Celebrating Success and Overcoming Challenges

• By
• April 1, 2020
• Agency

Account management, what is it and why is it important? Account management is defined as a client-facing role that liaisons between the client and agency. This person is seen as the face of the agency to the client and acts as the face of the client to the agency, is expected to provide seamless support and aims to expedite response time to both parties. ACs (account coordinators) usually work on clients for the lifetime of their account and are tasked with growing the account, keeping quality of work high, creating long-term strategies, and ensuring overall client satisfaction.

 

Why are we important? Because honestly, everything would fall apart without us. There are dozens of projects running simultaneously with a million moving parts and someone has to keep track of them.

One of the biggest parts of the job is managing expectations both internally to the agency and externally to the client. By setting expectations, both parties are aware of what to expect both in terms of process and deliverables in order to prevent dissatisfaction.

Process is king. It is what defines our projects, how they are going to get done, and in what order. Account Coordinators manage expectations by involving clients in processes early on and they work very hard to ensure that the project stays on track and on budget. This also means laying out what deliverables will come from the project and what is excluded.

Communication is key in managing expectations and keeping good relations.

Account Coordinators manage all of the day-to-day activities but occasionally there are unexpected twists and turns with projects. Even after setting goals, managing expectations and locking down the process, problems will arise (more often than not) and AC’s are in charge of putting out those fires. RocketBrand AC’s pride themselves on attacking these fires with their creative problem-solving skills. 

Issues in the project could arise from delays caused by the agency which you must take full responsibility for, and work to ensure that these don’t happen in the future. Oftentimes, delays will be caused on the client-side. When that happens, you manage expectations internally, revise the timeline, and work at the client’s pace. Sometimes these pain-points are completely out of any party’s control. For example, If it rains on the day of the shoot, or a terrible virus halts all non-essential business. The most important thing is to keep an open line of communication and be as transparent as possible. We are in the business of relationships and people, never forget that. 

As ACs one of  our favorite things is probably hearing our clients say, “Approved.” It keeps us going through tough projects and serves as our little slice of victory and allows us to look back and say “worth it”. Where there is success, there is also failure, and those failures give us an opportunity to reflect and grow. We reflect on our shortcomings and grow as both marketing professionals and Account Coordinators. One of RocketBrand’s  Core Values is “Learn For Life” and we stress the importance of analyzing the project post morteum and figuring out what went well, what didn’t and what we can do better next time.

Our job as Account Coordinators is important. We are the small but mighty force that keeps a project moving. We might not be making the large decisions that make or break a project, but our work is vital and our presence is felt. We take pride in our work of assuring that these projects are managed well, expectations are met and, most importantly, that our clients are happy.