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The Account Management & Client Services Summit
This is your chance to hear how other agency client services leaders are engaging clients, growing accounts and developing their roles
• Get inspired! Take away ideas to implement in your agency
Tuesday 10th September 2024 – 9.30am to 5pm
The British Library, Kings Cross
Client services is as much about new business as it is about retention.
And as more and more holes poke through their pipeline, agencies are looking strengthen and grow their relationships with existing clients.
This has created a mounting pressure on account managers and client services teams.
Yet still,
- Clients still don’t want to pay for it.
- Project managers think they could do the job themselves.
- Communication between sales teams and account managers is still abysmal.
It’s enough to make anyone’s legs buckle.
So while you’re battling cheeky contract changes, cancelled projects (despite great performance) and client-side staff changes – we’ll be looking at how you can manage the expectations put on your role, by your team and your clients, whilst leaving enough time to do what you do best: keeping clients close and committed.
For the agency founders in the room – we’ll be looking at why account management needs your support now more than ever, as well as the ways you can make client services more of a team effort.
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Meet other people improving how their agency runs
Happy Clients is a day that will help you get inspired, and meet other agency client services and account leaders that you can learn from.
We blend interactive talks and group discussion.
- We dot you around the venue so you can interact – and we mix up the groups so you meet different people.
- We poll you before the event to see what you want to talk about.
- We make sure all the talks are original and interesting. We facilitate questions and reflections throughout.
It’s aimed at agency leaders and their process or operations leaders – but anybody can come.
- Our venue is the Knowledge Centre at The British Library. We have the entire building, so you will explore the venue interacting with different agency leaders. We mix up the groups so you meet different people.
- We poll you before the event to see what you want to talk about.
- We make sure all the talks are original and interesting. We facilitate questions and reflections throughout.
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Five Rooms of Learning and Inspiration
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Here’s who you’ll hear from…
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“Hiring An Account Director Transformed Our Agency”
Jon Kennett wasn’t sleeping.
Client services was starting to slip in his agency – BozBoz – and it showed.
We were seeing it directly in our reporting and feedback that we were getting from clients. Many were unengaged, and it felt awkward to ask them to recommend us,” says Jon. “New business was good – we were signing new clients, but we weren’t nurturing them very well.”
It was time to take action. So Jon set about finding an Account Director to support him – so they could start nurturing more clients.
Then, Jon met Malcolm.
👉 At Happy Clients, Jon will be telling his story of how hiring an account director helped keep the business profitable, grow new business AND strengthened the relationships with clients. [Read more]
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What Do Clients Really Think of Agencies?
“Your best new business opportunities? They live with your existing clients,” says Simon Rhindtutt, co-founder of Relationship Audits.
As new biz gets harder and harder, agencies are taking a closer look at making sure the clients they’ve already got are sticking with them. But are you approaching this in the right way?
Having been in the industry 25 years, Simon understands the landscape of client-agency relationships better than most. His business, Relationship Audits, helps agencies build stronger and more sustainable client partnerships.
“We’ve got over 30 million data points of what clients think of agencies, and vice versa,” says Simon. “The problem is, many agencies are defaulting to a passive role – like a waiter or waitress. If you’re going to act like that, then there’s always going to be somebody who can do it cheaper or with a bit more personality.”
👉 At Happy Clients, Simon will dive deep into Relationship Audits’ ® extensive insights on client-agency relationships – and provide actionable advice on how you can use this to strengthen your client relationships. [Read more]
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“How We Overcame Our ‘Great Churn of 2023′”
Last year, Vicki Jakes‘ agency experienced “the great churn of 2023“.
“I didn’t expect it to be that savage, but I really got my arse handed to me,” says Vicki. “We had maybe 70 clients go through the books last year, and we’re working with less than a fifth of them now.”
There were a few external factors contributing to this, sure. Things like Brexit, conflict in other countries, the cost of living crisis.
But Vicki says the number one culprit was bad client fit.
“We just picked the wrong people to sell this to,” says Vicki. “My dream for the business was to bring big agency level thinking to smaller businesses who can’t always afford it. But any changes in the market and they cancel – they spook so easily.”
