In this week’s episode, guest Priscilla McKinney, CEO of Little Bird Marketing and the author of “Collaboration is the New Competition,” shares her insights on shifting mindsets in marketing and advertising. Learn about Priscilla’s proven framework for successful collaboration and the concept of “itchy backs,” illustrated with real-world examples. Discover how to identify opportunities, overcome challenges, and build partnerships with a transformational approach to collaboration.
Episode Transcript
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Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS:
Priscilla McKinney: People’s behaviors do not change until their attitudes change. So we have to get at the attitude, we have to get at that mindset before people can set about doing better work or changing the way that they work and therefore changing their outcomes.
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Collaboration takes many forms in the marketing and advertising industry. It can characterize the strategic partnership between a brand and its agency, or the involvement of clients throughout the creative development process. or even the unexpected pairing of brands that generates buzz on social media. Some partnerships have the potential to create outcomes that far exceed what any individual participant could achieve alone. But recognising opportunities and navigating complex collaborative relationships requires special skills and insights. Today’s guest is an expert on this topic with a track record of bringing together multiple competitors to collaborate toward shared goals. Priscilla McKinney is the founder and CEO of Little Bird Marketing, which provides strategic content marketing and social media influence services for business-to-business professionals. She’s also the host of two podcasts, Digital Transformation Success and Ponderings from the Perch, in which Priscilla shares her expertise on collaboration, leadership and business growth. She’s also the author of the book, “Collaboration is the New Competition: Why The Future Of Work Rewards A Cross-Pollinating Hive Mind And How Not To Get Left Behind.” To discuss some of the key ideas in her book, I’m delighted that Priscilla is joining us today from Joplin, Missouri. Priscilla, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS!
Priscilla McKinney: Adrian, thank you so much for having me. And I just have to tell people, give Adrian some love for this podcast because it is absolutely a labor of love to do. So I’m going to give him a shout out before we even get started and say, if you love this show, go give him a great rating, go give him a great review. It’s hard to do podcasts, but thank you for having me, Adrian.
Adrian Tennant: Oh, you’re so welcome. I’m blushing here. Thank you. Priscilla, could you tell us first of all, what led you to a career in marketing?
Priscilla McKinney: Well, I think that I’ve always been so curious about why people make the decisions they do, what feeds into that. And even when I was younger, growing up in Spain and being really given a worldview that is multicultural and then going to boarding school in Germany and then moving back to the U.S., all of these things led me to understand that people have a lot going on. You know, the subconscious is so strong in how we make decisions. We may not be even aware of why and how we’re making decisions. And I’ve always been curious about that. There’s obviously studies of symbiotics, there’s cultural anthropology, there’s behavioral science underneath that, but that’s where I’ve always been curious. And I eventually led into marketing from this curiosity. I was really helping companies understand how to direct consumer behavior to where they wanted them to go in a way that was not salesy and not gross, but in a manner that was very helping to clients. And so that’s how I ended up getting involved in marketing. And I think my background and my schooling in cultural anthropology really undergirds that.
Adrian Tennant: Well, you’re the founder of Little Bird Marketing and describe your position as Momma Bird – which I love. What services does your agency offer and what kinds of clients do you typically work with?
Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, CEO life is probably not as glamorous as some people think, but I have a wonderful staff here. We call them the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing. And as you said, I’m the mama bird, but all of that brand view aside, what we do is create really high quality content for the purpose of lead generation and ultimately revenue generation. We come alongside marketing and sales professionals and say, we want to figure out how to write content that really leverages your expertise, but also is incredibly helpful to your most ideal client. Helpful to help them deal with old problems that are very persistent and new challenges that are emerging. And if you do that, if you spend your marketing budget and your content efforts really helping your most ideal clients solve their problem, then you will build rapport with them. And when you build that rapport, you earn the right to sell them your services. So we do that for other B2B companies, and we happen to specialize in the market research industry. Now, that doesn’t mean all of our clients are in that industry. We happen to just have a concentration there, and I happen to be known in that area. Also, they’re social scientists, just like I am. But we also work for companies that are B2B apps. We work for companies that are B2B insurance and language translators and the like.
