Account Director

As Thought Quarter’s Account Director you will be responsible for building, maintaining and growing profitable client relationships.

This will involve having a strategic input on the clients’ projects, ensuring success and growth. As a people-focused business, a key area of the role is to strengthen relationships, with a focus on building trust and confidence.

More specifically, this role includes handling commercial discussions, tracking budgets, and growing client accounts. Acting as the voice of the client, you will ensure that all the work we do moves our clients closer to their vision and is delivered profitably.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Owning the client relationship, quickly building a rapport with senior stakeholders to help them overcome business challenges

• Supporting the final part of the sales journey by explaining our processes and winning the trust of client stakeholders by presenting our approach and recommendations in a clear, compelling way

• Onboarding new clients, leading them through our discovery process, and ensuring we clearly understand their vision, goals, constraints, and budgets

• Leading and facilitating client workshops with the support of the delivery team

• Presenting strategies and approaches back to clients to secure buy-in to budgets, timelines, and release plans

• Ensuring we deliver profitably and proactively addressing any challenges

• Identifying growth opportunities by mapping out the current and new key stakeholders within your accounts and identifying what matters to them, what are their potential use cases, who holds budgets, who makes decisions, who influences decisions, who owns which process

• Proactively identifying and presenting new ideas and opportunities to clients, and converting those into paying work

• Owning, planning, and executing activities to nurture client relationships, feedback loops, referrals, renewals, upsells, cross-sells, expansions with the support of the Marketing and Sales teams. This includes events, award entries, and joint opportunities

• Creating and executing strategic plans for every account to not only ensure company goals are met across key revenue and churn metrics, but also new growth opportunities are discovered and pursued

• Developing a roster of happy clients that will refer new prospects, champion Thought Quarter, and provide crucial feedback

• Ensuring that every interaction our clients have with us is immaculately presented, professional, and well-informed

• Keeping your industry and technology knowledge up to date, with a particular focus on CX, UX, and emerging topics and technologies.

Skills and experience

Ideally, you will have been working as an Account Director in a digital agency and have experience of larger software development projects for complex clients.

You will also need:

• Strong critical thinking, problem solving and decision-making capabilities enabling you to think on your feet and identify the best course of action

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

• Excellent presentation skills (both creating in PowerPoint and delivering)

• Excellent facilitation and meeting chairing skills, being able to keep meetings and workshops on track, to time, and productive

• Demonstrable ability to understand different personality types (using DISC or similar) and vary your style and approach to suit

• The ability to grow accounts by identifying new opportunities, and successfully pitching them to the clients in an effective, clear and professional manner

• A good understanding of budget management, revenue recognition and forecasting

• Demonstrable ability to lead, motivate and influence teams and business stakeholders, maintaining focus on the agreed goals

Our ideal candidate will:

• Have a working knowledge of design, UX, software development, testing, and deployment so they can hold informed conversations with delivery team members and clients

• Live up to our value of Confidence by tackling delivery and budgetary challenges quickly, openly, and professionally

• Embody our value of Clarity by being an advocate of agile concepts - conversation over documentation, people over process, working software as the primary measure of progress

• Be realistic about what it’s like to work in an agency environment - agencies are imperfect businesses, sometimes priorities have to change, and often pragmatism is required to balance different priorities.

Working arrangements

Our teams work from the office at least 2 days a week, although you're welcome to use the office as much as you like. This means you must live within a reasonable distance of our offices in Bristol or Redruth.

We're open to full- or part-time candidates, and we're especially keen to hear from anyone looking to return to work after parental leave or a career break.

Salary and benefits

• Salary £40-50k (pro-rata for part-time roles) depending on experience + bonus, OTE £55-60k

• 38 days’ holiday (30 days' leave + 8 bank holidays, pro-rata for part-time roles)

• 2 days’ Innovation Leave

• Private healthcare

• Quarterly team socials and an annual summer party

• A £300 training and wellness budget to spend on anything you like

• Flexible working, allowing you the autonomy to choose where and when you work including a “work from anywhere” policy

• Quarterly progress reviews to help you progress in your role