Curiosity Killed the Cat ... Not
A couple of years ago, when I was working on an orientation program for a marketing agency, the client team reported a point the agency's president wanted included that struck me as particularly valuable.The president and the team had been talking about what type of people were good for the agency. The first quality the president mentioned was "business curious." (His other top requirements were business vision, strategic thinking, entrepreneurism, and relationship expertise.)
As soon as I heard this idea of being "business curious," it rang true because it brought to mind the sort of people I myself had seen move briskly toward finding, developing, and managing business opportunities.
My clients and I came up with the following key questions that an agency employee with healthy business curiosity would ask and explore:
- How does the customer make money?
- "Who" is the brand? What is its personality?
- What's happening in the client's industry?
- What is the target consumer like? How and where can we embrace him/her?
These questions are naturally oriented toward my client's particular business of providing marketing communications services. For your own business, a good place to start in constructing your set of questions for slaking business curiosity is the classic journalist's quintet — Who, What, When, Where, and Why.
All five questions are important, but I'd emphasize that you are very likely to need to ask "Why?" more than once. That's because your success with a customer, especially a quite sophisticated customer, depends on deep understanding of the forces and goals driving their business, their business environment, and their strategies.
Labels: Productivity
posted by Karen Nelson @ 8:41 AM
<< Home