Adrian Tennant: So what prompted you to write “Collaboration is the New Competition“?
Priscilla McKinney: I really got ahead of the game so quickly coming into the market research world. And I did it naturally. I did it in ways that were very natural to me. I did it by connecting with people and by saying, I’m not trying to connect one-on-one, have a win-win situation. I wanted to win on a much bigger level. I wanted to get 10 of us in the room and 10 of us win. right, or 10 of us in the room and 20 people win. And so this thinking of mine, I thought was really obvious. And I came into the market research industry in only 2016. And within just a very few short years, I was in demand as a speaker, I was really booking some amazing contracts and had a lot of people asking me, how did you do that so quickly? I’ve been in this industry for two decades or whatever it was. And I thought, well, isn’t this what everybody does? And it’s like really making sense to me that my natural style of going about things where I got built some consensus, not all about consensus, but some consensus. And then I really understood how to network properly to understand everybody else’s problems. And I was able to collaborate successfully. It built a lot of influence for me very quickly. And so when I started realizing through conversations with other people that this was not the norm and that people didn’t know how I did it, I thought maybe I should write down some of these key tenants of how I go about networking. where we are collaborating even with competitors for a bigger win. And so what seemed really obvious to me, I realized through these conversations was not obvious to everybody. So I set out to write “Collaboration is the New Competition” really as a framework so people could understand if they wanted to crib that whole concept from me.
Adrian Tennant: Well, in the book, you discuss the need for a fundamental mindset shift from competition to collaboration. Priscilla, why is this shift needed?
Priscilla McKinney: Oh, that’s a great question, Adrian. And I have to say, forget even what this mindset shift is, I think we know that people’s behaviours do not change until their attitudes change. So we have to get at the attitude. We have to get at the framework. We have to get at that mindset before people can set about doing better work or changing the way that they work and therefore changing their outcomes. So for me, my first half of the book is about the mindset shift where I say, look, I get it. This is the way business has been done in the past, but can you see that it’s already not working? Can’t you see that it’s not effective? And getting people to say, oh, okay, well, collaboration to me means X, Y, Z. And I’m like, no, that’s actually not what it is. Let’s break it down and let’s change your mindset about what collaboration truly is and redefine it, recategorize it and reframe it in your mind. And once we do that, then I can tell you how to work within the framework. But I really think we needed that fundamental mindset shift before we could even get into things. And this is what kind of taps into, I think, a bigger problem in business in general is that people dive into tips and tricks really fast. Here’s a better way for marketing. Here’s a better way for sales. Here’s a better way for lead generation. And it’s all tips and tricks and little tactics. But without the strategy, without the mindset shift, without the larger purpose and that fundamental mindset shift, I don’t think those tips and tricks and tactics are effective at all.
Adrian Tennant: I totally agree that strategy should be the lead. To help illustrate this, could you share an example of a company or a team that successfully made this mindset shift and its impact on their work?
Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, I give a lot of examples in the book, but I’ll give a big shout out right now to Ryan Barry at Zappi. And he’s a colleague of mine that I just absolutely admire. And I see eye to eye about collaboration with. But I talk about a little bit in the book about how he is in a very fiercely competitive world. His companies that he works with, his clients are Coke and McDonald’s and Pepsi and P&G. You know, it’s the big names. It’s the Fortune 100. And some of them are competitors. But you can compete when you do it properly. You can compete and you can collaborate at the same time. In my opinion, true collaboration is not about giving away trade secrets. It’s about sometimes holding them very close to the vest so you can collaborate in particular ways. And so I would call out Ryan Berry at Zappi, the CEO there, because he took the company into a majorly different direction, made a big pivot in which he brought his key clients to a private meeting and basically laid the ground rules for amazing collaboration where they could share best practices as opposed to having to get these learnings all on their own. And there was amazing ground rules that he followed in order to get them collaborating. But I really highlight exactly how he did it in the book. But to me, I see a lot of this kind of collaboration happening with true leadership in many, many different industries.
