny 00:12
So listen, because of the success of the last one, I’ve had a lot of people asking me for you to come back. And I thought what would be most useful is if we can do maybe a few quickfire questions around the challenges that account managers have. Because inevitably, you see people on your training courses, workshops and you’re consulting, people come to you with the problems. But the first question is less of a problem, it’s more of a definition. I went to an event a little while ago, and I had an agency owner who was starting his own agency, it was rather small at the time, and it was just at the point where he was ready to hire his first account manager. And he said, I know this sounds a bit daft, but I’ve never actually done the role myself. And I’ve never worked in an agency. So, what does an account manager do? How would you respond to that?
Robert 01:05
Okay, well that is a very good question. And the short answer is, look, I wrote a 300-page book on this subject. So, the first thing is to read the book. But to answer that founder’s question, the first chapter of the book is called, ‘What makes great client service?’ And you can just substitute ‘account manager’, ‘What makes a great account manager? And it was my attempt, maybe a lame attempt to identify it, and to sort of explain it. So let me see if I can do this for you quickly. Let’s pretend he’s hiring people. And he doesn’t know who to hire. So, you tend to look at, I don’t know if this is true for you but it’s true for me. I look at three things when I hire someone. I look at their experience, I look at their skills and I look at their qualities. And you think, well, that’s the order in which I’m going to look at, where they work, or what kind of skills do they have and then what are the qualities there. I would do it in exactly the reverse. I would look at the qualities first, I’d then go to the skills and I do experience last. So it starting with quality to say, Well what kind of qualities do I want in a person? Well, that’s pretty easy. You can list them, right? You say you want someone who’s honourable. You want somebody who is dedicated. You want somebody who’s resilient, you want somebody who’s consistent. And above all, you want someone who’s trustworthy, you can go down the list of qualities that you think are important. And you say these are the things, these are the attributes I really want. The problem here is these are really hard to identify in an interview. But I will tell you, if you’re looking at the mix of quality skills and experience, the thing I would rank first are qualities, because skills you can teach and experience you can gain. But qualities are sort of integral to your character. And you need to look for people who are good people basically. So that would be the first piece of advice I’d say to him is challenging these ideas. In terms of skills, it’s pretty straightforward. You want somebody who’s a really, really good listener above all of the things. Most people when they’re listening, they’re forming an answer. So you want someone who’s an excellent, excellent listener. Like you are right now, as I’m going on, and you’re listening to me, You want somebody who’s a superb communicator. That’s the second thing, orally and in writing, someone who’s good on their feet, someone who’s good on paper, and then you want someone who’s possessed of really good judgement, who can actually sort of discern brilliance from bullshit. And knows what matters and what doesn’t matter and can distinguish between the two. So those three things, listening skills, communicating skills, and being possessed of great judgement are great. So that’s the second thing I would look for, and these are the things I would search for. And then the third thing is in terms of experience, which to me is the least important part. Let’s say you want someone who works in an industry in your case, you have some background in the healthcare industry, you’re sort of a vertical market specialist, other people are. You may be looking for someone who has skill in technology, financial services, retail, automotive, go down the list of all the skills, and you can look for these things. But you have to add another thing to this. You have to add, I need someone who’s good at social media, someone who’s good at search, someone who’s good in some other matters that are digital, maybe someone who’s really expert in broadcasting radio, outdoor, sales promotion. Again, they’re all these kinds of sub disciplines to the advertising and marketing industry that we face. I’m sort of reminded of what my colleague Tim Pantello said, you may know him he happens to be the CEO of a big healthcare communications agencies called Syneos. Tim, it’s actually quoted in my book says, ‘Account, people need to be second best at everything an agency does now’. Alright, so we’re not writers, we’re not art directors, we’re not producers, we’re not media people, we’re not planners. But you’ve got to be conversant in all of these things, and good at it. So as you’re talking to this person, and you’re trying to explain this to him, he’s saying, ‘Oh, my God, that’s an impossible job’. And I’m going to say, ‘You’re right, it’s an impossible job!’ And people will say, ‘Oh, account people, it’s so easy’. And I say, ‘Oh, you just don’t really know what goes into it’. So I don’t know if that helps? I’m sorry to be so long winded about it.
Jenny 05:53
I think it’s a really lovely way of kind of approaching that. I love that you started with qualities and then skills and then experience. Robert, you’ve met so many in your past, you are one yourself, you’ve been one yourself. I feel when I meet another account manager, there’s almost this kind of connection, because they’re so easy to connect with. And I think that’s a real sign. For example, if you get on a call and you speak to someone who does paid search, or who is optimising websites, they won’t perhaps connect so quickly as an account manager will, because the account managers job is to connect all day, every day with clients and colleagues. Do you agree?
Robert 06:44
I absolutely agree. I think it’s kind of a natural ease that account people have. I used to work with a colleague, very senior guy, very, very smart, excellent strategist, although he was a client service guy, he’s was an account guy. But he was so uncomfortable in his own skin. And you can see it with clients. He was just very unrelaxed. And of course we would do the occasional client entertaining thing. I would do all the heavy lifting. I’d be the guy who would orchestrate the evening out, I be the one when the wine list came. I was the guy who navigated the wine list! I was the guy who talked to the captain in the Somme, and the all of those social things. Because really good account people are at ease with themselves. And they like to talk to people, they get pleasure out of it.
