What are the attributes that makes one person a better account manager than another?  I’m sure there are plenty of managers out there with their own “picture” of a great account manager candidate, but based on my 20+ years’ experience, here are some of the things I think make a difference: (more…)

One of the greatest challenges (and most fun thing) about being an account manager is that clients often look to you when it comes to growing their business. They want answers to their questions or, at the very least, suggestions on what to do next.

And the one thing they don’t want to hear is that everything they’re planning to do looks great and you’d be glad to implement it for them.

(Aside: I used to work with a creative director that called AE’s who just nodded in agreement with the client and brought the work back to the agency, “parrots” and had a picture of a pirate with a big, nasty parrot on his shoulder. I knew when I was in trouble for being too complacent because my name would be pinned to the parrot.)

As a point of fact, you owe it to your client to think about all the markets that hold potential for them. If that requires a little extra research (whether it be reading or actually spending time in the community), that’s a small investment to make in a relationship. Exploring the possibilities presented by ethnic or minority markets is a great example.

Once you understand the media landscape for various ethnic groups, you should begin to see the potential for opportunity. Broaching the subject with your client, however, can be a tricky proposition. Here are some tips on how to do that:

1) Collect market information from the client that would help you identify the nature of the relationship they currently have with a specific minority group.2) Investigate the market potential online. There are plenty of online databases and resource groups that can provide insights into almost any aspect of the major ethnic groups in the USA.

3) Talk to/interview a handful of people that fit the ethnic profile of the group you’re interested in. Try to capture, in their words, why your client’s product or brand is important to them.

4) Prepare a presentation that explains the differences in perceptions and perceived advantages of your brand (and, ideally, the competitions’ brands) from the point of view of the ethnic market(s) in review.

5) Find allies (other agencies, freelancers, journalists, etc.) who accurately represent the point of view of the customer. Make sure they’re integrated into your team.

When you present your findings and recommendations, be prepared for a two-part reaction. At first, the client might seem interested and gracious – at least in the presence of guests. After your allies leave, though, be prepared for the hard questions to come out.

Clients who are comfortable with the white, mainstream media, are often uncomfortable with considering ethnic marketing opportunities. Ironically, the initial reaction (and it’s more common than not) is that marketing through ethnic media or with customized messages is “pandering” to one group or another. In fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

You need to point out the benefits of cross-cultural branding and the application of the same principles inside our own country.

Despite their own discomfort, clients will take your recommendation under consideration. Be prepared to play a waiting game on this kind of opportunity, but keep bringing it to the forefront – especially if a competitor takes advantage of the opportunity before your client.

The sooner you can get your client thinking about the entire market, the better your client will fare (and the more work for your agency and its partners).

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Advertising, B2B Marketing, Ethnic Advertising, Minority Marketing, Client Management, Leadership, Creative Thinking, Culture, Cultural Diversity

(c) 2006, Brand Central Station - all rights reserved. For more information on Brand Central Station, a branding consultancy that helps clients and marketing service providers make connections, please click here.

Very often, when it comes to presenting out-of-the-box, creative thinking to clients, the biggest sales job has to happen inside the agency.

It’s a shame, really. Clients love to see innovative thinking but many times the folks that work back at the agencies (both PR and advertising-focused) get into a project mindset that is great for getting work out the door but not so good when it comes to generating the next big idea. Clients often refer to creative burn-out as a reason for initiating new agency searches.

The benefits of unsolicited innovation for a client can be difficult to define on the P&L and even harder to find with the account team. Creating new advertising campaigns, conducting unsolicited research or pestering vendors for new ideas or special deals takes time and effort. An effort that is often minimized or overlooked entirely by the account manager.

It’s tough enough to do the work; to do it with very little information, no client input and limited resources is almost impossible. To then have the effort dismissed by an account executive is often the final straw. The only consolation for those team members who get diss’d is the realization that AE’s who commit this error against the account team are hurting themselves worse than they can imagine.