Adrian Tennant: In the book, you also introduce the concept of Itchy Backs. Priscilla, can you unpack this for us?
Priscilla McKinney: Sure. I think this kind of goes back to the shout out to Ryan Berry to say you can’t unlock new opportunities and outcomes if you’re not willing to change. And if you’re not willing to maybe risk a lot by trying something new and in that. there’s a fundamental need to believe in abundance, that there is enough out here for all of us, as opposed to this concept of scarcity, saying, if I win, you lose. That’s not the world I want to live in. I think there’s something much bigger to live in. And so that kind of brings us to this idea of Itchy Backs. Itchy Backs is one of those tactics, I think, that is really important, that is very, very, very closely related to a mindset shift. It’s not about scarcity, it’s about abundance. So therefore, if I walk into a room, instead of just thinking about what I can get out of it, meaning I have an itchy back, like I’ve got an itch, I can’t quite reach, can someone get it for me? Or I’m always trying to get someone to do something for me. Instead, if I can look around the room and say, well, who else might need their back scratched? Like, where is it that someone can’t reach? What is a persistent problem that they can’t get solved? What is keeping them up on Sunday night? What is maybe even a newly emerging problem that is really stumping them? When you start networking in a way where you’re talking to people, not just for what you can get out of it, but looking for their Itchy Backs. Then you start basically gathering people, you start looking at a room differently, and you start understanding, oh, that’s your need. Okay, that’s your need. Oh, this is your need. And when you start working in that mindset, and with the tactics that are included in Itchy Backs, you start pulling together a lot of needs, a lot of pains, a lot of Itchy Backs. And so from that, you can get a lot of opportunities because you start connecting dots that other people have not connected. So it’s not just you do this for me and I’ll do this for you. But it’s hey, how can I get other people in the room? Just not just me and Adrian. Okay, we’re right now you and I are collaborating. I’m a podcaster, you’re a podcaster, you’re letting me come on your podcast and amplify my thought leadership and my book and my company. But in exchange for what? How can I then give something back to you in exchange and we can collaborate? Well, that’s just you and me. But what if you and I were awake and alive to three or four or five other Itchy Backs in our world? And let’s say you said to me, hey, Priscilla, thank you for coming on my show. But I have two other podcasters who are really looking for great people to interview on theirs. Could you help them? Could you give them some time? And could you, you know, work on getting understanding their audience and bringing something of value value to them. That’s where you say, I’m not just in it for me, but now let’s all collaborate. Maybe all four of us get on a call together and say, okay, what do you need? What do you need? And we start coming together and figuring out how we can solve it for everybody and get everybody a win.
Adrian Tennant: Love that. Could you give us an example of how a company or individual might use the Itchy Back concept to find potential collaborators?
Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, yeah. I’ll give you a really good example that I hear in a lot of different industries. And I do talk about one specific example in the book. But this happens across so many industries that I’ll just lay it out like this. For example, with new young junior staffers coming out of college and coming into a work environment, you have a lot of employers saying, oh, it takes us forever to explain this to them, to get this trained. You know, I can hear all of the, that’s what I’m listening for. What is really exasperating to people? To me, that’s itchy back, right? And so a good example of that is we have an employer complaining about that. It takes forever to bring people up to speed. Then you have a competitor, maybe they’re a larger entity in that same industry, and they’re saying, oh, well, we’re really good. We don’t have a problem training them. Our problem is that we get them all trained. We give them six months, a year, get them totally trained. And then they don’t want to be in this big corporate environment. They take that knowledge and either start their own or they take that training and now go to that small company and get a little bit more of their freedom. But we’ve done all the training. Right. So there’s a over there, too. It’s an exasperation. Then you have over here on a third party, you have an industry association. whatever industry it is that’s saying, hey, we want to bring membership. We want all to collaborate. We want to have meaningful conferences, or we want to be able to disseminate information about our industry and make it better and maybe have some standards and best practices. And they’re thinking, yeah, but we can’t get people to come to the event or read the content. We want to really drive membership, right? These seem to be completely unrelated problems and everybody’s just going to have to go solve them themselves. But if you understand the right framework for collaboration, if you do have a mindset of abundance as opposed to scarcity, and you can see that itchy back, you’ve just connected those three dots. What if we bring that small company in, the junior staffer in, what if we bring the large company in, and we bring the association together and say, guys, how are we going to solve this together? Listen, hold some cards close to the vest. That’s fine. We’re not giving away trade secrets. But couldn’t we suspend some of that for just a little bit and have maybe a short-term, maybe a long-term partnership of collaboration? But could we solve this? Could the industry instead provide some training to equalize this experience on both sides and people can really find the right company, the right size, the right experience that they want for their career and stay put a little bit longer? This is good for everybody. And so when companies really attack their problems as if they’re the only people who are experiencing this, this is a lot like, Adrienne, I got to tell you, just a little bit of the Americana in a lot of companies I see here. Our Americanism drives this Lone Ranger mentality, or as I call the white snake dilemma, you know, the song, here I go again on my own. So I think companies need to really understand that kind of mentality is not going to work in really a successful, efficient, really a beautiful new future of work. There are opportunities to collaborate with your competitors, with associations, bring in players maybe you hadn’t even seen. But by opening up the conversation, that’s a real tangible way of how you can find really great collaboration partners.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
 | Adrian Tennant: Each month, in partnership with our friends at Kogan Page, the Bigeye Book Club features books by industry thought leaders. Our selection for June is The Creative Thinking Handbook: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Problem-Solving in Business. As an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can save 25 percent on a copy of The Creative Thinking Handbook when you order directly from the publisher at KoganPage.com. Just enter the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25 at checkout. |
Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Priscilla McKinney, the founder and CEO of Little Bird Marketing and the author of “Collaboration is the New Competition”. I know you’re a very popular speaker at conferences. I’m curious, when you’re speaking with folks afterwards, what common mistakes or misconceptions do people have when you’ve spoken about identifying and leveraging Itchybacks opportunities?
Priscilla McKinney: Oh, I love this. I love this. Okay. So my favorite thing to dispel for people is that people think they’re entering into collaboration because they call a meeting. And I like to remind people that is geography. That is not collaboration. Yes, you may have got someone to sit next to you, but that doesn’t mean you’re collaborating with them yet. And I liken it to a lot of people coming and waiting together at a bus stop. You’re all in the same place. You supposedly have the same purpose. You’re going somewhere. You’re doing like things, but you do not have the same destination in mind. And therefore, all you’re going to accomplish is getting on the bus together and having this momentary, quote unquote, togetherness. But you’re not going to arrive to the destination that you want with all of the people, right? You’re not helping anybody get to their destination any better. You’re all just waiting together. And so for me, that’s the biggest thing that comes up is that people kind of are triggered or maybe they’re twitching a little bit because they don’t want to hear from me that they should collaborate because they think they have and it was unsuccessful. And I take that away from them and say, I don’t think that was collaboration. Can you give it another shot using my framework?
Adrian Tennant: Okay, well you’ve given us a little promo there. The Itchy Backs concept is a powerful tool for finding collaboration partners. So now let’s talk about what to do once you’ve identified those partners. And in the book you lay out a step-by-step framework for collaboration. So Priscilla, what are the key components of this framework?
Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, it’s really easy. I really try and break this down to be so simple so that you can just quickly assess it in the moment. The first thing is that everybody involved has to have something to lose and something to gain. And I could go through example after example, but too often this is not set up correctly. Think of every unsuccessful board you’ve ever been a part of. or any committee, like you say the word committee and I’m already like twitching. Like I just don’t enjoy that because typically those have been code words for let’s all get together, pretend we’re working, but really these two people are gonna do all the work. That’s not collaboration, right? The first part of the framework is really assessing. Everybody involved needs to have something to win and something to lose. It is important. Otherwise we’re not really collaborating. The second one is that everybody needs to be willing to show their cards. They have to put the truth out on the table. And again, I don’t mean this is divulging trade secrets. I mean, they need to be honest about what they stand to gain and what they stand to lose out of this. They’ve got to be able to show their cards, because if they aren’t and they’re withholding, then we really don’t know how to work with them over time. We don’t know how to help them win for themselves, which we need to be able to do. And we don’t get clear about what they’re bringing to the table that will help us win. So you have to have that sense of real divulging of intentions. So I would not get involved in a collaboration with someone who was not willing to be honest with me. And then the third thing is really simple. You need to have people in your collaboration who have a will to win. Now, let me clarify about that a little bit. They need to have a drive to win for themselves and for others. And I don’t know about you, but have you been involved in a committee or a supposed collaboration or project or campaign or whatever it is, and you’re stuck with someone who is just taking up space? You know, they’re there, but they’re not there. It’s not worth it. You cannot really create a successful collaboration if someone doesn’t have the drive, the energy, the will, the verb. I don’t care what you call it, but you have to have it there because if they’re not in it to win it for themselves, they are never going to be in it to win it for you or for anybody else in that room. And so do yourself a favor at the beginning, don’t call it a collaboration unless you have all three of those things correct. And that is number one, everybody, everybody who was involved has to have something to win or lose. Number two, they need to be willing to show their hearts. And number three, they got to have some drive to win. That’s the framework anybody can create for me to say, if you’re getting involved or thinking about being involved with someone in a collaboration, ask yourself those quick three things because those are going to be the things that frame you up for real success.
Adrian Tennant: Well, we love examples on it and clear focus. Priscilla, you know I’m going to ask you for one. A company or a team that used your framework to structure a successful collaboration and especially what were the outcomes?
Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, yeah. Okay, I’ll give a great shout out to an amazing colleague and friend, Sarah Kotva. We’d be starting out as colleagues and then became genuine friends because of this mindset, the mindset of generosity, the mindset of abundance. And, you know, I’ll come back to COVID. She was faced with a very, what looked like insurmountable problem. She is executive VP of a company called Fieldwork. And they are an amazing hospitality-driven network of facilities and recruiters for in-person qualitative research. So this is where focus groups are held. Well, as you can imagine during COVID, this face-to-face interaction was not happening. Well, what happens with all of these beautiful facilities all around the world and all of these people recruiting people for in-person research, you know, overnight? This industry takes a very, very big hit. And massive kudos to Sarah Koffa and the Fieldwork team because they are so, so big believers in this generosity mindset and a hospitality framework that they very quickly worked with their competitors. competitors in their field, and I underscore that, competitors, and came to everybody in the industry and said, look, we are all going to go down if we don’t get together and solve this in a much bigger way. And so she was able to use that framework. These were all people who had something to win and something to lose. Hold some cards close to the chest, which are trade secrets, but yet divulge what they needed to for collaboration. and to suspend that for just whatever period of time. But they were able to put cards on the table and talk about what they really needed. They had to be vulnerable and honest about what was going on in their business. And then thirdly, they had to have a drive to when they needed to put something in. So instead of her going out all by herself and hiring me to create a campaign to talk about the value and the importance and what really needed to keep happening for face-to-face research, What could go digital? What could not go digital? Think about medical devices. There’s a lot of things that could not wait, right? Okay, maybe your design of your cocaine or whatever, maybe that can wait. But real pressing things still had to go on, and she knew that. And so she, instead of going it alone, she brought together an amazing group of competitors who were willing to collaborate. And instead, they all threw a smaller piece of money into a pool, pulled their money all together, gave me money to make a really significant campaign that would be that rising tide that lifted all boats. And they have had tremendous success out of it. They started using a hashtag, face-to-face MX, which is about market research being face-to-face. They have had over a hundred thousand uses of that hashtag. The success story is just so huge. They garnered such amazing goodwill. And of course, as things came back, they had done the hard work of really educating the public about what does need to still go on face-to-face in order to keep institutions, companies afloat. And it was such a wonderful example of collaboration at its finest.
