Account management is a lot more complicated these days.
Learn the ropes of account service by untying its knots.
Clients no longer accept the old standard agency formulas on overhead, hourly charges, and set staffing arrangements. The Achilles’ heel of most agency retention programs is the account management staff. Most often under-trained, over-committed, and lacking proper leadership, account management teams at many agencies careen from one near disaster to another with little regard for what clients really want. Too stressed to listen, too rushed to think, and too pricey to just manage workflow, account management is a lurking problem that won’t go away.
What’s more, clients don’t want high-paid account management teams that just manage projects. More and more clients see the inefficiency of this and resent paying high-priced fees for low-level work. Instead clients are anxious to pay for smart people who can have a strategic impact on their business. And age or seniority doesn’t matter to them.
New Account Team Skill Check List
- Marketing knowledge
- Advertising knowledge
- Marketing planning
- Set proper business strategy
- How to integrate a campaign
- How to present
- How to create trust
- How to grow clients organically
- When to pitch a BBI, VBI, or VAS
- Long term retention planning
- Establishing budgets
- Salesmanship
- Negotiating skills
- How to treat clients
- Basics of social etiquette
These changes plus more are putting enormous stress on agencies who find themselves coping with new challenges not imaged just a few years ago.
Our one-day account management training program HighGear offers a new way to address these challenges. It introduces new ideas, techniques and skills to meet these demands coming from a new breed of clients. These clients are younger, smarter, more aggressive, and more anxious than ever for results. And they aren’t tied to the traditions of the past. Your account management team is either in step with them or out. To agencies that understand these new clients, the new digital era promises to be both challenging and rewarding. For agencies that don’t understand these new breeds of clients, the new world order looks grim.
Now is the time to get on the right side of all these changes.
Photo by mebilia
