In this instructional video, Joshua Nelson explains how digital‑marketing agency owners can scale their businesses and improve client retention by hiring the right account managers. He argues that founders cannot handle all client communication as they grow to seven‑ or eight‑figure revenues, so a dedicated account‑management team is essential. Nelson shares his experience hiring 25‑30 account managers and recommends using pre‑employment personality assessments to predict fit. He focuses on the Kolbe A assessment, emphasizing two key traits: a high Fact‑Finder score (indicating research‑oriented, up‑to‑date knowledge of SEO, PPC, social media) and a high Follow‑Through score (≥6, showing reliability, consistency, and willingness to handle repetitive tasks). He also recommends a low‑cost DiSC assessment to ensure candidates have at least moderate Dominance (D) and Influence (I) traits, enabling them to confidently lead client conversations and build relationships. Nelson outlines the modest costs ($55 for Kolbe, $5 for DiSC), explains how these metrics reduce churn, boost word‑of‑mouth, and support agency growth, and advises founders to remove themselves from day‑to‑day client communication. He concludes with a call to download a free Client Retention Plan workbook and to subscribe for weekly videos.
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If you run a digital marketing agency, you're trying to figure out how to hire the right account management staff, how to put the right people in place that can interact with your clients, that can create a great experience, that can help you retain your clients at the highest level possible, you're going to want to watch this video. Alright, so on today's video, I want to talk about an advanced strategy for scaling your agency and, and for retaining your clients at the highest level possible. I've talked about in a lot of different videos here that to grow your agency, you can't do it all yourself. One of the key positions you're going to need to hire for is account managers, the people that actually talk with the clients, that go through the reports, that set the expectations, that can retain the clients at the highest level possible. And, you know, when it comes to hiring good quality account managers, we've gone through at least 25 or 30 account managers in our agency over the years. And we've tried everything from hiring the local kid right outta high school to hiring seasoned professionals. And we've learned a lot of things. And I've become a big time advocate of using personality profiles and assessments in advance to help me predict who's gonna be a good fit for the role. And what I wanna do is share kind of some of my experience and share some of the things I look for in account managers today that have made a big difference in the people that actually stay in the role, the people that actually get great experience for our member, for our clients, and that wind up helping us retain our clients, build our reputation, and grow our agency. The, the number one test that I'm a big fan of is called a Kolbe A assessment. You can learn more about it at wherewithal.com, or you could run a search for Kolbe assessment. But what Kolbe does is it helps to kind of look at the, the striving personality of the person that you're hiring. And if you think about it, like, hey, I wanna hire an account manager, somebody that's customer service, somebody that understands digital marketing, somebody that is gonna engage with my clients. If they've got a persuasive voice, right, they're probably a good fit. But what we don't want is somebody that says all the right things but doesn't actually follow it up, doesn't actually follow through on things, drops the ball on the client, right? Or works with us for 6 months and then walks out the door, which is a lot of what we experienced early by not having a Kolbe assessment in place. Because somebody would look good, they would sound good, they'd have a great inflection in their voice, but when it came right down to it, they weren't the right candidate. And so what Kolbe does is it gives a quick 10-minute assessment that the person answers, and it starts to give you an insight as to what kind of role they'd be best suited for. And what we found when it comes to a account managers, there's two things we really, really want to see on a Colby assessment test. And doing this has made a big difference in hiring the right candidates and getting candidates to stay with us long-term. Number one is high fact find, right? In this digital marketing game, we wanna make sure the person does their research. They like to know how digital marketing works, SEO, pay-per-click, and social media. And digital marketing's constantly evolving. And our clients usually hire us because they want to deal with the best of the best. And so if your account managers on the front end haven't done the research, they're not willing to stay on the cutting edge, they're going to fall behind, right? All it takes is one client to ask a question with the account manager, make something up, or like acts like they don't know, haven't heard of that. That immediately starts to trigger the client that there's something wrong with the organization, that they're going to consider going somewhere else. And so this This high Fact Finder is an indication that the person likes to do their research. They like to be on the, on the know of what's going on. So that's one thing I really like to pay close attention to. The second is Follow Through. And to me, actually, this is probably more important, probably most important, is I want somebody that's high Follow Through. What that means is they're the kind of person that's okay doing repetitive tasks, having similar conversations, they take notes, and they follow through on things. They, they follow through, they follow up, they get things done. Typically, as entrepreneurs, we're usually, if you look at one of these assessments, high quick start, low follow-through. And if you think about yourself for a minute, probably one of the reasons you're so successful is because you're willing to take risks, you're willing to get a new idea and take quick action