This is an account manager. An account manager is partly a sales manager as well. In addition to working actively online, he or she also attends gamesdev conferences and other events and communicates with developers in person. Therefore, the account manager is often the first representative of the company whom the customer gets to know.
What an account manager does
An account manager develops relationships with existing customers and builds contacts with potential ones. His mission is to build long-term, positive and mutually beneficial relationships.
Long-term is the key word. Sometimes an account manager and a developer meet at a conference and stay in touch for months or even years before their relationship turns into a client/executor one.
Game developers do not have to be aware of all the intricacies of the localization process. This is why one of the tasks of the account manager is to understand the client’s task and offer a solution. If the developer is not ready to order the localization from the company, the connection with him is not interrupted. Maybe after some time the situation will change on his side, and he already has a reliable contact for all questions of localization.
Who the account manager should be.
Ideally he should be a specialist with the higher education in economics (VED) or management, who understands the IT-market in general and the games market in particular.
Personality-wise, this is a person with empathy. Without it, building relationships can turn into obsessive attempts to sell the company’s services. And this is a flimsy foundation for many years of constructive cooperation.
The account manager should understand that the client cannot be forced to make a decision. You can and should look for a solution together, offer options and look for compromises. But the client should make the decision himself, without pressure.
What an account manager should be able to do
In general an account manager consists of well-developed soft skills: sociability, high self-organization, the ability to listen, solve problems and take responsibility.
The account manager communicates with customers both in person and by voice and correspondence. Therefore, he or she needs to be able to speak and write intelligently, articulate and beautifully.
A confident command of English and other foreign languages will help to communicate with foreign clients, and therefore will be a plus.
A working experience in the sphere of translation is also a plus, though it will be enough to understand the business processes in game-development companies, the sphere of responsibility of specialists working there, and to have a general idea about the development cycle.
Among the specific skills you can mention the work in CRM, as well as the work with numbers and document management (NDA, contracts, etc.).