Account Management Mastery: 5 Easy Steps to Happy Long-Term Profitable Clients (w/ Taylor McMaster)

This webinar is being recorded. Of course. The recording starts immediately. Hello, hello, hello. Please join us and we'll get things on the road here in just a second. Ah, lovely. People are coming in.

We got the chat and stuff open. Kuba.

Good question. But I think we do. Hello, chat. Can you let us know everything works? Where is everybody coming from? And what is your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Good question.

And does anybody here know the stracciatella flavor or is that a European thing?

I've never heard of it.

I think it's European.

Strawberry cheesecake. What a strong choice, Skylar. Thank you. Dairy free, gluten free fish food. I'm gonna share my idea. Somebody steal it and, and, and, and, and do it like, I'm thinking, right, if you can have like zero calorie diet Coke, right, Can you turn that into ice cream and you have zero calorie ice cream. Ever thought of that?

That's a good idea.

I don't know. I feel like all that stuff is great, but it's like if you're gonna eat sweets, just eat sweets. Just like enjoy it for what it's worth. Like you're not doing eating ice cream.

To be eating ice cream, I need to cheat, Jeff.

You know, when I, when I treat myself to ice cream, I want as many calories as possible and just give.

Me the like go big.

The custard that's like just got a ton of fat in there and it's not healthy for me. But you know what? I'll enjoy it every, every so often. You just need to treat yourself. So that's my take on a Cuba. But sure, wait. I'll try to make use of zero calorie ice cream.

Guy just killed all my hopes and dreams. Saw that on Shark Tank and they said it was gross. Okay, well, I guess I won't be a millionaire then. Damn it.

Mark Cuban, Mr. Wonderful.

Webinars. Okay everyone, we're one minute in. Let's wait until minute two and I'll open the ceremonies here. So, so nice for all of you to join us. What other. I wanted to say languages, flavors. Mango gelato. I love that. Good morning from the Philippines. Good morning from Poland. How about that? Alrighty.

What time is it for you in Poland?

What time is it?

Nighttime.

It is game time. It's. No, it's 7pm 7pm for me. Okay. All right. Some people are bound to join as we go on here, but let me properly open everything and get the show on the road here. We got a lot of good stuff to Share. So let's not delay any longer. Hello, hello, hello everyone and welcome to a very special Zen pilot webinar. Today we're doing account management Mastery creating happy long term profitable clients what we all want in five easy steps with our special guest, Taylor McMaster from dot and co. Taylor, how are you doing today?

Excellent. Thank you both for having me.

We are super happy to have you. Also on the call for reasons is Jeff Seifer, our productivity Professor Head of Growth. Jeff, how are you doing today?

I always do great, especially after you say the hello, hello, hello. Just gets me super energized and I'm sure it does in the crowd as well, so I'm pumped.

Jeff, I'm really sorry but please get new material. You always say that at the beginning of every webinar like some repeat guests are probably getting bored with it, but.

Okay, the drop off rate just went through the roof right now. Everyone just left the webinar.

Not this again. Alrighty, here's how we're going to run this. I'm going to do a little bit of quick housekeeping, give you a little bit of context who you're hanging out with here today. And by the way, so thank you so, so much for hanging out with us here today. So typical questions, let's answer them right off the bat. Ask your questions as you have them in the Q and A section on Zoom. That's what we'll be checking first and foremost. The chat might move quickly, so we might miss your question. If you use chat, use Q and A, please and thank you. Don't be shy in the chat. Leave comments, you know, like this is live. If you want to have like specific cases you want to mention or specific, you know, pains you're dealing with in terms of account management, then let's keep it interactive. That's what webinars are for. The recording, everybody asks. We shall be sharing the recording via email within a couple days. And finally, for more events like this hosted by Zenpilot and friends, don't Forget to follow ZenPilot on LinkedIn. You can also go to ZenPilot.com Newsletter and get the First Class Operations Newsletter run by yours truly where I always leave notes on our events and sometimes about like when I'm about to board a flight and go to a team off site and I was sharing about this very event in that particular instance, there's the chat. Okay, chat is all good. So this event is brought to you by zenpilot. In case anybody's meeting zenpilot for the first time Hi. What we do is we help agencies cancel chaos and create clarity. How we do it is we set agencies and other service based businesses up on ClickUp. You can read more about us here. We are not the spotlight here today so I'll keep this very brief, but here are the two dudes from Zenpilot that you're seeing here today. Just cypher product of your professor, myself, my name is Jakub Greitzer. Everybody calls me Kuba. All my friends do. So you can call me Kuba too. And I'll be your host for this evening and answering questions in the chat. And yeah, very happy to hang out with you here today. But our guest and our star for today is Taylor McMaster from Dot and co. Here's some stuff about her but Taylor, why don't you maybe introduce yourself in your own words.

Cool, thanks for having me. I'm Taylor. I'm the founder of DOT and Company and for the past five years we've been helping agencies revolutionize the way that they do account management. So we work with tons of agencies all across the globe and really just help them get out of the day to day when it comes to client communication. We really want to allow agency owners to step into their zone of genius, into the money makers in their business which for the most part is not talking to their clients all day long. So we come in place account managers into their agency and help kind of change how they operate on a day to day basis.

Love it. Yeah. Amazing. And I'm really looking forward to learning from you here today, Taylor, as are 50 other people on the call here today. So that's amazing that so many of you showed up here today. Awesome. We'll start Taylor's presentation in just a second here. I just wanted to say in case, you know, any of you need to dash a little bit earlier, I don't want you to miss our next event. We're running the next webinar next week and generally speaking, you might be expecting more webinars from Zenpilot in the near future. We're energized. We're ready to go. We're going to be sharing a lot of good stuff. The next one is find and fix your agency profitability leaks with Graham McKenzie. You want to have a look at your agency numbers. You want to make sure your bottom line is sound. Gray knows all about it. He's done consulting directly for over 1800 agencies on this very thing. So definitely go and join that. You can go to zenpilot.com event that will take you straight to the zoom landing page just like for this event as well. And you can sign up and join us there. We would be super glad to have you. And that's it for my slides. Going to stop sharing. Taylor, it's time for you to take the stage.

