Joshua Nelson argues agency owners should hire an account manager at 10-15 clients or $10k-$20k monthly revenue. Trying to handle sales, delivery, and account management yourself causes burnout, dropped tasks, and client churn. Delegating account management frees you to focus on growth.
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Running your digital marketing agency, I've got news for you. You probably need a specific role within your company, and you need it sooner than you think. And that role is account management, right? If you run your digital marketing agency, there's lots of hats to wear, right? There's landing of the clients, is the sales hat, the marketing hat for your own business. There's the delivery hat, which is how do we get the work done, whatever you just sold— website, SEO, pay-per-click, social media marketing— the actual doing of the work. And then there's account management. That's Managing the relationship with the client, going through the reporting, helping them see what you're doing, helping them understand the value so they stick with you long term. The fact is that takes a lot of time, that takes a lot of energy, and if you don't do it right, if you're not consistent with the follow-through, you'll have churn problems. Those churn problems lead to— they lead to what? They lead to lack of revenue, lack of confidence. They also lead to a bad reputation within your vertical, right? If you're, if you're doing an industry-specific agency like I recommend in one particular vertical, if you lose clients, the word will spread relatively quickly. And so here's, here's what I think most agencies do. They try and do it all themselves. They try and focus on getting the clients and then they keep themselves active with doing the work. And then they're also trying to retain the clients and like retain the relationships. That leads to a couple things. It's going to lead to burnout. Something's got to give. If you're trying to wear all the hats and you're trying to retain the clients and you're trying to do everything, you're going to burn out. You're either going to stop selling, you're going to stop fulfilling, and ultimately balls are going to get dropped. Balls will either get dropped in your own sales and marketing efforts. Probably more likely, balls will get dropped for your client. Things you promised you were going to do don't get done. Communication that you know you should be keeping up, going through the reports, showing them what you're doing, starts to fall by the wayside. And that results in client churn, right? It results in clients leaving, it results in frustration, it results in feeling like you're taking one step forward and one step back. And so what you need to do, right, I really think there's two positions you have to remove yourself from right away within your business. The first is operations, right? The doing of the websites, doing the SEO, doing the pay-per-click. The second position that you need to remove yourself from is account management, that customer relationship, that customer focus side of the business. And I really believe it's sooner than you think, right? You might think, well, once I've got 50 clients, once I've got 30 clients, I can think about doing something like that. I think that would be a mistake. I think that's way too far into the future. I believe you probably need to be looking at an account manager around 10 to 15 clients. Depending upon what you charge, that's probably somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000 in MRR— monthly recurring revenue. If you can make the investment in a good account manager at that point in time, you'll be able to retain your clients higher because they're gonna be getting served and they're gonna have a proactive communication process that account manager is responsible for. But you're also gonna free yourself up not to have to do the launch calls, not to have to do the monthly reviews, not to have to worry about that client calling in at 4 in the afternoon asking for these 19 things that didn't get done. It will free you to focus on what you need to focus on as the entrepreneur, as the owner in the business, which is business development, which is thinking about, okay, how do we position ourselves in the space? How do we continue to fill the funnel for our business? And how we continue to grow and scale. So you may need an account manager sooner than you think. If this has been helpful and you'd like some additional insights on how to find great account managers for your digital marketing agency, put account managers in comments and I'll kinda hook you up with some training that walks you through how to find really good account managers and some of the psychological factors you wanna pay close attention to when selecting someone for that role. So post that in comments. If you have any questions about this, let me know. And if you're not already in the Digital Marketing Agency Success Facebook group, I'll have a link here. Be sure to join us there. We're sharing some of our best ideas, strategies, and techniques for growing and scaling your digital marketing agency. We'd love to have you join us in that Facebook group. It's completely free. Other than that, post "account management" in comments here if you'd like some additional insights on how to find good account managers, and I look forward to talking with you soon.
