One of the biggest things people get wrong in this process is that they spend a lot of time vetting the agency and no time vetting the account manager. They look at reviews of the agency, they talk to former clients and then once the contract is signed they are randomly assigned to an account manager.
Vetting the Account Manager
The experience and results you are going to get on your campaign is largely determined on the project manager who is actually working on the account. Lets say at an online marketing agency they have 20 account managers. Usually of these 20 a couple are excellent, a couple are pretty bad and everyone else is in the middle. The difference in the experience you will get with a top performer vs. a bottom performer is huge.
If you have ever looked at reviews of an agency you have probably noticed that a lot of times you will see some good reviews and some bad reviews. This is usually due to the different project managers working on those accounts.
Going into the process, account manager selection is one of the most critical pieces. In our process we do this for our clients but if you are doing it on your own you want to know who the project manager assigned to your campaign is before signing any contract. You want to vet the account manager just like you would vet the agency. Ask questions like:
- Have you worked on this type of account before?
- What is your experience level?
- How many active clients do you have?
If you ask these questions you can determine if they are the right fit for your campaign.
Account Manager Selection at Grow Team
This is one of the most important things we do for our clients at Grow Team. It is so important to us that we have created an entire system when it comes to account manager selection. We grade all of the project managers at all of the agencies that we work with.
The concept that we use is called topgrading, based on the principles from the book by Brad Smart. We constantly monitor the performance of all the account reps in our network and systematically cull out lower performing reps and replace them with higher performing ones so that after doing it as long as we have we can deliver the highest performers in the country directly to our clients.
If you found this helpful and would like our help vetting your account manager, please {{cta(‘249ebb3b-4019-4b56-95f8-d224bdc2fa62’)}}.