The Standards: Automation In Account Management
Alex on why not all project admin needs to be 100% corn-fed, human activity.
Why adding robots to your handshakes is a good idea.
Account management is all about people, from the first meetings we have with clients to understand their problem, to the way we manage our team in delivering the solution. As such, it might feel like that process needs to be one consisting of 100% corn-fed, human activity. Yet, in the same way new creative tools have removed the tedium from the design process to achieve faster, more meaningful solutions, automation in account management allows us to remove countless hours of unnecessary project admin in favour of being more present in the areas that matter most. This is the Standard for Automation In Account Management.
At Love + Money we created The Standards as a manual on creating exceptional work that works, every time. It’s a set of processes that leverage a proven structure to blend inspiration with experience, freedom with discipline, and experimentation with certainty.
It’s easy to be scared of automation, especially in an industry that revolves around human creativity.
Growing up as a *traditional* account manager I’ve often shied away from the tools that pop up in our Slack channels or in blogs I’d read online. Whether it’s because I didn’t trust them, or didn’t want to trade a proven process for an untested approach, it often feels easier to do things the way I always have than take the time to learn a (potentially) smarter approach. Yet with a substantial chunk of each day spent doing “busy” work like summarising meetings or writing task briefs, it’s all too easy to struggle with time management, task prioritisation and feeling like little more than a glorified note-taker.
In a world where I’m meant to be the truth keeper, the client advocate and creator of the brief, I’ve wired myself to make sure that every detail is attended to and that nothing is left to chance. With that in mind, tools that promise to automate parts of my workflow can all too often feel like black boxes, making me hesitant to adopt them even when our team has been experimenting with custom GPT models. But like all of us facing the explosion of AI tools, I’ve had to face the ultimatum of “lean in, or get left behind”. Over the past six months I’ve been leaning in, adopting automation into my everyday workflow as an Account Manager. In doing so, I’ve found four key areas that have benefitted extensively, allowing me to get the basics done more efficiently so I can better allocate that time to things that benefit from brain cells.
Inbox Zero:
It was enlightening to learn that I’m not alone in feeling overwhelmed at the thought of automating parts of my workflow. My hesitancy to relinquish direct, manual control over every task had me aligned me to the (less than ideal sounding) archetype of “Scared Sarah” when chatting to our email client, Superhuman. Recognising how many hours we were losing to the blackhole of a crowded inbox, we’ve adopted Superhuman as a way to automate the tedious parts of email comms to elevate their quality and our broader focus. Superhuman does this by focusing on achieving “Inbox Zero”. The goal of Inbox Zero is to bring clarity to a chaotic inbox and reduce your cognitive load while working. While initially sceptical of the name, the “Zero” part refers to the desired amount of time an employee’s brain should stay lingering in their inbox. Using this technique has allowed me to process and prioritise notifications without distracting me from the other work I need to be doing each day. Did you know that on average, it takes us 25 minutes to get back into the flow of a task if we get distracted by another? Ain’t nobody got time for that. While we know time and attention may be finite, the requests are not. Automating the repetitive parts of email comms means we can make better decisions about how we use our most precious resource - our attention.
The Gateway Drug:
My gateway into the world of automation with AI tools started with Supernormal, a browser extension that generates a transcript and summary of the meetings you attend. Why would I spend literally hours during sessions, half listening, half furiously taking notes when I can have AI do it for me? By having Supernormal focus on the word-by-word transcript, it means we can attend creative sessions and client meetings with a much deeper sense of presence. It means we can focus on going deeper on certain ideas, better gauging our client’s sentiment and best capturing the nuance of the meeting where our AI tools might be unable to. Here, we’re no longer limited to capturing fragments of meetings at the mercy of how fast we can type. While this might not be groundbreaking to everyone, it has been for me. Even better, we can place this piping-hot transcript directly into one of our custom-built GPTs, The Effective Executive, to spin up a task brief for the next steps, mere minutes after we jump out of the meeting.
The Effective Executive. Who is she?
A few months ago our founder, Charl, spun up a custom GPT called the Effective Executive, that allows you to turn any meeting transcript into a rough task brief and the next steps needed. Is it always perfect? Nope. And I’m glad it isn’t. If it was perfect every time, we’d lose touch of the problem we’re trying to solve with GPT briefs flying back and forth with no strategic or human lens. Like all AI tools, The Effective Executive gets you 80% of the way there, and then you spend a fraction of the time adding nuance at the margin.
Unreasonable Hospitality:
In the same way creative tools help creative people spend more time on the good stuff and less time niggling with the toolbar, automation and AI tools allows client service to be more focused on what it should be: creating and nurturing relationships, understanding our clients and their businesses. If this role is something that should feel clarifying, human and helpful, why does so much of the role often feel mundane and rooted in admin? Automation has created more space to deliver Unreasonable Hospitality to our clients. By eliminating the need to spend literal hours per week compiling comprehensive meeting follow ups, pain-staking notes and sending repetitive emails, we can free ourselves up to add more value to the creative process through elevated client service. Top down thinking, considering briefs more broadly and how they fit into the business strategy. Talking about category trends and product market fit. What other business models could you explore?
I’ve been the first to say “I didn’t get to that, I had to get back to a client” or defer to my calendar as a way of excusing my lack of discipline. In client-facing roles within the creative industry, it’s easy to spend time on the busy work. I’d often feel that if I was contributing ideas or more directly involved in the ‘thinking’ I wouldn’t be adding value. After all, I used to think, I’m an account manager, I’m not here to be creative. It’s easier to spend time on the menial tasks, simply because we know them like the back of our hands. You don’t have to put your ideas and thoughts out there, or spend time articulating them. Yet, by automating these menial tasks we can free up the time needed to instead think deeply about the challenges our clients face and the nuance needed in solving them. Often, a client’s request for a rebrand is one symptom of a much larger business problem they face, that’s not so easily remedied by a single logo. In doing so, we can best leverage the team at our disposal to create work that solves fundamental problems for our clients.
If you like what you’ve heard and want to see us in action with your next project, you can book a time with Joe (South Hemisphere) via this link or Adnaan (North Hemisphere) via this link.