As much as we talk about account management “best practice”, the reality is that, more often than not, good account management is a moving target. What works for one firm may not work in another context; and many firms find that as they grow, they have to adapt and evolve their approach to managing client relationships. For small to mid-sized firms, a robust approach to account management can be a key engine of growth.
Elixirr is a firm that knows this better than most. Since its foundation in London in 2009, Elixirr has carved out a role for itself as “the challenger consultancy”, and has developed a strong reputation both for creativity and for a willingness to create new and innovative types of client relationships. We sat down with Brandon Bichler, a partner at the firm, to learn about how Elixirr approaches the topic of account management.
Maybe to start with, could you tell us about where the responsibilities of account management sit within Elixirr? Is it seen as part of a sales function, or is it an area where individual partners take the lead?
At Elixirr, we don't have separate sales teams; our partners take full accountability for building relationships with clients and leading those accounts. But we also believe that everyone in our business is responsible for the quality of the relationships we build with our clients. It's important to us that everyone—from partners all the way down to analyst level—understands the need to provide our customers with a high-quality service that creates value for them.
What sort of client experience does that translate into? If I were a client of your firm and I was interested in bringing Elixirr in to do a piece of work, who would be my first point of contact?
I don't think you can afford to be too prescriptive with clients. If you get into the habit of telling clients, ‘You have to go through this person if you want to use our services’, then the relationship starts to feel very artificial. To give a concrete example of this, about four years ago, I opened up a large multinational account. And as we started to grow that account, one of the principals on our project team took a real interest in the client and built a strong relationship with them. He ended up stepping into an account management role—and that in turn led to him becoming a partner.
I've been at firms before where clients were told exactly who they had to talk to and what channels to use to contact us. I don't think that approach works; consulting is a business that revolves around person-to-person connections, so you have to give clients the freedom to find the people in your organisation that they trust and build relationships with them. If that means that they end up forming a relationship with someone who wasn't the original ‘account manager’, then that's fine—embrace that!
And what does your approach to account planning look like?
A lot of the larger firms will create growth plans by choosing the sectors they want to focus on and then figuring out the point of view that they want to take into the market. That's not necessarily a bad approach, but it does put you in a situation where you're trying to tell the market what to do. At Elixirr, we do things the other way around. We focus on having our ear to the market—with the idea that, if we can listen to what clients want and be the first ones to respond to that, that's how we'll be able to create opportunities for our firm.
One challenge that a lot of firms face—particularly those that, like Elixirr, have capabilities across a number of different areas—is figuring out how to help clients understand the totality of their organisation, and how all of the different services within it can translate into customer value. What’s your approach to dealing with that challenge?
It's always a challenge to make clients aware of the full breadth of services you provide. And it's particularly hard for smaller firms like ours. A larger firm will often have the resources to appoint a dedicated account manager—whose whole job is to know everything inside the kit bag, so to speak, and walk the client's corridors trying to spot opportunities. Elixirr Partners focus on identifying the toughest problems that our clients need to solve and then building our proposition around that vs. what is in our kit bag.
It can be difficult when you're a small firm and you become very well known for one particular thing—in the way that we've become well known for innovation and developing new products to fuel business growth, when we do much more than that. If you build a relationship with a client based on your competency in that one area, you then find yourself in a position where you have to change that dynamic or risk missing out on opportunities in other areas, such as regulatory or outsourcing advice.
Elixirr is well known for its work with start-ups and technology companies. How do your account managers go about bringing those types of third parties into the client relationship?
Elixirr was founded on a philosophy that said, ‘We want to bring the very best people and technology to our clients’. And since we don't have a monopoly on smart people, putting that philosophy into practice means it is part of our DNA to introduce clients to relevant third parties. We really understand the marketplace of experts—and know how to navigate that marketplace to help our clients find the right skillsets for their toughest business problems.
A lot of consultants will be more than happy to bring their ecosystem partners into the delivery process—but often on the condition that their firm remains the single point of contact for the client, and all communication with those third parties gets routed through them. That's not our approach at all; we can play that role if our client wants us to, but we're also comfortable letting our clients contract directly with those third parties. Our goal is to make sure that those partnerships create value; we don't want to get in the way of progress by inserting ourselves into the process and trying to maintain control of the relationship—that doesn't serve value for anyone, and certainly not our clients.