It’s time to turn this situation around and lead the team to victory.

Account managers first have to understand the value of having a client perceive the account team as interested, engaged, passionate and knowledgeable about his business. The easiest – and best – way to do this is to present new ideas, concepts, research and programs to the client for his review and comment. There shouldn’t be a separate charge for this service. If you manage your budgets right, there should be plenty of opportunities for the team to think about the client’s future and then use available knowledge assets to conceive possible executions.

The account team has to recognize the value of having a client who is convinced of their interest, passion and knowledge of his business. Clients who love their agencies don’t leave them. And with an average shelf-life of 3 years, any client who is happy with the nature of the partnership he has with his agency is likely to stay past that deadline. That spells job security and more for all the members of the account team, not just the AE.

Initially, unsolicited ideas should be presented to the client as a teaching opportunity. Present the ideas to the client with a request to learn why it is or is not a good idea for him. This soft-sounding procedure will help you identify where the client sits politically inside his organization as well as how much the client knows and understands about the state of his industry or profession. This is a border-staking expedition and everything you learn about the client (i.e. his likes and dislikes, his areas of interest and expertise, the budget and political challenges he faces) should be relayed to the account team for future reference.

As time goes by, the ideas and concepts generated by the account team will come closer and closer to the strategic goals of the client’s organization and (hopefully) will fall within the client’s expectations of budget and production timelines. That’s when, as the account manager, you’re able to start making the change from just presenting the work to selling the work. If you do your job well, new ideas will create referral opportunities for you within the client’s own organization. That business expansion strategy can be both profitable and tremendously satisfying.

Both to the client and to your account team back at the agency.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Advertising, Branding, Brand, Leadership, Client Management, Innovation, Creative Thinking

(c) 2005, Brand Central Station - all rights reserved. For more information on Brand Central Station, a branding consultancy that helps clients and marketing service providers make connections, please click here.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to tell a client: “I know you know the answer to this question, but we really need to hear it from the customer to see what they actually know and understand.”

In fact, in my experience, this has been the single, largest impediment to market research when it comes to “selling” the service to a client. They just don’t want to do it because they don’t think they’ll learn anything new. The fact is, usually, just the opposite.

But let’s take a look at the objection and figure out the best way to make your case:

First off, clients are often in the position of having all the answers when it comes to dealing with account managers – especially new ones. Decisions and requests made by the client often go unchallenged early on in the relationship which may be respectful but often creates a bias that can work against the AE later on in the relationship.

The best thing to do is to concentrate your questioning in three specific areas – at least early on in the relationship with a new client. Keep them focused on the three areas where they have the most influence and, as you’ll soon see, concern: project scope, budget and deadlines. If a new account manager is to get off on the right foot with a client, the AE has got to become a “credible expert” when it comes to making and keeping promises related to what work will be done, when it will be done and how much things will cost.

These three things are vitally important to a client for one, simple reason. Failure in any of these areas reflects directly on his or her ability to manage the account manager and the agency. These are, in effect, personal performance standards. Failure to perform could be cause for termination – of the agency, the AE or the client!

As an account manager, you have to establish your credentials and credibility in these areas first before you can start digging in to the issues that will lead to opportunities for insightful market research that could make a difference to your client’s brand.

Once the client is comfortable with your ability to perform on the things that matter most to their job security, you’ll find you have an opportunity to start thinking “proactively” about their business. And that, eventually, leads to a realization that both the client and the agency need to know more about the client’s customer than what is readily available at the client’s office.

In fact, it’s during this second step – getting to know the customer –where an account manager can create a long-term bond with a client and make the move from “supplier” to “counselor.”

Start first by investing some time and effort of your own into getting to know the people your client needs to convince. If you’re working on a consumer product, use the product yourself or visit the retail locations where the product is sold. Once you’ve seen the kind of people who use the product, find some friends, family or neighbors who “fit” the apparent demographic of the customer. Ask them why they would consider using that product, what it does for them, how it makes them feel.

