Four Things You Must Know When Hiring an Account Manager
Digital marketing agencies come in all shapes and sizes, but their owners tend to share one critical trait: they want to make their clients happy and successful. And that means that at some point in their journey, most agency owners will start to think about bringing on a Client Account Manager (CAM) to help them (and therefore their clients) out.
Hiring a Client Account Manager (CAM) can help reduce stress, free up time, and ultimately increase profits for your agency. But this can only happen when agency owners understand the process of hiring, onboarding, and ultimately working with a CAM.
Specifically, understanding the following four items can help ensure success if and when you’re ready to expand your team.
1. Not Every Agency Needs a Client Account Manager (CAM)
Kudos for being so gung-ho and excited to grow your digital marketing agency. There’s no one we love chatting with more than agency owners who are passionate about their business.
That said—bringing on a CAM is a big step, and it’s not always right for everyone, right now.
Specifically, there are two types of agencies that we often suggest hold off on outsourcing client management.
First, it says it in the name: if you don’t have many client accounts, then you might not need a Client Account Manager just yet. To ensure that your CAM is a profit center instead of a cost, then you tend to need a steady pipeline of clients coming in.
So a pro-tip: CAMs work best when client management is actually a pain point for you and/or your business.
Second, sometimes agency owners just aren’t ready to hand over the reins. Are you really ready to delegate? Be honest with yourself. Even if your agency is ready for a CAM … are you? And are you currently willing and able to do the work to set your new Account Manager up for success? (More on training your new team member below!)
Ultimately, if your baby is still very much your baby, and you’re not ready to let someone take over client communications, then it’s ok to wait until that’s something you’ll be more comfortable with.
And third, in our experience, most agency owners prefer to spend their time on strategizing and business growth. They’re talented, ambitious, and creative people, and they want to use all that talent to do big things. But then once their agency gets going, they get mired in day-to-day client management, instead of focusing on their own business.
In other words, most agency owners spend a lot of time on client management because they have to, not because they want to.
BUT! If you started your agency because you absolutely love working hands-on with clients, and you like having those regular touchpoints with them, then a CAM might not be the right addition for your team. You might be better off as a smaller boutique agency, or you might want to consider whether there are other roles/positions you might be better off adding to your team.
2. There’s No One-Size-Fits-All CAM
Make no mistake—there are definitely some essential skill sets that a CAM needs under their belt before we’d bring them onto our team. Every CAM needs to have digital marketing experience and expertise, along with great organizational and problem-solving skills. They need to stay calm and collected under pressure. And it goes without saying they need to be team players and incredibly flexible and adaptable, too.
But then there’s also that ‘je ne sais quoi’ when it comes to CAMs. Every agency is a little bit different. Your CAM needs to be the right culture fit, and they need to have the right expertise to match your agency’s needs and goals.
So yes, you want an independent thinking, confident CAM with a great work ethic. But the way that flushes out in different people can make the difference between the CAM who’s right for you and your team, versus one who’s great, but maybe better off going down a different path. Figuring that out now helps everyone.
3. Finding the Right CAM for Your Agency Takes Time
Take it from the folks who get no less than 500 applications a month (truly!) from would-be CAMs. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to find a great CAM. For us, that usually means anywhere from four to eight weeks.
Like we outline in our guide to hiring best practices, this is a multi-step process—four steps, to be exact! Beyond the initial stages of attracting talent (we like to use Indeed, as well as our socials and occasionally online ads to get the word out there), you need to do qualification checks before you can move on to the assessment phase. And that’s before any interviews even take place!
(Good thing there’s an agency dedicated to doing all this leg work for you!)
4. Training Your CAM Takes Time
And finally, it doesn’t just take time to find your dream CAM. It takes time to train them, too.
There’s a learning curve to any new job, and joining a new agency. Just because they’re steller at client management in general, doesn’t mean your CAM is going to know how you specifically like to handle things.
Specifically, we find that the first month a CAM is on your team, their time really needs to be dedicated to getting a lay of the land, learning as much about you and your clients as possible. Those first few weeks, they can go through your SOPs (and maybe help create new ones), get familiar with your project management software, take lots of notes, and sit in on meetings with clients.
By month two, you CAM should be ready to transition into actually doing the work of managing clients. But it’s often not until month three that they really start to bloom. By this point, they should be really owning things, handling all client communication and helping to keep everyone on track. They may even be able to identify areas in your agency where things may be falling through the cracks (so that they can help you fix them!).
In other words, getting a CAM for your team is a pretty darn good investment, but it’s just that—an investment. And investments take time. That’s why you want to do all the work up front, to ensure you’re only bringing on what we like to call ‘unicorn status’ CAMs. When you know you’re bringing on stellar Client Account Managers, it’s much easier to put in the time and trust the process.
We provide a host of white label, full-service, fractional, and remote client account management services (phew!). Let’s work together!