Okay, cool.

I am so ready.

Goodbye. You can see that.

Okay, I can see that chat, let us know that you can see that and I'll retreat into the chat to answer questions, drop links, et cetera. Everybody have fun. And Taylor, the floor is yours.

Okay, thank you. Well, let's talk all things account management today. I'm just curious before we get started started, if you could just drop in the chat, are you still managing your clients yourself or do you have somebody on your team who is doing this account management for you? That will help me really understand where everybody's at, who's listening. But in the meantime, let's talk all about account management. So like I said in my intro, we've been at this for five years, specifically working with agencies to help them optimize their account management systems within their business. And of course, with that comes a lot of project management tools. So we have been friends with the Zen Pilot team for a while because a lot of our clients use ClickUp and they need support when it comes to improving their processes. So we've been in touch for a long time. But I know for a lot of you listening, you're probably thinking, okay, I have some really cool systems in the back end, but I don't have the people to actually manage those systems and make them make magic. So that's kind of where we come in. So to give you a quick intro. So like I said, my name is Taylor and I used to run my own agency. So I know all about the struggles, you know, from managing clients to payroll, hr, all of the things building landing pages, writing copy, running Facebook ads, everything in between. Running an agency is not easy, and some people might call us crazy for wanting to do it. But a number of years ago when I was running my agency, I kind of hit this point where I realized I just want to do what I'm good at. And I just want to do what brings me joy and what I feel like I can contribute to the people that I'm working with. And for me, that is talking to clients and building relationships and holding their hand and becoming best friends with my clients. And for all of my agency friends who were also running agencies, they were like, taylor, why would you want to do that? That's the worst part of running an agency. I never want to talk to my clients again. You're crazy. And that's when I realized there was something here. You know, as we're growing an agency, the biggest thing that we have to conquer is our clients. Right? We're not an agency without our clients. But if you are still the person who is in that client facing seat, driving the bus when it comes to those relationships, you don't have enough bandwidth to go grow your business, to go think about strategy to high level. You build processes and systems that are going to take your business up the next mountain. And if you're still the one who is managing every client communication, you really burn yourself out and you don't have time to focus on the high level things. And so fast forward to today. You know, what we have built is a team of account managers just like me, who actually love talking to clients. We love building relationships with clients. We're not the ones who are actually on the back end of meta, you know, putting in every detail and optimizing those campaigns, but we definitely can jump on, on zoom with your clients and ensure that they're taken care of. And so today I want to talk to you a little bit about why agencies can't afford to get account management wrong. And what I mean by that is it's not just in the client retention side of things. It comes down to, you know, the employee retention and happiness. If your team members are having to talk to clients all day long, well, they're not happy doing that. Of course. Client retention, upselling, cross selling your clients, all of the things that go into this, it's not just about, you know, keeping your clients, it's about the whole agency and how it all comes together. And so I believe that if you're running an agency, you cannot afford to get this piece wrong. And so my goal for this webinar today is that you walk away with some really tangible things that will help you take your account management to the next level. So today we're going to talk about the four pillar framework that we use. And so this is the framework that we've developed over the last five years. And what we essentially did was we looked at what are all the components of account management that actually move the needle and what is actually important in our role. And so I'm going to give you that four pillar framework that you can walk away with and you know, be able to really identify where the gaps are within your agency. Secondly, I'm going to show you exactly how we hire account managers at scale. So We're a team of 50 people right now. We have a combination of account managers and project managers. And we have spent tens and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on hiring. And we've built a really cool system and some things that we look for when we're hiring account managers. So if you're in the market for an account manager, hopefully this will help you and then the most important piece, which is passing the ownership onto your team so that they can manage your clients for you. The biggest bottleneck that I see within the agencies that we work with and why sometimes account management doesn't work for them, is because the agency owner has the tightest white knuckle grip on everything and they don't allow their account team to actually take ownership over this role and over the account department. And so I want to help you kind of work through some of those things so you can, so you can understand how you can take agency to the next level. So first things first. What is an account manager? So let's get on the same page here, because I know in our industry, account management can mean a whole bunch of different things. It could mean a sales rep or it could mean a customer service representative. So what I'm talking about when I think about an account manager, or we call them a client account manager here at DOT is we want to be the glue. We are that person. If you think of a wheel, we're like in the middle, right? We're the ones who are talking to your clients and building relationships. Relationships. But we're also internally talking to the internal team members, whether that's media buyers, designers, project managers. We're talking to the agency owner, we're talking to the finance team. We're kind of in the middle. We're gluing everything together. And I always call myself a control freak because as an account manager, you essentially have to be a control freak. And I don't care what anyone says, I believe that you have to be, because you need to know where everything is at. You know, everyone on the team is going to come to the account manager and say, hey, where are we at with this? Or hey, what does the client think about that? Or are we on track for the project to launch in two weeks? The account manager should know where all things are at. And so you kind of have to be that glue, gluing everything together within the agency. So