Welcome to Episode 76. This is part two of a two part episode about raising your account management game. If you haven’t listened to part one, I’d recommend you go back and give it a listen, it’s episode 74.
This two part series is relevant for you if you’re in a more senior account manager role, and you want to either be promoted to account director, and you need to know what you need to do to get there, and you don’t understand what tasks you need to do, how you need to be behaving differently to get that promotion.
You might be sitting there frustrated that you aren’t being recognised by your agency. So you want to raise your profile, or you’re not really sure what you can do to be more effective in your account management role.
I hope you enjoy this episode. If you’d like to raise your account management game, increase your confidence with your clients, add more value to your clients and be seen more as that trusted advisor that a reactive order taker, check out the details of my Account Accelerator programme. From January 2023, we not only have a nine week programme, where I work with you to help you not only with the core training principles, but also to implement what you’ve learned, we also have a taster version, which is a one week format. You work with me for 3 x 90 minute sessions over one week and you also get access to my online programme. Once you’ve been through that programme, you can join me in my Account Academy where you can connect with other people, and you have ongoing support with me. If any of this sounds interesting for either you or a member of your team, then go to my Training page.
Transcript:
Welcome to Episode 76. This is part two of a two part episode about raising your account management games. So if you haven’t listened to part one, I’d recommend you go back and give it a listen. It’s episode 74. Now, this two part series is relevant more for you if you’re in a more senior account manager role, and you want to either be promoted to account director, and you need to know what you need to do to get there, and you don’t understand what tasks you need to do, how you need to be behaving differently to get that promotion. You might be sitting there frustrated that you aren’t being recognised by your agency. So you want to raise your profile, or you’re not really sure what you can do to be more effective in your account management role.
So in part one, we talked about the acronym RAISE. And I talked through the first two letters of that acronym. R was for research, and A was for asking great questions. So again, if you haven’t heard the episode, go back and give it a listen, because we go into a lot more detail about what those two things stand for, and what you should be doing differently. So now on this episode, I’m going to be talking about the other elements of that acronym RAISE. So ‘I’ of RAISE is for Insight. So what do we mean by insight, because there’s actually quite a lot of debate, particularly in agencies, about what’s an insight and what isn’t. So this is about you. And what I mean by insight is about you proactively coming up with information that’s relevant to your client that they don’t know. Or it will be difficult for them to find out. So you’re bringing it to them as new news. And insight could also relate to you coming forward to your senior management team at the agency with something perhaps they didn’t know before. So a tangible client example of this would be maybe to uncover an insight about a change in their customer’s behaviour. And then you bring this to your client with a suggestion for what you need to do differently, or what they need to do differently in their marketing campaigns, for example. Now, the highest level of insight is you conducting your own research. So maybe you would get together a focus group, and then you generate some insight from that. But often, that’s expensive and time consuming. But that would be really interesting insight that you come up with, and I know some agencies that do put that amount of time and effort. And it probably depends a lot about the type of agency you’re working for. If you’re working in a big network agency with multiple departments and a lot more resource, that’s a lot more of a possibility.
A great source of customer behaviour trends and insights are often found by reading management consultancy websites. So management consultancies could be places like Accenture, PriceWaterhouseCooper, Deloitte and other sources of insight about consumer behaviour, or sites like Gartner, or Forrester. So we’ll put the links in the show notes, because it’s always a good idea to stay abreast of what’s happening with your clients customers, because ultimately, that’s all they’re concerned about. So the more that we’re concerned about their customer, and understanding how their customers are changing the profile of the customer that’s really where the value comes from, and what our clients are most concerned about.
So to give you a kind of an example of this, your client, let’s say, is in the beauty space, and they have a range of beauty products. And, currently, their product positioning is around purity, the purity of the ingredients and the purity angle of sourcing pure products from around the world, for example. But during the course of the last few years, consumer preferences have slightly changed. So we’ve obviously been through a global pandemic and now you’ve uncovered an insight through looking at beauty trends for 2025. So you found a report that’s just come out and it shows that actually consumer preferences are less worried about the purity angle of the products, but more about how efficacious the ingredients are, because obviously, there’s been this need to wash our hands all the time and be really cognizant of how germs are spread because of the pandemic that’s been highlighted over the last few years. So this insight, in this report that you’ve uncovered, could trigger a need to take a whole new look at the client’s products, positioning, and also its messaging. So that could spark an area or a thought in you to bring this insight to the client to open up a dialogue with the client about revising, or certainly looking in further depth, about the products positioning. So that could be that could be one thing, because obviously, product positioning and messaging, if you’re a brand strategy agency that’s absolutely in your wheelhouse. That’s the kind of thing that your client will be expecting you to bring proactively to them. This insight that could change fundamentally how they’re talking about their products, and how they are appealing to their audience. A further step into that could be looking at looking at what your products or what your clients competitors are doing, are they revising their messaging? Have they changed, look at some of the competitors, maybe they’re also taking that purity angle as their core positioning in the marketplace.
