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At some point in the year, most agency leadership teams sit down to build a plan and realize the same thing:
Yikes. That new business number feels high.
Sometimes it feels just a little high. Sometimes it feels completely disconnected from reality. Either way, it can trigger a moment of panic because you've likely already planned for your expenses - some of them fixed - for the year ahead.
But maybe you're leaning into the wrong side of your business. There's already a book of business in place; clients who are active, paying, and - at least in most cases - getting value from the work. What if you leaned in a little bit more with those clients? What revenue could you produce there?
For most small digital and marketing agencies, the majority of year-over-year revenue doesn’t come from new logos. It comes from the clients you already have.
There will always be some churn. That’s normal. But there’s also usually room to grow accounts that are already in motion, but that requires more than just a quarterly check-in with your top clients. It requires a function that most small agencies have in pieces, but not fully built: account management.
When people hear “account management,” they often think about a salesperson who adds nothing of value to an engagement — and for good reason.
You subscribe to a SaaS platform. Your account is handed off to someone who has no context for your business problems and is very transparently trying to sell you more, more, more. You start to dread talking to that person, and eventually you start canceling their meetings.
No one is suggesting you do that to your clients.
A real account management function inside an agency has two jobs: It keeps the relationship between agency and client strong by adding value of its own, and it actively looks for ways to expand the relationship. The second job depends on, and is secondary to, the first.
Growth comes from paying attention to what’s changing inside the client’s business, spotting new problems as they show up, and connecting those problems to work the agency can do. A good account manager knows how to do this naturally.
That doesn’t happen in a quarterly status meeting and it certainly doesn't happen if the account manager isn't fully versed on the outcomes the client wants to be getting from the agency. Context matters.
The agencies that see consistent account growth are usually doing one thing differently: they understand their clients’ world beyond the current scope of work.
That means they know what success looks like for the main point of contact. They understand what that person is being measured on internally. They pay attention to where pressure is building inside the organization.
One way to think about it is this: your agency’s job isn’t just to deliver for the client. It’s to make your main point of contact more successful inside their company.
These changes have to happen on the delivery side of the business. It comes in the form of changes to the way the delivery teams thinks about the work, talks about the work, and even potentially the templates and formats they use to deliver the work and check-in with the clients.
Account managers should lead the charge in making sure the value of your team’s work is clear to the client. That doesn’t mean an account manager needs to be on every call. But it does mean the account management function should be accountable for ensuring clients understand not just what was delivered, but why it mattered.
Bad account management makes your team feel more removed from their clients.
Good account management makes everyone feel like they are playing on the same team.
Most small agencies don’t have the margin or means to hire large account teams. That’s okay.
You don’t need a full department to start building the function. But you do need to define it clearly and assign ownership to someone senior enough to understand both the client relationship and the business model. That role may only be half-time at first, but it still needs to exist.
As your agency grows, you’ll need to do the math. You’ll want to understand the unit economics, margin impact, and revenue potential of a more dedicated account management role. But you don’t have to wait until the perfect structure is affordable to start covering the function.
When even a basic account management capability is in place, revenue planning will feel different.
Conversations with clients move beyond what’s due this week and into what’s coming next quarter. Ideas get brought forward before they’re asked for. Someone is consistently thinking about the health of the relationship, not just the status of the work.
That changes how the rest of the business feels too.
Revenue becomes more predictable because existing clients aren’t static. Retention improves because clients feel supported and understood. And new business gets easier, because satisfied clients talk. They refer. They make introductions that are far warmer than anything coming from outbound.
If your new business number feels aggressive every year to maintain or grow the way you want to, it’s worth a moment to see if you are actually supporting your existing book of business the way you should be.
Is there someone clearly responsible for those relationships?
Are you creating space to understand what those clients actually need next?
Are you investing any time or energy into growing accounts, or just maintaining them?
Because for most agencies, the easiest revenue to close next year isn’t sitting in your pipeline. It’s already on your roster.
Want to know more about how we help marketing and digital agencies define and execute on the account management function? Let's chat.