I know Elixirr operates in a few different countries now; how easy is it for your account managers to bring in resources from other geographies to help address client needs?
When we started Elixirr, one of our core principles was that however large we grew and however many new offices we opened, we'd always have a single P&L—and we've stayed true to that vision. Even though we have people in the UK, the US, South Africa, and Australia, we're still one global team. Because of that set-up, it's very easy for us to tag-team and bring in resources from across the globe based on the needs of our clients to ensure we deliver the best possible value to them.
As a smaller firm, we want to grow in a way that's rooted in developing strong client relationships. For example, we did some work with a company headquartered in Germany, and through that we were introduced to their Head of Strategy in Australia. We did a project for them, and at the end of it they said that they wanted to keep our team around. So, we told them, ‘Look, that's going to be difficult because we don't have a permanent office in Australia right now. But if you're willing to invest in this as a long-term partnership, then that will enable us to build up a presence there so we don't have to keep flying people in from Europe and the US.’ That's how we built our Australian firm—and also how we built our practices in South Africa and the US.
What are the specific skills that you think it’s most important for an account manager at Elixirr to have?
A good account manager needs the ability to do two things. Firstly, they need to be able to spot a problem and develop hypotheses on how to solve it. And, secondly, they need the ability to pull people together around those ideas and mobilise an effective team. Doing those two things effectively requires empathy, resourcefulness, and creativity in equal measures.
You often see account managers somewhere on a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, you have people who are natural relationship-builders—people who intuitively understand how to network but have little to no content knowledge. And on the other end, you have people who are tremendous content specialists, but lack the relationship-building skills. I think the best account managers fall somewhere in the middle and can genuinely do both.
If you have networking skills but no content, you'll miss opportunities because you won't be able to effectively understand and respond to the problems the client is facing. I see this all the time in consulting; an account manager will hear the word ‘digital’ and then say, ‘Ah, let me introduce you to my colleague who does digital!’ And then it turns out that they were completely the wrong person to talk to the client because their area of expertise has zero overlap with what the client actually needs.
Over your time in the industry, have you seen the balance between those two ends of the spectrum shift at all? Does account management today look different from how it did when you started out in your career?
In some ways, consulting has come full circle on the topic of account management. In the early days of the industry, it was all about having practitioners who also did sales. But then as the industry shifted, the focus for many firms became big outsourcing and tech deals with a thin consulting layer on top—and that required a more administrative approach to account management. I think now it's started to shift back; more and more firms are reverting back to the old model where account managers are real practitioners, not just people who float across the business but lack content.
Some firms these days are looking at technology to help them get more out of account management—investing, for example, in self-service customer portals that can relieve some of the strain on human account managers. Do you think that approach has merit?
I don't think that a self-service portal for buying consulting services will ever realistically work. I had a client once who required all of their service providers to create websites with menus and prices for all of their different services; predictably, no one ever used it. That's just not how people buy consulting services; clients buy based on personal relationships and trust, not because they've seen something interesting on a menu of services.
I've almost never won a consulting project because procurement called us and asked us to put in a bid. That's why we don't engage with RFPs; nine times out of 10, the client already knows who they want to work with and it's more a formality than anything else. And that's understandable; clients buy consulting services based on who they trust more than anything else. They want to know that when they go to present to their board or their shareholders, they'll have someone by their side they can trust 100%—someone who isn't going to run for cover when things get tough.
I do think that technology could play an important role in helping give clients more visibility of the consulting work going on in their organisation. Lack of transparency is honestly one of the biggest problems that clients have; as a consultant, you'll walk around the halls and hear, ‘Oh, McKinsey's here delivering a project’, and then no one will seem to have any idea what they're actually working on. And that leads to a lot of duplication of work, and to IP being created and then left to gather dust because none of the people who could benefit from it know that it exists. So, any piece of technology that could address that problem could be hugely impactful.
