Azhar

Let's see here. Anything. Aimen & Sana, you guys are on the call anything that you guys want to share about Aimen and Sana our Rockstar CSMs as we call them CSMs, but they're essentially account managers, or maybe tell us a little bit about how many clients each one if you guys are handling right now. Go ahead.

Aimen

I currently have 17 accounts at the moment. And I make sure that I don't only connect with my clients at a professional level, I make sure that I also connect them with them at a personal level. So that's really, really important. That's one of our job responsibilities. Apart from that. When we speak to our clients, they go through a lot of issues, and we make sure that we are able to resolve those issues or cost them about those issues.

Azhar

Sana why don't you tell me a little bit about how your day was today? Like what are the day-to-day activities that you do during a normal day at work?

Sana

Yeah, today was busy. It was a good busy though, you know, we start off making sure that we have answered all our emails, you know, sometimes there is a time difference and sometimes we need to make sure that if we got an email, while you know we’re not at work with those our priorities and if a client has, you know, emailed us raising a concern, we need to make sure that we're on top of it. So that's our first thing and then we make sure you know, we schedule one on ones with our clients almost regularly. And if not monthly, then at least weekly. So we need to make sure that we're in constant contact with our clients. That's really important to make sure that our clients are confident in us. So you know, like Aimen said building that entity personal relationship is very important. It's not just about their job, it's not just about their agency, we talk about almost everything, forming that relationship that helps them feel like okay, we will be there, if they have an issue, if they have a concern, we will be there and we will listen to it. So for my day-to-day, I have meetings. I have the training, I have emails, I had a training in, you know, customer success with someone who is successful in this field, who has had experience in this field. And then I had a huddle, with my team with the associates that are managing. So we need to make sure that we have a happy, healthy relationship with them (the clients) as well. So if they have a concern, they can come to us as well.

Azhar

So inside a digital marketing agency, because these guys are managing clients, and just so you guys know our clients average, 2 VAs with us. So Sana? How many associates are you managing on the back end?

Sana

So at the moment, I have 21 Associates that I'm managing in my team. 

Azhar

 Aimen, how many do you have?

Aimen

 I have 24.

Azhar

 Maham you? 

Maham

 3 (coming) right now, there will be 20 or 25. Tomorrow, because I'll be onboarding a few.

Azhar

So this is the relationship-building part guys, for a digital marketing agency, your account manager would be building so these guys are building relationships with their VAs and their clients. But your account manager would be building relationships with your clients and your internal teams like the web development team and SEO team, project managers may be, and however you have that, the agency set up. So so you know, the basically the liaison or the face of the company, once you've onboarded your clients is going to be an account manager, and they're going to basically run that client for you on a day to day basis anything. Well, it'd be awesome. Like, you know, and it is awesome that, you know, when we onboard a client, those clients don't have to call me anymore, they just you know, work with Aimen or Maham or Sana. And, you know, any issue they have anything they want to do, even if they want to give out a bonus to their VA is these are the people they talk to. So, so that's kind of how we have our team set up. And you guys can do something very similar as well. targets and benchmarks. So this is really important for you, for your account manager. The most important thing I think that an account manager should be able to do for you is retaining current agency accounts every month, right or maximizing the retention, I think a 3% retention ratio for an agency owner is very well, very, very healthy. So you guys should shoot for that. This is the number one most important job that account managers should be able to do is that they should like once those clients come in, they make sure that these clients stay with you for as long as possible. The other thing that these guys can do for you is making upsells. So for example, our amazing team of CSM is our account managers, they helped us close four new deals in the last month, just by you know, building those relationships and, you know, clients see their work with them. And clients see how their current accounts are doing. And they were able to upsell them to they may have a marketing assistant, now they move on to a sales assistant as well. Or they may have both, and now they've hired an account manager as well. So you know, so we're making up sales, using the account managers as well as collecting client reviews. We are less than one year old. And since we really started using our account managers, were approaching close to 50 client reviews all on video, some of our clients have given us multiple reviews. And we'll show you actually one of those reviews today as well. So that is such a huge thing like you know, the social proof that we can get. And you know, the Google reviews and all of that stuff is great. But you can go on our website and you can see client review after client review after client review after client review. And that's all because of our amazing account manager. So that's another big thing. And you know, we again, like if you were to do this, I don't know how many reviews that each one of your agencies has. And I don't know how many of them are on video. The video makes a huge impact on your target audience and you can use them for Facebook ads, you can use them for so many different things. You can turn them into case studies and do a lot of things with those video testimonials and the only type of reviews we get are direct Put on video or audio the at the least so. So that's another thing that these guys can do for you by holding regular review meetings with their clients, this is an ongoing process that the account manager should be able to do for you. But I think on a daily basis, I'm hearing from our account managers that they have one, two, sometimes three, regular client check-ins and things like that. And these check-ins are the opportunities to learn more about the clients how they're doing, preempt if there's an issue, get a review, or you know, try to upsell them to something that they may need in the future. And there are a few other things here as well. anything you'd like to add to targets and benchmarks in terms of an account manager's job responsibility, Jeff?