Similar insights can be gathered on B2B clients, as well. You might not be able to spend time with members of the target market, but you can certainly call trade associations and magazines and talk to people who are intimately involved with the business. Take notes and try to put yourself in their position. Try to understand and identify the possible obstacles that might stand in your client’s way when they try to convince the customer to buy.

These insights, no matter how crude, are vitally important to your long-standing relationship with the client. Because you took the effort to get to know their customer, your stock will go up with 99+% of all clients. (The other 1%, we’ll deal with in another blog post.) The quality of the insights you share will have an effect on the client, too.

If you’ve been an astute, observant student, you are bound to make some observations that are valuable to the client. This breaks the ice so you can enter the third, and final, piece of your argument in favor of market research.

As soon as the client realizes that you might know more about his customer than he does, his attitude will change (usually for the better). If you can show how this knowledge can be used to create both a manageable project (where you have already established your credibility) and an expected result (to determine “return” on the marketing investment), you’ll be a star.

More importantly, you’ll be at a place where both you and your client have a better understanding of the value and importance of market research.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Branding, Market Research, Customer Relationships, Vendor Relationships, Employee Training, Sales Training, Informed Decision Making

(c) 2005, Brand Central Station - all rights reserved. For more information on Brand Central Station, a branding consultancy that helps clients and marketing service providers make connections, please click here.

It sounds good, but it isn’t easy. It takes a combination of technology and technique to really be an effective, collaborative worker.

Corporate leaders we interviewed said that their companies offered very little training in collaboration but they try to hire individuals who demonstrate an ability to work well with others. “The ability to build and foster relationships is a trait that we look for in new hires,” explains a senior marketing executive at a national hospitality company.

“Collaborative skills are in short supply in most new hires,” says consultant Peter Davidson. “It’s a fundamental skill going all the way back to learning to share as toddlers.” But companies seem ill-prepared to continue developing that skill in the workplace short of providing new technologies that are supposed to foster collaboration.

“I’m a sort-of new hire myself,” claims Jinal Shah a recent college graduate, new employee and blogger living in the Northeastern US. “However I wasn’t spoon-fed. I was just thrown in and I learned my way quickly.”

While some companies provide mentoring or buddy programs for new hires, others leave assimilation into the corporate culture up to the new hire. The result can be a stifling of creativity and intimidation when it comes to collaboration. An executive currently working inside one of the top three auto companies responded to our inquiry on this matter with the following insights:

“There is an awareness that new hires will not be “accepted” by the old guard, but 110% of the burden is placed upon the new hire and no attention is placed upon changing the worst aspects of the old culture.”

So, as tough as it is to bring in new employees with strong collaborative talents, how do the best companies go about leveraging the skills and abilities of their human resource? There seem to be some common themes in the businesses we interviewed:

1) Knowledge and information was transferred from text-based repositories to more interactive medias (i.e. a wiki or some other interactive database structure) that provided both access to the information and the ability to add/modify content on the fly;2) The transformation to a project management scheduling tool that was both web-based and interactive, allowing workers to set their own production schedules, share information, etc.;

3) Clear and objective direction from managers tasked with keeping “the big picture” in full view and instructed not to worry about the small stuff;

4) Active engagement by management when things went astray – including the disciplining of team members who could not stay on task or get jobs done on time – in essence a higher standard of accountability;

5) The development of trust between all members of the collaborative team and between the teams and management, thereby avoiding devious politics and micro-management;

6) Benchmarking and measurement of results to use for constructive feedback.

Interestingly enough, most of the innovations required to create a collaborative workplace involved changes in behavior (by both employees and management) and were not, necessarily technology-reliant.

Maybe there’s a greater lesson to learn here?

