Last year I was approached by a marketing agency based in Lima, Perú. The director asked me if I was interested in forming part of the team. My first impression was: It´s obviously a mistake,  I mean, I specialize in managing knowledge and have very limited know-how in marketing ¿are you sure you need my specific skills? 

The answer that followed up was very interesting and got me thinking a lot about the extent to which knowledge management (KM) can be applied:

“As part of our projects, we need to help our clients identify and extract their core knowledge so that it can be turned to marketing assets in the form of case studies, best practices, briefs, articles, and so on. We need to conduct specialized meetings with subject matter experts and teams. It´s an approach we feel an expert should help us deal with”. 

Following this conversation and a lot of thinking, finally, I was convinced by the idea of joining a company that was totally out of my comfort zone. After 5 straight years in the tech field, I felt that it was time to shift horizon. From the very first week, I  started to work with clients in many fields ranging from metallurgy, tea-production, transport, retail, banking, and law. 

I also began working with the process team in order to create a methodology that entwined marketing tools with knowledge management. It was refreshing to see how KM can be applied in a field that´s not a common practice and that eventually translates into other types of results: consumer interaction, sales, leads, funnels, and so on (yes, I am learning the jargon).

Up to now the ride has been fascinating and very different from my last positions. It’s also great to see how companies in this field are starting to deploy KM as an added value in order to generate new strategies. 

Thanks Carambola for the journey ahead.