---
title: "Your Account Managers Are Your Most Underused Sales Team"
description: "Account managers sit closer to your revenue than anyone, and nobody trained or paid them to grow it. How to turn agency account managers into a growth engine."
url: https://timkilroy.com/blog/agency-account-managers-growth
date: 2026-06-28
updated: 2026-06-28T18:32:48Z
category: "Client Retention"
readTime: "6 min"
author: Tim Kilroy
---

# Your Account Managers Are Your Most Underused Sales Team

_Account managers sit closer to your revenue than anyone, and nobody trained or paid them to grow it. How to turn agency account managers into a growth engine._


Your account managers sit closer to your revenue than anyone else in the building. They're in the client's inbox, on the standing call, in the thread where the client mentions a new initiative nobody's quoted yet. And you've trained them to do everything except grow that revenue. You taught them to keep the project on track, keep the client calm, and keep the relationship from catching fire. You never taught them to grow the account, and you definitely never paid them to. Your account managers are the most underused sales team you have.

## You're paying your growth function like a help desk

The 2026 Promethean research is blunt about this. Account management is the highest-leverage revenue function in the entire dataset, the role that owns both retention and expansion, and 97 percent of the typical account manager's pay is fixed salary. The variable slice is too small to change anyone's behavior. Sit with that contradiction. You've handed the job of growing your existing revenue to a role you compensate like back-office admin, then you act surprised when nobody grows the account. People do what they're paid to do. If an AM's entire paycheck shows up whether the account expands or shrinks, you've told them, in the only language that actually lands, that growing it isn't their job.

## The mindset shift: from order-taker to growth partner

The deeper problem is what we've taught account managers to want. The unspoken goal of most account management is a calm client who doesn't complain. Leave us alone and let us do our thing gets treated as the dream account. It's actually a warning light. A client who's gone quiet isn't satisfied, they're disengaged, and disengaged clients are the ones who [churn](https://timkilroy.com/blog/two-reasons-agencies-experience-client-churn) without warning. The job was never to keep the client happy, because [you're not responsible for client happiness](https://timkilroy.com/blog/you-are-not-responsible-for-client-happiness) in the first place. The job is to make the client more successful, and a growth partner who's making you more successful is in your business constantly, not politely staying out of the way.

## Expansion stops feeling icky when it's framed as service

Most account managers hate the idea of selling, and that instinct is worth respecting instead of steamrolling. The discomfort comes from imagining expansion as a vendor shoving more product across the table. Flip it. When an AM sees a problem the client hasn't solved and raises it, that isn't a pitch, that's care. Staying silent about a gap you can clearly see, because naming it feels too salesy, is the actual failure. That's withholding help to protect your own comfort. [Sales is a service](https://timkilroy.com/blog/sales-is-a-service-not-a-performance), and an account manager who surfaces the right problem at the right time is doing the most useful thing anyone on your team can do for that client. Reframe expansion as service and most of the ick disappears.

## Train the behavior, then pay for it

You can't mindset your way out of a comp problem. If you want account managers to grow accounts, the money has to follow the behavior. That means real variable compensation tied to retention and expansion, not a token bonus, but a number big enough to change how an AM spends a Tuesday. Pay people to spot opportunities and they'll start spotting them. Pay them only to keep the client quiet and they'll keep the client quiet, right up until the day the client leaves. Train the behavior, then put money behind it, in that order. Training without incentive fades, and incentive without training just creates anxious people doing the wrong things faster.

## Give them the reps

Growth is a skill, and skills need practice. Three reps turn a nervous order-taker into a confident growth partner. The first is signal-spotting: training the AM to notice what changed in the client's world, a new hire, a new priority, a budget that just moved, and to treat each one as a prompt to act. The second is the non-operational check-in, a conversation that is deliberately not about deliverables, where the AM asks about the client's goals and actually listens for the gap. The third is the ask itself, a simple way to raise an opportunity that sounds like a colleague noticing something useful, not a vendor reading from a script. Run these as real practice, role-played and coached, the same way you'd train any other sales skill, because that's precisely what it is.

Here's the uncomfortable summary. The growth you've been chasing with expensive new-business effort has been sitting inside your account management team the whole time, untrained and unpaid to go get it. Fixing that is cheaper than another business development hire and faster than another lead-gen campaign. Give your account managers the mandate, the reps, and the comp, and watch the function you've been treating as overhead become the highest-margin growth engine you own. The [Agency Account Growth Playbook](https://timkilroy.com/agency-account-growth-playbook) lays out the whole system, including how to make account management actually grow accounts.

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Canonical URL: https://timkilroy.com/blog/agency-account-managers-growth