How to Hire Account Managers For Your Marketing Agency

What's up, digital marketing agency owners? On, on today's session, I want to talk a little bit about one of the key things you're going to need to solve for as you grow and as you scale your agency, which is how to hire account managers. So if you're thinking about growing and kind of creating some more freedom for yourself, maybe you've got a couple of account managers, you're trying to figure out how to scale your account management team, or you just want some very practical tips on how to hire world-class account managers, you're going to want to watch this video. So let's talk about account management and kind of how we grow, how we scale, and how we really retain the clients. Because the whole purpose of the account management role within the agency is to manage the relationships, to create the great experience, and ultimately to retain the clients at the highest level possible. And on previous videos, I talked about the client maximization model, which was really around onboarding, effective communication, and client success management. Really, your client success management strategy is this where your account managers fall into play. And so really, as I think about it, and I think about putting account managers in place, really what I find is that you as the owner, as you grow your business— and I don't know where you're at in your business right now, maybe you're already at 7 figures or multiple 7 figures, or maybe you're kind of more in that struggle phase in the business where you're just getting things off the ground, what I found is usually at about 10 or 15 clients, you get a decision to make, right? If you get 10 or 15 clients on retainer that are paying you to do what it is that you do, whether it's the website, SEO, pay-per-click, social media, funnels, something in between, if you're still the person talking to the client, going through the reports, seeding the vision, keeping them engaged, maybe even doing some of the onboarding process. You've gotta make a decision. Do I stop here and just continue to focus on these clients, or do I cap out, right? And at that point you can decide, alright, I'm just gonna pause here and that is what it is, and you're only gonna have a certain amount of income, or you can decide that you're gonna scale the business. You can decide, I'm gonna hire an account manager, I'm gonna build an account management team, and I'm gonna delegate this so I can continue to grow the business, so I can continue to make sure things continue to move forward. And ideally, if you're watching this video, you've decided you're gonna scale, you're gonna continue to scale, and you just wanna figure out how do we do better at hiring account managers, training account managers, putting them in place, and making sure they provide world-class service to the clients. So one of the benchmarks I find in our agency and in the hundreds of agencies we work with here at Seven Figure Agency is that the typical account manager can handle between 25 and 30 accounts. So if they're the kind of account manager that's the quarterback in the relationship, so maybe they're not doing the SEO or running the funnels, but they're the ones setting the client up, doing the monthly review, figuring out where things are failing and going back to the team saying, hey, I need some updates on this, I need this to be modified, and being that liaison between the client and your business, that's kind of a sweet spot. Less than 25, they're gonna have capacity. More than 30, they're gonna start to get super busy and maybe start to drop some balls, and it will start to impact your retention. So what I'm gonna suggest is if you're looking at your scale plan for your account managers, you're gonna wanna about 1 full-time account manager for every 20 to 25 clients. So kind of as you hit that 20 mark, you start to place the ads, you start to do the recruiting, you start to really look for that candidate that you can hire and train up. And if you're on a good growth track, by the time you get to 25 or 30 additional clients, you can have that account manager in place and they can step in and be capable right out of the gate. So for every 20 to 25 clients is when you're gonna wanna start hiring for the next account manager. And at 7 Figure Agency, we got a great course, a process for this called the Account Manager Advantage. I'm gonna share with you guys some of the key points, some of the cliff notes And know that as a member you can even go much deeper with these concepts and some of these swipe and deploys. So as it comes to hiring account managers, the first thing you want to think through is your compensation plan. How much are you going to pay the account manager so that you can still maintain profitability, but at the same time have people that are capable and interested in working for you that are going to stick around long term? Well, we found this is going to vary depending upon how much you charge and how complex your service offering is. Um, but usually somewhere in the $35,000 to $55,000 base salary range, you can find a really good account manager. They might not have a ton of experience, but they've got the right attitude, the right aptitude, they've got a desire to learn, and the right psychological profile. Um, you can play with some bonuses as well to give them an upside that, that can work well. So play with a retention bonus or bonuses for the clients that become case studies. That's one of my favorite plays, is to incentivize the account manager not just to retain the client, but to convert that client into an advocate that would be willing to be a testimonial, that would be willing to be a case study, that would be willing to speak highly. And I'm happy to pay a bonus for that because that almost turns into a marketing asset for your organization. And if your account management team is all organized around how do we create such a great experience for the client, and how