Jenny 07:30
And one of the words I think that is absolutely key that you’ve just said is ‘orchestrate’. You include absolutely everybody and make sure everybody is involved. And those people are the connectors aren’t they? They’re like the glue that pulls everything together and makes everything happen.
Robert 07:48
I am so much in agreement. My friend Christy Faulkner, who’s a writer here in United States actually said to me that account people are like orchestra conductors. There are lots of analogies, people will say, ‘Well, you’re like a general contractor’. I mean, there are all kinds of metaphors you could use. But I think you’re exactly right, you have to orchestrate how things work. And so much of this gets done subtly. It doesn’t get done overtly. I often say to my colleagues in the business, because I have coaching clients that I will often say this to them,
the only person who will recognise the brilliance of what you’ve done, or what you just did is another account person. They are the only ones who really appreciate the deftness, the skill, the subtlety, with which you just happen to pull off that moment. And most writers, art directors, even the ones who are really attuned to this, planners, media, people are pretty much not attuned to this. They’re more attuned to their area of expertise – I’m a writer or an art director, I’m a planner. But account people, their skill is ephemeral. It’s hard to put your fingers on it. But I will tell anyone who says, ‘Oh, your job’s easy’. I say, ‘Okay. I’ll tell you what, spend a week being an account person and come back and then give me your opinion’. I think it’s the hardest job in advertising.
Jenny 09:19
I love your answer, and my answer at the time I think was a lot shorter and sweeter. I just said, because I only actually had 10 minutes in the whole presentation so it was really quick fire, but I said that they are your ambassador the for the agency and they’re responsible for retention and growth of the client relationship. And going back to your tips on when you’re hiring someone and what to look for which were fabulous, I think the other thing is when you meet an account person, you have to kind of think, they’re going to be representing my company. So if I was a client meeting them for the first time, how do I how do they make me feel? How do I come away from that interaction? Did they uplift me? Do I feel engaged? Or are they kind of leaving me a bit flat? Are they talking about themselves too much? So an interview scenario is quite an interesting insight for yourself, if you’re an agency owner,
Robert 10:22
I agree. I think that owner, when he hires his early account manager folks to run his agency, they will be representing him, they will be an extension of him. And so I’m just hoping, as he goes out and hunts for people, because finding these people is not easy, writing a job description for them is not easy. And actually identifying the ones who really are in possession of the qualities you care about, very elusive, I have to say. You make more mistakes than not. A lot of this is trial and error. I was just going to say, you, you hire someone, you think, ‘Oh, they’re going to be wonderful’, they turn out not to be wonderful. And then you hire somebody say, ‘Well, I’m taking a little bit of a chance’. And you are amazingly surprised at how gifted they are. And I found this true in my own experience in sitting across the table and interviewing scores of candidates and making good decisions and bad decisions. And I’d love to tell you there’s some science to it, but there’s not very much. There’s a lot of work and luck and serendipity in this.
Jenny 11:33
I love that. One tip that was shared with me many moons ago that I pass on now, which is to ask the candidate, if you want to take them forward to the next stage, to write themselves a one page, 90 day plan, which is three goals for your first 90 days in the role. And you ask the candidate to produce it themselves. You agree those goals and then in three months time, you can sit down and think well, did I achieve them, have we have we achieved what we set out? And it also shows the account managers are thinking into what they think needs to happen in their first 90 days in the job.
Robert 12:10
I think that’s brilliant, because not only does it get them to make, three is right, you don’t want a list of 10, you want them to choose and their selection will be quite revealing and illuminating about them. The other thing is, by writing it, you’re going to get a window on how good they are on paper in terms of expressing themselves. And you’re going to know whether or not they’re going to be capable of being clear, concise, accurate and inspiring as a writer, and you hope, now you’re obviously going to have interviewed them, so you will have some sense of their presence – do they have some grace? Do they have some elements of charisma? But on paper, that actually will be quite revealing, and it will help you. If they were terrible writers and they make all the wrong choices, that’s going to be a sign that you probably want to raise a flag here.
Jenny 13:09
Really good point. Really good point. Okay, so let’s move on to other challenges. So what does an account manager do when, for example, a client makes a just possible request? And how do they manage the consequences of making the inevitable mistake?