👉 At Happy Clients, Vicki will delve into how her agency tackled severe client churn, reshaped their approach to client services, and set themselves up for long-term success. [Read more]
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“How We’re Tackling Over-Servicing with a Data-Led Approach”
How do you set boundaries with clients?
It’s a problem every agency grapples with – and something Claire James has put a lot of effort into solving.
“I was in a client meeting recently – and we’ve over-delivered by 200% on their account,” says Claire, deputy MD at Skout PR.
Claire began to prepare herself for a very tricky conversation – but actually, it wasn’t.
“It all comes back down to what kind of relationship you want with your client. If you want an honest and open relationship with your client, you will set that out from the outset: this is a partnership, we will work to deliver what we both agree are the right things to deliver. But if the goalposts for the work change, we reserve the right to change the KPIs that we’re delivering.”
👉 At Happy Clients, Claire will share more about how her agency is tackling over servicing and setting boundaries with clients by combining data insights with strong personal relationships. [Read more]
How To Make ‘Client Services’ The Whole Team’s Responsibility
Trenton Moss could feel a big change looming.
Instead of fighting tooth and nail for new biz (and losing), he turned his focus on making sure his agency was indispensable to clients.
To do that, he needed to make every staff member in his agency a ‘client superstar’.
Step one: increase commercial awareness across the team.
“You need to define what client servicing excellence looks like in your agency – then relentlessly remind everyone of this and make sure they have the confidence and tools to deliver against it.”
“Soon, [my team] began to understand the importance of not doing unbillable time. Whereas previously, they’d just do whatever the client asked, with little thought for the commercial implications.”
The project was a huge undertaking – but the payoff was equally massive: “After we set all of this up, we saw a 35% uplift in revenue from our accounts.”
👉 At Happy Clients, Trenton will delve into how he turned his entire team into client superstars, and how this helped to boost revenue, transform team morale and saved the business. [Read more]
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What Does GOOD Account Leadership Look Like?
Are you investing in YOUR juniors’ development?
In a role like account management, a lot of the big lessons come from simply doing the job.
Things like:
- Asking the right questions to understand the client’s needs and challenges
- Identifying new opportunities and growth areas for the client’s business
- Having difficult conversations around scope, timelines, and budget in a constructive way
The benefits of employee development are pretty obvious. But what happens when you don’t prioritise this stuff?
“You better be prepared to run a monthly employee survey, or a quarterly employee survey, so that you know which people you’re about to lose,” says client services coach, Joanna Anthony. “And it’s always the good people that go first.”
👉 At Happy Clients, Joanna and Rachel Raphael will be pulling together their collective 50 years of client services experience to discuss what excellent account leadership looks like in an agency – and how you can train your junior team members to follow in your footsteps.
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“How We’re Keeping Clients Close and Committed”
Agencies know they’re meant to track their clients’ health and happiness, but a lot of them just… don’t.
“Up until three years ago, there was no one purely focusing on client services,” admits Fiona Skilton, client services director at Collective Content.
“Some projects had statements of work, others didn’t, and there were no timing plans or concrete plans behind relationship building – none of that stuff.”
Fiona knew that the best way to stay aligned with clients’ needs was in the form of client health checks.
“It’s literally forty-five minutes once a year to get us all really focusing on a specific client,” says Fiona. “Now, we have a really good client retention rate, and I think it’s a combination of our niche, our brilliant creative team, and how easy we are to work with.”
👉 At Happy Clients, Fiona will be joining us to discuss how their annual client health checks have hugely impacted their client services, as well as the positive effect it’s had on the team.
She’ll be joined by Launch‘s Amy Budd, who’ll be taking us through how their client onboarding process creates a equal partnership with their clients, rather than a master-slave relationship, and how the team’s client charter ensures happiness on both sides of the coin.
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“How We’re Upselling Existing Clients”
“We’re not just chasing new business anymore – we’ve realised there’s a goldmine of opportunities for upselling within our existing client relationships,” says Lillie Price, head of account management at Mr. President.
