When working with clients, account managers are on the front lines of communication. But what makes for a good account manager? What makes a bad account manager? Chris Copacino from the agency Copacino Fujikado joins us to shed light on account management best practices, expectation setting, and how good account management leads to client success. Plus, Chris shares the five P’s and talks about putting a rock on the table.
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Full episode transcript:
Preston Parshall 00:15
Welcome to The Digital Marketer’s Guide podcast where we break down digital marketing topics into bite sized episodes that can help make your marketing program and you a little better. I’m Preston Parshall, the founder and CEO Fujisan marketing. We’re here today with Chris Copacino from Copacino Fujikado to discuss account management best practices. Welcome to the show, Chris.
Chris Copacino 00:38
Thanks for having me.
Preston Parshall 00:39
So Chris, what makes for a good account manager?
Chris Copacino 00:43
What makes for a good account manager? Well, I harken back to the person I was trained under who really put into my head, what makes a great count manager, I think there’s three things. I think there is a masterful orchestrator. You have to be able to engage and activate a lots of different parts of the agency in service of a goal. So you have to orchestrate and you have to have a vision and put a rock on the table and then bring people around that vision towards the goal. So you’re constantly orchestrating then you have to be a masterful manager of your book of business. Right? There’s a there’s a, there’s a Business Administration and financial kind of fiduciary management component to this right. Are we billing on time? Are we invoicing? What’s our profitability look like? All those different things. When Lastly, I think and this is probably above all, is you have to be really good marketer. First, you can be an account manager, you can manage an account, you can manage it passively. But especially in an agency like ours and midsize integrated agency, you have to be really good marketer, you have to understand, you know, kind of the four P’s of marketing are actually, sidenote, five P’s of marketing. I was talking to some students the other day from Western Washington University, my alma mater, and I said, the four P’s and they go, Oh, Chris, they’ve added a P, I was like, you can just add a P. Yeah,
Preston Parshall 02:03
Let’s hear the five B’s. Yeah. And,
Chris Copacino 02:05
and so, you know, product, place, price promotion, and promotion is what you know, agencies spend most of their time on. But there always should have been a fifth P, which is people, which is about audience and understanding your audience, and really, who’s buying your thing. So I was like, okay, but like to be a really good marketer makes you a great account person, because you are the client’s voice, often inside the agency. And so therefore, you have to be really good marketer of that product inside the agency.
Preston Parshall 02:34
Yeah, I would, I would tag on back to the people point is, you have to know the person that’s across the table from you, right? You have to know that their wants internally, their goals of the business as a whole? And how they’re going to respond to how certain things are presented as well. Absolutely. Yeah. So on the other hand, what makes a bad account manager
Chris Copacino 02:54
I think there’s a little probably a long laundry list, but what comes you know, I think order takers, pure order takers, there’s no value in just being order taker. Hi, client, what do you want? Cool, go back to the agency, hey, client wants this great client, you know, agency says to Hey, client, here’s what the agency thinks, you know, and you’re just kind of a conduit, right? And you’re not adding value by putting your brand point of view or your marketing point of view on that. So I think that’s number one. I think I’ve often said that account manager, account managers are only as good as the expectations they set, right. And everything in life is a function of expectation. It just, I think that’s one of the truisms in this world. If you go into a movie think you’re going to absolutely love movie, I bet you don’t love it as much. If you have less expectation for it, I bet you end up liking it a lot. We’ve all had that meal and expensive restaurant that you’ve heard a lot about in the news. All right. So everything in life is a function of expectation. Therefore, as an account person, you’re constantly setting expectations, when are you going to get something to somebody? What are we going to do? What are the gonna be the results, and you have to set those expectations because the way you your clients perceive your effectiveness, your efficacy is directly related to the expectations that had going in. And then there’s obviously hard data, right? The thing worked to accomplish the KPIs, all those different things, but the soft skills or relationship skills, often about the expectations that you set. And then I think lastly, it’s one of our values at the agency is something we talking a talk a lot about, you got to give a damn, you just got to give a damn You got to want to do great work and facilitate and orchestrate good work, great work. And if you don’t, if you’re just here for the job passively, hey, you’re not gonna be an effective account manager.
Preston Parshall 04:38
So, to your first point, how would someone get out of that order taking mentality? How do you flip it?