Adrian Tennant: I love that example and I will say Fieldwork is an excellent company. They do have a great network.
Priscilla McKinney: It’s just excellence across the board. And that’s where I say, when you are looking for a collaboration partner, be picky, right? So my book is not to say, go collaborate, go collaborate. No, no, no, no, no, no. Careful. Careful who you collaborate with. You don’t have to collaborate with them for the next 20 years. You could collaborate for 20 minutes, or you could collaborate for two weeks. Understand that there’s not necessarily a time period on it. What is important is that you find the right people. And that that’s really what’s going to lend the predisposition towards success is who you choose. And in that way, absolutely, they are really tangible excellence.
Adrian Tennant: In your experience, are there common challenges to implementing this framework and how can they be overcome?
Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges is that people feel funny when they really tell people what they need or ask for help. This gets crazy. And then you add global elements to this and there’s different like personality types involved in this. Let me tell you what I mean by this. So someone starting in a collaboration, you have to get vulnerable at some point and say, Priscilla, what do you need? Well, at some point, I need to have vetted you in some ways where I can tell you, hey, this is where we’re hurting in my company. This is what we really need to solve. So you have to do some, you know, pre-work and some rapport building before you think you want to share this with someone. But there are also personality and maybe politeness and maybe issues at work that keep people from networking in the way that they should to get the opportunities. And some of that can be, hey, I don’t want to divulge something to make my company look bad, which is a good thought. But you need to overcome that if you’re going to collaborate. And so then there’s also the personalities where people say, well, I don’t want to ask Adrian for a favor. And they’ll say to Adrian, oh, yeah, well, let me know if you can help me. That’s so vague. How is Adrian ever gonna help me if I don’t say, hey, Adrian, you know what would really help me with my book is if you had me on your podcast. Why can’t I be honest about that? Why do I have to be ashamed that I’m selling anything? So that really gets in the way. People have any weird senses of shame or maybe politeness or a lack of practice in asking for things. And then the second piece of that is people, if they get over themselves and they ask for favors often, They don’t do the second thing, which is to say, and then Adrian, once you do that for me, what can I do for you? And even better, what if we led with giving, right? So those are the things that hold people back. They kind of get trapped in either this uber polite world or this tit for tat world. And instead, it needs to be more of a fluid opening where people really can get opportunities for much bigger collaborations than they would have even imagined for themselves. But that happens with a different way of talking and a different way of being with each other.
Adrian Tennant: Priscilla, what’s one practical step that brand managers or advertising professionals can take to be more proactive in identifying opportunities for collaboration?
Priscilla McKinney: I think the first thing they need to do is reflect and become more awake and alive to the pain points they’re experiencing every day. And as marketers, we’re very good about writing that up for our audience and for our most ideal clients. But when did we write that up for ourselves? And so if I become more awake and alive to really what are the large problems and then what are the small problems that I’m facing, then when someone does ask me, well, how can I help you, Priscilla? I’m not just deer in headlights. I don’t know No, you’re a legend at all. You need to be prepared with an answer. So I think the first part is just some reflection. Personally, how could someone help me build my career? And then secondly, for my company, how could someone help me build my company? What is it really I need? And there have to be very small tactical things that, like I said before, just being like, we all get this pitch slap on LinkedIn. Hey, Priscilla, nice to meet you. What’s the most pressing problem facing Little Bird Marketing today? Like, man, I don’t even know you. Why on earth am I going to do that? It’s just so inappropriate to the relationship. It’s like asking someone if they want to go home with you within three minutes of the first date. It just feels weird because it is weird. So don’t do the equivalent in business. Right? So I think it’s about being able to really self-reflect and be really in in tune with what it is you need. And then, of course, the next step is to start asking better questions. Well, if I have a competitor, I have a competitor who’s across the pond to me, and we have many times entered into collaborations. But I ask them, well, what do you need to get out of this event? they may need to get something totally different out of the event than I do. And if I don’t ask them, I’m going to assume they needed the same thing that I needed. And so when you don’t ask good questions, then you start maybe even trying to help someone, but you’re helping them for something they don’t even want. So we get better at asking ourselves the questions, and then we get better at asking other people better questions. Then we know what the real needs are, and then we can start collaborating to work to achieve those.