So I hope this stimulated a few thoughts in your mind about how you can start thinking about bringing some insight to your client. And let’s talk about how you could bring insight to the senior management team of your agency. So you could have, for example, you could be really attune and situationally aware of what’s happening in your marketing field. So you read, for example, Marketing Week, on a regular basis. And you’ve noticed that there’s a webinar that’s happening with Professor Mark Ritson, and he’s talking specifically about brands that are marketing through a recession, because there’s lots of historical data about how brands perform, if they continue spending through a recession, rather than slashing their marketing budgets. So you decide to share this fact with the senior management team proactively, and you offer to watch the webinar, and then provide a summary to them afterwards and then identify the relevance of to some of your clients. And then you can proactively again, provide some ideas for how you might translate that those findings that you’ve listened to, through the webinar, to your client base. So why is that important?
Why would you, in order to raise your account management game, want to provide insight? Well,
it really demonstrates your attitude in your job, you look enthused, you look interested, you look engaged. It makes you stand out, and shows that you’re really keen to progress. Because you’re going over and above, you’re bringing ideas, you’re bringing insight. And it reinforces your value to the client, and also to the agency. And then it’s something that you can be proud to chat about in your annual performance review.
Because, you know, how many times have you thought, Oh, my goodness, I’ve got my annual performance review coming up with my line manager. What have I done this year, to show that I’m ready to be promoted, I’m ready to go to the next level. So, you know, no one’s ever lost their job for showing too much enthusiasm. So that’s kind of the attitude that you’ve got to have. So don’t forget that all of these tips is around, you already want to progress in your career, you already want to stand out, you want to get promoted, etc. So that’s the ‘I’ of RAISE. It’s to provide insights, and I hope that’s stimulated some thoughts.
Now, let’s go to the next letter of the acronym RAISE. So the S is about sell. So what do I mean by sell? Well, if you want to raise your account management game, and you want to go to the next level, perhaps if you want to reach account director, senior account director, group account director or client services director, you really need to learn the principles of selling, and to have some awareness of selling. And when I speak to account managers about selling, they absolutely cringe sometimes at the word sales. Because it often conjures up an image of someone who’s a bit cheesy, bit sleazy, you know, who’s pushing someone into a sale. And of course, that’s not the reality, there’s a lot of professional salesmen out there. And you obviously wouldn’t want to compromise your precious client relationship that you’ve built and nurtured over many, many years. You’ve invested in building a solid relationship, the client loves working with you, you’ve done some great work. There’s mutual respect, trust and understanding.
And I’m not suggesting here that you clumsily start selling your services, banging on about you, your services, your agency, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it’s rude at best and repellent at worst. And actually, your precious relationship that you’ve built up could be tarnished somehow, if your client sniffs, they call it ‘commission breath’. Because often salespeople are incentivized on commissions so you want to sell in a way that’s totally authentic, totally comfortable. And ultimately, what I’m talking about here is making sure you are proactively uncovering clients goals and their desired outcomes, so that you can then proactively come up with some solutions to help because selling ultimately is helping you. You’re certainly not selling stuff that your client doesn’t need or want. Now, those solutions that you could come up with first and foremost, should be focused absolutely on helping the client, their business, their role, their progression. And it’s not about serving your needs. Obviously, growing your account and getting additional revenue for the agency is a byproduct of helping solve the client’s business problems. Because no client is going to part with any money to pay for an agency services, if ultimately, it’s not bringing some kind of outcome.
