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Your Account Managers Aren’t the Problem. Your System Is - Jenny Plant

Your Account Managers Aren’t the Problem. Your System Is - Jenny Plant

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Your Account Managers Aren’t the Problem. Your System Is. Most agencies are very good at winning new clients. Far fewer are equally deliberate about protecting, expanding and winning back the business they already have. That is a strange omission when the people closest to existing clients often have the strongest opportunity to understand what is changing inside those businesses. In this episode of TheInquisitor Podcast, Marcus Cauchi talks to Jenny Plant of Account Management Skills about why account managers are so often blamed for weak account growth when the real problem may sit much higher up the organisation. Jenny has spent more than 25 years working in agencies, as well as time on the client side in the airline and pharmaceutical sectors. She now works with agencies to make account management more commercially effective without turning account managers into stereotypical salespeople. And there is an important distinction. The answer is not simply to train account managers to “sell more”. It is to give them the clarity, capability, time, confidence and organisational conditions to become genuinely useful to their clients. Why this conversation matters Existing accounts are an obvious source of revenue, yet many agencies still manage them primarily around delivery. The account manager becomes the person who keeps projects moving, answers questions, attends status meetings and makes sure the client is happy. That can create a dangerous gap between being delivery reliable and being business relevant. Jenny argues that account growth depends on three things: 1. Commercial clarity Do account managers know which accounts are actually growable? Do they understand the agency's goals, their own role, the risks in the relationship and the rhythm in which accounts should be managed? 2. Capability Can they understand the client's business, ask useful questions, connect the agency's services to business outcomes and bring ideas into the conversation? 3. Cultural continuity Is account growth embedded into forecasting, coaching, planning, client meetings and the employee lifecycle? Jenny describes these as a three-legged stool. Training one leg while ignoring the other two is unlikely to produce sustainable change. Account management is sitting on a gold mine One of the most striking examples Jenny shares involves a US promotional merchandise agency serving the education sector. Its account managers had hybrid roles combining project management and growth. The growth wasn't happening. The agency separated the roles and gave existing team members the opportunity to focus specifically on growth. Within six months, the agency had increased revenue by 12% and client consultations by 50%. The important part was not simply the training. The account managers had gained the time, capacity and enablement to actually develop their clients. They were initially worried about becoming “salesy”. Once they understood that their job was to be consultative rather than transactional, the resistance disappeared. Did you hire them this way, or make them this way? This becomes one of the most important challenges in the conversation. Marcus asks whether founders should consider: “Did you hire them this way, or did you make them this way?” An account manager may be told to lead the client relationship, only for the founder or agency leadership to step in whenever something goes wrong. The client then learns that the account manager is not really in charge. The account manager loses authority. The founder remains trapped in the relationship. And everybody wonders why the account manager isn't becoming more commercially confident. Jenny argues that agency leaders need to orchestrate their involvement so that the account manager remains visibly in control. Delivery reliable is not the same as business relevant A client may be perfectly happy with the work and still begin to question the value of the relationship. Why? Because the agency isn't bringing anything beyond delivery. Jenny's 30/30/30/10 framework provides a useful way to think about strategic client meetings: 30%: What happened and what has been delivered? 30%: What happens next? 30%: What are we seeing in the market, with other clients and in the wider business environment? 10%: Agency news and corporate information. That third 30% is where the relationship can become genuinely valuable. It gives the client something they cannot get simply by reading a project report. Your client doesn't owe you their attention Jenny discusses research suggesting that a marketing director spends less than 7% of their working week managing all supplier relationships. Even if that figure varies by role or organisation, the principle is important. Your agency is competing for a tiny amount of attention. If the conversation consists entirely of status updates, delivery detail and requests for the next project, why would a senior client prioritise it? The agency has to earn ...
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