Why Mad Men Marketing is Moot: Account Managing in the Digital Era
Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Damian Davila, Content Marketing Consultant at idaconcpts.com.
While your grandpa’s idea of the ultimate account executive might be Clark Gable in the 1940s movie The Hucksters, there is little doubt that our era’s idea is more in tune with Don Draper. Partially based on the life of Draper Daniels and the track record of Rosser Reeves, the “mad man” is capable of everything: writing copy, directing visual, planning media, managing the client relationship, and getting the big accounts . As he has said more than once, “You didn’t want it until I told you you wanted it.”
Still, this “modern” idea of the account executive (AE) or manager (AM) is outdated. Given the growth of specialization in the field, the AE’s role and importance is diminishing. The rise of agencies dedicated solely to digital projects further complicates the role because the faster pace demands a higher focus on client project management.
What is an AM to do in these modern times?
As Draper would say himself, “I don’t know where advertising’s going, but it’s not leaving.” Likewise, the AM is not going away; he or she is just evolving to adapt to the new times.
Here are three key trends that I observe in our field.
Trend #1: Market Success > Client Satisfaction
In the past a happy client equaled a happy account life. In spite of crazy deadlines and low budgets, we must deliver! Forget strategy; we are too busy pumping out deliverables. This is swiftly changing as everybody is feeling the crunch to meet real results, as in actual revenue. More and more marketing departments are allocating a higher percentage of budgets into direct response and less into branding efforts. The AE needs to understand this trend and make sure that the client has market success.
This is not an easy task for two reasons. First, the client may not reveal to the AE what the benchmarks are that the client is being evaluated on. It is the task of the AE to build and maintain a deep and strong client relationship, so that those benchmarks are revealed. The conversation needs to move away from “We need five banner ads to go live in one week” to “We need to develop a strategy to increase Product X purchases 10% from last quarter.”
Second, we need to understand that while we live and breathe marketing every day of our lives, the client believes it is just one small part of his or her job. There are legal, research & development, financial and several other issues. We need to drop the marketing jargon and speak to them in a manner that appeals to them. We have to become great diagnosticians and penetrate the client’s psyche to understand what they really need. Like Draper’s clients, they don’t know what they want until we tell them they want it.
The AE sets client relationships for success by focusing the conversation into strategizing for market victories.
Trend #2: Think like the client’s client.
You know how much we talked about focusing on market success for your client on the first trend? Well, this won’t be possible if you don’t learn to think like the clients.
Let me know whether or not you have ever heard any of these questions from your client:
“Do you think they will click on it?”
“What color would they prefer between these two?”
“Do they search our service with this set of keywords or that other one?”
Are you making “educated” guesses, or are you ready to back up your answers with research, data or facts? The more prepared you are to answer to these questions by understanding how your client’s customers view the world, the better your client relationship will be. In this growing field of specialists, no one is in a better position to take the agency lead in understanding the thinking patterns of the client’s customers than the AE. Take every opportunity to learn more about your client’s industry and client base, because this will make your position more relevant and valuable in the eyes of both the client and the agency.
Trend #3: “Winging it” is not a good sales technique.
Selling is not a four-letter word. It is a critical part of our jobs.
However, very few of us receive appropriate sales training, and our experience in sales is very haphazard. Here is the typical scenario. The client has an urgent need yesterday for a project and asks you to get an estimate and statement of work (SOW) by the end of the day so she can still allocate money for this quarter’s budget. In a rush to meet the deadline and avoid a cash flow crunch, you force the team to make some very high-level assumptions. There is no time to check anything, and you shoot back the estimate and SOW to the client before 5 p.m.
This is a real shame.
Honed sales skills are critical in helping clients grasp fragile, embryonic concepts. Very few of today’s account executives spend time prepping presentations. Most prep work is done in the car on the way to meet the client, as everybody is trying to remember if they forgot to bring something with them. In order for the benefits of the agency’s proposal to become clear to the client, the AE needs to spend time on how to present them in a way that truly speaks to the client (Trend #2) and that demonstrates the potential for market success (Trend #1).
Takeaway Point
While Don Draper makes for a great TV character, he doesn’t fit the expectations of today’s account executives. The AE needs to focus on the market success for the client’s projects, think like the client’s customers, and develop better sales techniques.
Damian Davila is a professional marketer living in sunny Honolulu, HI. Since 2008 Damian has been writing articles on online marketing and web analytics at idaconcpts.com. Find Damian on Twitter at @idaconcpts and on Google Plus.
