The unmissable playbook to max your influence as a marketer

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes. 

00:03 
Dom Hawes 
Welcome to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. I'm your host, Dom Hawes, and this is a podcast about the practice of marketing, how it creates value, who's doing it well, and how marketing helps businesses win the future. Last week we spoke to Charlote Lander from Standard Chartered bank about how leaders like you are expected to have a professional sociatl media presence. Today's culture and societal expectation is that leaders cultivate their personal brand as a human expression of the businesses they work for. Now, we all know about the importance of thought leadership. It's been one of the principal tactics of communications agencies for decades and decades. You know, when I was cutting my own teeth in this business in the mid 90s, we used to sell thought leadership.  

 
00:54 
Dom Hawes 
It's not new, but back then we had far fewer owned media opportunities, by which I mean were either at the mercy of journalists to print our opinion pieces or we had to pay to print and post papers. It was only the super senior execs therefore, that were put on a pedestal to promote and position their business. Then in the early noughties, something fundamental changed and that's where today's guest had his epiphany that led him to write his first book. Now, I read that book in around 2012 or 2013 and I've read all of his published works since. He is, in my opinion, the leading thinker in this country and beyond on the subject of entrepreneurialism. Today we're all expected to bring an entrepreneurial attitude and a personal brand to work. It's our added value as a marketer. You are your business's internal entrepreneur.  

 
01:51 
Dom Hawes 
So pin your ears back and get ready to meet Daniel Priestley, author of Key Person of Influence, 24 Assets, oversubscribed entrepreneur revolution and scorecard. Now, I think his observations and intuition are going to blow you away. We had such a good talk that I've split our conversation now into two parts. To make them easier to digest, we're going to publish them across two weeks on the main podcast platforms. But if you do want to follow straight on with part two, you're going to find it ungated on the blog at Unicorny Co. UK. And we've linked that in the show notes broadly. Today we're going to talk to Daniel about his book, Key person of Influence, KPI as it's known, and it's about how you establish yourself or your colleagues as business influencers. We cover a lot more too, but that's the main thrust.  

 
02:41 
Dom Hawes 
Then in week two or part two, we talk about his book 24 Assets, which is more about how you develop the digital assets your business needs to win the future. And he also saves a proper mind fry that frames the importance of everything we discuss. But he does it right at the end of part two. This is how my conversation with Daniel Priestley went down. Although we've never met, I feel I've known you for years, Daniel, because I've followed your work since you first published key person of influence, and I've learned loads from that book. And actually the others you've written now, we're going to come back to those later today, but why don't you first give us a brief overview of your backstory.  

 
03:24 
Daniel Priestley 
Sure. I'm an entrepreneur and author. I started my first company 20 something years ago when I was 21 years old in Australia. You can hear I've got a bit of an Australian twang and I've built and sold several different companies over the last 20 years and written, I think, four books and co authored four books as well, and passionate about entrepreneurship, business growth, trends, all of those sorts of things. I'm a father of three little kids, live here in London at the moment. I've got a group of eight companies that I run. So we've got a tech company that's a very fast growth tech company. We've got one of the biggest publishers in the UK, a really significant training accelerator business that is global. We've had four and a half thousand companies come through our accelerator program, which is a year long program.  

 
04:11 
Daniel Priestley 
And yeah, there's some other businesses in there as well. So I guess you could say I'm all things entrepreneurship up to my elbows in entrepreneurs and fast growth and strategy and all of that sort of stuff.  

 
04:23 
Dom Hawes 
Perfect, right. Key person of influence, or KPI as it's known, was your first book. And I think you wrote that in 2009, didn't you?  

 
04:31 
Daniel Priestley 
Yeah.  

 
04:31 
Dom Hawes 
You say? Yeah, and first published in 2010. So it's written 15 years ago. But it struck me that was written in exactly the same kind of financial downturn that we're now experiencing.  

 
04:41 
Daniel Priestley 
Yeah, it was one heck of a downturn. Yeah.  

 
04:44 
Dom Hawes 
This time around it's hard. I don't think it's as bad as then. I think most businesses are experiencing a gentle descent. They're not experiencing the kind of free.  

 
04:51 
Daniel Priestley 
Fall that we did in 2008, 2009.  

 
04:54 
Dom Hawes 
But the thinking that led to and the experience that led to that content is so relevant now. And so we're going to talk today about principally, I think, two pieces of your work, KPI and 24 assets. We may bring some others in, but we'll see how we go. Let's start at the beginning with KPI. I'm going to just talk about some of the key concepts that you talk about in the beginning of the book. And I'm more interested, I guess, to hear about how you think rather than necessarily, specifically the content of the book. That was 15 years ago. You've done a hell of a lot since then. What led you to write the book? Key person of influence?  

 
05:29 
Daniel Priestley 
I'll quickly set the scene. So around that time, Barack Obama had run the 2008 Obama campaign, and he had done something significant that no one had done before, which was he'd really gotten himself into social media in a big way. And he had this campaign called Obama everywhere, where you could connect with him on Twitter and you could connect with him on YouTube and all of this. And I started piecing bits of puzzle pieces together around that time. So the Obama thing was very significant because everyone at that moment had a shift in their thinking from, this is a silly thing that teenagers do to this is a serious tool.  