So by selling, I mean, suggesting ideas to help the client reach their goals and not feeling bad about that, not feeling like, oh, no, I shouldn’t really be talking about our other services, even though I think they really could do with them. You know, I know we do great work for other clients in other areas of our business but I feel hesitant about suggesting it. Many, many agency account managers just feel like they just don’t want to open up that conversation, because sometimes they don’t know how to have that conversation in a really natural way. Now, why is it important? Why is it important, this sales aspect of your role? Well, if you’re not suggesting ideas to help your client, you can be sure they are receiving phone calls and emails from other agencies, offering to solve their marketing problems, and coming up with their own solutions and helping the clients business. So think of it in those terms as well. Think about your competitors, other agencies in the marketplace, are looking at your client as a prospect and they’re doing their own marketing activities. They’re doing their own new business activities and your client could be on their prospecting list. Because, frankly, how can we reasonably reasonably expect that our clients are going to ignore an irresistible offer to solve their marketing challenges? So, they may be tempted to take a phone call, or to reply to an email from a competing agency, if their own agency isn’t being proactive, and providing support and making it known that they want to help solve their clients challenges.
So how do you do this? How can we even start to think about this? One of the things that you can do is to offer to be part of the client’s yearly marketing planning process, or conduct quarterly business reviews where you bring those ideas to them. This sets the precedent for a way of working with your agency that keeps you upstream, I call it upstream. Because you’re working with senior clients, you are demonstrating your strategic ability, you’re leveraging the learnings from all the other clients that you’re working with. And you’re demonstrating really your value, rather than being a reactive order taker, that’s downstream and that’s waiting for a project brief. If you have strategic capability within your agency, then it would be remiss not to offer that to your client. So make sure that you’re asking for your clients goals, what do they want to achieve? Have they already set their strategy for the year? How could you add to that? How could you bring relevant ideas to support them in that. So if you don’t, the likelihood is that it might be a great idea that you bring, but it’s not going to be relevant to what they want to solve. So, agencies often want to be proactive, they want to bring new ideas. But if you’re doing that in a vacuum, without knowing what the client wants to achieve, then you may be missing a trick, you may be wasting time.
So the ideal scenario is that you do it in combination, you are asking the client what their goals are, what their challenges are, what their business problems are. And at the same time doing your own research into, we talked about before, how their customers are changing, how the marketplace is changing, and what their competitors are doing, for example. So where you bring those two elements together, it really is the dynamite.
Because, again, if you’re just coming up with random ideas, it looks like you’re being salesy, quite frankly. And in terms of effectiveness, it’s like throwing leaflets out of a helicopter, and hoping they’re going to land in the hands of the right target, and the right person, it’s just not a strategy for success.
So what if you’re not selling, if you’re not being proactive, and providing new ideas that are relevant and asking for their goals and strategy and challenges, then you’re in danger of being seen as a reactive order taker. You know, every study I ever read, and I tried to read every study about when clients feedback about their agency’s performance, what comes up time and time, again, is this lack of practivity, and this lack of coming with new ideas. So try not to fall into the trap of being that person that just waits for the brief. And you might be listening to this and thinking, it’s okay for you to say, but I am stacked with work as it is, where am I going to carve out the time to step back, do this research, look at the market come up with insight, and I get it, I really get it. And it’s a whole other podcast episode for me to talk about why you might be struggling in that area. Sometimes it’s because you have a hybrid account management role, where hybrid means you have project management duties, which focus on project delivery, scoping, scheduling, trafficking, troubleshooting. And the account management side of your role is really about coming up with new ideas, understanding the client’s business, running quarterly business reviews, being involved in their yearly planning. So there’s a conflict in the two areas. And sometimes it can feel a bit relentless, if you are always in project management mode. So yeah, that’s a whole different podcast episode on the differences between project management and account management. But fundamentally, what we’re talking about here is raising your game, raising your account management game and everything that you can do to make you more successful in that area. So I hope that was helpful. That’s the S in RAISE.
The next letter in the acronym of RAISE is E, and it’s for Education. So what do I mean by education? Well,
if you want to raise your account management game, you’re really serious about your career, you want to be good at your job. You perhaps have got your eyes on maybe one day, running the company, or leading the team, or you just want to be better. You might want to go to another agency that you know is going to be a step up for you, so you want to prepare yourself. I would say education is something to really think about, read as many books as you can, listen to podcasts, do many free online courses, and account management. The skill of account management covers multiple areas. It’s leadership skills, marketing skills, agency business understanding, sales, and managing client relationships, softer skills. So there really is loads of different topics that you can read up about, and learn about.