Robert 13:29
You know, it’s funny because I do a workshop on this which is called, ‘One agency meltdown, two client disasters equals three difficult conversations and how to navigate through them’. That’s what it is. It’s one agency meltdown, two client disasters equals three difficult conversations and how to navigate through them. And I actually talk about a situation that you’ve just alluded to, which is I had a client pull us up with an impossible request, an absolutely impossible request, which the agency actually exceeded to, executed and then we made a mistake. We made a mistake in the execution. And the client of course was apoplectic about this. Came back to us and said, you have to pay to correct the mistake. Now the mistake by the way, which was in a print ad that ran nationally in the United States, in three major newspapers, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, full page ad for a technology client, that mistake would have cost the agency hundreds of 1000s of dollars, not in soft dollars hard cash. So my solution to this was to say no. And normally you would say well, how could you say no? They are a client, super important. Well the client made a couple of requests, they made an impossible request. And so we said yes, with two conditions. One condition is that they would be fast in their response. And their changes to what they were asking us to do would be minimal. Because we’re actually doing a print ad on a very accelerated schedule, that pre digital actually, so this was harder in terms of scheduling. So the mistake happened in the final round, because the client delayed in getting back to us and their changes weren’t minimal. They were substantial. While the agency still stepped up and did everything they needed to do. They got the ad out the door, but they had to forego a final proof. The paper was going to send one more proof before they went to press. That mistake, which was a simple typographical error, we transposed two letters in a word. It wasn’t like we made a mistake in the name of the client or mistake in the price of the product, or something like that. We made a minor typographical error. We transposed two letters, someone was typing so fast to get this out the door, they made a human error. And so when we saw it, we actually we were very proud of ourselves. This went out and it showed up in the papers, we look at the papers, and we go, OMG. Because there’s the mistake. Let me say it, before I get on the phone to the client the client was on the phone to me, and she was crazy angry at us, me in particular. And I said to her, I said, Well, Yvonne, we’re not going to pay for that ad. And she said, why not Robert? I said, I’ll tell you what. I’m not going to debate this with you. Give me an hour and I will write an answer to you. So I do all of that. I write an answer, a very, very long, meticulous answer explaining all of the reasons. And there’s something I’ve quoted in this, I said, Yvonne, that’s her name, she’s the client, I said, if you subvert the very processes we put in place to preclude errors like these and then a mistake occurs, it is not our responsibility, actually it’s yours. And she actually took ownership at that moment. So we didn’t have to pay for the ad. But there were three lessons here that came out of that. So this was the story of doing something on an insane schedule, stepping up and doing it, getting it done, and then screwing it up. So there are three things that came out of this. One is, you don’t want to ever choose rank over reason here. So I was the head of the agency at the time, and I was the guy who agreed like this, but I wouldn’t do that. When she made this request I actually said to her Yvonne give me an hour. I pulled everybody together, and we made decision collectively. I could have done this by fear, I could have imposed this on the group. But I would never do that. And that was the first rule. You can never sign up your people for something normal, let alone something accelerated, without consulting with them first, which of course I did. So that was the first thing. The second thing I learned in all of this is the exception must never become the rule. Because what will happen is if you do something remarkable for a client, and it’s the exception, all of a sudden, it will become the norm. They’ll expect – Oh, you did that the last time. I can’t do it the next time and the time after, time after that. That is a blueprint for insanity. So you have to insist that this is going to be a rare if ever occasion to do this. And that was the second thing. And I think I learned in all of this, this was a moment where I could have written that cheque to that client, I could have made it go away. That was the path of least resistance. But I didn’t, I actually took the harder route, which was to explain why we were not going to do this, even though Jenny, we actually put the account at risk by doing that, because clients will often say, okay, you don’t have to pay for that. And then a week later, the account goes in review. And this can happen and I know situations where things like this occur. So it was really, it was not a decision made cavalierly. And I will tell you the letter I wrote was enormously thoughtful. And by the way, we were enormously apologetic for the mistake. We were mortified it ever happened. We were not in any way dismissive, but we didn’t feel this was our fault.
Jenny 19:35
Fantastic story. I have a question for you. It sounds to me like the success of the outcome of this situation was because you had set some conditions at the time of request. Do you think? Because you’d been explicit in: Okay, we will do this only if… If you hadn’t have done that and you’d have said yes, yes, yes, okay, we’ll rush it through and then the mistake, perhaps it would have been a different story. What do you think?
Robert 20:08
I think that’s actually quite observant of you and I will make another point. The other reason we survived this, is well before this event ever happened, I had built a pretty good relationship with this client and she knew me, and I knew her, and she had grown to trust me. And I think she also grew to rely on me and my team. And so when the moment came when something went off the rails here, and I had a stand up to her and say, I cannot do this, I cannot, not in good conscience. This was our mistake, but it wasn’t our responsibility. You really have to think about this, was this really our fault? You didn’t do the very things, as you pointed out, the very things that we’d laid down as conditions to do this, and we still did it, we could have easily have said no.
Jenny 21:06
What I love about what you said, Robert, was that you are the agency leader at that stage, when that mistake happened. And the first thing you did was to say, Leave it with me, I’ll get back to you, to the client. So you were, I’m going to take an action, so they knew you’re on it. But the first thing you did was pull the team together to really investigate what had happened, which says to me that you listened to the team.
