I’m going to answer this question early on and say, “most likely”.
Weirdly enough if you speak to any agency owner big or small, an account manager is never really considered as an early hire. Until recently, the answer would likely be “No, I have better ways to spend that money, I can handle my customers”.
Of course, you can, I’ve no doubt about that, you’re a smart and charismatic entrepreneur, but I want to make a brief (650-ish word) argument for them, as someone with several years’ experience of account management at a few different businesses, I think I can offer my two cents on the matter.
Why Do I Need One Then?
I don’t want to teach anyone here to suck eggs, but they look after your customers, they communicate with stakeholders, they’re the face of your business and they also help keep an eye on the till (a good one will anyway).
Your marketing specialist/manager potentially won’t have this commercial hat (amongst the others they must wear), as they’re focusing on (and quite rightly so) marketing!
Of course, as a small business and a founder or even someone very senior it might be hard to take that step back, I mean, you built your company from nothing and handing it over is tough and not to stroke your ego anymore, you have a big skill set and other things to deal with, like strategy and maybe treating yourself to that BMW you promised yourself when you were knocking out 16 hour days.
Does An Account Manager Need to Know Marketing?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say “no” (not initially anyway).
Now don’t get me wrong, it’s never a bad thing to have. But these skills can be taught, you can mould and nurture them down a particular path.
I’d argue some softer skills are considerably more challenging to teach to someone who’s maybe not had that level of exposure or pressure of dealing with customers happy or otherwise.
But keep in mind the essence of what an account manager is:
They provide you with customer management, they make sure everyone is not just kept happy, projects are kept on track and the not-so-happy ones are tended too and managed.
All of this might sound obvious, but the amount of marketing account management roles I’ve seen at agencies typically want all of this and PPC, SEO or every other marketing skill known man, this simply doesn’t work, you’re stretching them too thin.
What Else do They Bring to The Table?
I don’t want to be crass here, but… money! Moving on from my previous point, account managers should be able to have the freedom to focus on growing the bottom line.
Now that’s not to say they shouldn’t know what they’re talking about, quite the opposite. But they shouldn’t have to be running the show from a technical perspective.
They should be probing, questioning, sleuthing their way to cross-selling and upselling your fine services, or at the bare minimum, retaining a customer, identifying those threats and acting on them before they are lost.
Sum Up
At the end of the day, we all know agencies big or small typically have time constraints, especially if you’re growing and that can mean things can slip, but customer service is something you can never skimp on.
Account managers are not just there to manage customers and clients, they’re there to sell as well, sell the campaigns, the activities, additional services, and your agency! You need them to grow your business.
We’ve been working with marketing agencies for years now, it’s not something we talk about enough frankly, but if you’re an agency owner, founder, or co-founder and some of this has resonated with you around the broader subject of growing your agency with someone who knows how it’s done, give us a call and let’s arrange a meeting.