do we make sure the results that we've delivered are so good and the client understands the value that we're bringing to the table so well that they're happy to be an advocate for us, that is a slam dunk win. So you wanna build that into your compensation structure as well. From there, you're gonna wanna write the job description, and this, you know, just be sure that as you hire, it's very clear, like here's the expectations, here's what your day in the life looks like, here's what your KPIs are and what you're gonna be held accountable to and here's how you have opportunities to make more money. So have a nice clean job description. If you need one, type job description in comments. I can send something your way as kind of a baseline, something that you can work from. From there you wanna determine how you're gonna recruit, how you're gonna hire, and how you're gonna train, right? Because you don't wanna just hire someone and not have a plan for how you're gonna ramp them up, how you're gonna get them capable. What we found from a recruiting perspective, The best place to recruit, really I found Indeed to be the best place, just because there's lots of people looking on Indeed. And while LinkedIn could be a great source to go out and laser target candidates, what I found is the candidates we get that want to come through that we find through LinkedIn tend to have higher salary expectations and are harder to get, where if they're looking on Indeed and they're kind of in the market, you can kind of get them in that $30,000 to $50,000 range, knowing you might have to train them up, right? Assuming they've got the right attitude and aptitude. And this is where the psychological profile comes into play. One of the most important things you want to pay attention to as you hire account managers is their psychological profile. Because you want to be looking for a very specific type of person that likes to be on the phone, likes to communicate, right, is comfortable having those tough conversations, also has the confidence to instill in the client that they're in the right place, but at the same time is also a high follow-through person, right? The kind of person that isn't going to do this for 6 months, get bored, and then try and move to a different position, or you just kind of be with you for a very short period of time and say, "Yeah, this is like too redundant, I want to move on." So I'm going to share with you guys some of the psychological ideas and some of the psychological profiles you want to pay attention to. And make sure you get someone that's gonna be a good fit. Map out the KPIs. What are their key performance indicators? For us, in our agency, really what we are monitoring them for is what percentage of your clients have you met with on a monthly basis, right? And we want every client to have had a meaningful meeting with their account manager to go through the reports, to talk about next steps, to see the vision, right? We know when we're meeting with the clients consistently, they're more likely to stay. We're looking at their retention rate, monthly, quarterly, annually, and we, we've got a benchmark they should be shooting for 98% monthly retention in the clients that they serve. And then what percentage of your clients have you moved to a case study or to an advocate within the program? Those are the top 3. There's other KPIs we track, but those are the 3 ones we really want to focus on. And then from a training and onboarding perspective, The most important thing, right, if you're gonna be hiring people and putting them into this role and getting them ramped up over time, you need to give them the basic fundamentals of internet marketing in your particular niche, right? So they can't just understand SEO, pay-per-click, social media. They also need to understand the dynamics of the niche. So we work with plumbing and HVAC companies. We want them to understand like what does a plumbing and HVAC company do? What are the types of jobs that they run? What's the average transaction value? What are the highest ticket things that they provide? What are the questions people are asking? Like, you really wanna arm your account managers with that information. In the perfect world, ideally you'd set up a training portal where they can learn. Like, here's what we sell. Here's what we deliver. Here's kinda what the client expectations are. Here's how to manage a monthly review call with a client. Here's the questions that come up consistently and how to answer those questions. And that's a great start, but if that's all you do to train and onboard your account managers, you're gonna wind up with troubles at least 60 or 70% of the time. Because if you do not role-play with your account managers, if you don't inspect like kind of how they're communicating and how they're presenting things, you're gonna wind up with problems. So make sure in your training process and in on your ongoing management process You've got role-playing. So if they had to watch a training on how to do a monthly review call, and you've got a flow that you've given them that they're supposed to go through, and kind of, this is how you set the agenda, and this is the questions, and this is what you show. Give them that training, let them sit on a couple of those types of calls with other account managers, but then make sure you have a meeting with them where they're gonna emulate that process, where they're gonna practice it with you. And don't expect them to get it perfect, right? Expect them to get it like 80% and see if they're coachable. Just say, hey, you know what, you did— you skipped this or you didn't show that the way that I would have, and see if they can improve, right? You need to make sure you've got that training process with the simulations built in, otherwise you're going to have serious problems. Now, psychological profile-wise, I could go super deep on this. I will say from a very surface level, there's a test you can give called The Kolbe