Robert 21:30
I will tell you, Jenny, when I pulled the team together, so I got the creative team, I got my two creative directors in the room and I got my production person in the room, and I got a couple of the account people who work on the account. So we’re all in the room, and I lay this out for them. You should have heard the laughter from the group. They said, You’re kidding, right? You’re kidding, right? This is a big joke. Robert, you can’t be serious. And I said, Guys, I’ll tell you, we can say no. And I will say no, if you tell me we cannot do it, I’m going to get back on the phone and say we can’t do it. I said, but here are the consequences of that. She’ll say, okay, and there are two things again, which are possible outcomes. One is, she will never forget this moment, she will have what I call TGR -Total Grievance Recall. She will never forget that we failed her in a moment when she was asking us to step up. That’s one. The other thing is, this was a huge account. She probably had a half a dozen agencies waiting in the wings, ready to say, Of course, we’ll do that for you – we’ll pay you to do that! So I said, A: she won’t forget it. And that will come back to haunt us. And B: don’t think for a moment she won’t turn to another agency to get it done. And if they get it done well, that will be their foot in the proverbial door. And we will suddenly be at risk. All agencies are at risk with their clients. So they thought about it. And they said, You know what, we don’t have a choice, do we? I said, No, we really don’t have a choice. You know, we were all laughing about this a little bit, because otherwise you’d be crying hysterically. I remember this moment so vividly. And how we screwed it up monumentally. And how we recovered. By the way we went on, we not only did we see this client go on for years afterwards with us and deepening and growing the relationship. We did more of these ads like this, but we had them indemnify us formally. We literally had them write us a letter that said, we’ll do more of these with you. But if we do these, and there’s a mistake, we will as the client, we will be accountable not you. Well, we never made another mistake. Just so you know, we neve made another mistake.
Jenny 24:06
I can imagine.
Robert 24:08
Oh, my God, I cannot tell you how mortified my copywriter, my art director, my creative directors when they walked in my office with the ad. And by the way, I had to answer to my boss, the chairman. And I said, Look, Martin, this is Martin Paris. I said, Martin, I’m going to lay this out and I’m going to get this fixed. And he said, Okay, Robert, go with God. So anyway, that’s the story.
Jenny 24:35
Love it. Love it. And I love how collaborative you were with the team both when you made the decision to say yes, and also where they all went pears. And you got the team together again to find out what had happened and made the decision on the basis of the team being prepared to push back because if Robert, I was just going to say I’ve been in a situation and I bet you have too, where perhaps you’re an account manager and not the agency lead, and you’ve been overridden. You’ve said, No, no, we shouldn’t pay for this. But then your agency lead or someone more senior and said, No, no, no, we’ll just do it. And then you end up looking silly or you kind of lose the faith in your leadership. What do you think?
Robert 25:19
Yeah, it has happened to me. When I was a young account guy, and I worked for the founder of an agency, he would sign his team up, meaning the team I’d led because I’d led an account group there. He would sign the team up for impossible tasks, and then we would have to go do it. Now I was the kind of account person who wasn’t shy about this. So when Michael would walk in with this, I would scream bloody murder at him. I wouldn’t go and turn to my people. I would defend by people. I would actually say, What have you just done to us? I said, Michael- I did with him, I imposed the same kind of discipline on him that I imposed on my client when I ran it when I was the President of Direct and Digital marketing. This is what I was the line account guy at Digitas, and
I was running the American Express account, Michael would walk in with some kind of crazy, impossible demand. This was the founder, Michael Bronner. And I would say, You must be kidding. You didn’t consult with us first? I held them to the same accounting standard that I held myself to. I never, ever, ever signed up, not knowingly, signed up the agency to do anything without consulting with my colleagues. I always made that a policy. I asked. And I will tell you, I think they respected even if they knew the question was rhetorical Jenny, they respected the fact that I came to them. I at least had the decency to ask their opinion.
Jenny 26:51
And to that point, I think what that does is build trust with your team. So your team support you and trust you moving forward, which I think is super important. And talking about that, I know a lot of account managers are listening to this podcast, who are very new to their role. And maybe they’re moving jobs, and they’re starting a new role as an account manager. And probably they do have to get the trust of their team very quickly. So have you got any advice or pointers for anyone starting a new role for the first time of how to really hit the ground running get up to speed really quickly?
