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Inbound Agencies Should Hire A Marketing Manager Instead Of An Account Manager

Posted by Mike Lieberman on Oct 27, 2015 10:00:00 AM

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Inbound_Agency_Hiring_Marketing_ConsultantsWhen it comes to hiring people to take care of your clients, most of you with agency experience lean into the idea of the traditional account manager. It kind of makes sense right? Let’s get people who are good at taking care of the clients.

However, the inbound marketing agency isn’t taking care of clients in the same way a traditional agency is taking care of clients and inbound agencies have a responsibility to get clients results, so there’s a fairly significant shift from the skills account managers leverage in a traditional agency to the skills your marketing consultants are going to need in an inbound agency.

As a result of this shift, we’ve seen people with in-house corporate marketing management experience outperform every single one of our traditional account management hires. As a result, I’m suggesting make that shift too.

Why hiring a marketing manager works better for an inbound agency.

They’ve Been Accountable For Results

Account managers are rarely accountable for actual client results. All they’re really responsible for in most traditional agencies is client communication. So when you pull them out of their traditional agency and put them in an inbound agency, they struggle. They don’t know how to improve performance, they don’t know how to evaluate program analytics, they don’t know how to execute any marketing tactics and they don’t know how to get clients leads. It’s not their fault, they’ve never been asked to do any of this before.

In-house marketing people, on the other hand, are directly responsible for demand gen in their company. While they might not practice inbound marketing and they might not have direct experience with all the tactics we run in an inbound program, they are much more comfortable running a variety of programs, tracking performance and making adjustments to programs when they underperform.

They Know How To Generate Leads

As we started to talk about above, marketing managers are used to being responsible for generating leads. While they might have had a variety of issues doing so, they’re still looked at by leadership as the responsible party.

Now it’s highly likely anyone coming from a traditional marketing manager or marketing director role might not have been as accountable as you’re going to want them to be but the feeling of responsibility to the organization for lead generation is very similar.

Perhaps more importantly, they’ve experienced running marketing tactics that generated leads. Even if it was a trade show program, email campaign, or a webinar series—they have experience creating opportunities to turn anonymous people into leads for their companies. This is something the traditional account manager may have never done.

They Manage Programs With Multiple Tactics

I’ve written about this before and feel strongly that one of the secrets to inbound marketing is getting a wide variety of perfectly orchestrated tactics to run simultaneously—delivering the one plus one equals three scenario.

The challenge with this approach is you have to be super organized and you have to be comfortable with 10 or so balls in the air at the same time for a single client. Now multiply this by four or five and you get a seriously stressed out account manager. But take that same program and put in the hands of an experienced marketing person and we’ve seen this type of person light up.

To be completely honest with you, one of the reasons I started Square 2 Marketing was because I was bored working for only one company. After a while it became so easy to execute the same program over and over again—the challenge was gone.

But put three, four or five different companies in the hands of a true marketer and they should be extremely excited about the opportunity to move the needle for all of these businesses. That’s what you should be looking for in your next marketing consultant.

They’ll Empathize With Your Clients

There’s one more benefit to going with a marketing manager from corporate. They understand what it’s like to be one of your clients. They’ve been called to the carpet by sales. They’ve argued over budget. They know what it’s like to get a crazy request from the CEO and have to deliver it in little or no time. They can talk to your clients like peers because they’ve been in their shoes.

This empathy helps in the sales process and it helps when engagements get tested. Almost every engagement has the time when difficult conversations need to be had or results need to be explained and having that perspective helps in almost every scenario.

As you’re probably finding with almost every area of the business, what used to make sense might not make sense going forward. This is one of those examples. We’ve had numerous experiences with account managers who looked perfect on paper only to fail miserably in reality. On the flip side, the marketing managers we bring in love the idea of working with four or five clients instead of just one like they’ve been doing for years. Sometimes what seems crazy is the best idea in a new world.

Start Today Tip – If you’re in the middle of your inbound agency hiring process for new team members to take care of your clients try interviewing a few in-house marketing managers. Ask them some key behavior questions and challenge them with some actual client scenarios. I think you’ll be surprised at how they respond and the nature of their answers might give you some insight into how well they’d do helping your clients get found, get leads and close more new customers.

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Topics: Hiring, inbound agency hiring

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