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Branding, Collaboration, Partnership, Hawthorne Effect, Customer Relationships, Vendor Relations, Leadership, Culture

(c) 2006, Brand Central Station - all rights reserved. For more information on Brand Central Station, a branding consultancy that helps clients and marketing service providers make connections, please click here.

Clients can be horribly indecisive. Is it that they’re never entirely sure of what they want or that they’re not entirely interested in working with you right now? You don’t ever really know.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough … there’s nothing worse than thinking you have reached an agreement with a client on an assignment only to find out you don’t know everything you really needed to know. (Note: some creative types consider this a kind of sport, especially with first-year account managers.)

The result of your ignorance can be missed deadlines, increased budgets, pissed off clients.

How do you avoid this problem? Essentially, what you need to do is get a more objective understanding of what the client is trying to accomplish. Understand the strategy behind the request, first, and you’ll find it easier to provide guidance to your team members and to identify potential additional business for down the road.

The strategic visioning process, outlined on our BrandCrafting blog, works for corporate and product brands alike.

Here are some things to keep in mind when working with a client to set their “vision” for a project or account:

1) Understand how the client defines “success” – get them to discuss success on their own terms. How are they going to know if what they spent was good for their company? Who needs to be happy with the outcome? What are the long-term benefits of a continued relationship?2) Part of having a clear vision of success is being able to identify (fairly accurately) the financial benefits of success. Once a client can objectively identify the financial outcomes of a successful effort, they can objectively identify a budget to spend in order to generate the anticipated “return” on their investment.

3) Work with the client to describe their “vision” from the point of view of the customer/end-user. Are there any insights that result from this conversation? Can you identify any measurable actions that might help you set performance metrics down the road?

As you can probably tell, a discussion with a client on this level will require account managers to be better prepared and educated on the nature of the client’s business, their customers, competition and media. It’s well worth the investment, though, since these kinds of conversations successfully position your firm as a strategic partner rather than just a vendor.

Alright, I’ll admit it. I’ve had the best of intentions and never got around to writing my obligatory blog posts. For that I apologize.

I’m back now, after a couple of injuries, computer meltdowns and starting a new venture with a long-time friend. All refreshed and ready to write, this is where to turn for information on that strange occupation we refer to as account service.

More to come ….

(c) 2005, Brand Central Station - all rights reserved. For more information on Brand Central Station, a branding consultancy that helps clients and marketing service providers make connections, please click here.

I had a delightful lunch with an old client the other day. In fact, every time Juan and I get together for lunch it turns into a kind of “mutual admiration society” meeting. I guess that’s because either he’s smart enough to agree with everything I say or vice versa.

Juan’s consulting now - the great beyond for all of us who cooked ourselves to a crisp either working for “the man” or working for someone who works for him. Juan’s a smart, affable guy, though and he’s doing well, but he’s frustrated. “I just can’t seem to land clients who understand the difference between a strategy and a tactic,” he tells me.

I know what he means. I subscribe to several discussion groups and am constantly amazed how often the two terms are used interchangeably. It’s clear to me that someone out there, with as much credibility as me (which may, at times, not seem like much I realize), is providing definitions to these essential marketing terms that are diametrically opposed to the definitions I’ve used my entire career.

It’s no mistake that one of the greatest advantages Brand Central Station brings to its clients and partners is a common lexicon. I insist on it. A client in France and an agency in the US have to agree on a common terminology in order to work together - that seems obvious. But just as importantly, a client in Illinois has to be able to understand what their agency in Missouri is talking about when it comes to marketing objectives, goals, strategies and tactics.

So, now, for better or worse, here is a written explanation of what strategies and tactics are and - more importantly - why business owners and managers need to “think” strategically rather than tactically:

What is the difference between a strategic and tactical approach to business?
To understand the difference between strategic and tactical thinking, you have to understand the essential difference between strategies and tactics. Both are required to make your business a success – but, all too often, business owners and managers spend too much time on the smaller, tactical issues rather than on the larger, longer-range, strategic ones.