Robert 27:24
Well, the word that stops me Jenny is the word quickly. I think you can gain the knowledge. You join a new agency, you change accounts, and you need to get up to speed quickly. The knowledge part is doable, you can immerse yourself. And by the way, if you’re joining a new agency, what my biggest recommendation is you start before you start. So you’re joining a new agency in two weeks, or whatever the length of time, the duration, as you transition from one shop to another, let’s say you have a week or two off, you don’t start on day one, you start the day you leave the agency, even before you leave your old agency, you are already deeply immersing yourself in your new agency in your new account. So you’ll do things like- alright, I’m going to get my hands on every piece of information I can find. I’ll do a Google search, I’ll check the client’s website, I’ll read all that, I’ll get a hold of their annual report. If I’m really smart, I’ll get a couple of Wall Street analysts or London exchange analysts reports and just delve deeply into what the client’s doing well, what the client’s not doing well. If I get my hands on some advertising, I will do that. I’ll go out to YouTube. And I’ll check not only the advertising that the client’s doing, I’ll check all the competitors work. I’ll do all of this stuff in advance. All this stuff can make you at least halfway familiar before you walk in the door. Plus, in addition to doing all that stuff, you pick up the phone or you send an email to somebody and say, Hey, I’m going to be joining the agency could we get together, can I buy you lunch, can we go to get a drink so you can tell me a little bit about who the clients are, what the culture is like? All that stuff is doable. The thing that’s hard to do though, is the trust part. I mean trust is like building a brand. I mean, it happens slowly. It doesn’t happen overnight. I think the knowledge part is doable. You can impress it and accelerate it in a short time period. But trust. That’s a much more challenging thing. However, so you joined a new agency and you’re trying to build credibility and trust with your new colleagues. There will come a moment which will test you, there’s a crisis in the agency. Your boss, all of a sudden, he’s short staffed. He has an emergency. Something goes mammothly wrong. You got to work night, you got to work a weekend. You got to do something that’s unexpected. And that’s the time where you step up. The way you build trust with colleagues is in that moment, being there for them, being the person who you can depend on, who actually said, I’ll take that off your plate, let me handle that, whether it’s a boss or a colleague or a subordinate. That’s what builds trust with people. I will tell you when you’re in a position of leadership, and you do this, the moment that you stand up to your own management on behalf of your people, or the moment you stand up to a client gently, diplomatically, not abrasively. But you do this, you will gain a huge amount of receipt from your people, because they will see you going to bat for them, which is an American term. Well, then I guess you have batsman because you play cricket!
Jenny 30:49
I love that. That’s such a thoughtful answer, Robert. And I bet there’s a lot of people thinking of their own past. I was thinking back to my first agency, where I was account exec, and my account manager was off sick for two weeks. And I just, I had to get on with it. And I did, but that was my moment. And it was busy. And I managed it. And her boss was saying what a great job I’d done. So sometimes you have to take advantage of that moment don’t you, to show what you can do and to help and step up? So I love that very, very thoughtful.
Robert 31:27
Yeah, I think that is the only way. And by the way, this gets incremental, you do it once, you do it again, you do it again. And over time, people will say, there was a colleague of mine, he was creative director and he said, If there’s one person I want to go into battle with, it’s Robert Solomon, because I know that I can count on Robert. If Robert says he’s going to do something, it will get done. There won’t be an excuse. There won’t be some explain it away. If he says he will do it, if he commits to it, he will do it, I totally trust him on that. And I was actually very impressed by the fact that he said that about me. And I thought about I said, Well, when the moment really counted, I was the guy who volunteered, who said, Yes, I’ll do it.
Jenny 32:23
A lovely thing for someone to say. And actually just going back to your previous tips about before you start an agency, do the Google research, do the stuff that you can do before you get actually get into the agency. Because that’s the time you’ve got. So lovely answer. Thank you. The other thing I want to talk about is, so they’re they’ve joined the agency and obviously, they have a new client that they are either taking over from someone else, or maybe that’s a brand new client in the agency. Obviously, from the very beginning, there’s a lot of things you can do to kind of set the expectations or manage the expectations. Do you have any advice or tips that you can share? For best practice what to do at the beginning of a client relationship?
Robert 33:12
Well,
I do have one piece of advice, which is, I mean your first instinct is to speak. And my first instinct isn’t to speak, it’s to listen. I alluded to this before and I think in our previous conversation I may have made reference this, listening skills are the most underappreciated capability that account people, client service people have in this business, the ability to listen well. And I made reference to a TED talk, done by a guy named Julian Treasure called Five ways to listen better. And it’s seven minutes of brilliance about how to listen really, really well. Because what most people are doing when they’re listening is they’re formulating their answer. But a really good listener is tuning in to not just what your client or your colleague is saying, but what they’re not saying. Not just the text of the communication, but the subtext of it.
So I think being a really good listener is point one and a corollary to this, most people will listen and then they will respond. A really good listener will respond not with a declaration, or an opinion, or an imperative, but with an interrogatory. They will ask a question, and then they will ask another question. When I started out, as a young account guy, my instinct, I don’t even know where I sort of gained this, maybe it was from my father who was a salesperson. My instinct was not only listen, but I would ask questions. And when they would answer the question, I would drill down I’d say, What’s that for? Can you tell me a little bit more about X? And I would get them to talk to me. And at the end of the conversation they actually thought I was pretty smart. So actually I think that listening skills as a piece of advice when you’re starting out makes the most sense. So when you go to see a client, and you have your first call, that first meeting, ideally it would be face to face. These days, it’s so much harder, it may be more like you and me now, on Zoom. I will just say, tell me what’s going on? How do you feel about that? How do you feel about the work? How do you feel about the people? What can we do better? And I’m going to ask all of the questions that will get the client to open up a little bit. Because I think that’s the way you’re signaling to them that you have their interests at heart, that you want to figure out alright, look, we know what we do reasonably well, but I’m much more concerned about what we don’t do as well, where we do less well. And I want to see if I can address that. And if there’s anything that’s keeping you awake at night, by God, I want to know that. I want to know what’s worrying you. And if there’s some underlying unresolved issue, let’s see if we can surface it, because maybe I can help with that. So, listening is the number one thing and asking questions is the other thing to actually get you a little bit more quickly up to speed on a new account, more than anything else.