how we identify what an account manager is essentially the glue, we're in the middle. We know where everything is at all the time. So. And of Course, as I'm kind of going through this, drop questions. And Jeff, if you want to unmute yourself, if you have questions that pop up in the chat, feel free, but let's kind of, step one, start to talk about the framework. So the opportunity cost that I see from not doing account management right is, like I said earlier, client churn. You know, if you are not getting these, these elements of account management right, clients will churn. And it's funny, I've worked with hundreds of agencies over the last five years, and one thing that they always tell me is when clients leave, it's generally not because of the results. Sometimes it is, but generally it's because they didn't feel like the agency understood them. They didn't unders. They didn't feel like the agency was driving towards the goals that the business was driving towards, you know, and not understanding what was really important to that client. So if you're not understanding how to really run a proper account management process, your clients will not feel like you're. You're putting your best foot forward when it comes to, you know, working with them and optimizing that relationship. Another thing that I see when agencies don't get this right is employees churn. You know, if the media buyer doesn't feel like the whole team is working towards the same thing for the clients, employees feel this lack of purpose and they don't feel like the clients are taken care of, which means that they don't feel taken care of. And so if your account management team isn't doing a really good job of optimizing this process, the internal team members fall apart, the clients leave, and that's just not a good feeling for the agency as a whole. So what we've identified when it comes to account management, there's four key pillars. And so there's agency structure, there's client happiness and retention, there's project management, which ClickUp comes in, and then there's onboarding, which, again, ClickUp comes in there too. How we use these tools really ties into the account management framework because your account team should be using these tools and they should be owning the tools as well. So I know that at Zenpilot, they do all consulting for agencies, and as they're consulting with agencies, they want to understand, okay, what are the goals of the agency? How do you work? But then who's going to take this on? Who's going to run with this? Because that is the most important part when it comes to working with different tools and different products is that we want to make sure that the team is actually going to utilize them. And so this is where your account managers come into play. How we look at it at DOT is that the account manager should be running with the software and owning it. Because so many times we work with, let's say a media buyer and they're just not using it or the agency owner. This is the worst one. The agency owners are like, yeah, I set up this and I hired consultants to build clicks ClickUp and then they don't use it. So we transfer that ownership over to the account manager. They have to make sure that the whole team is using it. And so when I look at this framework, I want you to think about transferring the full ownership of the client experience over to your account department. So you want to be able to give this whole framework to your account department to run with it. If you don't give that full ownership over to your account team, you as the agency owner will never get out of account management. It's that simple. You need your team to be able to take ownership and run with it. So how we do this is from the outside looking in, it looks like you're just doing, or I guess.it just looks like we're doing account management and we're just doing project management. Right? We're just like doing the tasks. But how I want you to think about the client experience as a whole. I want you to think of it as the whole thing, from client retention and building relationships to project management to the whole agency as a whole. So we want the account team to own the entire client experience. So when we start working with an agency, we kind of go through a three step process. We want to audit where they're currently at. So we look at all four of these pillars and we identify what's working really well. And for the most part, a lot of agencies, they have things that are working really, really well within their systems. But we really want to see where the gaps are. We want to see what's not working so that when we step in, we hit the ground running and we can actually change things. You know, what is your CL client retention like right now and where should it be? You know, where are the gaps? What does the onboarding process look like right now? And where, where are people falling off? Are projects delivered on time or are they generally running a week behind? We want to see where the gaps are so that our team can really come in and, and own that whole client experience. So pillar one is the agency structure. So this is really important as an account manager. Remember Control freak? I'm going into an agency and I want to understand everything. And I know it might seem counterintuitive to have somebody in an account management role come in and want to understand the whole agency. You're like, well, don't you just want to understand the account management well, as an account manager? Because like I said, we're the glue. We're the middle of the tire. We need to know how the whole agency runs for us to do a good job. So, for example, what does the sales process look like? Right? Because as an account manager, after sales, we're taking over. We want the. We want to understand how on a very detailed visual, something like. Like this, we want to know the exact process step by step by step by step from sales. You know, what are these service offerings that we're offering? And can you lay out the exact detail of getting a client from onboarding to getting things launched, and then to maintaining that relationship? I want to see every single step as an account manager, I want to see it through. So I'm auditing, you know, the. The challenges that are. They're being faced within the agency right now. So where is the team at? Who's responsible for every step and where are the bottlenecks? Because as an account manager, I want to come in and I want to own that, right? I want to glue it back together. So we really want to break down the agency and understand what the communication channels are like, who's responsible for every part, and how we then can step in and kind of see the whole p. So how we do that, this is just a screenshot from our Miro board. I think that's how you pronounce it. Miro Myro. We actually map out the whole system. So I know that Zenpilot, you guys do a lot of kind of system mapping and things like that as well. But what I'm talking about here is really the whole agency communication. So like I said, from sales, how does that transfer over to me as the account manager? What