Revisiting Account Management This Year

Do I look forward to an extended drive with this person? We'll get to that question in a minute.

I so believe in the account management role that we do an event for them every year (Sept 23-24 in Atlanta in 2025), I’ve talked at conferences about how digital firms are under-indexing on that role specifically, and we spent $300,000 over the years finding scientific ways to identify the best ones.

This all stems from a core belief: clients notice deficiencies in account service (and project management, too) long before they notice deficiencies in the quality of the work itself. And if you think about it, the reason is pretty simple: everyone is qualified to judge that, while very few are experts in whatever tradecraft they’re pay for. Which is why they aren’t doing it themselves. But everyone is an expert in how they are treated.

Setting the Standard

I’ll just make a few broad statements, and if you want to learn more, you can follow the links.

• AMs should close the sale. A salesperson assesses fit and answers objections, but the relationship should be transitioned to AM way earlier than you think, for three reasons. First, the new client won’t feel like there’s been a bait and switch as they bonded with the salesperson and then had to work with someone else. Second, the AM is not going to appreciate inheriting those promises that an overeager salesperson made. Third, the salesperson needs to leave the cave and go out and find something else to kill and drag back to the AM. Full article here.
• AMs should be strategic, but that strategy is delivered mainly through questions rather than answers. There are always going to be multiple people at the firm where they work who know a lot more about a subject. The notion that a great AM cannot stand between your client and your expert is nonsensical, and it’s based on a deep misunderstanding of that role. More here.
• AMs are usually terrible at pricing things (though they are good at selling that pricing that’s based on working with others to arrive at it), and their feet must be held to the fire by a strong PM team that does not answer to the AMs.
• In a traditional creative/advertising shop, AMs and PMs together should account for 30% of your total workforce. In a dev shop, that drops to 28%. In an in-house, client-side setting, that rises to 37%.
• Being a PM is not a stepping stone to being an AM. They are different roles and only about 8% of people are sufficiently good at both.
• PMs should not be embedded with or answer to AMs. Why here.

Oh, and by the way, here are the ten things they do (listed at the top of the transcription of this 2 Bobs episode).

Screening for Good AMs

First, you have to realize that nobody went to school for this. Usually, they went to school for something else, and they weren’t amazing at it, but some smart boss recognized their skill in AM and gave them a chance. So it’s not an education or even certification thing, like you find with PMs.

Because of the database of more than 30,000 people we’ve built, we can predict the best AMs through our paid consulting programs, but some of the old methods are still rock solidly predictive of success in that area, and here are two of them.

#1: Missed Flight + Long Drive

Imagine that you and the candidate in question are in the boarding lounge of a major city airport early on a Monday, and the airline has canceled your flight. You were scheduled to land at your destination and get to the hotel by 1:00p, catch up on email, and take the client to an early dinner before the big meeting the next day.

Now, instead, you are going to cancel the dinner, rent a car, and drive nine hours with this person because you simply cannot miss the big meeting tomorrow.

Do you look forward to that ride? Sure, you can carry a conversation for quite some time, but will they ask you good questions, too? Pick up clues when you don’t want to talk? Be able to tell interesting stories? Have an appropriate level of personal disclosure? Even disagree with you from time to time? Be confident…but also curious?

If you aren’t looking forward to that trip, your clients aren’t going to enjoy working with that person, either.

#2: Handling Pissed Off Client

Fast forward a year, and the same client is pissed off. It’s not yet nuclear, but it’s pretty hot and it’s embarrassing. Someone on the team trucked up and nobody noticed. Not you and not the AM.

The client is insisting on a face-to-face meeting, and rightly so.

You can’t go, and you don’t even feel the need to go. This AM, in your opinion, can think on their feet, push back where necessary, save the relationship (if it’s worth saving), not give away the firm, look them in the eye without getting carried away with emotion, and just do what capable humans do when they think on their feet.

Do you have any anxiety in sending them there on their own?

#3: Bonus Round

Can your AM spot the places where your firm’s relationship can grow this client? If the client is a worthy one and if the AM is not growing that account, they are not likely a good AM. It’s really that simple.

Finally

Anyway, as I noted in a post this week, in this near year, I’m “long” on depending on contractors and near-/off-shore teams for all sorts of reasons, and “short” on traditional employee relationships, but if you’re deciding what roles should be included in the full-time, dedicated staff, it should always be AMs, PMs, strategists, and whoever manages a team. They are harder to find, and they are more essential to the client experience.