Jenny 36:20
And the way you actually ask those questions, you really genuinely, it felt like you really wanted to know the answers as well, because that’s the other thing, isn’t it?
Robert 36:30
Yes,
one of the great people, the original founder of Digitas, a guy named Michael Bronner, one of the things as a very young entrepreneur, founding what has now become quite a famous agency, publicly traded now owned by Publicis says, Michael, in the early goings, he was maybe all of 24 years old, he had the instinct, when we would meet with clients, he would say, Tell me what your biggest problem is, maybe we can help you solve it? That was Michael’s opening gambit with clients. And it seemed to work because everybody had a big problem. No one would say, Oh, I have no problems. Everybody had a big problem.
Jenny 37:12
The interesting thing about that question is it shows you’re confident. And also it shows that you’re interested in the business, because it’s probably unlikely that someone senior at the client side is going to say, Oh my PPC is not working very well. They’re going to say, You know, my sales are going down, or My market share has collapsed or, I’m trying to launch this new brand or new product in the market. Do you agree?
Robert 37:40
You are so right. I mean they will often say, I’ve got a huge pricing issue here. I’ve got a distribution issue, there’s something wrong in my supply chain that’s not working. It could be a sales issue. It’s not necessarily going to be an advertising issue. By the way, the question sounds much more like a consultant at McKinsey Consulting would ask, rather than an advertising person would ask. But it’s sort of suggests, as you point out, an interest that extends beyond advertising, marketing and communicating, because so much of his business is not related to those things. And so much of your client’s day is not about the thing that is central to your own day. I often will say this to people, if you’ve ever spoken to a client, they’ll say, Oh, advertising is one of the many things that I have to worry about every day.
Jenny 38:36
It’s actually a statistic. Relationship Audits and Management which is a consultancy based in the UK, but they’ve got offices around the world, they run a survey for clients, because they audit client relationships, and they have a statistic that it’s 7% of a client’s week is spent on managing all of their supplier relationships. So if you are one of those people, then you’re less than 7% of their working week. So you’d better make that interaction count hadn’t you?
Robert 39:12
I think that’s true. And I’m a little struck by how small it is. It’s like tiny, I’m not going to argue with the numbers but the thing is Martin Puris, the co founder of Ammirati and Puris used to say to me, he was pretty sensitive to this and he would say, I think what we have to do as agency people is make the agency’s visit with the client the best part of their day, the thing that they look forward to the most. The thing that isn’t as maddening as all the other things they have to deal with, but it is something they look forward to. They look forward to us. They look forward to what we’re going to share with them. They get excited about whatever challenge we’re trying to address, and we are the best part of their day. He says that is the way you can insulate yourself from threats from other arenas. And I think Martin is instinctively right.
Jenny 40:09
Great philosophy. So, Robert, can you share with us from your own experience any other moments where you’ve faced other kinds of really difficult situations that maybe an account manager who’s listening may be facing, right now even?
Robert 40:24
I will tell you one, and you can tell me if you want me to talk about it. So when I joined Ammirati and Puris and I walked in the door, I discovered a couple of weeks into being there, that we had a $1 million fee overage. We were unbilled fee, 1 million not cash but fee to a client, unbilled. And we had an agency that was kind of like the proverbial deer in headlights, they were paralysed, unable to deal with this. And I discovered this, and by the way this was like the time because we were pretty small at the beginning, it was a huge percentage of the agency’s overall revenues, and it was unbilled. And what made it worse was the client wasn’t aware of it. The client did not know that they owe the agency a million dollars. And I have been there like a couple of weeks and suddenly discovered this, and I just had this moment of You’re kidding, right? You’re really kidding? This can’t possibly be true that our client owes us a million dollars, and haven’t paid us? By the way I didn’t find this out from my own people, I found this out from the finance people. The finance people came to me and said, Robert, I know you don’t know this, but we’ve got a shitload of unbilled fee here that your people are refusing to send out. So, when I went to my own people, they said, We’re afraid to send it out because we’re afraid the client will fire us. So that is a problem. And I’m happy to talk about it more if you want. That’s one problem. Another problem is we had the moment where the agency’s biggest client fired us, that was a pretty terrifying day.
Jenny 42:26
Before you go on to that one, I want to know, and I’m sure people listening will too, how did you actually have that conversation with the client? What did you do with that dilemma? Because let’s put it this way, Robert, I bet there’s some people listening who maybe they know the project’s gone over and they know they have to have that difficult conversation with the client, but they’re thinking, Where the hell am I going to start with that one?
