Curious Partners: No Handholding, Please.
One thing that may keep you from reaching out for expert marketing communication help is the thought of bringing someone up to speed. Your technology is complex, and so is your value proposition. Your brand has nuanced points that need just the right language.
Bringing in communication help sounds exhausting. Plus, who’s got time for that? After all, you spent months or years understanding, honing, and then communicating your messaging.
Let’s talk about three ways that onboarding can become a pleasure rather than a marathon:
- Find curious communication partners
- Let curious partners bring their questions to the first download meeting
- Expect curious partners to bring adjacent knowledge
#1—Find curious communication partners
Self-starters take particular joy in understanding and coming prepared to meetings. But it is hard to tell if you are getting a self-starter if you talk to an agency account executive who may hand off your opportunities to their less-than-enthused writing staff. Sometimes, unmotivated staff may not feel they “own the business”; that is, they may not feel responsible for what happens next. That feeling of responsibility is a prime motivator for curiosity.
Curious communication partners will get excited about your technology and value proposition immediately. They will start asking about how your brand works with different audiences and who it works best with.
When I was on the other side and shopping for an advertising agency for our company’s neuromodulation device, I knew we had found the right team when they were nearly as excited as we were about how this device helped patients. Their curiosity translated into a series of ads that instantly broadcasted our core values.
#2—Curious partners bring perceptive questions
Our team enjoys quickly getting up to speed with a working knowledge of the technology, the service, and the brand. We get to know your features and benefits and then study your competition so we know their features and benefits. All of that helps us understand how the market fits together. From that position in the market, we can begin to see the gaps in content or messaging. As we identify those gaps, we can propose messaging and atomized content that speaks to the specific gap.
Because of previous work with medical devices, clinical trials, and technology, we bring a different set of questions to our first meeting. Some of those questions anticipate situations we’ve seen before.
But curious partners are keenly interested in the questions you, the expert, are bringing to the opportunity. Conversations around marketing objectives and current opportunities can be vibrant and build trust.
#3—Curious partners bring adjacent knowledge
“Polymath” and “autodidact” are two ways of talking about people who acquire a vast range of understanding. We often celebrate these ’folks’ ability to synthesize information and turn it into useful knowledge that a team can use to move forward.
David Bohm was one such person. He made his mark as a theoretical physicist, studied under Oppenheimer, and contributed “unorthodox ideas to quantum theory.” His work was used in the Manhattan Project, but his politics were at odds with McCarthyism, so he left the country. But his 1996 book On Dialogue[i] made significant contributions to the theory of mind and was a readable inquiry into the mysteries of how we talk to and understand each other.
Curious partners who are autodidacts and polymaths bring their diverse knowledge to bear on the opportunities you have before you. And they will likely do it in ways you had not thought of.
Contact us if you are ready to invite a curious partner to help your marketing communication efforts.
We’ll make it as easy as possible.
Promise.
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[i] Bohm, D. (2013). On dialogue. Routledge.