are the things that you're talking about on those sales calls? What are the things you're promising them so that I can then bridge that gap for the client coming into the agency? I want to hold their hand and make sure that, you know, everything that we're promising them gets delivered. So really understanding how things are happening within. Within the agency is crucial. Another key thing that we want to look for is are you. So as an agency owner, you want to make sure that you and the account manager are on the same page all the time this person is managing your clients, right? It is the bread and butter. It is keeping the lights on these, these clients. And you want to make sure that your account manager and you are on that same page. So we use things like dashboards and we have the, we have the account manager self assess. So they assess, are they doing a good job? How, how could they do better? How could they deliver over deliver? How could they surprise and delight their clients? Are they optimizing the sops on a weekly basis? Are they project managing at a rate that makes sense? And they're going to self evaluate? But then the agency owner also needs to evaluate, make sure that they're living up to the expectations that the agency owner has. Because like I said earlier, the biggest bottleneck that we see when working with agencies is that the agency owner doesn't let go of control. And that sounds like such a negative thing, but they don't trust their team yet, right? And in order to trust your team, you have to constantly be on the same page and you have to keep gut checking each other. So we use tools like this to be on the same page all the time. If there's things that are out of alignment, let's deal with it quickly. Because the most important piece when it comes to optimizing the whole client experience is that you, the agency owner are out of the way. And in order to do that is you build trust with your team. So this is a really great tool that I will give you guys that you can use for your team so that they can rate themselves on a weekly basis. And you rate them and then you just come together and have honest conversations. What you don't want is six months down the road, your clients have churned and then you're like, what happened? You want to be on the same page. So pillar two is client happiness and retention. So like I said earlier, client retention is not all about the results. It's about how the client feels. And as an account manager, we're a really unique breed. You know, in an agency, we're probably the only role that is like the touchy feely side of agency life. We're like the vibes. We want clients to be happy, we want to be, we want to understand their sentiment, we want to get on the same page. We want to sit down and make eye contact with these people. Pretty much every other piece of the agency is like numbers and processes and SOPs and like all these really like nerdy things, right? And we're those people who are like, what's your Dog's name. I remember that it was Betty Jo's birthday last week. Like, let me send you some dog treats in the mail. Like, how are you doing? We are the soft side of agency life. And for an agency owner, most times they're not worried about those things. They, they need to make sure that the business is running and getting their clients results. But that's why you need to hire somebody who's really good at their job when it comes to account management, because you want to make sure your clients are feeling taken care of and you want to make sure that your clients feel like you have their best interest. And like I said earlier, if your clients don't feel heard and they don't feel like you're driving towards the same goals as them, they're never going to feel understood and then they're going to leave. You know, I even just had this experience working with an agency. And, you know, when we onboarded, she asked me this one question. The agency owner asked me this question, like, you know, I know you've worked with other agencies in the past. What's the one thing that I can do to make sure that you feel taken care of? And for me, the first thing that I said was, with time, I want to feel like you're putting the time into really understanding what our goals are. I want to feel like you're actually trying to make an impact on the results that you're. That. That you're responsible for. Because in the past, I just felt like I was ghosted and that nobody was really working on my account and that I felt like I needed to drive the bus. And what I really wanted from her was, was time. I wanted her time. And I wanted to feel like we were both on the same page. And so I think that as we're growing and scaling agencies, we lose a little bit of this understanding our clients. And so if you can have a really strong account manager who can make your, your clients feel like they're your, then that's when you get to a point where you can start to grow and scale because your clients feel taken care of. And I'll repeat this because I think it's something that we all need to remember all the time. You want to make sure that your clients feel like they're your only client. Because anytime that you're not communicating with your clients, you're not being proactive with your clients, these are human beings. They automatically think that you're doing absolutely nothing for their account. And I know that you might think that that's not the case. Oh, they know we're working on things and yada, yada, yada. No, they don't. You know, over time they're going to think that you're, you're too busy for them. You have too many clients, you have too many things on the go and your business isn't getting the attention that it deserves. And this, this happens over time when you are not prioritizing client happiness and retention. So a way that we use, we bring in client happiness and retention into our day to day. Our account managers use things like client status boards. And Jeff, I know you use different tools like this internally using ClickUp, but something that I always prioritize as an account manager and again, control freak. I want to have a dashboard where I know where all my clients are at all the time. And also I want the agency owner to be able to look at this high level and see are my clients happy? Are they at risk? Where are we at? Right. Because at the end of the day all that matters to the agency owner is are our clients happy or not and what are we going to do about it? And as an account manager, you should be able to show them where clients are at. And I want you to be really confident that you know if a client's happy or not. And Jeff, feel free to unmute yourself if you have ideas of how you use this. But having a dashboard for the agency owner to be able to look at this every day and see where things are at is amazing. And I will add to this, the account manager should be updating this every day and down to the nitty gritty details of when was the last time I contacted this client. I'm going to get into optimizing your communication in a second. But Jeff, do you guys use this, like build dashboards like this for your clients?

