Two Different Jobs Hiding Under One Title at a Lot of Agencies
At a lot of smaller agencies, whoever is available ends up doing new business, often an account manager pulled in because they are already good with clients and already on staff. That default is understandable and, per Wikipedia’s definition of the customer success function, structurally mismatched: an account manager’s job is adoption and retention after a deal is already signed, not persuading a stranger to sign one in the first place.
The two skills overlap less than the shared instinct to hand both to “the good client person” suggests. Selling to someone with no existing relationship and managing someone who already trusts you draw on genuinely different instincts, even when the same person happens to be capable of both.
What an Account Manager’s Role Is Built For
Wikipedia’s entry on customer success describes the role as serving a client after a salesperson has already closed the deal, focused specifically on adoption and ongoing value realization, and explicitly distinct from the sales function that won the account. The same entry notes that traditional customer service and support alone is generally considered insufficient to retain clients over time, the stated reason the function exists as its own discipline at all, not just a friendlier name for account service.
An account manager built around that definition is optimized to keep a client happy and renewing, a genuinely different daily rhythm from cold outreach, qualification, and closing a stranger who has never worked with the agency before.
What a Dedicated BD Rep Costs, and What That Buys
PayScale’s crowdsourced data, drawn from 705 self-reported profiles and a general BD-role benchmark rather than an agency-specific one, puts total compensation for a Business Development Representative at $43,000 to $89,000 a year, with an average base of $56,095. That figure buys a role built and measured against new-business output specifically, rather than a portion of an account manager’s attention split across two jobs with different success metrics.
Treat the PayScale range as directional. It is self-reported, not audited, and it describes the BD-rep role broadly rather than agency new business specifically. Even as a directional figure, it is a real, concrete number to weigh against the cost of quietly asking an existing account manager to absorb a second role for free.
The Real Tradeoff: Relationship Trust Against Sales Training
This is reasoning, not a cited comparative study; no source directly measures account-manager-doing-BD against dedicated-BD-rep outcomes. An account manager already has agency-specific client knowledge, credibility with existing relationships, and no ramp-up time on understanding how the agency works. What they typically lack is formal training in cold outreach, objection handling, and closing a stranger, the specific skill a dedicated BD rep is hired and measured on.
A dedicated BD rep flips that tradeoff: real sales training and a role built entirely around new business, but no existing relationships and a genuine ramp period learning the agency’s positioning from scratch, the same ramp problem a new-business director hire faces in their own first 90 days.
A Practical Way to Decide
Practitioner guidance: if the agency’s new-business volume is low and occasional, an account manager absorbing some new-business responsibility alongside their existing role is a reasonable stopgap, as long as it is named and compensated as an added responsibility rather than assumed for free. If new business needs to be a consistent, measured, ongoing function, the customer success definition above argues for a dedicated hire built and paid specifically for that job, at the PayScale range described.
The mistake to avoid is the default nobody decided: an account manager absorbing new business informally, indefinitely, with neither role getting the attention it needs to be done well.
What Happens When Neither Role Gets Done Well
An account manager stretched across both jobs risks the failure mode Wikipedia’s customer success entry warns against directly: support and service alone, without dedicated attention, is not enough to retain clients over time. Split further by new-business responsibilities that were never really theirs to own, that risk compounds on both sides of the job at once.
Naming the tradeoff explicitly, and either compensating for the dual role or hiring a dedicated one, is what keeps an agency from quietly under-resourcing both functions while assuming one person covers both.
What this means for you
- Customer success, the function an account manager performs, is defined as a distinct post-sale role from the sales function that closed the account, per Wikipedia, not two versions of the same job.
- PayScale’s general BD-role benchmark puts a dedicated business development rep’s total compensation at $43,000 to $89,000 a year, the real cost of a specialist hire instead of a split role.
- The core tradeoff is relationship trust against formal sales training: an account manager already has the first, a dedicated BD rep is hired and trained specifically for the second.
Sources
The external data in this guide draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.