What an agency account manager does: I'm your one call at Exhibit A Media

You should know exactly who to call at your agency, and it should be the same person each time. At Exhibit A Media, that person is me.

I'm Jana Smith, a partner and head of business development, and I'm the agency account manager for each Exhibit A Media client. If you run a law office, a paralegal practice, a dental clinic or an accounting firm, this is what an agency account manager should do for you, what I do for our clients from the first call onward, and how to tell whether any agency will look after you once the contract is signed.

My background is in small-business operations, customer service and administration. I ran a retail store, and I led business development for a web design firm. I'm also a Law Society of Ontario licensed paralegal, and I teach continuing professional development courses for legal professionals through Bootcamp CPD. My way of working is the one on my team page: listen carefully, explain things plainly and keep everything organized from start to launch.

What does an agency account manager do?

An agency account manager is the client's main contact at an agency. They find out what you want, turn it into work for the people who build it, keep you posted on progress and handle the questions that come up along the way: a change in scope, a missed date, an invoice that doesn't look right. At a larger agency, the account manager sits between you and a production team you may never meet.

That is a fair description of the job, and plenty of people do it well. It is also a hard seat. The account manager answers to the client and depends on a production floor they often don't control. When the designers are behind, the account manager is the one who has to call you about it.

The difference that matters to you is simpler than any job description. Does the person you talk to actually know your business, and can they get you an answer?

Here is a quick test. In your first or second conversation, ask something specific. Why is the home page built around that service and not the other one? What happens to my site if I stop paying for marketing? Then listen. "Good question, let me check with the team" is a perfectly reasonable answer once. If it's the answer each time, you aren't talking to an account manager. You're talking to a relay.

Why there's no relay here

At Exhibit A Media there are two people: Frank Alfano and me. AI agents do research, drafting, design and checking. I review the work, and Frank approves everything that ships. Frank wrote about that setup in how Exhibit A Media works with two humans in the loop.

So when you call me, you're calling one of the two people who decide what happens on your project. If I don't know the answer, I know who does, and I go and get it. An AI agent may draft a reply to your email, and nothing is sent until Frank approves it. The person you talk to is me.

Why clients end up chasing their agency

The best evidence I found on this comes from the UK. The Design Business Association's 2024 report, What Clients Think, is based on 675 interviews with clients of creative agencies, carried out by the research firm Up to the Light. The agencies paid for the interviews to hear from their own clients, so these are people describing an agency they still work with, not people who left in a temper.

The report lists four danger signals that make a client feel less valued. The first is a drop in responsiveness: things take longer than they used to, including replies to email and calls, follow-up from meetings, turnaround on quotes and work delivered late. The report's own list ends with "client having to chase." The fourth signal is a lack of proactivity, which the report describes as a marked drop from the level that existed at the start of the relationship.

Two numbers from the client service section stood out to me:

• 48% of clients believe their agency's account management is too transactional. The report says day-to-day account management for nearly half of them lacks added value, proactivity, views and opinions, and can sink into account managers "simply taking direction."
• 24% felt their agency's communication around team changes was poor. Clients mention team changes "being flagged up very late or sometimes not at all."

That is a UK report on creative agencies and their clients, so treat it as a strong signal rather than a Canadian census. I didn't find a Canadian survey on the same question.

The "who do I call?" problem

Most of the people I work with run their own practice. They hired the agency themselves, and they deal with it between appointments. When the hours on their Google listing are wrong, or the contact form stops sending, they don't want to open a ticket and wait for whoever is on rotation. They want to send one email to a person who already knows their site, and hear back from that person.

The moment you have to stop and work out who to call is the moment the relationship has started to slip. My job is to make sure you never have to work it out.

What I do for every client

The closest word for the job is concierge, or if you like the old word, a majordomo: the person in a big household who knew where everything was, who was responsible for what, and who to ask when something went wrong. Mine answers email rather than the door, and the dress code is more relaxed.

In practice, it comes down to four jobs.

Getting to know your business

Before anyone writes a page or picks a keyword, I want to know what you do, who your clients are and what you need your website and marketing to accomplish. A family law practice that wants more consultations needs something different from a dental clinic that wants fewer no-shows, even if both of them say "more patients" or "more clients" in the first meeting.

