Account Manager/Senior Account Manager

Role: Account Manager/Senior Account Manager

Salary: GBP25,000-GBP40,000 per annum depending on experience

Location: Sheffield

Our client is a strategic, creative marketing agency.

Role Purpose:

• To maintain excellent relationships with our clients, supporting the Account Director with the management of a group of client accounts and ensuring all relevant client and agency targets are met.
• To ensure excellent client service through the delivery of client work that exceeds expectations both strategically and creatively, demonstrates our value add and delivers results.
• To co-ordinate and manage the junior members of the Client Services team in the delivery of client work, providing guidance and driving best practices in agency procedures and ways of working, ensuring that we maintain and maximise a healthy level of profitability on all work we do.

You will report to an Account Director.

Duties within the role include:

Client Services

• Work with your Account Director to identify and initiate opportunities for revenue growth from existing clients and actively pursue these opportunities.
• Cultivate and maintain strong, long term and profitable relationships with your clients, specifically with project leads and budget holders.
• Act as the point of contact on some client accounts, consistently delivering a highly responsive service to clients and ensuring that requirements are dealt with promptly and efficiently.
• Develop and apply an understanding of your clients' businesses and their competitors - understand their challenges and business/marketing objectives.
• Maintain awareness of the latest industry issues, tactics and trends that may be relevant to the clients you are responsible for.
• Establish an understanding of the client's internal structure, process and policy, applying this knowledge to your approach to account management, and supporting the team to do the same.
• Support the Account Director in analysing and reporting on figures as required.
• Write and produce, or input into, briefs, proposals and/or cost estimates for speculative projects, as required.
• Proactively challenge client briefs, and if required, work with the Account Director to lead clients in the development of the campaign brief and overall strategy.
• Actively and visibly brief in, sell in and safeguard creative, working closely with the Studio team to deliver the best possible creative solutions.
• Ensure estimates are carried out accurately and checked/signed off internally before being communicated clearly to the client.
• Gain written approval from the client before any work is started.
• Provide a consistently high level of service to our clients.
• Ensure all work is carried out intelligently and effectively, and is always delivered to the highest quality and standards
• Maintain an appropriate mix of phone, email and face-to-face contact with clients.
• Front client meetings as appropriate, managing client expectations and ensuring clients' requirements and understood, met and if possible, exceeded.
• Always seek to add value and be extraordinary in everything we do - create a clear, own-able difference between the agency and its competitors.
• Assist in the development of new business opportunities and contribute to the new business conversion process as required - this may involve meeting with prospective clients, developing presentation content and costs, and/or being part of the pitch team.

Project Management

• Oversee the management of projects effectively and efficiently from brief through to completion, with the highest standards of client servicing, communication and professionalism.
• Ensure a written brief is created for all pieces of work, supplying all relevant background information and key insights, and manage the briefing process - confirming client / internal sign off of briefs before briefing internally.
• Work with the client services team, and the wider project team, to provide clients with a clear timing plan, and supply updates as necessary; track schedules, anticipate and address any issues with timings / deadlines.
• Anticipate problems and negotiate deadlines or agreed priorities where they conflict and negotiate around budgets and client terms where necessary.
• Manage and prioritise resources effectively to ensure that milestones within the timing plan are met.
• Lead the weekly project management monitoring meetings (WiP Meetings) for your client group, ensuring all reporting is up to date, accurate and makes full use of the Agency Management System, keeping the Account Director fully abreast of budget spend and profitability.

General

• Challenge thinking, internally and externally, ensuring we maximise our impact to all stakeholders at all times.
• Manage junior team members in line with Company Polices, processes and ways of working, helping to develop their capability and expertise by leading by example, and providing support, direction and development opportunities.
• Ensure you have a sound understanding of the agencies Business Plan, and are able to apply this in your day-to-day work.
• Accurately track your time within the agency management system, ensuring that your timesheet is kept up date on a daily basis.
• Support junior members of the team in their use of internal systems and help them to ensure accuracy and consistency.
• Contribute to all internal governance meetings, including Client Services, Sales and WIP meetings.
• Maintain information accurately within the agency management system and any third party systems used.

Glu Recruit are an equal opportunities employer.