Robert 42:49
Exactly. And there’s a lot of answers to it. But let me give you the one I actually arrived at. So, I was in a little bit of shock when this happened. So, I retreat to my office and I sort of think it through. I’d literally say, well, what am I going to do about this? Well, one thing I decided is, I can’t send this client an email and tell them and I can’t get on the phone. This is too important. I’ve got to go see them. Now this is pre COVID I understand. But this is when you could fly and this client was a long way away, we were in New York, but they were in Houston. So, I said I have to get on a plane. So that was the first thing. So, I called the client and she said, What’s it about? I said, I need really to talk with you. And by the way, you should get your boss there too, which told her it was important. And she said, Robert, tell me what it’s about. I said, let me wait and actually speak to you and Barbara directly. I’d rather talk to you face to face. If you have patience, I’ll come tomorrow. So that was point 1. Point 2 is I had been smart enough to actually build a relationship. In the early days I went and had dinner with this client. And I listened to her vent about all the things we had done wrong. And I asked a lot of questions. And I said to her look, I’m here. I wasn’t here at the beginning. I’m here for a reason. I’m here to actually address the things you’re talking about. So let me see if I can go back, talk to my own people and I will come back to you. And I will have some resolution or some observations that I hope will be salutary. So that was the beginning. So, I’d actually already done that. And that was helpful. So, I’m going to call her I made it face to face that was the second thing. I understood it couldn’t be done remotely. It had to be done in person. And the third thing is, this was the most brilliant insight. I said Okay, they owe us a million dollars. That’s true, but how much money have we spent? How much money have we spent on salaries, hard costs, how much have we paid our people? How much have we paid for all the overhead and vacation all kinds of stuff? So, I went to my finance people I said, Look, I understand they owe us a million bucks. Tell me how much they’ve paid. So, they go to the CFO. The CFO sort of figures out where I’m going with this, he says, I know exactly what he’s doing. And so, he said, Go back to Solomon and tell him, we could live with a half a million dollars, we could live with a half a million dollars. He understood better than most, that I wasn’t going to be able to walk out with a million bucks. But if I was willing to divide the proverbial baby, maybe this would work. So, they come back and said, we’re on the hook for half a million dollars. Now in fairness, we were probably hooked up for a lot more. But he was willing to live with that amount of money, he looked at the financials, the P&L. We’ll live to fight another day. So, I get on a plane, I go see the client, I’m seeing these two women in a room and I lay it out, I very meticulously lay out and the point I make to them, I said, Look, we did all this work for you. We did. I don’t want you to think that there’s anything misleading about this, this work actually got done. It wasn’t done on my watch. But I know it got done for you, and it got done at your behest. We didn’t bill you. That was our failure. And that is our mistake. And we own that. And what I said to them wasn’t, you’re going to pay us a half a million dollars, I did something else. I said, we’re going to eat a half a million dollars of this million dollar fee, we are going to absorb it as punishment for our mistake. And what we’re asking for you is to meet us halfway. And so, they said, I mean it goes on for about an hour or two, a lot of back and forth conversation. They said, Robert, could you give us a few minutes to ourselves, we’re going to step out. So, we step out for maybe 15/20 minutes, they come back and they say, Okay, send us a bill for $500,000. This is US money. And so, I get back on the plane, and I have collected a half a million dollars. And people say, Oh big deal. Solomon, anybody could just split the difference. I said it initially took a while to arrive at this point. And I said, the real brilliance of this, because they said, yes, you just ate a half a million dollars, but we kept this account for six more years. In the aggregate it was worth close to $100 million in fee over that period of time. Half a million dollars probably saved us. All of that fee, all of that staff, all of that work. And so, in retrospect, was it worth it? To me it was. And it seems like a simple answer now to me, but at the moment when it was in the middle of it, I will tell you it wasn’t simple.
Jenny 47:30
So quick question. Why hadn’t they billed that money?
Robert 47:34
They were afraid. They had a hugely contentious relationship with the client, the client was looking to replace them. I was hired to rescue this account, which was the vast majority of the agency’s billing at the time. And they brought me in to do this. I actually was in San Francisco at the time they brought me in to New York. And my number one job was to actually save this account. And I remember thinking to myself, okay, I could write off a million dollars but that means let’s say I’ll ask for a million dollars. That means the client will fire me. I could write off a million dollars, that means my agency will fire me. So how do I navigate through this and actually survive this? This wasn’t my doing. But I said, you can’t claim ‘not on my watch here’. The moment I walked in the door, I owned all of it. I absolutely felt it and I took possession of it. I wasn’t the lead account guide but I became the lead account guide on this. And I actually fixed it. And someone asked me about this. They said what happened to the person who ran the agency? I said she was gone within 90 days. I completely cleaned the house afterwards. Because one of the problems I realised in all of this was the dysfunction of the leadership of the group. And I needed to change it. And I did. And we actually went and built what was a quite superlative organisation supporting this client.
Jenny 49:12
Well, well done. Because that plane journey over to see the client, that must’ve been a really long trip?
Robert 49:20
It was called a white knuckle flight – I was so scared Jenny! I honestly, I really thought I can come home with nothing. Not only can I come home with nothing, I could come home so alienating the client by reviewing this, that not only will they not pay us, they will promptly put the account in review, and my agency will almost cease to exist. It was fairly terrifying to go down and by the way, when I was in front of them, you would have never known it.
