Having the experience and confidence to challenge a client
With sales and marketing anointing ever-younger staff as account executives, the need for confident, empathetic and conversationally astute communication – and staff training – is more vital than ever, says Ant Gowthorp, in this guest column.
Account directors and waiters never used to have so much in common.
One was an experienced, hard-working media professional, highly practiced at her craft and realistic about her client’s goals and expectations. The other was an order taker, charged with wrangling the kitchen and making the customer experience as pleasant and obliging as possible.
With media careers now more compressed than ever, youthful inexperience is fuelling confusion about the role of account services. Account directors who once had the industry bona-fides for difficult and frank conversations with clients, find themselves without experience or confidence to challenge a client’s statements or beliefs.
With account service teams younger than perhaps at any time in advertising history, it’s not surprising that some of these young peoples’ customer service training is making the jump from hospitality or retail and into the realm of agency account service.
The most important person in any organisation is the one who represents the organisation to the clients. So what do most companied do? Employ low-wage 18 year olds. Of course their focus is not on representing the organisation well, their focus is on getting their degree done so they can escape their low-wage job. Such dumb thinking. Yet this happens everywhere you look.
..when one states a goal as being the smartest people in the room, however you qualify it. It sounds way too arrogant. The credibility to challenge the client brief comes not just from experience, but also empathy – understanding the client’s business and culture thoroughly enough to propose a workable alternative approach.
Training hopefully gives client service people a wider understanding of their real role beyond the all too common order taker/project manager. Unfortunately, it can’t provide them the experience they need to have a knowledgeable contribution where challenging the client will be respected. Preparedness, bravery and pragmatism, whilst being honourable qualities, don’t enable them to draw upon the experience that clients have every right to expect. The circumstance of clients putting the financial squeeze on agencies, then agencies not being able to afford experienced people, points towards their inability to present the added value and cost of experience as a benefit. This in itself seems somewhat ironic from an industry in the business of selling.
Imagine other industries taking the same stance. A medical intern running an ER. A newly graduated accountant fighting your tax audit. Apprentice mechanic fixing a major fault on your car. A young architect designing your house. But don’t worry. They are all undergoing training but have little experience and their bravery and pragmatism will get them through. That’s OK isn’t it?
I recently attended a forum on the future of client service and the room packed with 20 somethings were asked if they saw client service as their future. Very few hands rose. Perhaps they have already reached the conclusion that there are very few people older than themselves left in the agency. There are few mentors to rescue them from those “deer in the headlights” moments. Has client service been so dumbed-down that it has lost its position of respect within agencies and also with clients?
Meanwhile, try getting a job at a PR or an ad agency if you are even slightly over 50 and experienced. From a a client’s perspective, it would be good if agencies were mature enough to be, yes, more mature. Training is good but you can’t train-in genuine and informed gravitas.
It’s only a semantic difference.
Account service or account management?
BUT
Servers serve and managers manage
As long as the industry talks account ‘service’, it will attract obedient order-takers, empty suits and bag carriers who give the client what it wants, not what it needs.
Great point Gawen! Great client managers are intensely curious about the clients business. They listen and explore the other aspects that make the clients business tick This goes far beyond just responding to obvious client requests. Their clients spend the majority of their day not on the the items the agency are preoccupied in solving and delivering. Investing time in these other aspects unveils opportunities and gains respect through simply giving a damn and shows that they “have skin in the game” with a client rather than just one of the many agencies acting as order takers and servers.
Ant, the focus on training is great but sadly experience has become a dirty word.
With careers in the industry becoming even shorter, is the industry in danger of not being taken seriously as they offer clients less and less skills, experience and value?
Perhaps clients have every right to pay less to their agencies as they are receiving less for their money? In compromising, what kind of future for the industry is being built?
Good points from both David and Gawen (yes, I’m a 50+-er).
Ant, I disagree slightly with: “… none of this experience gap is the fault of the very capable young people working in account service roles across the media industry. ”
Whilst my experience is in media sales, it’s still very much Account Management and I found that those 20-somethings were less inclined to soak up training and mentoring than those who were the same age in the 1990’s, for example. (Generalization time, sorry).
Yep, train, coach and lead, by all means, but the staff have to want to learn, grow and improve.
Some very good points.
However some agencies reach a size, a critical mass, where having too many mouths to feed, they must say yes to everything, or start letting people go.
The benefits of that mass of talents are offset by the compromises they inevitably make to pay for them all.
It’s good to have smart people in the room, but when their overseers have demanded X% growth in revenue, fear of failure degrades their intelligence and discretion, and those challenges to clients become meeker by the minute.