Welcome to Episode 96. My guest is David Meikle, the author of ‘Tuning Up’, a book about improving performance and reducing stress in advertising and marketing. This chat will be particularly interesting for you if you're finding the pressure and stress of working in an agency unmanageable, or you're responsible for creating positive agency environment in which your team can thrive. 

We discuss:
- why David describes the relationship between the agency, the client and the client's procurement department as the triangle of doom. 
- David’s signature relationship diagnostic tool, The Meikle Matrix, that essentially helps you pinpoint the heart of the problem with any relationship
- how this diagnostic tool can help you in practical ways in your agency. I highly recommend you reading this book for me. 

You can visit David’s website at https://www.tuningup.co.uk for more information about the book and also to road test a prototype of The Meikle Matrix for yourself. 

If you’re listening to this at the end of 2023 and you want to build a more entrepreneurial mindset in your account management role or your team, I'm enrolling right now for my twelve month training and mentoring program called the Account Accelerator. 

I created the Account Accelerator because agency owners were telling me they knew their existing client accounts could grow further but they needed their account managers to do three key things:

1. Act as trusted advisors rather than order takers, so they understood their clients business objectives and felt confident to have conversations about how the agency could help. 
2. Spot upsell and cross sell opportunities and follow them effectively so they could increase retention and generate new business opportunities with existing clients. 
3. Ask insightful questions to uncover client challenges and feel confident presenting new ideas and asking for referrals and testimonials so they could help a strong sales pipeline of new leads and capture proof of happy clients. 


I've had 30 years experience in account management and, having trained account growth since 2016, I know not all account managers have the skills, the experience or the mindset to deliver at this level, and many agencies don't have the right internal processes in place to support their account managers with account growth. 

But, I believe with the right strategies, systems, processes and the support, your account managers can become more entrepreneurially minded, which could have a big impact on your agency's bottom line. 

So if all of this sounds interesting, then please visit my website https://www.accountmanagementskills.com, where you can book a call, have a chat with me and see if this might be a good fit for you or a member of your team.