Posts Tagged ‘Account management’
What makes you different?
Monday, January 25th, 2010
Whether it’s at a networking event, meeting with a potential client or vendor or speaking with budding graphic artists, the same question always arises: what makes you guys different?
As a young creative studio of 3 fairly recent college grads, one MBA and visual communications expert classically trained on the West Cost, you want the answer to be something like:
“Well our father learned the art of communication from his father, and he learned it from his father and these age old family secrets of being creative and doing business have been passed down to us.”
or
“We’ve developed a new technology that blah blah blah and blah’s and it works amazingly.”
or
“We have the ability to read minds. It helps.”
I think you get it. The point is that we all want and feel the need to say something memorable and impressive but really, half the time it’s just you! Your team! The people who make your company what it is.
And that answer is not memorable and unfortunately is the default answer that everyone is most likely using.
Last year BCG was nominated for an award, 25 Under 25, which recognizes the top small businesses under 25 employees in Kansas City. Applying was rather grueling as we were forced to look under the hood and figure out what was fueling our engine and what made it different than the other cars parked down the street (that was a metaphor for the other 6 or 7 creative agencies in the River Market btw).
Well, after asking our clients and looking at how we did things, we got an answer…but it’s still not as exciting as being apart of a creative lineage.
The answer is simple, old school and obvious…We offer superior customer service and account management.
I know you were looking for something else. So were we! But to be honest, we have acquired several clients solely based on their bad customer service experiece with other agencies. And we’ve kept our flagship client since day one *knocking on wood* because of it. And the awesome part about it is that great customer service is actually not as common or as easy as you would think or hope.
To make a long story even longer, please read the article that spurred this post.
McGarryBowen Is Ad Age’s Agency of the Year
It’s a short article about John McGarry and how his “Old World” approach to account management, coupled with adapting to the change in the game, has fueled 25% growth (600 Million dollars) in ‘09.
Tags: Account management, Small business
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »