Welcome to Episode 68, a solo episode in which I talk about four key considerations you can make within your creative agency, as an account manager, to boost your account growth.
Transcript:
00:03
Welcome to Episode 68. Now, this is a shorter episode than normal. But I wanted to talk to you about growing your existing accounts. Now, there’s been a lot of talk about the coming recession. Are we going into recession? If so, how do we prepare for it? Mark Ritson has written about this in Marketing Week, and also The Drum have been talking about how agencies can prepare for it. So, for agencies, it will be even more important than ever to look after their current clients. And also, not only look after them, but also seek ways of growing them as well. So, I’d like to share with you four reminders, and some questions you could ask yourself, about how you can grow existing business, and also to talk about why it helps you in your account management role.
00:57
So, let’s start. The first one is to categorise your clients. Now, by that I mean, are you prioritising the clients you know you can add value to. Who are the clients you actually want to work with? Who are the clients that maybe come to you for advice, for example, and are actually willing to invest in your expertise? And also, do you know, the state of their business, i.e. is their business growing? Do they have perhaps a new product pipeline? Are they expanding internationally? Or are they in a particularly fast growing market sector, for example? So, a combination of factors to categorise your clients to really focus your attention in one area. So, who do you want to extend that relationship with and also think about are you aligned values-wise. Is it easy doing business with them? So, think about the criteria that you could use to categorise your clients.
You could use bronze, silver, gold, platinum, but those platinum clients are the ones that you’ve identified, that you really don’t want to lose. And, as I said, this will really help the account manager focus their scarce time and energy in developing a client development plan. So, you’re already busy, you’re already thin on the ground, maybe, and you don’t want to be creating client development action plans for clients who, quite frankly, you don’t see a future with. So, have a sit down, think about categorising your clients in terms of the ones that you think have growth potential. And that will just enable you to focus your effort and time on thinking about the ways that you can be more helpful to those clients. What ideas could you bring?
So, that’s the first thing, categorise your clients.
02:57
Number two, in terms of the considerations of growing your business, is to understand your client’s priorities. So, take those platinum clients and think, are you part of their internal yearly planning process, for example? Do they have a tendency to share their yearly goals with you and their strategy? Or maybe you co-create their plan with them? Are you holding quarterly strategy sessions, where you’re staying close to their changing business priorities and their challenges, and have this regular forum to understand what their priorities are? And then you can present your ideas to support them to achieve their goals. So, do you really understand the client’s business? What are their individual goals, because many of our clients have commercial business goals, but also have personal KPIs (key performance indicators) that are important to their success. So, they’re being measured. So, getting to know both the client goals, personally, and also the business goals. Again, it helps you focus your efforts to develop relevant solutions. So, understanding these client priorities means gathering relevant information, doing research behind the scenes. Don’t ask a client any question that you could Google. So, gather that relevant information externally. If it’s a publicly listed company, for example, you could look at downloading the transcripts from the investor relations meetings, or if they’re a limited company in the UK, you can look on Companies House because they often have the Chairman’s statement. Similarly with their website, you can look at downloading their report and accounts and looking at what they’re saying in the media here. So, gathering relevant information externally, but also asking the right stakeholders the right questions in the right way.
Every interaction you have with your points of contact within the client company is an opportunity for you to gather information. So, maybe you’re not dealing with those senior clients who are potentially closer to understanding their business priorities. How are you going to make a plan for contacting those senior people? Those senior people have more authority and budget sign-off, to potentially fund any additional business-enhancing ideas that you would come up with. Maybe you’re only dealing with clients who are more reactive, and they have predefined budgets, and maybe they don’t have the scope in their role to be open to your additional thoughts, additional ideas, and solutions. We need to gather as much information as we can about the client and their business. Why that’s helpful for us is because, by understanding the client’s business and their personal priorities, we can be laser targeted on finding the right solutions. We want to be seen as a contributor to the client strategy.
And this keeps you upstream. You’re being perceived more in line of a management consultant, for example, than a reactive order taker that’s just focused on tactics. So far, we’ve talked about one, categorising your clients and two, understanding the client’s priorities.