I ask about how clients find you now, what they ask on the first call, what you wish they knew before they walked in and what you've already tried. When a lawyer or paralegal describes how their practice runs, I've worked on that side of the desk, so I'm not learning the vocabulary on your time. Everything I learn goes into the brief that the research and writing start from, so the work begins from your business rather than a template.

Managing expectations

Most disappointment with an agency starts with an expectation nobody wrote down. So I write them down. You get the scope in plain words, what happens next, what we need from you and when, and who does what.

That includes telling you what won't happen. If something you asked for won't help your practice, you'll hear that from me early, with the reason, rather than discovering it after you've paid for it. If a date moves, you hear it from me before the date, not after. I would much rather have an awkward phone call on a Monday than an angry email on a Friday.

Reviewing the work against your goals

When the AI agents have done their research and drafting, and the review agents have checked it, I read the work against what you came to us for. Does the page speak to the clients you described? Does it answer the questions they actually ask? Is the service you care most about easy to find? Then it goes to Frank, who approves what ships.

Reviewing also means showing you what was done. "We worked on your SEO" isn't a report. If you've ever wondered what proof to ask for, Frank's piece on what evidence shows that SEO work was completed sets out the evidence any agency should be able to hand you.

Looking after you after launch

Launch day is the start of the relationship, and the DBA research above is a list of what goes wrong when an agency treats it as the end. I look after existing clients as well as new ones. You keep the same contact after your site goes live, and if something needs attention, you email or call me. If it's technical, I take it to Frank, and I come back to you with the answer. You don't have to learn who handles servers.

Client onboarding: your first weeks with us

Client onboarding is everything that happens between "yes, let's talk" and the work starting. Done well, it means nobody guesses later. Here is how it runs with us, in order.

1. You get in touch. You can email me or book a first meeting, and either way, I'm the person who picks it up.
2. Before we meet, I'll point you to our free guide, Get the most out of your first meeting. It asks you to settle six things: the goal of the project, a budget range (approximate is fine), who makes the final decision, who your clients are and how they find you now, what you've already tried and how much of your own time you can give the project.
3. At the first meeting, we work through those six points together. The guide is built so that as much as possible, scope and price included, can be settled in one sitting. Our prices are published, so you'll know the numbers before you arrive. Frank explained why in why we publish our prices, and the current figures are on the pricing page.
4. After the meeting, I send you what we agreed, in writing: the scope, who does what, what we need from you and what happens next.
5. I collect what the project needs from you, and I tell you what you'll see, roughly when, and where you'll be asked to approve something.
6. The work starts. When there's something for you to look at, I send it with a short note on what to look for, so you aren't reviewing a draft cold.

The point of all this is that nothing surprises you. Nobody should call you three weeks in asking for a logo file you were never told about. Onboarding is the same whether you're starting a new site through our websites service, ongoing marketing, or a digital clone.

Coordinating your AI clone

Some clients ask us to make a digital clone of them: an AI avatar of you, with your voice, that can present videos for your practice. It's the part of my job that involves the most care, because the clone has your face and your name on it.

Frank builds the clone. I organise the process between you and Frank, from booking the recording to your final sign-off. I'm also training to build clones myself. Here is what it looks like from your side, using the steps on our digital cloning page.

Recording once

You record once. That means a continuous video of you speaking to camera for 2 to 5 minutes, a short consent video, a voice recording and a signed release. I schedule all of it, and I make sure the consent video and the release are done before anything is built.

You can record in our office, where we supply the camera, lights, microphone and teleprompter, or at home or at your practice using our recording guide. If you record at home, you send a 10-second test first, and we confirm your setup before you do the full take. That small step saves a lot of re-recording.

The test clip and your approval

Before any real videos are made, a 6-second test clip is made from your recording and checked for the eyes, the expression, the lip sync and the voice. Then I sit down with you to look at it. The question I ask is simple: does this feel like you? If the recording can't produce a convincing clone, we tell you what to re-record.

The first long-form video is made only after you approve the clone. After that, you approve each video before it's published, and nothing goes out under your name without your sign-off.

As of November 2026, setup is $2,500 plus HST, which covers the clone itself. Videos are priced separately on the cloning page.

