Account Director - Marketing Agency

Column Five is a B2B-focused creative agency that helps ambitious brands find and tell their best stories to drive real results.

We’re looking to hire an Account Director who is able to grow existing client accounts. Healthy, trusting client relationships + sound strategic guidance are the ingredients to winning meaningful work that will keep our clients successful, our teams fulfilled, and our agency financially healthy. Account Directors are responsible for selling and supporting our work by establishing and growing our engagements with current clients. This is done through being curious about the client’s brand and business strategy, and positioning our team as trusted experts who can help refine the strategy over time and execute the right work to achieve our clients’ goals. By digging deeper to understand what each client truly wants and needs, our Account Directors can effectively collaborate with our Strategy and Creative teams to determine recommended solutions and pricing for the work.

The Account Director position reports to the co-founder who oversees our Accounts + Client Services team. 

At Column Five, you’ll work with a vibrant team of people in a fast-paced environment built on collaboration, camaraderie, freedom, and flexibility. Each day you’ll find surprising challenges that stretch your skills and expand your creativity. As a distributed team, we value responsibility and autonomy, so we’ve designed our tools and processes to help you do your best work—the way you work best. Most importantly, you’ll get the chance to grow with talented people who make you feel loved, respected, and welcomed. If you’re ready to roll up your sleeves, we can make work a place of belonging and a source of fulfillment and joy—together. (Find out more about our core values.)
 

ACCOUNT DIRECTOR RESPONSIBILITIES & DUTIES

• Within the first year on the job you will be expected to:
  • Sell, service and grow large engagements of high complexity. 
  • Be fully competent and confident in selling our strategic creative offering structured as quarterly or annual retainers.
  • Work autonomously in role and responsibilities. You grow your bookings from current clients by at least 10% year-over-year and support at least $1.5MM in annual revenue from accounts under your ownership. 
• Day-to-day responsibilities:
  • Deeply understanding the needs of our partners, and consulting on solutions to meet them. 
  • Educate existing clients on our full range of capabilities and uncover opportunities for strategic creative work together.
  • Facilitate the concepting, accurate estimation and scoping, presentation and onboarding of services to generate bookings from prospective and existing clients.
  • Support our team and our clients in successful execution of the work, balancing the needs of both. 
  • Coaching and leading by example to bring new ideas and approaches to the creative team. 

REQUIREMENTS FOR AN ACCOUNT DIRECTOR

• Humility to listen, grow, and learn 
• Excellent at consultative selling; familiar with value-based pricing methodology; frequently and proactively using knowledge of our partners’ industries and news cycles to identify new business opportunities and make strategic recommendations to capitalize on them.
• Care and respect for the Strategy and Creative teams responsible for executing the work, with solid track record of working collaboratively across disciplines to succeed on complex client work.
• Curiosity and capability of asking smart questions to determine larger opportunities and/or deeper challengers a client is facing to hone in on the most important and valuable work we can do together
   

JOB PERKS

• Competitive salary
• Full health insurance
• Profit Sharing
• Parental leave
• Trainings, education, and investment to support career growth
• FSA plan (medical and dependent care)
• Life insurance, short-term and long-term disability insurance
• Remote-first company 
• Generous 401(k) savings plan
• A fun, engaged, and inclusive team 

COMPENSATION
Compensation is dependent upon experience. We do not pay based on the location of the employee, rather based on the market rates in Orange County, CA, where we are headquartered.

LOCATION
We are a distributed- or remote-first company. This means that we are open to working with you if you live anywhere within the USA (and even Canada!). If you desire to work in an office with other C5ers, we have an office in Costa Mesa, CA.

HOW TO APPLY

Please apply with a current resume, and a cover letter that includes why you are the right person for Column Five.

No phone calls, please. Although we value the services recruitment agencies provide, at this time we are not leveraging external 3rd party recruitment resources for this search. Should those needs change, we will seek your assistance directly.

Column Five is an Equal Opportunity Employer focused on creating a workplace of belonging. We encourage applicants from all walks of life and do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, veteran status, disability, and other applicable legally protected characteristics. If you need reasonable accommodations for any part of the employment process, let us know.

Note to applicants: On our application, we have an optional section that collects the federal equal employment opportunity data, known as an EEO-1 report. This report collects demographic workforce data  including race/ethnicity, sex and job categories. Because it is a federally regulated program, we are not able to modify the categories. We acknowledge that some of the designations are not inclusive to all identities. For example, the data does not designate a non-binary gender option and may not coincide with how you identify in other ways. We hope one day we can all be federally (and globally) recognized by the identities we hold true to ourselves.

Column Five is not currently required to report this data, but we collect it as a way to track how we are doing in hitting our goals of reaching, at minimum, the national census numbers for applicant diversity. This is important to us as we’ve made commitments to expanding our company’s diversity. We track this data during recruiting cycles and modify our strategies to ensure we are reaching more communities and qualified applicants wherever they may live, and whatever identities they hold, nationally.