"We're working harder than ever for the same money. And it's harder than ever to get teams thinking about growing the account, not just delivering for it."
Two complaints with common cause. The second is symptomatic of what the first is doing to your team.
Efficiency pressures are nothing new. Now, there's an additional mandated AI efficiency discount that's impossible to dodge without looking positively technophobic. For the poor account managers working with rates and billable hours, it's yet another round of work harder, work faster, deliver the same for less.
When these efficiency pressures are front of mind, whatever the client says gets filtered through two questions:
will this impact on delivery?
will this distract from delivery?
Both totally correct questions when the model depends on efficiency, but anything outside those two concerns gets no attention at all. This efficiency mindset deliberately, if unintentionally, excludes the incidental stuff that fuels future growth.
Growth opportunities seldom arrive with a growth-shaped flag. More often, they're hidden in passing mentions that something somewhere with someone has changed. Like a new boss, a management restructure or a strategic pivot.
The efficiency mindset identifies a potential block: probably some extra rounds of review, likely a delay in timelines. The opportunity mindset sees the same as a potential additional need, for example, aligning to new management priorities, or creating proposals that account for what matters most now.
Left unchecked, the efficiency mindset fosters a painful cycle of low-margin growth through volume at lower rates. Conversely, the opportunity mindset generates more strategic and creative work with a better margin than discounted delivery. Therein lies the cruel irony of the efficiency mindset – it filters out the only thing capable of paying for the discount that drives it. Tactical efficiency margin loss has to be offset by strategic opportunity margin gain.
This might read like an impossible binary choice between two mindsets. In reality, we're giving account managers the tall order of holding both at once, and to do it under a discount pressure that’s taken away the time to do either properly.
If we're asking teams to grow accounts as well as deliver for them, it's only fair to recognise the contradictory (but necessary) pressures being placed on them – grow, efficiently.
