• why they did this in the first place
• how it was working before 
• how it's working now
• who manages the client relationship and what does each role do 

1. You'd like to know what the Client Services Director does in an award-winning digital marketing agency.
2. You'd like some tips on how to get more client recommendations.
3. What it means for the client services team if you work for a B Corp agency.

• what her role entails as client relationship lead
• what it takes to be an excellent account manager and account team lead
• some tips for making the transition from account manager to account director
• why she follows the philosophy of Radical Candour when giving feedback to her team
• and she also shares some great book recommendations for those who are keen to develop their own leadership skills.

• what have been the biggest changes for her, her role and her organisation in the last couple of years
• how her needs have changed in terms of what she's looking for from agencies
• some suggestions for how you can strengthen your relationships with clients while working remotely.

• why it's useful to know who could be looking at your profile
• what typically holds business leaders back from posting
• how to avoid making awful faux pas when connecting with people
• the benefits of being more selective about who you add to your network
• and lots more nuggets of usefulness.

when we talk about fandoms, a lot of people think about screaming teenage girls, like Beatlemania, One Direction, maybe even think about Trekkies from Star Trek, or Star Wars fans or Comic Con or something like that. Fandoms have been around for decades and decades and decades. But what we're seeing now is an unleashing of them in a way that they are becoming a dominant, basically force within culture, within commerce, and they're starting to actually drive huge trends in terms of entertainment in terms of brands in terms of spending power, in terms of creativity. And I was looking at, how do I summarise this and a formula that kind of makes sense. And the formula that I've got is: Community times Autonomy times Equity. 

these new platforms that are coming out, are enabling fan fiction, fan created songs, fan created art, fan created merchandise, to rise almost to the level of official in some capacity, which is just fascinating. And that is unleashing a new form of creativity that we've never seen before. And now what's happening is some brands who are very smart, are waking up to this, and they're actually encouraging the fans to create ideas from their existing intellectual property that they then might turn into movies and comic books and merge lines. And Lego is one of them. So Lego realised that there's lots and lots of fanfiction going on around their characters. And they were finding it on amateur Publishing platforms. And they were like, this is amazing. But we don't own this. And we can't do anything with it. If it's disparate, and it's all across these different platforms. So they've set up a platform called Lego World Builder, where they're encouraging fans to write stories to write screenplays to do designs. And then they're allowing the community within Lego World Builder to up vote or to endorse the stories that they love. And they're doing that because what they want to do is they want to use the fans in order to be able to create new ideas, new movies, new Lego sets, new worlds, and they're giving the fans who create those a share in the equity as well. So it's only been around for about six months, but they've already got two projects out of the back of it. So one of them is a short film around Ninjago. So Ninjago is a kind of ninja Lego character. And a fan wrote a short screenplay for Ninjago. And they're turning it into a production. They also had a challenge around world building, so a whole universe, for example. And somebody came up with a universe called Holiday Heroes, which is basically a little planet where all of our holiday icons live, like the Easter Bunny, and the leprechaun from St. Paddy's Day, and Santa Claus, and all this kind of stuff, and they all live together. And they're actually turning that into a new Lego set. And that then could become a movie franchise, and it could become a comic book and it could become a merch line. 

18 months ago, maybe a little bit more, I said on Twitter, creators will be the new brands. And I got absolutely annihilated for saying that. That I was an idiot, that I didn't understand the space, that there's no way that creators could ever rival brands that, brands had huge supply chains and infrastructure and all this kind of stuff. And I am looking at it now 18 months later, and I was like, I was right. And that's what's going to happen, because Cory can then turn Xanadu, as I said, into an entire world with the tools that he now has at his disposal, if he wants to create a merch line. So you know, hoodies, t shirts, all this kind of stuff, he can use a contact in China, and then he can do drop shipping. So he doesn't actually have to have a factory or a warehouse or anything, it just all gets automatically made online. Drop shipping has completely changed the merch landscape. That's why new Teespring is huge in that space. They've partnered with TikTok to allow all the TikTok creators to create their own merch lines. So they can actually rival the supply chains of the big brands, but they don't actually have to know what they're doing. They just have to press a couple of buttons and it's done. And it goes out to their fans. 

many participants on my Account Accelerator programme tell me that sometimes they struggle, leading client meetings where there are several agency colleagues involved. And one of the reasons is, perhaps the agency colleagues that are attending the meeting are more senior, or maybe they're more extroverted, or maybe they just have more to say. But what happens is sometimes the account manager feels, hang on a minute, I should be sort of being seen to lead this, this call or this meeting and actually, what I'm beginning to feel like is, I'm not being the main person here, and I just don't look like I'm in control. 

