I read as many reports I can about the state of agency account management and it makes for grim reading.
“I sometimes feel they are more concerned with their gmail and booking meetings than with my challenge” –
client lead (“The Future of Account Management” report, IPA 2020)
The feedback from clients and industry experts is relentless and often scathing about the account manager’s performance.
But I think the agency business model and how account managers are set up in their roles needs an overhaul before the finger is pointed at their lack of skill/abilities.
There’s often a mismatch in expectations.
Clients want account managers to:
- Understand their goals, problems and world to be able to “walk in their shoes” and bring relevant solutions
- Take an interest in their product, company, business, market and customer so they can be more consultative
- Have a unique, critical perspective. Paint a picture of the client’s future business and provide an ROI on the relationship – so they can have client improvement conversations (according to Gartner)
- Be knowledgeable, professional and efficient when it comes to delivering the agency’s service but also proactive with suggesting new, business-relevant ideas and insight
- Have an ‘external’ perspective (changes and trends) to keep the client’s knowledge current
Account managers also want to do this but they’re often not set up for success (through no fault of their own) because they’re:
- Managing too many accounts – so are overwhelmed
- Understaffed and covering for colleagues – so can’t get ahead of their workload
- Billed by the hour and capped with a billable target – so can’t be proactive
- Responsible for clients across multiple industries & delivering multiple types of agency services – so struggle to build depth of knowledge or expertise in any one area (affecting their confidence in client interactions)
- Told their job is about ‘service’ – so they have a tendency to have a servitude mentality as apposed to a challenger mindset and being encouraged to strengthen their business acumen, commercial and strategic skills and bring a unique, critical perspective to the client
- Not onboarded thoroughly – so can’t articulate the agency’s business value or differentiating proposition
- Essentially a project manager – so are consumed by operational delivery details with no time for client development
Conversely where I’ve seen account managers thrive i.e. not only meet but exceed client’s expectations, they’re working for an agency which has:
- A separate project management team to take care of the project delivery details – so they can focus on how to help the client solve their business/marketing challenges and suggest ideas based on what’s ahead
- A strong positioning (vertical or horizontal) – so they can build deeper subject-matter expertise
- The right business model to support pricing that ensures healthy profit is baked in (mostly fixed fee/project based or value-based)
- A strong new business qualification process – so their agency attracts the right types of clients
- A solid internal client development process and growth KPIs tied to employee performance and a supportive ‘coaching’ culture – so they don’t hit unnecessary mindset roadblocks e.g. “we’re too busy with existing workload/under-resourced to be proactive & develop more ideas”
- A culture of celebrating account growth as well as net new account wins, co-creating financial targets with account managers and ensuring financial forecasting is central to the role – so they develop a more entrepreneurial mindset