Lillie Price has spearheaded a shift in how Mr. President approaches client relationships and business growth. Instead of placing all their focus on new leads, the agency is actively ‘farming’ their existing clients.
One standout example is their work with White & Mackay: “They’ve smashed all of their targets – the work is winning awards, and the business is growing. It’s a full-circle success story. And for us, it meant a substantial increase in revenue from an existing client.”
Rob Twells, co-founder of Digital Maze, has also implemented a unique approach to growing existing clients, resulting in about 30% of their new revenue coming from upselling efforts.
“A good chunk of our new revenue comes from [upselling]. We have OKRs around that too; we’ll take 10 or 15 clients and set actual revenue targets against them, which are then assigned to our account managers.”
👉 At Happy Clients, Lillie and Rob will delve into the details of their active farming and upselling approach.
They’ll share practical tips on how agencies can identify and capitalise on upselling opportunities within their existing client base, foster deeper relationships, and position themselves as indispensable strategic partners. [Read more]
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Client Services Group Therapy Surgery
If you work in client services or account management, chances are you have your fair share of horror stories…
- Impossible briefs with impossible budgets
- Difficult clients with unmanageable expectations
- Awkward mistakes (and the tricky conversations thereafter)
But when experiences like this begin to pile up, it can take a heavy toll.
When faced with that situation, it helps to break out of your agency’s bubble and hear about the challenges others in your role are facing – so you know it’s not just you trudging through the cowpats.
👉 So at Happy Clients, we’ll be hosting a ‘talkshow style’ surgery session for you to share stories and get advice from your peers.
It’s a chance for you to vent your challenges, whinge about difficult clients and discuss the unexpected changes you’re facing in your role. We’ll have two client services ‘veterans’ on hand to kick off the surgery and lend some solutions to your challenges.
If you’re just about ready to snap, you can submit your client challenges here (anonymously or not) to be discussed in the surgery.
‘Client-Side’ Q&A
It seems more and more client-agency relationships are turning into a game of tug of war.
Agencies are desperate to get a hold on scope creep, keep margins tight and pipelines full.
But from where they’re standing, clients are looking to squeeze as much value out of them for as little money as possible – and the constant reshuffling within brand organisations is causing even the strongest partnerships to crack.
So we’re putting together a panel of client representatives from some of the biggest brands in the UK – so you can pose your pressing questions to the people who actually have the answers.
You can ask things like:
- What does a good agency partner look like to a client?
- What are your predicted trends for 2024/2025?
- What pressures are you facing in your role that is impacting agency relationships?
Or even things you’ve always been too afraid to ask YOUR client!
This is your chance to get an insight into what’s happening on ‘the dark side’ – and improve your client relationships going forward.
Submit your questions here.
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Full running order coming soon…
Q: What actually happens on the day?
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We start the event at 9.30am, so try to arrive by 9am.
The day’s format is pretty simple: you will spend some time hearing from guests with interesting stories that you can learn from, and you will also spend some time in small groups discussing your journey with like-minded agency leaders.
The event is hosted by an Agency Hackers facilitator who makes sure that everybody with something interesting to say gets heard. (We poll attendees before the event, so we know who to ‘pick on’ on the day.)
Q: Who will I hear from? Who are the speakers?
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The people you’ll hear from are all agency leaders with interesting stories to tell about agency process or operations.
We also decide who to spotlight based on the information we capture in the weeks before. (Look out for our emails!)
We will publish the line-up a few weeks before, but mostly we hope that you will trust us to select interesting folk from our audience. We find that the people who choose to attend our events are overwhelmingly on fascinating journeys that will resonate with you.
Also, the ‘talks’ aren’t really linear presentations. They’re more like structured case studies, with lots of questions and reflections from the audience.
You could potentially call them ‘fireside chats’, but these are not rambling cosy conversations. They are planned and structured . We put a lot of work into researching our guests, out of respect for your time.
Q: Who can attend?
This event is mainly for people who work in client services in agencies – but it’s potentially of interest to anybody interested in making their agency run better.
Basically, anybody can attend if you think it looks up your street.
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