Chris Copacino 04:46
I think one of the biggest things are slowing down. Because we work in such a fast paced business sometimes that you get an email client feedback. And before you know some account managers before they’ve even stopped the process. What does this mean? What’s the ask? What’s the implication? All these things they’ve already forwarded on to their team, they’ve hit the slack, or they have running over to the desk to say, client had feedback. So I think part of that is just slowing down. And, and always having that thing in your head that account people in my mind, own internally, the brand and the business, like you own that, right? You own the brand and the business. So if something comes inbound, and you have, you know, opposed to just knee jerk, get off my desk, pass it along, it’s like, nope, what does it mean? What do I think about it? Does that have good or bad? Does that brand right or brand wrong? Is that in service of the objectives that we set out to do? Is that going to aid in the performance? Is that going to put us behind schedule? Is that going to be out of scope, all these different things, as opposed to just firing off, and that creates its own energy and fanaticism inside the agency? It’s all of a sudden, you spin up a bunch of shit. And we haven’t actually thought yet about the thing. And the implication of that thing,
Preston Parshall 06:03
right? So it’s slowing down, asking why do you want the thing, right? And then thinking is what they’re asking for actually going to deliver, you know, the goal that they’re setting up for, right? And without that you have an inability to be strategic and absolute inability to be strategic, what can clients do to get the most out of their account manager.
Chris Copacino 06:23
So I think that there’s a lot, you know, account managers can do. And then clients can help account managers, they can share, I think that’s one of the biggest things, share goals, share objectives, share budgets, be open and honest, all cards on the table. It’s so refreshing when clients are that way. And they go, here’s what I want to do. Here’s what I’ve been asked to do by my superiors, here are my objectives. Here’s my budget, here are my fears. And here are my what I want to achieve personally out of this, because at the end of the day, oftentimes, you know, a great account person and an agency will help make their clients look good. That’s a big part of what we do, right. So that sharing is huge real being realistic. You know, I always appreciate when I have when I’ve had clients who have worked in agencies, because they know, the general time it takes the general resources associated with what needs to be done. They have a realistic grounding on what needs to be done. So that sets account managers up for success. And then lastly, they don’t take you know, I’ve seen clients sometimes sell and account personnel to make themselves look okay. And I think that is some of the most unethical stuff you can do in this business. Like if we’re partners for open honesty with each other. If we’re accountable to each other, then don’t sell me out, you know? Yeah. And if if it’s between, you know, so I think that’s another big part of it.
Preston Parshall 07:50
And a big chunk of how we select our clients, and sometimes how we deselect our clients goes into when we see those sorts of things, right? Yep, Yep, absolutely. Who did you learn your account management best practices from?
Chris Copacino 08:06
I was, I was thinking about this question. And I’ll name probably five people, four of which I’ve worked with, and when I haven’t, when I was coming up in this in the agency world in Seattle, I run into people. And I talked to them and my dad was obviously in the business. And I knew a lot of people through him. And there was a founder of Wong Duty, Pat Duty. Whenever someone mentioned him in a professional setting there, they’d say, best account person I’ve ever worked with. And that would, you know, job the question why? And it’s because he was smart. He was he had great interpersonal skills. He’s a great marketer, he ever he definitely advocated for the the agency and the client. And so just those like, you know, guys, like I want to be the best account people a person that people talk about, like in lower. So that was one, two, I mentioned Betty Fujikado. You know, just putting those things in your head about Master orchestration, general manager or your book of business, great marketer. I have had the pleasure for the last seven years working with Scott Foreman, who is our CEO. He is he’s a great agency leader. He’s a 12 out of 10 account director at heart so the way he champions creative as an account person digs into the craft of an idea and how it gets executed, has been, I’ve learned a lot. Steve Caneta, who is no longer with us on this world. He was our third employee. He ran the Mariners business for a long time and succumbed to cancer in the in the mid 2000 10s. He was an old school frenetic, Brooklyn raised New York bred admin, but an account per a great account person and he was, you know, he taught me to always have a point of view, never show up without a point of view. You always have a point of view and he was a high service ethic. How are we going to serve Is this business the best? What’s the? How do we show up as an agency? How is this going to be right? And, frankly, sometimes I think he may have gone too far. And then ultimately, it just always being a very good market or understanding the business that important. And then today, fast forward today, I have the distinct pleasure of working with John line at our shop, who’s, who runs our account management group, and his energy is infectious. His ability to build relationships is amazing. And this is a relationship driven business. It keeps you out of the transactional to transactional relationship with your clients. It builds up equity of the relationship. He’s also a whip smart, quick, and you can’t help but like him, so he’s able to very much orchestrate teams. So long answer for you. I’m sorry, but I had to name those five people.
