Here’s how to get the best out of your agency strategists.

Clients spend good money and are known to explore new agency partnerships in search for better strategic thinking. So if you help to create better strategic conditions, you’re going to get greater value.  

So if your strategist is any good, here are four ways to extract more from their brain:

1. Give their curiosity somewhere to go.

Ask: “Have you read anything interesting recently about [insert the problem currently keeping you awake here]?”

Curiosity is contagious. Give a strategist an intellectual itch and they’ll immediately start wanting to scratch it, they’ll open mental drawers, connect odd dots and find useful things you didn’t technically ask (or pay) for.

2. Give the question or problem some space.

A strategist can usually give you an answer quickly, but asking them to come up with a solution on the spot or overnight is a hard task and you won’t get the best outcome.

Their best answer often arrives after they’ve challenged the first one, tested a few hypotheses in their head or with other, thought about in the shower for 20 minutes that night, interrogated the numbers and wandered briefly down a completely unhelpful rabbit hole at least twice.

Don’t confuse immediacy with intelligence. Let them simmer on it.

Curiosity is contagious

3. Challenge the strategy. Don’t just pronounce it wrong.

You may be right. A good strategist will want to know if you’re questioning their work. 

First step is to genuinely ask what led them there. Explain what doesn’t feel true for you. Introduce the evidence or context you think they’ve missed.

You’ll either expose a weakness in the strategy or discover their thinking is stronger than you realised. Both of these situations are useful. If it’s the former, they will want will want to rectify it quick smart. 

4. Feed the magpie. Share interesting things.

Send them the strange customer comment. The competitor move that made you pause. The article, behaviour or category detail you found facinating.

Good strategists are constantly collecting fragments and looking for connections, but there are only so many hours in the day.

You don’t get the best from a strategist by treating them like a vending machine for clever answers.

You get it by giving them better ingredients, productive friction and enough room to think.

Are you encoding memory into new potential customers faster than those who already know you are forgetting?