Jeff

Well, I just want to point out the Azhar said a 3% retention rate, I think he really means loss rate. Because if you are only keeping 3% of your clients every month, you should not be in business, you should do something else. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, turn, yeah, is always going to be there. But you definitely are going to cut down on your churn, I think that's the biggest thing that most people don't realize is if you're already struggling to sell, and you got a few clients, and you have, you know, 20% churn, for example, if you could just reduce that down to three to 5%, your activities selling can come down as well and give you more time to become a better salesperson, and actually growing your business. So yeah, working on churn can is one of the big things that your account manager can do just again, by listening, communicating, taking notes, and making sure whatever the requests are getting done, and reported back. And that's where we make a big mistake to is, we won't tell the client, oh, yeah, I put that new button on your website, we'll just assume they saw it. And they're setting their fretting, when's the button going to go? When are they going to put the button up? And now and then the next time the account manager gets on the call? And they say, have you put the button up on my website? Well, I was done a month ago, but they didn't know and in the back of their mind, you know, your clients saying, hey, they're not performing for me. So closing that loop is really essential. And, and as a busy entrepreneur, that's probably one of the biggest downfalls that we have. Because as Azhar pointed out, I'm busy doing this, that I'm doing that and pretty soon I forgot about that request. I mean, I know my team got it done. But I didn't take that moment in time to report back to the client.

Azhar

Yeah, totally. And I think, Jeff, you talked about this as well, and you just hit nail on the head that, you know, the biggest reason that our clients leave us is not that we're not doing the work, it's perceived indifference. They think that the work is not being done, and we're just not doing a good enough job communicating that. And an account manager will help you do just that. Like if there's a small win, they'll get on the phone, that's their job is to make sure that you retain that client, they'll get on the phone, and they'll talk to the client, they'll say that, hey, congratulations, we hit number one for this keyword, or we hit page a page one for this particular keyword or, you know, we seeing an influx of new leads coming in? How are those? Are you able to close those clients and things like that? So, you know, having that continuous loop of communication, we can do that. But a great account manager would do just that for you. And on a day-to-day basis. And watch those churn numbers come down. So I think, you know, the other thing is, your account manager just does not need to report on what's happening specifically on your website or your SEO, if you're in a state, for example, that only holds the legislation every two years. They can stay on top of that legislation. If you're a plumber and say, Hey, did you know they passed the bill that impacts you as a plumber, you have to do some crazy, whatever hazard material report now that you never had to do before. So just having those account managers stay on top of industry-specific stuff. And that's why we fully support the whole idea of your agency being a niche agency because now you've got somebody else watching out for you and helping you stay on top of what's going on in the world. Yep.