with it. But if you also look, you recognize that a lot of times you get excited about something, You'll do it 2, 3, 4 times, but then the repetitive nature of it starts to get boring and you're like, "Eh, I'm out," right? And that's causing issues for you in your operations, in your account management. And so I believe you're looking for high follow-through in most of the key operational roles in the business, but especially your account managers, 'cause they're the ones that are gonna be talking with the clients. They're gonna be the ones kind of saying, "Hey, here's what we're gonna work on next," or getting feedback from the client. And they need to be able to have those consistent conversations, and they need to be able to follow through and get that back to the operations team and say, "Hey guys, what's going on with this? Hey, can we build this landing page? Hey, can we make sure we add this additional content?" And follow through and close the loop with the clients. Also, they're willing to stay with this type of role. What I found is somebody that's a 5 or higher in account management follow-through is usually the kind of person that doesn't just want a job, for 6 months or 4 months, they're happy, they wanna stick around, they wanna put down deep roots, and they wanna commit to what they're in for. And so entrepreneurs are typically high Quick Start, that's probably you if you're watching this, but your account managers and your operations team, we want high Follow Through and high Fact Find. When I started testing for this in advance of hiring our account managers, We found that we got better account managers that stuck around and created much better experiences for our clients, which obviously drives better retention, which drives more word of mouth, which drives more growth within your agency. Now, the other personality profile that's pretty important is what we call a DiSC assessment. And DiSC also looks at like kind of a different side of the personality But usually you've got these 3 different things. We've got dominance, influential, steadiness, and conscientious. And account managers, what we're looking for ideally is relatively high D and relatively high I. So while they're high follow-through and high fact-finding, we need them to have a little bit of a dominant characteristic so that when they talk with the client, when they go through the reports, when they explain what we're working on, they're not a pushover, right? Because let's face it, your client is wanting to deal with the best of the best. They're paying top dollar, and they need to know that the person on the other side knows what they're saying and believes in what your organization is doing for them. And so you want to test for— they don't have to be a high D complete, but you want to have them have at least a little bit of a dominance in their personality profile so that they can stand up to those tough conversations and they can they can have those conversations. The other thing I like to look for is high influential or interpersonal communication style. What that says to me is they enjoy people, right? They enjoy being on the phone, they like talking, they like having conversations. If you hire account managers that don't have any of this I personality profile, they're all C and S, they're not gonna wanna have those long conversations. They're not gonna wanna talk with the client and ask about their kids and ask about their team and, build those bonds and those relationships. They're going to want to hide behind the scenes, and there's a place for that, right? There's a place for your operations team that just wants to do the work, to build the links, to build the citations, to do the work. That's your operations team. Your account management team, we want to have more of the D.I. personality type where they're happy to be on camera, on Zoom with the clients. They're happy to have those conversations and to build those bonds. So So, long story short, two assessments that can make a big difference in pre-selecting the right account managers for your company or client success team that's gonna improve your retention, it's gonna reduce churn, it's gonna improve profitability is we're gonna give them a Kolbe assessment, costs about $55 before they get hired, and we're looking for are they relatively high Fact Find and Follow Through. We're looking for at least a 6 on the Follow Through scale. And then we're going to test to see a DISC assessment, which costs like $5 anywhere, will tell us do they have that dominant interpersonality profile that is going to, it's going to be a good fit and create the right relationship bonds within your company. And again, you kind of going back to the initial concept here is you can't do this on your own. If you're running a digital marketing agency and you want to go to 7 figures, or 8 figures, you can't be the person selling the client, doing the work, managing the operations team, having the client communication. The second thing you wanna remove yourself from is account management. And so you wanna get really good at hiring account managers, training account managers, putting the right people in place, and removing yourself from those client communication conversations. And so account management is just a, a portion of your overall client retention strategy. And if you'd like more ideas and strategies on how to build your account management team and really how to create a world-class client experience to improve your retention, I highly suggest you check out the Client Retention Plan. It's a workbook and a checklist. You can get that for free by going to 7figureagency.com/retention-workbook. Thanks so much for joining me today. Thanks so much for kind of tracking along. If you got insights from this, please hit the like button. If you have follow-up questions, post them in the comments and be sure to subscribe. We post new videos every Monday at 10 AM. So be sure that you've got yourself subscribed and you can be alerted as we roll out these new videos and content going forward. Thanks so much for watching. And I can't wait to hear how you hire better account managers and retain your clients at a higher level.