Make sure that you're the one leading the meeting pulling people in and looking for those signals from from the client side, particularly, if they are, you know, maybe losing their concentration, getting distracted looking bored, look for members of your team, maybe that may be waffling a little bit too long, or going off agenda points, make sure you bring everyone back to the key objective of why you're there. And then at the end of the call, you can then wrap up, summarise the key points that have been covered in the meeting, and talk about next steps. 

between 61 and 63%, depending on what year you're in, of our clients we speak to say that their agency has never asked them what their expectations of them are. So I'll speak to them and say, if you're asking what your client, what they want from you, you're ahead of the pack. And it's in this whole era of expectations that again, we got a interesting development over the last 12 months, when we sit down and talk to our clients, when we do deep, in depth interviews, a deep dive into this, first thing we do is we ask the client company about their expectations of their service provider, specifically, their agency. And one of the things we noticed last year was that the proportion of those people, the client, individuals with whom we spoke, who said that agility, flexibility, being able to flex was one of their expectations of the agency, had grown enormously. 

I was speaking to a client a couple of days ago about this and one particular agency has its workload meeting on a Wednesday. And apparently, the account manager from the agency said, 'Well, I'm going to have to wait until we have the workload meeting in a couple of days time until I can get back to you, and tell you when you can have the piece of work'. Now, this caused major, major problems with that client because the client needed the work really within 48 hours not to have to wait 48 hours until he he could be told when he actually got it. But also, I think this also raises something that occasionally comes up but Carey and I know, it's very, very true. The quality of an account manager, the quality of an accounts director, is partly judged by clients in that their ability to actually short circuit agency internal processes, that when something is urgent or needed very, very quickly, to be able to bend the rules and to actually get that work done. And what clients don't want to do, rather like this particular agency I've just talked about, is feel that they are in a set process that they have to abide by when things are really, really urgent. I would also add that a great account manager, a great account director, actually knows how their clients work, how they think, how they plan. And so lots of examples of non agility are also related in many cases to the agency, not thinking one step ahead. What is likely to be coming down the line from the client? And can we be preparing for that?

with the intensity of deliverables and the problems associated with remote working, one of the casualties of this are regular post project reviews. What we're seeing is they're being sacrificed, just in the charge to get everything done. If you are holding regular post project reviews, to look at what's worked and why it's worked, particularly in terms of process, but also to look at where problems have occurred, and what the agency can be doing to prevent those problems occurring again, one of which may be forward planning, you will have a much, much, much better client relationship.

firstly, don't assume that everybody wants a Zoom call. Secondly, we'd suggest it's worth resetting with your clients, asking them what communication methods they prefer. And indeed, if you're going to have those Teams and video type calls, reevaluating just how many people do you really need on that call. And thirdly, recognise that in person meetings, certainly for the immediate future, are now a precious commodity. Particularly within marketing services. Face to face meetings have been absolutely crucial to establish and maintaining enduring business relationships. And clearly there will be opportunities, sorry, clearly that there will be less opportunities to meet your clients in person, certainly over the next year. So therefore, you need to think carefully about how your agency and you can get to meet your client in person, be it creating those collaborative working spaces that clients will want to safely visit, workspaces for them to actually hot desk from and also importantly, if you're going to do all of that, have a think about when those clients are going to be in the office and make sure that you're in the office on the same day with them. Even if you haven't got a meeting. Key message is face to face meetings are precious.

we like to ask people to imagine determining their own reputation, and building trust at scale. And that's what we're here to do really is to help people to find out who their real true self is. Gain a sense of direction, and purpose and confidence and clarity in who they are, and what value that they bring. And it's amazing how many people we work with don't know how to clearly articulate their strengths. And it's actually your strengths is where your value is and that's what you trade off. So if you don't know your strengths, and you're not really clear on what commercial value you bring, what value you bring. And so we do a lot of work, helping people come to that realisation and then supporting them to put themselves out there.

the number one thing people said were holding them back from putting themselves out there was fear of judgement. And a lot of the time, this battlefield is in the mind, and it's perceived and not necessarily real. And so we meet amazing leaders that are hidden within their company brands that are almost like paralysed by fear. Or it could be like, self doubt, or low self regard. And that's why we do emotional intelligence a lot. Because, actually, and we start off with doing development, because sometimes we need to get to the point where we're ready to put ourselves out there. And there's a gap to close for a lot of people. And a lot of the time, it's the story they tell themselves, it's not necessarily the reality. And so when we can then get people on the radar, showing their gifts and talent, creating value for their audiences, and it generating new business for them, that's where we get our big excitement.

