As an account manager, your most important priority is developing a trusted advisor relationship with your client. Although some of that will come from genuinely empathizing with her, when you achieve the goals you both agreed to, listen to her, co-collaborate, and educate her, you earn her trust, gratitude, and respect. If you own a small agency, we’re betting that you (or your principals) wear this hat as well.
Your next priority is to improve each client account’s profitability. Why? Because it’s far easier and less expensive to get more business from a loyal client than to find and close a new one. Acquiring a new client can cost four to 10 times as much what it costs to retain an existing one. (This is a major reason why strong and strategic account management is so crucial to an agency’s success.)
Over time, as agency teams become more efficient, honing workflows with a client, profits typically improve marginally. The greatest profits come from expanding the work you’re already doing for a client — whether you upsell her on a new campaign for a different persona or cross-sell your services to another division in the same company.
These opportunities are all around you, every day. It’s why the best account managers become experts on their clients’ businesses and industries. This makes it easy for them to have informed conversations where they add value, having earned the right to ask clients what could be otherwise perceived as intrusive questions. Bigger companies will obviously have more opportunities, especially for cross-selling across divisions, but even with the smallest of clients, opportunities are just waiting to be discovered.