Preston Parshall 10:50
Well, I just thought you were gonna say better. Well, I listen,
Chris Copacino 10:53
I we could do a whole podcast on Betty because Betty is the smartest person I’ve ever worked with for. And there’s not a day I go, I go through my job where I don’t say something or think about something I learned from Betty love her.
Preston Parshall 11:07
Can you give an example of a time when good account management led to a client success?
Chris Copacino 11:12
Yeah, I mean, a lot, lots of lots of times, I can think about, you know, when, and this is Betty Fujikado, kind of this is me watching from the sidelines. But we started working with REI back in the day, this is in the early 2000s, mid 2000s. And she was so powerful in her ability to understand the business. Understand that we sat at the intersection of a lot of different disciplines inside REI, that she ended up being embedded in Rei two days a week as as their director of advertising. So she was actually in the clients building two days a week. And that that seen that partnership and that success that led to it. And we helped them crossed a billion dollars, open a ton of stores, all these different things. I just looked at it and said guys, that is that is in the ground in the weeds account management, which is which is brilliant, you know, then we’ve had successes over the year, we were pushed back and clients are really taken a hairball of a client of a client project and brought order to it. That’s a Scott Foremanism great account, people and agencies bring order to complicated things. And I agree with that, to be able to get to solutions with a lot of down St. Michel wine estates. We did that yearly on the mariners. And we’re currently doing that for our clients.
Preston Parshall 12:31
What advice do you have for those that want to improve their account management skills? We’ve covered a couple, but what other advice would you give them,
Chris Copacino 12:39
be a student of this business, like really get into the like, build out your knowledge, it’s it’s a very buzzword like buzzword thing to say, but like T shaped people who are have a broad breadth of knowledge and go decently deep on each, because, um, and that really comes from an integrated agency, like I realize, as an account person, like I have to be the second best creative person, second best media person, second best production person, second best project manager. And that ability to have that knowledge across all these different things is super important. Because when you’re in a conversation with a client, there’s no quicker way to give away your credibility than to constantly say, You know what, let me get back to you that let me get back to that. I don’t know, let me get back on that. Now, you can do that sometimes.
Preston Parshall 13:22
And you should do that. Sometimes you absolutely should do that
Chris Copacino 13:25
Sometimes, because you don’t want to, you know, you don’t want to, but the ability for them to know that you have this breadth is is huge. And I think the second thing is be open for feedback. Like, you know, it’s it gets uncomfortable, but like, how am I How am I managing this business? And I can’t be doing anything better? So was that briefing? Okay? You know, all these things like getting those feedback loops, because it builds trust with your co workers also with clients? Like how did that go for you? Like getting that feedback loop is huge, because you don’t know if you don’t know and knowing you can pivot on?
Preston Parshall 13:59
Correct. And the only way to learn how to be an expert is to go through that feedback loop and to work through you know, your conversation patterns, your emailing habits, your and your presentations, right? Yeah, absolutely.
Chris Copacino 14:11
And then the last thing I would say is just have a point of view, force yourself out of point of view. And, and there are times when I’ve seen not great account management work by not by not having a point of view. So I always I said our team, and I tried to come into a meeting with a client or internally input. And this is a Betty ism. I use it all the time a proverbial rock on the table when a rock on the table. Here’s what I think. It’s just a point of view, push back, dissect it, disagree with me. But putting that rock on the table gets the ball rolling, right? Because how many times have you come into a meeting you got a hairy problem and then you don’t put the rock on the table and all of a sudden the conversation starts to circle that’s right. And then you don’t you don’t move it forward. You don’t get to a good place because you’re not focused on the rock on the table. So I think always putting that rock on the table is huge and having that point of view because you’ll get to better solutions quicker.
Preston Parshall 15:08
Well, thanks Chris. I learned something and I know that the people out there are gonna learn something as well listening to this. And thanks for listening to the digital marketers guide podcast. Be sure to subscribe to stay up to date when a new episode is released. If you have any feedback or topics you’d like to see covered, email us at contact at we just on marketing.com or learn more about us at Fujisan marketing.com. See you next time.