Adrian Tennant: What do you hope readers will take away from your book?
Priscilla McKinney: I hope they get the message that not only do you not have to do it alone, but honestly, you can’t do it alone anymore. So quit trying.
Adrian Tennant: Priscilla, if listeners would like to learn more about your book, “Collaboration is the New Competition“, or Little Bird Marketing, what’s the best way to contact you?
Priscilla McKinney: Well, we do try and be overtly helpful all the time. So at littlebirdmarketing.com/resources, I have all kinds of freebies. So maybe you’re not the perfect fit for us and for what we provide. But there might be some knowledge that we have that would help you take the next step. And we just have tons of free things out there. And we are just not salesy people. So go take what you need. There are lots of resources that can help you in the next step on your journey. And then, of course, my book’s on Amazon, so very easy to find. And if you do read it or you do pass it on to someone, I would appreciate an Amazon review. That would be one great way of helping build a rapport between us. It’s that tiny micro-collaboration, right?
Adrian Tennant: You have something coming up for market researchers later this year. Go on, tell us about it, Priscilla.
Priscilla McKinney: I have things going on all the time. And I got to tell you, I just volunteered. Everybody’s got to pay their dues, man. But there’s the Insights Career Network, and I’ll give them a shout-out. They’re basically a collaboration of people who are out of work in the insights industry, and they have a really awesome LinkedIn group. They have meetings. And so I went on and I gave them about a half an hour of knowledge that I have about how to successfully use LinkedIn as a social influencer in the B2B world. And so I gave people tangible steps and this mindset shift about how they could maybe approach LinkedIn a little bit differently. And so there’s always things like that I’m looking to do. I work with women in research and I’m a part of that exec team and trying to always lead with giving, you know, actually teach a module on the accelerate program, which is by the way, free to join women in research.org. And there’s always something coming on. And then in October, we do our annual Insights Marketing Day, where companies who really need to focus on the marketing of a market research company can stop working in the business for the day and come step out and work on the business and really get content marketing, lead gen, web applications, thought leadership, understand what the tools of the trades are in marketing. So that is in October, that’s in Chicago, and you can find that at Insights Marketing Day. And yes, we would love to have you. So check out that website, insightsmarketingday.com.
Adrian Tennant: Great conversation. Priscilla, thank you very much for being our guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Priscilla McKinney: Adrian, such a pleasure. Thank you so much for giving up your time and collaborating with me in this way.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Priscilla McKinney, the author of “Collaboration is the New Competition.. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at bigeyeagency.com. Just select Insights from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00: Bigeye’s Retail Revolution Study
01:14: Introduction
02:08: Guest Introduction: Priscilla McKinney
03:03: Priscilla McKinney’s Background and Marketing Career
04:48: Little Bird Marketing Services and Clientele
06:30: Priscilla’s Motivation for Writing “Collaboration is the New Competition”
08:18: The Need for a Mindset Shift from Competition to Collaboration
11:53: Introduction to the Itchy Backs Concept
14:56: Example of Using the Itchy Backs Concept for Collaboration
18:13: Sponsorship Message: The Creative Thinking Handbook
19:38: Common Mistakes in Identifying Collaboration Opportunities
21:31: Key Components of Priscilla’s Collaboration Framework
24:19: Example of Successful Collaboration Using the Framework
27:47: Importance of Selecting the Right Collaboration Partners
28:32: Common Challenges to Implementing the Collaboration Framework
30:36: Practical Steps for Identifying Collaboration Opportunities
33:12: Contact Information for Priscilla McKinney and Little Bird Marketing
34:00: Upcoming Events for Market Researchers
35:34: Conclusion and Thank You