In short, they spend too much time working in their business and not enough time working on it.

In order to achieve any goal, you have to have a plan in place. That plan usually consists of one or more strategies – general directions or intentions that lead you to the goal. The actions you take to follow these directions or act upon these intentions are tactical by nature.

Imagine you have a very simple goal in mind – say; you want to travel from your home to New York for a vacation. There are a variety of strategies available to you: you could fly, you could travel by car, you could take a bus or a train. These are obvious strategies. Less obvious strategies are available as well: you could walk or hitchhike, you could package yourself up in a crate and go parcel post (don’t laugh, someone’s done this before).

Some strategies are inherently more risky than others (flying coach versus cargo, for example). But identifying the strategy is just half of the battle. Once you’ve selected your strategy, you actually have to do something. You see, a strategy helps you focus on the tactics that are best suited for that strategy. This process – referred to as planning – is one of the side benefits of thinking strategically. The clarity that comes from adopting a strategic plan can be tremendously empowering because you are able to compare available tactics against the strategy and determine very quickly which are appropriate and which are not.

For example, buying an airline ticket may be an appropriate tactic if you’re going to fly (or ship yourself) to New York. But building a crate is a tactic that only works for one strategy. No matter the price of nails and boards, you’re not likely to buy them if you’ve already landed on the strategy of traveling with other humans rather than the suitcases.

Now while our example was rather silly, I used it to make a point. Business owners and managers are constantly confronted by “tactical” solutions to their problems. Some are right, some aren’t. And even more are sort-of right/sort-of not right. It can be terribly confusing and horribly expensive.

It’s human nature to default to those tactics with which we feel most comfortable – and that means we doom ourselves to continue repeating what we know whether it’s worked for us in the past or not. You see, without a clear strategy for a business, the owner/manager has no standard for evaluating the relative significance of one tactic against another. The result is slow growth or, even worse, stagnation.

Why a business strategy can make all the difference in your future.
There’s a second reason why having a clear business strategy is key to your growth and prosperity: innovation.

Too many times, business owners feel like they are constantly responding to market forces that are beyond their control. A major reason for this is that these owners and managers are often managing on data collected in the past and spend a great deal of time trying to interpret this historical information that looses its relevance over time.

Businesses who adopt a strategic approach to their growth and development still track what they’ve done – but that information is only part of the data they evaluate when making forward-looking decisions. Strategies are based on research and analysis of market factors that help define customer needs, competitive supply levels and other market-making trends.

In the United States, growth of market share is increasingly dependent upon clear, value-driven business strategies. Businesses who are not thinking how to improve their customer relationships, open themselves to new markets or re-position their USP (unique selling proposition) in a relevant and compelling manner are doomed to stagnation, declining share and eventual failure.

You see, the total number of consumers in the US is still growing but at a significantly slower pace than it has over the past fifty years. That means businesses have to lure customers and clients away from competitors in order to continue growing. For those business owners and managers who are not fiercely guarding their existing client/customer relationships and aggressively going after new ones, this means they are under siege. Sales will decline. Margins will shrink. Profits will evaporate.

Having a well-defined business strategy will allow you to be more creative in how you approach prospective customers – maybe even open up entirely new markets never-before explored. Innovation in positioning, products and service can lead to significant breakthroughs and, more importantly, make you the only player in the field – if even for only a short time.

(c)2005, Brand Central Station - all rights reserved. To learn more about BCS, please visit our website.

The most difficult job in the marketing services field is that of the account manager. No doubt about it.

If everything goes well, the creative horsepower of an agency (art directors, writers, journalists, whoever) get the credit. When things go bad … well, it’s the suit’s fault.

This blog is intended to help people understand the nuance of being a master strategist, diplomat, manager, coach, mentor and salesman. All of the things that make an account manager the most vital member of the marketing team.

I hope you enjoy it.