Is the agency business model holding account managers back?
Question: Why did you ditch your agency?
Clients: “Because they never gave us anything we didn’t ask for”
This finding stuck out from a large scale agency-client survey conducted in 2018 sponsored by the AAAA and ANA.
Even though I read this years ago, the same sentiment is reflected in every similar survey I’ve read ever since.
So you may very well be delivering high quality work on time and on budget – but it won’t stop your clients from taking a cold call from one of your competitors.
Because if you aren’t bringing anything additional or new to remind your clients why they chose you and why you’re at the cutting edge of what you do, when the contract is up for renewal they’ll be tempted to look elsewhere.
Account managers are well placed to spot opportunities to bring clients relevant additional value; ideas, insights, perspective, trends, tech/legal news, other services – and have a conversation.
Gartner calls this having “client improvement conversations” i.e.
- Painting a picture of how the agency can bring future value
- Providing a critical perspective on how to improve on what the client is doing
- Delivering an ROI on the relationship through their help
But account managers (or any client-facing team members) often don’t have time to be proactive.
Often they don’t know what additional value is even relevant because they’re not close enough to the client’s evolving goals and business challenges.
Pitching new ideas without the context of understanding the client’s challenges and goals can come across as too ‘salesy’.
And clearly bringing new ideas would be equally beneficial to the agency’s bottom line – account growth is cheaper than finding new business as well as highly profitable.
According to Gartner “if the account manager is either unwilling or unable to have client improvement conversations, the whole growth engine stalls”
There are multiple reasons why client-facing team members don’t demonstrate this level of proactivity.
Yes a few clients occasionally don’t encourage it because they want you acting as an order taker and nothing more.
However, ‘agency controlled’ areas stopping proactivity include:
- Lack of time due to the agency’s business model e.g. wrong pricing model, charging by the hour / high billable targets
- No personal motivation; no direction/support/training/accountability
- No wider team availability; others unable to contribute to additional idea generation
- Absence of internal account growth processes & SoPs
Agencies leave a huge amount of money on the table. There are lots of potential additional projects they could generate from being more proactive with existing clients.
Clients know agencies have an ‘external’ perspective i.e. as well as understanding how they work you can share what they’re missing because of your work with other clients – that’s very compelling.
To leverage your “incumbent advantage” and avoid being ditched, pool your resources and have a focused account growth plan for your ‘key’ clients and be more intentional about client growth.
