A day in the life of an account supervisor
February 26th, 2008 by HeidiSA former coworker once told me that managing multiple projects is a lot like to balancing your grandmother’s best china in the air and making sure that you don’t drop any of the plates.
Whether you’re trying to meet the needs of your clients, your bosses or your staff, you need to be organized. As soon as I have a firm deadline, I use my outlook calendar to record notes about what I need to follow up on each day. It’s kind of an electronic “To Do” list that pops up for me each day. I check with the designers, clients, vendors multiple times on any given project to make sure things are moving along as expected. I try to set realistic expectations for everyone. We can’t do a good job for clients if we are not given an appropriate amount of time. If a client wants a 12 page brochure in 3 days, it is my job to let them know that is not likely to happen.
It is also about prioritization, as everyone knows. That is where experience can come into play…I know which projects I might be able to squeeze an extra day or two out of, but I also know which projects have “drop dead” deadlines and obviously those you don’t want to miss. Working with different clients, different products, different designers, different vendors each day…well that’s what keeps the day exciting.
As an account supervisor, it is my job to make recommendations to our clients and to offer different options or solutions to help them achieve their marketing objectives. Most clients recognize that the experience of the entire agency is behind those recommendations, and we offer solutions based on successes we have had over a number of years. I try to convey that. That being said, if a client is insistent about trying something which we don’t recommend, we will still assist them. In the end it is their right to decide how to spend their marketing dollars. And you never know, we might learn something in the process.