06:54
So number three is to show up as the sage. And what I mean by being the sage is, are you in the habit of providing additional insight, extra information outside of the brief? According to one of the largest studies ever conducted between clients and agencies, the number one reason clients fire agencies is because they never gave us anything that we didn’t ask for. So if you think about that for a moment, you think, well, that’s a bit unfair, we’re doing a really good job, delivering high-quality work on budget on time. But actually, our clients want us to be more productive. So for you to be the sage, it means bringing the external perspective. Our clients tend to go very narrow and deep on their brand. But we work with multiple clients, we have a wider perspective of the market. So for example, you could look at what the client’s competitors are up to? Could you gather some information, some screenshots, and present a competitor analysis back to them? How are their customers changing? Could you look at some management consultancy sites, and download sector-specific reports and see if there’s any changing behaviours that their customers are doing right now? What insight could you share? And what observations have you made from working with your other clients? Because, according to a study by Relationship Audits and Management, all clients want you to leverage the learnings you have from working with other clients and apply those learnings to their business. But unfortunately, in the majority of cases, agencies don’t tend to do that. So that’s a really easy way for you to show up in the client relationship as a sage, as someone that’s really bringing value and that external perspective. Similarly,
showing up as a sage means looking towards the future. What new market opportunities are opening up for the client? Are there any changes or challenges ahead in your area of expertise that the client should be aware of? Recently, for example, the law changed in the UK when it comes to packaging. It was mandated, from April 2022, that all packaging had to reduce the plastic. Now, that would mean a redesign of packaging, inevitably, as most FMCG companies retailers switch to more sustainable packaging. That’s an ideal opportunity for you to proactively have come to the client with that legal change and what your proactive ideas were in terms of redesigning their packaging, for example. So why is this helpful for you as an account manager? Well, unfortunately for us, sometimes we are seen in a bit of a servitude role, seen as reactive order takers who just get stuff done, but don’t tend to add additional value. So showing up as a sage, using some of the examples I’ve shared, demonstrates that you’re commercially strategic, not only to your client, but also your internal team.
And you really understand the client’s business and their market, their competitors, and their customers. And it positions you differently in their mind. I understand that this takes extra effort, there’s no doubt about it, but I think in terms of positioning yourself in the mind of the client, it’s really, really important. So number three, showing up as the sage.
10:54
Now, to the point about going it alone and feeling like you’ve got to do everything, because this sounds quite overwhelming. Number four, is to make it a team effort. So, are you having regular team meetings focused on client growth? For example, there’s never enough time in the day to spend on strategising about client growth. So make it a business priority by running quarterly client growth planning meetings, where you gather together all team members from different areas of your agency, so that they can contribute a strategy. Are you pooling those ideas and perspectives to come up with solutions, and then co creating those strategies as a group, so that you can approach the right client contacts in the right way? And the client is always reassured that there’s a team of people behind you thinking about their business. And this is something that came up in the Gartner study at the end of 2019. It was called ‘Why your accounts aren’t growing’. And it was one of the key factors,
you’re not a lone wolf, this is about you reminding the client that you’ve just come out of an internal meeting where we’ve been focused on your business and how we can bring you more ideas that are relevant to help you with your goals. So, make sure you keep telling them what you’re doing behind the scenes, and that there’s a whole team working with you on their business. So, you know, why is it helpful to make it a team effort for you? Well, hopefully, it’s obvious, but you can lead the client development planning process but you’ll get a much richer pool of ideas by bringing all of the members of the team together to co create the plan.
And also, as I said, it reassures the client that there’s a lot more people working on the business than just you.
12:52
So, I hope that was useful. Let’s just recap on those four considerations and reminders for growing your existing accounts. So number one, categorise your clients. Number two, understand the client’s priorities. Number three, show up as the sage and four, make it a team effort.
13:15
Now, if this has resonated with you, and you would like to go further into the other ways that you can grow your business, work with me for nine weeks so that we can work together to help you grow your accounts, and talk about all other aspects of growing your existing accounts, then my next Account Accelerator training programme starts on the 15th of September. So if this sounds like something that you’re interested in, or maybe you think it’s suitable for one of your team members, then please book a call with me, you can go to my website, accountmanagementskills.com/training and book a short call with me. And let’s have a discussion and see if it’s the right fit for you. Similarly, you can contact me on LinkedIn at Jenny Plant. So, thank you for your attention. I hope you like the new short format podcast, and I look forward to talking to you on the next one.