So these are some targets and benchmarks. You can expect your account managers to move on to skills and requirements. I think one of them especially when you're hiring an account manager inside your digital marketing agencies, one of the prerequisites for an account manager is that They need to have a basic understanding of digital marketing. So you know, they've been a designer or developer or SEO, or they've done content writing, and they've worked inside a digital marketing agency, maybe in a different role. Because this is not a role that you know, people train for and become, you know, they can go to school for and things like that, this is something that, you know, you kind of take a salesperson, and you take a digital marketer, and you know, and you combine them together, and you turn them into an account manager. So this is going to be a person who's going to be maybe, you know, have a little bit of both, maybe they're really good salesperson inside a digital marketing agency, they know, all these agencies services, and now they can move into an account manager role, or, you know, they've been doing something inside a digital marketing agency on the graphic design side, or whatever that might be. And their communication skills are really, really good. So I think the prerequisite over here, for my understanding of the digital marketing services that you guys are selling, it's a great, great, great plus here, even though we can still teach somebody with the right mindset, it'll be great to have somebody who understands these things for you because the learning curve is going to be really, really short. And then on top of that, you know, what you're really looking for is a problem solver, a person who can communicate effectively. I think I think those two things in addition to the digital marketing experience, I think, you have a really good mix of things there. Education, obviously, like, you know, some of these people have even master's degrees, but at least undergrad would be really, really important, perfect English because you can have issues on the grammar side, right? Because it's going to tell you the face of your company, if there is even a, you know, one sentence or one verb or noun here in there, it reflects poorly on you. So make sure that the English are perfect. Those are the basic skills that you guys need to hire for in this particular role. These are some roles and duties and expectations that you guys can have, yes, can go through here, for example, developer quarterly strategy for each client, you know, some of these guys are account managers going on these calls, and they're talking about three months ahead six months ahead of what's coming down the pipeline for their clients, agencies. So so there's, there's going to be a ton of things, we've listed out the most used ones, but You're welcome to play around with this a little bit more. compensation. Alright, so so we've done some math for you over here. And we've done compensation for if you were to hire an account manager locally in the States, how much it's going to cost you. So usually, they'll start out at $35,000. And there'll be between 35, and $55,000. So on average, around $45,000 plus bonuses, you can pay them a little bit less for the first 90 days. And you know, you can go up from there, as far as compensations are concerned, can also bonus are extremely important this role as well, because you're expecting them to retain your clients. So if you can tie your bonus structure to the retention that they deliver to you on a monthly basis. Even better.

Sana

I agree with this. 

Azhar

Thanks, Sana. Anything you'd like to add there, Jeff,

Jeff

I think you know, again, it's making that decision of what your budget is. But if you cannot afford an account manager in the United States RepStack program is definitely a good alternative. And we work very diligently to make sure that you're getting the right person that can do this communication at a price point that like I said if you're having 2500 $3,000 every month dropped to the bottom line you can afford. Add that and you'll see your bottom line grow from there.

Azhar

Yeah, exactly. And, and also like in terms of our particular service, not to toot our own horn here, but where we are trying to really benchmark with the US market. And our account managers who are on this call are a testament to that. These girls are handling clients in the United States all over the US and Canada right now. 17 plus clients, each of them, they're doing a phenomenal job for us and our clients are loving them. And all you have to do is go to our website and just take a look at our case studies and you'll find out how good of a job these guys are doing so so you know we do provide a price point advantage. If you choose to work with us, but the benchmark that we're trying to deliver on is the same benchmark if you were to hire somebody from the local market, without, you know, the extra complications of hiring a local person, also the extra money that you will have to shell out for a local person. So, with us, there's a ton of advantages. Working with us, we have, you know, we truly believe in our training. So what we, our training manager, nor is also on this call right now with us. And we have an entire training department set up with the help of Jeff Fisher. So you know, we actually hire people, even before we put them in front of a client, they have to go through a minimum of one week of training with us. But we figured we'd take a look at their work ethic, we make sure that there are no red flags, we make sure that, you know, the basis of all the training is completed. And that's the point when we place them in front of a client or match them with a client so that that relationship once they do go in front of a client, because, you know, we have a 95% placement rate when our clients when after the discovery call or a strategy session, once a client tells us to go ahead and find them a person, and they finally meet that person, we have a 95% approval rate on that last call. And the reason for that is because of you know, the time and effort we put in place, on that particular person that we match with our clients and ability that person has, we take out, you know, all the work that our clients would usually have to do in finding that right person. And we're doing this, like I said, replacing one person a day right now. So it's getting easier and easier for us right now.