Yeah.

So for those that have been on any zenpower webinars in the past, we've definitely talked about this, but we have like whether you call it a CRM inside of ClickUp for the delivery team or you call it like an agency client health tracker, account dashboard, whatever it is, we have basically the same exact thing where like all the clients are. You really want to create a single source of truth, especially for the agency owner. But things like being able to see their objectives, being able to see their status of where they're actually at, but also those internal health scores paired with the MPS because some people rely heavily on MPS scores, which it's good to see how the client's feeling. But you also, again, as you said, you want to know how the account manager is feeling about that account too. It's good to get those multiple perspectives. But then also adding in, yeah, some comments and some like, understanding of, okay, we're either a health score of 5, a 4, 3, 2 or 1. Give me some context into that as well. So we always have like questions that people that those account managers will answer. That gives good clarity to the agency owner as well to be able to dig into some of those issues. So yeah, we have something very similar and I highly recommend everyone have something like this. So you have a single source of truth for all of this.

Totally. And the most important piece here is that the account manager should own this. You shouldn't, as the agency owner, you shouldn't have to be going in and updating things. You know, you want to be able to sit down every day and say like, okay, oh, why is this client at risk? Like, let's talk about this. Like, are you on it really? You just want to know that your account team is dealing with everything the best way that they possibly can. Right. And so having kind of some of these tools will be super helpful. Let's kind of talk about proactive communication because I alluded to it there for a second. But as the days go on that you don't communicate with your clients, they think you're doing nothing for their account. And how to get ahead of that is proactive communication. There are so many agency owners that I meet with who, you know, they'll say, okay Taylor, like I, I don't need to talk to, I don't need to update my clients every day because I told them that the website is going to take four weeks and you know, they're not going to get a delivery for four weeks. So they don't expect to hear from me and I don't have time to do that. You know, there's no, there's no point in sending my, my clients an update because I don't have anything to update them on. And you know, they come up with all these excuses and I, and I say, well, you do have to communicate with your clients more than that. And it's, it's, it's a mandatory in, in the service based industry. So I recommend that you have somebody else who actually is responsible for this because as an agency owner you're going to have a million things that you're responsible for in the run of a day. And so you need to offload the proactive communication to someone else. So in early days of growing dot and company. I kind of coined this term called the Daily Pulse, and we still use it today. And it's. It's kind of a methodology for proactive communication. Now, most agency owners will say, well, Taylor, I think daily is overkill. I don't necessarily want to email my clients every day. That's totally fine. You don't have to email your clients every day. However, your account manager should know where all your clients are at every single day. They should know when the last communication was with the client. They should know where everything is at. And so if. If your account manager is responsible for the Daily Pulse and they're updating their dashboard, saying, you know, the last time I. The last time that I emailed Jeff was two weeks ago, well, that might be a red flag, you know, so the account manager should be updating the clients as much as. As possible and as much as it feels healthy for the relationship. But it doesn't have to be this big, robust report. And honestly, that's not ideal. What you want this to be is a quick gut check, right? Like, if. If you're planning to deliver something, maybe next Friday. Well, wouldn't it be nice to have an update every second day? Like, hey, we're still gunning for next Friday. Like, still on track. Here's what's outstanding. Or, hey, just letting you know that our. Our ADS team is still working on the optimizations. And, and I'm checking in with them tomorrow on a status update. I'll shoot you over a message then, you know, like, really little touch points so that the clients feel like they're your only client. You want your clients to feel like, oh, my gosh, I don't know how Taylor has another client. Like, she is all over my account, man. She must spend all day just thinking about me. That is what you want your clients to feel like, and we all know it's not true. However, a really strong account manager should be able to bang out these daily pulses really fast if that account manager knows where everything's at and they have a really good idea of where the projects are at and that everything is running smooth. So I want you to kind of think about this as more of, like, this methodology of proactive communication versus I have to email my clients every day. That is not the case. Your team should be responsible, though, for proactive communication. I think the worst thing that could happen to me as an account manager is if a client comes to me and says, hey, Taylor, where are we at with this project? I'm like, I missed it. I missed the mark there, if a client has to ask me where it's at, I've already missed the mark. And so this practice, embedding this into your culture, will allow your team to take ownership over proactively communicating with your clients. Another thing that I want to run through that you can easily implement for your team, and this kind of comes into the NPS scores as well. What we realized is, you know, we had all these processes and, and surveys and type forms and yada, yada, yada for getting client feedback. And I think at certain milestones, those are. Those work really well. But we found that clients were just getting exhausted from these surveys, and they were like, I don't want to fill this in anymore. And so we started testing the One Thing initiative where we just pop them over, maybe a slack message or an email, or maybe it's on a zoom. We just ask them three questions. What's one thing we can do better? What's one thing we're doing well? And that's one thing you'd like to see from us in the future. And it's short and sweet. It's a gut check so that we know where clients are at and how we can do better. If you're not asking, you're never going to get better. You're never going to see where the gaps are. Because what we see is that if you're not constantly checking in with your clients to make sure there's no gray areas, then in six months, they're going to turn. And you've missed all these little steps that you, you could have optimized that relationship. So this is something that you can just grab a screenshot of and share with your team. If you're not hearing from your clients when it comes to feedback, or maybe you're nervous to ask for feedback, which is very common, you can just pop them over this, you know, one thing we can do better. One thing we're doing well. One thing that you can, you'd like to see from us in the future. And it works really well. And don't be scared to ask for feedback. It's so, so, so important. And the last thing when it comes to client happiness is gifting. This is a huge thing that agency owners come to us for because they say, you know, I don't have a gifting strategy. I don't know. The last time I sent my client a gift was like the holidays last year. And so how I like to look at this is you want to be surprising and delighting your clients. So how we look at it is we give, we give all of our account managers a quarterly budget. So they have a budget per client where they have to spend that money, you know, so we want them to be looking for little things to surprise and delight their clients. And by giving them this quarterly budget, it allows them to get really creative. So for example, I had a client and it was actually an agency owner. It was his client and he kind of said to me, hey, Taylor, I really want to send this client a gift. He's really into like vintage books. And I was like, okay, like, I don't know what I'm gonna do with this. But I started to dig and get creative and was on like ebay in like the archives and found this like a vintage self self help book that he was like super into and couldn't find and then mailed it to him and he was like so excited and kept it on his bookshelf and thought of the agency owner all of the time. So find little snippets, right, that are opportunities to surprise and delete your clients is, is really great. And by giving your team the ownership of this, really gives them something fun to work on. Our, our account managers love gifting. It's like their favorite thing to do. Everything from a small little Starbucks gift card because they had a bad day, up to, you know, big gifts that are like very custom to them. I think it's really fun and really important. And I don't think that you should just save gifting for the holidays. Right? It should be throughout the year, little like onboarding gifts or hey, we had such a great month. We like crushed the goals together. Like, you know, send them something really fun. And then lastly, make sure your team is reporting back on the sentiment. You know, we want to learn what are some of the really awesome wins that we've had with our clients. What are the gifts that they love? So make sure that your team is reporting back to you and the team so that you can continue to wow your clients. I see a question here. I'm just going to pop this open. We do weekly pulses.

Yeah, I was just about to.

Okay, go for it.

You're on it. Okay. No, no, by all means, by all means. If you see that, then I won't interrupt you.

Okay, cool. So there was a question. We do weekly pulses where we outline wins, things that we are working on, and things that we are waiting on from the client. The issue we have is sometimes we don't have a win for the week and hate to send it without one. Any Advice? Oh, yes, totally. I feel like there has, there has to be some kind of win. Like, I don't think it has to be a results based win, but there's maybe something that you've, you've optimized for them on the back end, or maybe you've got a new campaign up and running that was really exciting, or maybe you just took one step forward to a big goal. I think that could be cool to really challenge your team to find wins. But if you don't have anything substantial and you don't want to have to kind of make something up, I think it's okay to send something without a massive win. I think as long as your clients feel like they're taken care of and that you're thinking about them and working towards their business goals and you really understand them. I think that is the most important thing. And as an agency, you always want to put yourself in the client's shoes. Right. If you, if you were the client and you were spending $10,000 a month on running ads, what do you want to see out of this working relationship? Like, if it's, I need to make sure that I have 10 book calls on my sales team's calendar every week. Well, make sure that you as the agency have that top of mind for your clients and you're always coming back to what their goals are and making it all about them versus about you. Um, so I know that's a long winded answer, but it's not like you have to have a huge win. It's similar to the Daily Pulse where you don't have to have a huge update, but there's little things that you can kind of celebrate as you're going. Um, so challenge your team to, to find those wins.

