The Person on Your Agency Call Should be the One Doing the Work

At Atlas Digital, the strategist on your call is the person working on your ad account. We're a New Zealand-based, fully remote agency that specialises in working with tech companies, and we don't have account managers. Every client works directly with our senior strategists, who plan and run their paid media, SEO, GEO and conversion optimisation work.

Many agencies, especially larger ones, are built in two layers. An account manager handles the relationship and a delivery team that you hardly ever meet does the work. On paper, this looks efficient. In practice, all the insights, change requests and product nuances go through a middle person before they reach the strategist who can act on them.

What should a SaaS company look for in a marketing agency?

Look for an agency where the people you meet with regularly are the ones who do the work. They should also specialise in tech and focus their reporting on pipeline and revenue rather than clicks and leads.

This reduces back and forth, speeding up execution. Atlas moves at the pace that you do. It also reduces miscommunication - with Atlas, you’re always talking to an expert.

For a SaaS company past product-market fit, the hard part of paid acquisition is connecting channels, targeting and conversion to revenue.

That needs a senior strategist who is close to your product, your sales team and your numbers, not an account manager passing messages along.

Ask these questions to determine whether an agency is a good fit:

• Who will build and run our campaigns, and will they be on our calls?
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• How does what our sales team learns this week reach the person changing the ads?
• How many clients does each strategist look after?
• Who owns the ad accounts, and can we see inside them at any time?
• Do you report on leads, or on pipeline and revenue? Here's how we connect marketing to pipeline.

Account manager vs strategist: What gets lost in the handover

A SaaS leader we spoke to recently had just ended a long agency relationship. An internal audit found that much of the work wasn't adding value, and nobody on the client side could see why, because the people they spoke to weren't the people doing the work.

This isn't really about one bad agency. It's what happens when the relationship and the work are handled by different people. Issues with this approach tend to include:

• The strategist doing the work only learns second-hand about your ICP, your pricing changes and what sales heard this week, and some information can get lost.
• Every change becomes a ticket that gets passed along.
• Accountability blurs, as when results dip, the person explaining them didn't make the decisions.

How Atlas works instead: Senior strategists who implement

Your account will be run by a senior strategist who does the implementation themselves. In practice, that means:

• A shared Slack channel with the people who are running your channels, not a support inbox.
• The same faces on every call, with the strategist who built your campaigns presenting the results.
• Quicker turnaround, so when your sales team says a segment is converting, the person who can shift budget hears it first-hand.
• An extension of your team. Depending on the client, we work directly with your RevOps or HubSpot admins, developers, designers and other agencies, so tracking, landing pages and campaigns move together.

It's the same model on every channel, from account-based campaigns built around your sales team's target accounts to helping New Zealand SaaS companies expand offshore. See the results in our SaaS marketing case studies.

Experience and expertise behind every account

Most of the people working on your account are senior-level strategists. The majority of our team has at least five or six years’ experience in digital marketing, and some have more than a decade.

Our strategists have already seen how long sales cycles, LinkedIn targeting and attribution play out across many tech accounts, so they can spot what’s holding your funnel back more quickly.

The team structure is relatively flat, so our expertise goes into the work itself rather than into managing others. At many agencies, unless you’re spending heavily, your account is run day to day by a junior team overseen by a mid-level manager.

Why the no-account-manager model is important for B2B SaaS

B2B SaaS marketing depends on detail, including product tiers, seat-based pricing, long sales cycles and buying committees. That detail tends to get flattened in a handover.

When the person writing your LinkedIn ads is also on the call where your CEO explains a pricing change or a new target segment, the ads become sharper and lead to better results.