Good account managers are hard to find but should treated like gold dust once discovered, this according to IT chiefs from 25 big businesses who met recently through the Forum to share their best practice experiences on this issue.Account managers are very often the public face of the IT department to the rest of the organisation and so play a critical role, not just in ensuring projects run smoothly but also for the IT department’s wider profile and status within the business.

But what makes the perfect account manager and what skills and attributes would such a person - if they ever existed - possess? Amongst a whole host of issues debated and discussed around internal account management (Forum subscribers can download the workshop report here), participants shared their thoughts on what qualities such a rare breed would have.

According to the workshop’s participants, in terms of personality traits, a good account manager must be likable, positive, capable, inquisitive and entrepreneurial and with a skin thick enough to withstand the pressures of having multiple demanding clients. They must have highly tuned political antenna, have a strong understanding of an organisation’s culture and be able to empathise with a whole range of different people. They must be good at developing trust and be able to diffuse conflict and disagreement quickly. They must have a strong appreciation of their role and function and understand that they are predominantly strategic players - an account manager’s role should be 75% strategic and 25% operational according to subscribers. This means that they often need to be good diplomats. They must be able to explain to a user that it is not their responsibility to fix a broken BlackBerry but do so in a way that is helpful and customer-focused. In terms of knowledge, they need to be all-rounders. They must have a ‘shallow’ knowledge of the whole of the business’ operation rather than a vertical specialism. All importantly, they need to be engage with customers using non-technical, business-orientated language. They must have a very strong understanding of the commercial application of IT. On top of all this, a good account manager must be an excellent ambassador for the IT department. They must be good writers, have excellent presentation, facilitation, time management and negotiation skills, possess a strong focus on quality and have a high level of attention to detail.

So, whilst it’s unlikely that any one person has all these qualities (and if you work with someone who does hang on to them!) what for you are the priority skills that any good account manager must possess?