I was, Taylor, I was going to add one thing and then I guess I'll throw a question to you your way just to see what your perspective is on this. I think the biggest thing like we've especially done at Zen Palette is especially like with those, those updates, even if there isn't a win, again, doesn't always have to be results driven. But basically what you're doing when you send those updates, whether it's daily or weekly, is you're documenting and building that story of like where we're at, where we're going and, or where we were where we're at, where we're going. And so over time, especially with, if you're working with a larger client, you might be talking with someone, but you're not necessarily talking to the CMO always. So it gets to the point when renewal conversations come around. If you document that whole story and the client has all of these updates, they're seeing results, they're seeing those wins on a weekly basis.

So the more that you can optimize not just the process but the actual ownership over the client experience, that is, that's where you're going to really set yourself apart in our industry, especially for the account manager to be able to do this for you. The big so I'll just go back for one more thing. You know, we work with tons and tons of agency owners and I've met with probably thousands of agency owners at this point. And the goal that everyone really wants to get to is that they're not involved in the client process. They don't want to be involved in taking a client from sales to onboarding them to managing them long term. They want to be removed from that majority of agency owners. And in order to do get to that point, you know, this is what I tell my team. I'm like, don't assume people know that you're working hard. You need to show them. You need to show all the things that are happening and you have to show it in a way that makes sense to the client, but also in a way that they can never say that you're not doing anything right. You want to show that story. I personally always prefer email for those kind of major updates. Slack. The way I look at it is Slack is where things go to die. I personally don't use Slack for anything important because everything just gets lost. You know, I've worked in big, small agencies, everywhere in between and things just get lost. So I always use a project management tool and email. I guess that it depends for you and how you want to work with your clients, but that's my rule of thumb. Emails best. Cool. So let's talk about project management. I know this is very relevant when it comes to using like a tool like ClickUp, but as the account manager you essentially want to know are the projects being delivered on time? Do I know that? I'm confident that my client's project is going to get over the finish line on the timeline that I gave them. Because I, as the account manager, you are responsible for that at the end of the day. Because if you're managing that client relationship and you're not setting the right expectations with the client, with the team, you are responsible for that at the end of the day. So like I said earlier, a client should never come to you and say where are we at With a project, you should always be one step ahead of them. You should be updating them. You should know that the project's running on time. And so when we're auditing a client and we're auditing an agency's systems, we're looking to see in general, are your clients projects delivered on time? Is the project management software running smooth? Is everyone on the same page? Is everybody using ClickUp? If we're not all on the same page, we can't understand if projects are running on time or not. So as the account manager I want, or if you're hiring an account manager and training them, I want you to put the onus on them to ensure that projects are running on time. And maybe this is a metric that you, that you track. Jeff, I don't know if you build this into your ClickUp software, but tracking how many projects have been delivered on time or days overdue, is that something that you track?

Yeah, I mean, basically, when you create a single source of truth, whatever product management system is, you need all the projects in there and as you were saying, like the habits of the team to actually track your time or to complete their tasks in there. So the account manager knows what's actually happening and where projects are. But yeah, once you get all that data into ClickUp, you can create a dashboard or even just in the view to know like what projects were on time, what projects were late. And sometimes especially important is you're able to show, like if you have tasks like what we would recommend is you have something where it's like send something to a client and receive the feedback from that client. If you have those both as tasks, you can really show the client where, like if they're not getting their feedback on time, we're pushing the timeline and it's not always our fault.

Fault.

Sometimes it's the client's fault. I know everyone. Sometimes it's difficult to deal with clients for this reason because they don't get back to us in time. So that's always super important to have that in your system, to be able to show that of it's not always us. Sometimes we need to get your feedback if we're going to keep these projects on time.

