We'll start by defining the main responsibilities of any account manager. These are listed in order of importance per Campbell.
1) Grow revenue of the account.
The No. 1 job of an account manager is to grow the size of the client account. While new business is essential, an agency’s stability and profitability is more aligned with the organic growth of its existing happy clients.
“We work for an agency, and we work with the client, but we don't work for the client,” Campbell said.
Account managers need to be constantly assessing the existing and future opportunities for their clients. They should be reading industry forecasts and analysis and staying on top of trends so they can identify what marketing strategies should be considered and when so that they can make a plan for upselling. They also need to be able to gauge the client's aptitude for risk.
New business might be more exciting, but having a roster of profitable and growing clients accounts is much more valuable to a business's financial health.
2) Collaborate with creative and other departments to ensure delivery of great work.
The account manager is responsible for helping to create great work by gaining access to and sharing all the information the agency team needs. She has to be involved throughout the process, working with planners, the creative team, developers, and outside vendors to produce work that meets the client’s goals and reflects their wants and needs. In addition, the account manager often presents the work or is at least responsible for building up excitement about the work, so she is also responsible for creating an environment and an attitude that will make the client more readily accept the work.
3) Achieve the client’s marketing goals.
Campbell doesn’t put this first on the list because she says it is obvious -- this is the baseline skill for an account manager. If an account manager can’t achieve this, it doesn't matter if the work is good or if the relationship is strong. Your agency is still at risk of being fired, and for good reason.
Account managers need to understand the client’s business and her goals for the quarter or year. You should have a repeatable onboarding process that leads you and the client through a discovery phase from which you can set SMART goals. Review and measure these on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis so that everyone is clear about what the ultimate goal is.
4) Manage agency resources with profitability and efficiency in mind.
Again, account managers work for the agency, not the client, so a large part of their role is making sure the account remains profitable. That might mean making sure a project is properly scoped, working to prevent scope creep from occurring, building processes to make projects run more efficiently, and asking the right questions so you have all the important information and a project doesn’t have to go through multiple rounds of revisions. An account manager’s job is to prevent or break down roadblocks that cause projects to go off course.
Campbell pointed to advice given to her a long time ago. Agencies only have a few resources: time, money, and information.
Account managers need to protect these resources from being overwhelmed by client requests. This is especially true as margins on projects continue to shrink. Just one write-off can wipe out the profitability of the project.
5) Keep clients happy.
This one is a bit of a trick. Account managers need to keep the client happy with the entire agency, not just the account manager. It’s an easy trap to fall into: The account manager wants the client to like her, so if those drafts are late or if the project goes out of scope, she blames other team members. She acts like she’s struggling and trying her best to deal with a difficult, unproductive team. This makes her the hero, which seems nice, but this position then makes the agency the enemy.
The account manager should be working to heighten the client's trust of the agency and its internal experts. Campbell gives an example of a positive way account managers can keep in touch with clients and improve the relationship. When the client’s team is assembled or if a designer is working on a project, take a picture and send it to the client, introducing the team or showing progress on the project with a note from the creative. The client needs to feel connected to the entire team, not one single individual.
Campbell suggests using these five account management skills as a career road map. Determine what you are naturally good at and what skills could be improved. Use this as a guide for ongoing training and development. These skills could also serve as a framework for goal setting for account people and their supervisors: How has the revenue on each account grown in the past year? What write-offs occurred for each account? Did the delivered projects meet the goals of the client? Doing a yearly or quarterly check-up on client accounts is a solid practice for understanding how successful an account manager is in her role.