Jenny 49:55
I can imagine. But I just want to pull out the key points of that, because there’s a lot of lessons in here, a lot of learnings. I mean, first of all, you insisted on talking to the client in person, not sending a huge email because you can’t get across your tonality or sincerity or empathy or anything. And then talking to finance, getting your team looking at the history, what’s happened, what hasn’t, the options of what you could go forward with. You obviously asked that really smart question about what are hard costs and what are the kind of the softer costs? And then you completely took ownership in front of the client, even though you’d only been there for a couple of weeks. As the representative you said, this is like the buck stops with me. And that must have built a lot of trust as well. Plus, you had a dinner with the client before?
Robert 50:46
Yes, you are so right about the last point when you say the buck stops with me. I actually in that meeting, I remember it now, turned to them and said, I swear to you on my life, this never, ever, ever will happen again. Not as long as I am at this agency, you will never be surprised by us. Never. You will never be surprised. If there is something we need to talk about, I will be the first person on the phone or on a plane to come and see you. You will never be blindsided. I said, I think this was dreadful on the agency’s part. And I think the punishment feels appropriate to me, I said that, too. I couldn’t stress enough, I said a half a million dollars is a lot of money for us. And we are really, really taking this extraordinarily seriously. And they understood that I was willing to meet them halfway. And I think, like me, they were also thinking long term. Beyond this meeting. And they said, This is someone we can work with, we do begin to actually think he has credibility with us. What he says he means, he’s speaking with real conviction. He’s speaking from the heart. And I can tell he really is suffering about this. And he feels badly for us. He doesn’t feel badly for his agency. He feels badly for us, because the agency let us down. And that’s exactly what I said to him. I said, we let you down. This is our fault. But the truth is we did do the work. I said and normally if we had just put this forward to you, you could have made a decision whether to say yes or no at the time, we just didn’t. It was terrible work on our part. Terribly deficient on our part.
Jenny 52:39
I think there’s a brilliant lesson in there for every account manager listening and I love how your sincerity also shines through. And I’m not surprised at all that you built so many strong trust relationships with your clients Robert. We’re at the top of the hour, and I’m regrettably going to have to wrap up. However, I would love to squeeze one more scenario in, where you talk about another difficult conversation or difficult scenario you’ve had with your clients. Because I think just through listening to your story, I think a lot of people can resonate. So would you mind sharing one more situation before we go?
Robert 53:19
I’ll do the last one, I’m going to do this super fast, because I want to respect your time. So we had a moment where, and this was the third of the difficult conversations, and we had a moment where the agency’s largest client globally fired us. Now we had three divisions, we had a broadcast division, we had a direct response division and we had digital division. I ran two of the divisions, I ran the direct response and digital division. The largest account was the broadcast account, the television radio, plus the print stuff, the general advertising side. The second largest account in the agency was my group, the digital indirect group. So they fired the general agency. And we all gathered and by the way, this spelt the end of the agency, the agency was gone a year later. This was the end of Ammirati and Puris. And this was Compaq Computer who fired us. And it was a dark day for the agency. So they gather us all together to announce this. This is dreadful news. And I’m waiting for the call to fire us, to fire my group. And I get the call from one of my clients. And David was on the phone. He was one of my chief clients and he said we’re not firing you. We’re firing the general agency. We’re not firing the director digital group. We fought like the dickens to keep you. I said why David? He said because we explained to the CEO of the agency, a guy named Eckhard Pfeiffer, we explained to Eckhard that our business would be harmed, seriously harmed if we let you go. And I thought about this, though he saved us but he fired my counterparts on the general agency side. I thought about this and I said the reason we were able to do this was all the years in which I had built trust with these clients, all of those plane trips, all of those lunches, all of those dinners, all of those phone calls, all of those conversations in the aggregate, built up to something where they came to really rely not just on me, but on every one of my team. I had 100 people working on this account. And up and down the line these people were hugely dedicated to them. And they realised how integral we had become to their business, and how much they would be damaged if they said goodbye to us. So where the general agency, it felt almost like a Cavalier decision. It wasn’t for us at all. They kept us. And because we knew, that we couldn’t stay forever, we actually transferred this group to a sister agency that was also run by our holding company. So for a year we worked with them, and we moved a whole bunch of people to another agency who continued for years later with them. So that was the story. And that was the third incredibly difficult conversation, but it’s all about, that’s probably the best place to leave this. The thing that saved us were the relationships. It wasn’t the work. It wasn’t the cost. It was the relationships. The relationships that not only I had built, but all my colleagues had built. There was there was like this inner connection that was so deep, they just couldn’t imagine life without us. So that was that was our saving grace. By the way, the account was worth millions of dollars to us. So you know, we actually were a big part of salvaging what was, which would have been an even bigger disaster.
Jenny 56:49
Fantastic. Well, that is just a testament to how much effort and energy you poured into those relationships. So that’s amazing, amazing story, Robert, thank you for sharing. And thank you for coming on the podcast again. Because, as always, you’ve delivered so many valuable tips and insights into the world of account management. And this has been brilliant to speak to you again. Thank you so much for joining me again.
Robert 57:13
My pleasure. Anytime, Jenny. Good to speak with you. Stay well.
Jenny 57:17
Thank you.
57:18