Yeah. And I don't know about you, but as a client, if somebody showed me that visually and was like, hey, like, your feedback's due on Friday, here's what happens if you don't. It's going to push the endpoint project out by a week. Well, then I'm gonna get My stuff done if somebody shows me that I'm the bottleneck. So, yeah, the more that you can show your clients and the more that you can optimize for projects being done on time, the better. And then let's talk about onboarding. So this is my favorite thing to talk about because this is the point in the client's journey when they actually expect to get something. And so hear me out. So a client is coming to you and they're like, hey, I want to SEO services. And you go through your whole sales process, they're pumped, they're excited, you're promising them the world, you're going to do all these things. They sign on the dotted line, they maybe pay their first invoice, and then that is when they expect to actually get something for all of that. Right? That is when you, the account team, take over and onboard them and make sure that everything is happening. So this is when you really need to nail it. This is when the relationship really begins to take off. And it's in your hands at this point. You need to make sure that your account manager is really optimizing this whole process and holding their hand along the way. And I know that at Zenpilot, you guys have tons of amazing processes and onboarding processes for clients, which is phenomenal. And then your account manager has to actually take those and run with those, those. And so this is where the account manager steps up to the plate. And maybe they're involved in the sales process, but this is when they kind of take over, and this is when they want to really build that relationship with the client. This is where the real expectation setting comes in. This is where they start to see, okay, here's the real project scope, here's what's happening next. And then, and then, and then, and the client starts to build trust with you as the account manager. But you have to be able to deliver that. So you as the account manager, need to understand what's happening internally within the agency, who's responsible for what, and then what those timelines should look like so that you are building that relationship with the client, and then you can onboard them in a really efficient way. But the relationship really starts here at the onboarding, I think so. I think most agencies, you know, in our industry are so obsessed with just getting the SOP right and getting the checklist right when it comes to onboarding, but they're not really optimizing for the client experience. And that is the role of a really strong account manager. You want to optimize for. Wowing, your clients, you know, you want them to be telling everyone they know that wow, like this agency actually is delivering what they said. Because I don't know about you, but the trust level within our industry right now is low and we want to be really wowing our clients from the get go. So the more that you can optimize not just the process but the actual ownership over the client experience that is, that's where you're going to really set yourself apart in our industry. Especially for the account manager to be able to do this for you. The big. So I'll just go back for one more thing. You know, we work with tons and tons of agency owners and I've met with probably thousands of agency owners at this point. And the goal that everyone really wants to get to is that they're not involved in the client process. They don't want to be involved in taking a client from sales to onboarding them to managing them long term. They want to be removed from that majority of agency owners. And in order to get to that point, the most successful agencies that I see have a, a really strong onboarding process. So they're. That's really buttoned down. They know what that is going to look like before they bring on a client. And two, they have somebody owning this seat. If they don't, they never get out of the client experience because they feel like they have to be the one to manage that client. And until you have your, your systems and your processes really streamlined, you will never be able to get out of the account management seat. Okay, so I know we're flying here and I want to leave a few minutes for questions. Let's kind of talk high level about our hiring process. In the last two years alone, we've been doing this for five years. So in the last two years we've received over 16,000 applications, 248 interviews. We hired 40 people and it cost us around $10,000 per account manager to hire them. And I don't do, I don't say this to scare you about trying to hire somebody. What I want you to think about when hiring an account manager is that it takes a while to find an A player and you shouldn't just go out and just hire somebody, you know, who maybe, you know, could do the job. I want you to think of this as a really, really important role within your agency because it is. These are your clients we're talking about. You want to make sure that this person has the expertise not only from experience, but they have to have the personality they have to have the vibe that we talk about. They have to have the knowledge of digital marketing or whatever industry you're in. They have to be able to have the written communication skills, they have to have the verbal communication skills. They need to be this really well rounded individual to properly represent your agency, but most importantly, to remove you. You will never remove yourself from the client facing seat until you have somebody you trust to really own this role for you within the agency. So these are just some of our stats. It takes us a really long time to hire account managers and we do this full time. Like this is our only job that we're really hiring for. But these are just some stats to keep in mind and then trust. So let's talk a little bit about empowering your account managers to really own this. So we've talked all about, you know, optimizing your account management process and best practices, how to hire that person, but how do you actually train this person? Ongoing. And I'll be perfectly honest with you guys, because I'm an account manager, so I can say this, we're a special breed. Like we're not normal people. Like we are different than everyone else in the agency and we have to be managed differently because we are the front line of the agency. We're dealing with the clients that are happy, but we're dealing with the clients who are not happy. And we're taking a lot of the feedback, the good stuff, the ugly stuff. So we need to be really coached to be confident in having those conversations, in, you know, ensuring that we're on the same page with the agency team. We really need to be trained and managed differently. So as you're thinking about training an account manager and managing them, we have to be led differently. And so training and development is a huge piece of what we do with our account managers. And account managers have a really unique skill set and the expectations that we have of ourself in our role are very different than let's say a media buyer or a graphic designer. We're dealing with the, like I said, the soft side of agency life. We're dealing with the feelings, the, the vibes and really building relationships with clients. So we need to be, I guess, managed differently. And so how I want you to think about managing your account manager, if you've never had an account manager before, you want to kind of approach this more of like a coaching kind of, of kind of thing. And so the emotional intelligence of your account manager should be quite high. They should be able to have these open conversations with You. But here I'm going to give you guys some, some tools that you can use for managing your team. But we have things like dashboards, so I showed that earlier. But getting on the same page with your account manager, get gut checking, gut checking with them, making sure that they're living up to the expectations that you want them to live up to. Accountability scorecards. So we want your account managers to be, you know, giving them, giving themselves a score on how they're doing weekly and making sure that they are staying accountable to the goals that they've set. Specific performance reviews for account managers, you can just copy and paste this for your own team. So we use different things like self evaluations and then the manager evaluation and then most importantly, as account managers, we're go getters. We want to always be, you know, people pleasing. We always want to be growing. We always want to have things that we're working towards. So professional development plans are really important for account managers. We want to have goals that we can work on and we want to make sure that we're always wowing you as the agency owner. So having really strong professional development and coaching plans are really important. So for us, we do, you know, obviously we manage our account managers on a weekly, monthly basis, but we do separate coaching calls because we want to develop them as people. And it's really important in this role that I've seen is that we really want to kind of treat account managers on a little bit of a different. A different level. So just a few key takeaways. My big thing that I want you to think about is that you can't afford to get this wrong. You want to make sure that not only do you have the right frameworks in place and that you've hired the right person, but you want to make sure that you're coaching and pushing your account team to the next level because they're taking care of your clients, which are the bread and butter of your agency. You want to make sure you're hiring the right person for the right seat. I've seen this so many times where you hire somebody, not that there's anything wrong with this, but hire somebody really junior and want to train them up. It takes years to get an account manager to a position where they can actually take over a conversation for you. So it's really important to find the right person. Number three, empower your account managers. So we want to be able to take the wheel, we want to be able to take the ownership. So empower your account managers to be able to do that and then always level up your team. So we have, you know, a whole coaching program for our team and other account managers because we believe that account management is an art and it's the feelings. And we want to make sure that they're coached on how to step into this role and really, really do a great job job. So always make sure that you're coaching them in a very unique way. So I will pause there and I know we're going to send over a link for you guys to download all of these tools, but I will open it up for questions, if anybody has any, before we. We wrap it up.

We've got a couple. I'm seeing two questions. Are you seeing them, too, Taylor?

Let me see. Oh, Q and A. Okay, sure. Did you want to read them or you want me to.

I can read them. Yeah, sure. Okay. So both are from Curtis. Thanks, Curtis, for leaving these questions. And if any of y' all have further questions or something extra you want to ask, then now would be a great time to leave that in the Q and A section. In the Q and A section, please. Not in the chat. Thank you. First question from Curtis. Could you give any more examples of gifts you have given to clients in the past?