We know when we ask the question, what brings in the most business to this agency? The founders, nine times out of 10. So would it be a good investment to scale that and to generate more conversations, okay, how we're going to do it? We're going to do it by promoting you, and adding value, get you to promote yourself in a way that feels authentic, truthful, honest, and attract those people that want to work with you. And so that's the justification around budget. It shouldn't be seen now as a brand new budget line. Although if that's the case, that's fine. But actually the resistance around budget should be answered with, it needs to come out your marketing budget, to factor in a percentage of that.

Recruitment's becoming more like marketing. And one of the things that will attract talent into your businesses, if you have like an employee branding programme, and actually, the fastest growing businesses, a large percentage of them, have like employee branding as official programmes. Employee branding is basically personal branding for the employees where they are pushing out the company's marketing and brand through their own social channels, because they get 560% more engagement than the company channels. So actually, if you're an account manager, it makes sense for you to be invested in your personal brand for your career opportunities going forward, but also for maintaining those relationships. Because if you're on LinkedIn, or wherever, putting out content and your clients are following you on LinkedIn, you're front of their mind, and it helps to scale trust faster and quicker, and build stronger relationships, deeper and more meaningful relationships with your clients, because they're not just having account management calls, they're seeing you in between the calls, and totally buying into you and the value that you bring.

I think bigger brands now are trying to humanise their storytelling through people. And I think it's linked with the trust leap. Trust is changing. You know, we used to trust big institutions, the big banks, we all bank or most of us bank with a challenger bank. We're trying new things. We're trusting new people, getting into taxis that aren't run by taxis they're just people off the street that have a car and I think it just goes full circle. But big businesses have always done business through, usually two human beings transacting at some point, there's a look in the eye to say, I'm going to trust you, shake hands and let's sign the contract, whether it's a multi million pound business, or whether it's a very small business, I think that still happens. And even if you look at some of the larger brands that are doing very, very well, and we buy their brands, but usually they've got key people. Whether it's a Musk for Tesla, or Jobs for Apple back in the day, they have these people spearheading it. 

the vehicle is at the moment social, it might be something else going forward. But I still think finding your point of difference through your truth will always give you the edge.

But my passion came when I started to experience and witness the impact of strategic thinking on life, business and career. You know, I guess there are two real main driving forces in success. Well, this is kind of me believing in this. The first one is definitely consistency. So it's like the power of showing up doing things in a disciplined way. Right. And we both experienced the result of a compound effect. And the second one is the ability to take perspective and analyse and shift or continue, which is, to me, is the power of the right questions and to do the right things. So the first one is do the things consistently. The second one is do the right things. 

great briefs ensure excellence. Bad briefs, cost in time, productivity, money, client relationships to agencies, or bad briefs create bad synergy and team problems. So I mean, this is the big thing about the polarity of creatives and account handlers, because all creatives didn't understand the brief or you didn't apply the brief, whatever, it's always this kind of like, touchy thing. And brief writing is probably one of the most strategic activities of account handling. So you got to have that, you got to have that little muscle ticking to be able to write excellent briefs to get to the excellent results, basically.

So in my experience, what I have seen is, it's always urgent. And the brief writing is squeezed between two calls and three mails and two projects so it's always a squeeze thing. I used to always say to my team, there's always time to do it again and again and again but there is never time to do it right at the first round. So that's kind of the main problem. And the second problem is, I think, to my knowledge, and you correct me, none of the account handlers that I came across, were properly trained on brief writing. So it is a skill, but you want your team to kind of be born with it, or come up with it so they're not trained and it is a skill to be trained up.

It's not just about brief writing, when you get good at brief writing, you get good at communicating, which is probably the most important life skill that you can gain.

But actually account handlers receive, most of the time, very bad briefs. Very, very bad briefs, because clients are not trained in brief writing either. And especially a marketing side of the client, so a marketing person from the client side, oh, my God, the things that they need to juggle between. So brief writing is the lowest importance on their to do list, and they just like chuck some information and send it to their agency. And then the account handler finds himself or herself in front of the thing that is called 'brief'. And there's a choice to make. It's either, I'm gonna take ownership and be able to push back or at least, I'm not saying pushing back in a irrespectful way, it's just asking the questions to actually refine that brief. Or you're going to become a post office, and then you're just going to pass the baby to, again, the hot potato, to the creative team, who will struggle, not understand, and then they will just create something. 

you make your client sign a brief right, and the client will sign a brief, okay, they will correct some minor stuff and they will sign a brief and then you are there. You're feeling empowered because because you can hold them accountable. That's, I'm sorry the expression, but it's bullshit because whenever that project goes wrong, even if you tell them oh you signed the brief that's it, it actually damaged the relationship. So that's where I actually like owning that relationship and nurturing it from the start by saying, hang on, this is a really key moment, let's spare an hour of your time and my time, let's hop on a call, a zoom call and let's go through all these questions together. And that's it, one hour.