assessment, it's at wherewithal.com. I think it costs $50 to give. You wanna test, I think everybody that comes into your organization on Kolbe, and then you wanna be clear, like what are the psychological profile that I'm looking for that's gonna be a good fit for this account management role? What we found at Seven Figure Agency, and kind of in all the members that we work with, is you're looking for someone that's relatively high fact find, which means they wanna learn about SEO, they wanna learn about the data, they wanna understand SEO and pay-per-click and social media, and kinda not just be like, "I don't know, I'm gonna toss you off to the SEO manager." They wanna know it, right? So that high fact-finding's kinda important. And then high follow-through is extremely important. High follow-through is somebody's aptitude to wanna kinda be routine with stuff and kinda carry things across the finish line. What we found is sometimes we get great candidates, where they get super persuasive, they're super professional on the phone, they can talk the talk, but they're low follow-through, and almost every time those people get complaints and wind up churning out of the role in like a 60 to 90 day window, maybe a little bit longer than that, like 6 to 9 months. So if you get somebody that's high follow-through and high fact-find, they're gonna understand the role, they're gonna be able to talk the talk, and they're actually gonna stick with it. And when the client says, hey, I need this done, they're gonna go back to the team and they're gonna follow through on things. So, you know, this is kind of like the secret code on finding good account managers. High follow-through, high fact-finding tends to work best. The other test I'm gonna suggest is called a DiSC profile test, which you've all heard of. And what you're looking for in an account manager is a relative balance between I, which is influential, they like to communicate, interpersonal, they're comfortable talking with people, But they need to be relatively high D, dominance, as well. Because if you get someone that's high I but low dominance, they're just wanting to be friends with the client, and when the client says no, or hey, this isn't working right, they quickly, like a wallflower, just kind of shrivel up. You need someone that's got a little bit of a backbone, they can say no, this is why we do it this way, this is how it works, and get them back in line, get them really excited about what they're doing with you. So hopefully those two assessments can really help solve some problems for you in your hiring process for account managers. When it comes to interviewing and kind of getting applications, I'll share one hack that I really love for hiring account managers, and that's using a video-based application process. What we find is if we post a job on Indeed, right, and we run that ad, we get lots of applicants, but it's really hard just looking at a resume, just because they've got experience in digital marketing or just because they've got customer service experience, I can't tell whether they're gonna be worth a call. And if I had to call all of those people, or somebody on my team had to call all those people and have a conversation and ask the questions and go through that vetting process, it's just a very, very long process. Now, with a video application, what you can do is you can send them through to a service like VideoAsk, where you can say, "Hey, thanks so much for your interest in the position. We think you're gonna be a great candidate. We have a video-based application process." and I want to ask you a couple questions. You just record a video with your answers, right? And they can answer the questions on video. That's very easy to do from their mobile phone or from their desktop. And that gives you the ability before you have to meet with them to see how do they present themselves on video, because most of us live in a video world, right? We're on Zoom all day. We're meeting with our clients on Zoom, not live and in person. So that's mission critical. How well do they communicate, right? Do they have A decent inflection in their voice, or do they seem really boring? Are they articulate with their words? This is really important, and what's cool is not everyone does the video application. Boom, I just saved myself hours of vetting time. The ones that take the effort to record the video are usually decent candidates, and then we can see whether they've got the communication skills that we need and only reach out to those ones that seem like they're gonna be a good fit. Doing this really helped to shortcut our hiring process and helped us get much higher quality people right out of the gates. So typically we're putting the ad, having them fill out a video application, sending them those assessments, the Kolbe and the DiSC, and if all those check, then we have the first interview, right? And that interview process starts. We're only working with a select few that turn out to be our best candidates. So hopefully this has been helpful. I tried to quickly hit some of the key things that you need to know in order to build your account management team, in order to hire really good account managers. This is only a part of your overall client retention strategy, and I put together our client retention workbook that helps you see the key things you wanna be thinking about from a client retention perspective. You can access that by going to 7figureagency.com/retention-workbook. There you can grab it, it's completely free. It's got a checklist of the key things you wanna think about in order to improve your retention. So I really hope you got value from today's video. If you did, hit the like button, hit the subscribe button so that you don't miss our future videos. Share this with another agency that might benefit. And if you have follow-up comments or follow-up questions, please post those below. And I look forward to seeing you on a future video. I'll talk to you soon.