Past? Yeah, we've given so many different gifts. It kind of depends. But here's like, a little one that I love. I was working with a client and we were having, like, a big meeting coming up. I think it was like, maybe a Friday. So what I did was I ordered custom cookies for them with the client's logo and our logo on it, sent them to them and to arrive the morning of before that meeting and they could enjoy some cookies, like custom cookies for that meeting, which was kind of cool. Some other cool ones that our team have sent, you know, we've had, you know, maybe there was a death in the family, unfortunately. So we've sent, like, really nice Etsy boxes. Like, you can go on Etsy and see, like, customized boxes for people that you can send with, like, a care package, for example, going right to their doorstep, which has been really awesome, man. We've sent, like, every. Every gift you could ever imagine. We try and avoid sending, like, just like a generic basket or alcohol, things like that. We try and avoid that. We try and make it customized. We've sent, like, really cool socks to a client before where it had their logo on it. It. We've sent, like, custom dog collars with the dog's name on it in, like, a little basket on Etsy from. With, like, dog treats and like those kind of things with the dog's name on it. Yeah. I think there's so many options now that you can send that are like, custom and really creative. And then always, like when we have a new team member start, we send them flowers to their doorstep. And they love that, that. So that's an easy one that you can kind of deploy, like right in your onboarding process, something like that.

Awesome, Awesome. I am waiting for the day that somebody sends me flowers for whatever reason.

I'll send you some.

There you go.

They're coming. They'll be on your doorstep tomorrow.

Jeff, you're already meant to send me click up Socks. And we all know how that ended. Do we, Jeff? Socks. All right, second one from Curtis is. And we've got another one extra that came in. That's awesome. So let's go through them. Curtis, second question. How do you maintain visibility over the communications between your account managers and your clients via email?

So you can use like a CRM if that's important. So sending, like, if you use ghl, go high level or HubSpot, things like that, you can have visibility with emails. I know a lot of clients will actually put their clients into, let's say ClickUp and there's more visibility there. That can work sometimes times. But yeah, CRM is really easy. Easy way to do that.

Okay, well, that's simple enough. Can I. Jeff, did you have more to add here, like from your end, or does that more or less answer it?

No, I would say yeah. I mean, in terms of how we communicate with clients, we're directly inside of ClickUp, just because obviously we're ClickUp nerds. But yeah, there are definitely apps and obviously your CRM that can pull email together.

Yeah, I was doing that just yesterday. There was an email that I really wanted to be included as part of the kind of project history in ClickUp. So I just forwarded it to the right address, grabbed that from ClickUp. It was really seamless. Cool. Next one. I'm really curious about the answer, even for myself. An anonymous attendee asks, what will be your advice to junior account managers? Where to start from, what they should do to stand out?

It's a great question. So we got this question so many times that we actually developed a membership for account managers where we kind of talk through all of these things. But the most important piece for junior account managers is confidence. Because they are junior. They don't have as much experience as a lot of us on this call talking to clients. They haven't gone through those experiences. Yet. So you just have to get them that confidence. So start inviting them to all of your client calls, maybe that they're recorded. They can start to watch them and then practicing. So we do a lot of, like, shadowing. What I'll do when I'm training an account manager is I'll give them situations and I'll have them jump on loom videos and record certain things and give them feedback on how confident they are if they're really articulating things, if they're, you know, walking the client through a report in a way that really feels. Feels confident. That's kind of the biggest thing that I see from junior people is that they can't actually have conversations with clients because they don't understand what they're talking about. So getting them the base, base knowledge of the digital marketing world, make sure they understand the actual stuff that they're talking about and then get them practicing being confident. Hopefully that answers.

I love that answer. Yeah, I guess we'll have to wait for the anonymous attendee to give us any more detail. If so. Okay, I'm seeing one more here and another one is in the chat. Interesting though. So I'll try to pull it up. Oh, I lost it just now. Anyway, there's one more in the Q and A. And let's keep using the Q and A. Then Omari asks Kevin, can you give an example of a growth plan for an account manager? How do you recommend agencies ascend their account managers? Like raises or junior to senior, et cetera?

Yeah, great question. So it kind of depends on the structure of your agency, but what I see is somebody might start in, I think you said, yeah, junior account manager. And then actually managing, like they might be supporting the account manager. And then when you're an account manager, you might be actually managing those relationships on your own. And then we have like senior account managers. So those people are overseeing other account managers. So that would be another step. Step. And then after that, you're probably moving into either like a director level of accounts, where you're overseeing maybe a senior manager with account managers under them, or maybe you're overseeing a whole department. So some agencies will implement like a POD model where they're, you know, they have a senior manager overseeing a media buyer, a copywriter, and an account manager. That could be an option. And then above that, you might be into more of like operations role. So operations manager. A lot of times account managers will kind of step into that, maybe even a chief of staff role and kind of start to go up that level. And maybe like COO would be kind of high up in terms of like growth plans for an account manager, setting goals in terms of like client retention. Like, I think an account, a strong account manager should really understand numbers and they should understand stats within the agency and what's important to the agency. So for example, you want your account manager to understand churn and what it is monthly and what you want it to be within the agency, what your goals are. Maybe it's the account manager is responsible for a budget. Like maybe they have to make sure that every client is an average of $10,000 and how are they optimizing for that? So then they're going to be cross selling, upselling, working on the sales. So I think that getting the account manager really focused on their own metrics and how that impacts the greater business, they'll be more bought in to really ascend and grow in their role.

Yeah, that's great. Probably isn't a role that wouldn't benefit from having kind of more of a sense of the business metrics. Right. That's essential for advancement in whatever path really. Okay. Omari says thanks, that's a great answer. Anonymous attendee says they love, loved the response. So we got, we can take that off. And I don't think I'm seeing more questions here. I thought one kind of flew by me, but no, that'll be it for the Q and A.