We often used the line: "We may not know, but we know how to know." While the team has experience across a diverse set of sectors from project work and prior professional experience, we will never know an industry as intimately as our client or other stakeholders do. Our role, especially when working in a new country, territory, or market that our client has never been in before, is to identify who the key stakeholders are in the market system and get to ask them the right questions. So we practice "how to know" by playing in two roles:
- We become deputies of our clients. We need to know what keeps an organization up at night, what their priorities are, what the pain points are, what the opportunities are, how they engage with their current customers/clients, how they wish to interact with new ones, how flexible the business can be. Ultimately, we know what their existing customer's needs are and how they are fulfilling them now so that we can ask the right questions of the needs of potential new customers in a way that shows a path of opportunity for our partner!
- We question like journalists. No piece of information is too small. The juicer answer comes from questions that make you squirm. We love knowing the unknown, and we've gotten quite good at it. We are charmers. We map all the people and organizations that understand what our partner needs to know, and we have a chat. And from those, we find new leads. A journalist never knows what the news of the day will be. But they have contacts and how to get information out of them.