Account manager vs project manager

An account manager owns the relationship. Their questions are whether you're getting what you came for, and whether you'd hire the agency again. A project manager owns the schedule. Their questions are which task is next, who is doing it and whether it will be done by Thursday.

Many larger agencies split those jobs between two people, and that can work well. The risk is that you end up talking to the person who knows your schedule but not your business, or the reverse.

At Exhibit A Media, I hold the relationship and keep track of what you've been promised and when. Frank sets the direction and approves the work, and the agents' work goes through a review chain before it reaches him. You get a single point of contact either way. You don't need to know which question is an "account" question and which is a "project" question. Ask me, and I'll get you the answer.

How to tell whether an agency will look after you

You can use these questions with any agency, including us, before you sign.

1. Who will I call after launch, and can I have their direct email and phone number now? A name and a number is the answer. "Our support team" is not.
2. Will I have a dedicated account manager, and what happens when that person is away or leaves? Ask how you'll be told about team changes. In the DBA research, about a quarter of clients rated their agency's communication on team changes as poor.
3. Ask one specific question about your own business in the sales meeting. If the answer could apply to any business in any city, expect the work to look the same way.
4. How will you check the work against my goals, and what will you show me as evidence that it was done?
5. Who owns my domain, my code and my accounts if I leave? If the answer is complicated, read do you actually own your website? before you sign anything.
6. What do you use AI for on my account, and who approves the work before it goes out under my name?
7. How quickly do you reply, and is that written down anywhere? Then watch whether they meet it before you're a client. The sales stage is when an agency is trying hardest.

An agency that answers all seven with names and specifics is likely to look after you. One that answers with adjectives is telling you something too.

Your one call

An agency account manager should know your business, tell you the truth early and get you an answer without making you chase. That's the job I do for each Exhibit A Media client, from the first meeting to long after launch, and for the clone, if you want one.

You can read more about me, and about Frank, on our team page. My phone number is on my page too. If you'd like to talk about your own practice, email me at jana@exhibitamedia.ca, and I'll take it from there.

Common questions

What does an agency account manager do?

An agency account manager is the client's main contact at a marketing or web agency. They learn what the client's business needs, set expectations on scope and timing, pass the work to the people who build it and report back. A good one knows the client's business well enough to answer questions directly. At Exhibit A Media, Jana Smith, a partner, does this for each client.

Do I get a dedicated account manager at Exhibit A Media?

Yes. Each Exhibit A Media client deals with Jana Smith, a partner and head of business development, from the first meeting through launch and after it. She gets to know the business, manages expectations, reviews the work against the client's goals and coordinates digital cloning. Frank Alfano approves everything that ships. Jana's phone number and email are on her team page at exhibitamedia.ca.

What is client onboarding?

Client onboarding is the process between agreeing to work together and the work starting. At Exhibit A Media, it begins with a free first-meeting guide that asks clients to settle six points, including goals, budget range and who decides. The aim is to agree scope and price at the first meeting, then Jana Smith sends a written summary of what was agreed, who does what and what happens next.

How do you manage client expectations?

Expectations are managed by writing them down at the start and updating them early. At Exhibit A Media, Jana Smith sends each client the agreed scope, timelines, responsibilities and next steps in plain words. If something requested won't help the practice, the client hears that early, with the reason. If a date moves, the client is told before the date, not after it.

Who do I call if something goes wrong?

At Exhibit A Media, you call or email Jana Smith, the partner who looks after clients. She knows your site and your project, so you don't have to explain it from the start. If the problem is technical, she takes it to Frank Alfano, the founder and chief developer, and comes back to you with the answer. Her contact details are on her team page.

How does the AI clone process work?

At Exhibit A Media, you record once: a 2 to 5 minute video speaking to camera, a short consent video, a voice recording and a signed release. Frank Alfano builds the clone, and a 6-second test clip is checked for eyes, expression, lip sync and voice. You see the test and approve it before any long-form video is made, and you approve each video before it's published.

Will I always deal with the same person?

Yes. At Exhibit A Media, Jana Smith is your contact from the first meeting onward, and that doesn't change after launch. Exhibit A Media is two people, Jana Smith and Frank Alfano, so there's no rotation of account staff. AI agents help with research, drafting and checking, but the person you talk to is Jana, and Frank approves the work.