And there really is an abundance of free educational materials out there on this topic, you just have to Google it. For example, LinkedIn Learning now has a vast array of free mini online trainings. If you want to hone your leadership skills, or you want to focus on developing your client management skills, communication skills, a lot of the softer skills are covered by LinkedIn Learning. Podcasts, you might be someone like me who loves to go for a walk, and put on a podcast because I find listening to podcasts really quite sort of an intimate experience, I really do enjoy that because I struggled to read, I’ve got loads of books that I start, and then I drift off, because I find it easier to listen. So for example, one podcast at the moment you’ve probably heard of is up there in the top charts, it’s probably number one, it’s certainly up in the top five, the Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett. And I think this is interesting if you have aspirations to becoming a business leader, because it really uncovers the different histories of the CEOs that Steven interviews. And the interesting thing about Steven Bartlett is the fact that he managed to build one of the biggest social media agencies himself, so he was an agency owner. And he often talks about his role in the agency. So I find his podcast absolutely brilliant. That’s one I would recommend.
The other one of the books I’ve read recently about organic account growth actually, is called The Expansion Sale by Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer. And I think that’s one of the best, most insightful books about organic account growth. It really is insightful and contains original data as well, they’ve conducted their own research. And whereas some of these research studies you read, they include people that aren’t actually clients. The type of people that they’ve included in these studies are actually people that you would want as a client. So check that out, if you’ve never heard of that one. And other books, I mean, there’s such a huge array of books, Win Without Pitching, or Pricing Creativity, these are two excellent books by Blair Enns. Blair Enns is an agency advisor and he runs his own training business called Win Without Pitching. And, again, super smart, really insightful. And you’re going to learn a lot about the agency business, and particularly new business and pricing. So check that one out. And, of course, the classic Art of Client Service by Robert Solomon, is another great book to put on your list about how to manage client relationships in an agency. I also interviewed Robert on this podcast actually. So if you are curious to get a taster of his work, then check out episodes 46 and 56. And Robert, again, was an agency guy, he was in account management and then he led his own agency, and lots of different stories to bring to life, the art of managing the client relationship and doing the account management role years ago when he was working in some of real, standout agencies.
So why do you want to educate yourself? Why is education so important? Well, it’s low cost. I mean, the cost of a book, free online training courses, it’s going to make you smarter. And you can also offer to share insights with your colleagues. You could even start a book club in your agency, that could be a good idea.
I know one agency called Skin and Blister, fantastic agency, they’re in the health care agency space. They encourage everyone in that team to share anything that they learn. So any insights that they may have picked up from a podcast episode, for example, they have a meeting, I don’t know if it’s weekly, but they make it a regular habit of everybody sharing something that they’ve learned. And even if you read a couple of pages a day from a book, that effort that you make will compound over time. And before you know it, you’ve read one book, you’ve gained some insight, you have a greater understanding.
And I just think it’s an amazing habit to have is to keep educating yourself. You’re never going to know everything. No one is ever going to know everything. You’re going to learn from experience of being on the job. But you can also learn things that are going to make your job easier. And if you don’t educate yourself, you’re going to miss out on so much rich information that’s already out there. People that have tried the trodden path before you. And, let’s face it, there’s a YouTube video for absolutely every scenario you could be in, in life, isn’t there nowadays? So keep that in mind. If you’re facing a challenge, how to get a promotion at work, how to have a difficult conversation with a client, just put it on YouTube and find a relevant video.
So, I hope that’s been useful. It’s not my usual format. I feel more comfortable asking other people questions. I’m not so comfortable with the monologue, I have to be honest, but I hope that’s been useful and has stimulated some thoughts for you about raising your account management game. So let’s just have a quick recap. The acronym is RAISE. And that’s ‘R’ for Research, ‘A’ for Asking great questions, ‘I’ for Insight, ‘S’ for Selling and Sales, and E is to Educate yourself. So I hope you’ve enjoyed that podcast episode.
And if you’d like to raise your account management game, increase your confidence with your clients, add more value to your clients by coming up with relevant ideas and proposing them in a way that you are not going to feel salesy. It’s going to flow and you’re going to feel really comfortable. You want to be seen more as that trusted advisor, you want to be more consultative with clients who want to run those meetings in a really buttoned up professional way. You don’t want to be seen as the reactive order taker, that’s not bringing value. You also want to make money for your agency by growing your accounts. Check out the details of my Account Accelerator programme. You can go to my website, which is accountmanagementskills.com. And from January 2023, we not only have a nine week programme, where I work with you to help you not only with the core training principles, but also to implement what you’ve learned, we also have a taster version, which is a one week format. So you work with me for 3 x 90 minute sessions over one week and you also get access to my online programme. And you also once you’ve been through that programme, you can join me in my Account Academy, my Academy where you can connect with other people, and you have ongoing support with me. So if any of this sounds interesting for either you or a member of your team, then go over to my website account managementskills.com/training. I look forward to seeing you on the next one.
