Partner Content
The martech landscape is becoming an increasingly complex jungle. Making sense of martech-related topics, often involving new technologies and data, requires coordination among experts with different backgrounds. How can these experts best leverage one another to make sense of data, technology and process to positively affect business decisions and customer experiences? The key lies in giving effective explanations.
When collaborating with different stakeholders, subject matter experts often need to provide brief lessons to those from different professional backgrounds. These lessons are useful for contextualizing information, but it can be easy to accidentally overwhelm your audience when the topic is complex. We forget that what is familiar to us is novel to others.
And there is a lot of novel material out there. In early 2020, there were more than 8,000 martech solutions, and one in five of these were created within the last year. With so much new information available, it’s important to make navigating this information as easy as possible. A subject matter expert serves as a local field guide who escorts others through the jungle of their domain.
When you are serving as a field guide, the difficulty your audience faces while navigating a new topic is directly correlated with how effectively you communicate. Explain things well, and their journey becomes easier. Explain things poorly, and they will become lost. Below are five strategies for more effective explanations.
Incorporating these will allow you to become a more skilled communicator, which increases your value in an organization by allowing others to better leverage your knowledge. While conceptually simple, these strategies require a conscious effort to implement, and they aren’t always easy. For example, I spent almost as much time removing words from this article as I did adding them. However, the fruits of these efforts are well worth it. As the martech jungle becomes increasingly dense, having good field guides is critical to staying ahead in the race.