 
06:05 
Dom Hawes 
Right?  

 
06:05 
Daniel Priestley 
So that was the first sort of moment. I was already aware that presidential elections are really good predictors of big trends. So if you go back right back to, I think it. It might have been Roosevelt anyway, it'll come to me. But did the fireside chats. And that was the first time national radio had been used in a US presidential election. And it signified the shift from print to radio. And then 60 was the Nixon versus JFK debate. And that was a live televised debate, and JFK won it. And that was the significant moment where television overtook radio. These kind of like moments where these things happen. And Obama everywhere with his social media campaign signified that were going into the social media age. So that happened.  

 
06:51 
Daniel Priestley 
Now, what was interesting about my background, relevant to that, is I'd spent ten years working with celebrities and authors and professional speakers, and I knew their business model really well, like behind the scenes. That was my whole world. And I knew how they built their personal brands. I knew how they monetized their personal brands. I knew how they leveraged their personal brands. All of that sort of stuff was my whole wheelhouse, my background. And I kind of had this epiphany moment where I went, everyone's going to do this. Like, everyone is going to use these tools to build a personal brand. They're going to have to build that, and it's going to be important and you won't be able to survive without it.  

 
07:27 
Daniel Priestley 
The magic is in building this personal brand and look at the influence and impact that you can have with this, and there's no gatekeeper. Anyone can do it. So that was kind of like the epiphany moment. And I'm like, I'm just going to write what I know, which is the business model of these celebrities, authors, speakers, and I'm just going to kind of get that out there.  

 
07:45 
Dom Hawes 
At that time, I was probably following a couple of those celebrity speakers, and I was fascinated by that kind of builder herd and then monetized their model. It's not so different, of course, than the commercial world, where you build a customer base and then try to satisfy demand. But there are some good observations, I think. So, firstly, I think that's an extraordinary observation, that presidential elections are a predictor of what's to come.  

 
08:06 
Daniel Priestley 
Fast forward to 2016. And we had this issue with Cambridge Analytica, and Cambridge Analytica was with Trump and Brexit, and what they did is, like, full on data analytics. And since then has been a massive transformation in marketing to data analytics, where marketing has data analytics at its absolute core. And it's interesting that election signified the data analytics movement had begun. And what are we going to see in the next presidential election? We're going to see the influence of AI.  

 
08:34 
Dom Hawes 
AI.  

 
08:35 
Daniel Priestley 
So the 2024 election is going to be the AI. Think of US presidential elections as like the Formula One of marketing, exactly where.  

 
08:43 
Dom Hawes 
They road test what's coming next.  

 
08:44 
Daniel Priestley 
Big budgets, high stakes, cutthroat, and they road test new tech.  

 
08:49 
Dom Hawes 
So vitality, in a person, vitality is much more important than functionality. Talk to me about that.  

 
08:54 
Daniel Priestley 
Yeah. So, in the industrial age, we needed people to be functional. So think about this idea of component labor. Component labor is that you can basically get trained up in a set of skills and then plug those skills into an industrial workforce. And normally it's local geography. So you go to school in a local geography, you then come out of school, and then somewhere within a few miles, you join a workforce and your skills plug into that. It's all about functionality. What's happening more and more as we progress is that the functional work is automated by technology. And as we go into this AI revolution, it's going to be game over, for human functionality is losing its value very rapidly. So the best doctor you've ever met is an AI. The best lawyer you've ever met will be an AI.  

 
09:39 
Daniel Priestley 
The best accountant and auditor will be AI led, the best coder and developer. I hate to say it, but even marketing people are going to get.  

 
09:48 
Dom Hawes 
I have a theory about this.  

 
09:49 
Daniel Priestley 
Okay, come back to it. So a lot of the functionality is going to be completely automated. So then vitality is what humans are actually naturally pretty good at. In fact, we beat it out of the kids in school. And that is the ability to disrupt and be humorous and attention seek and form coalitions and enroll people in ideas. So the word vitality has two meanings in the dictionary, which is life force and irreplaceable. So if you're vital, you're irreplaceable. If you're vital, you're a life force. So you're the irreplaceable life force. So if you think, well, what is the irreplaceable life force? Work that needs to be done. And that is the work that humans are doing in the future.  

 
10:31 
Daniel Priestley 
That is the difference between a key person of influence, they're doing the work of an irreplaceable life force for the business or the organization. They're bringing something to life. And it's an important distinction that it's not a replaceable functional component, it's something that energizes the whole.  

 
10:45 
Dom Hawes 
I get that and I totally buy into it, by the way. So my theory is that the people who are most vulnerable to AI are the most productive people, because the functional you're talking about needs people who are very dedicated and very productive. If you're a lazy marketer like me, who likes ideas and doing bad things, AIn't going to replace it anytime soon. So I think lazy people are probably a little bit safer. I say lazy and inverted comments.  

 
11:10 
Daniel Priestley 
I think you're onto something because a doctor is someone who's repeated something over and over. Functionality has a lot of repetition to it, and vitality has a lot of freshness and newness to it. So I think what you're saying is that if you're lazy, quote unquote, you're leaving space for vitality, you're leaving space for energy. That human intuition, that creativity, it's hard to say, right? So I get the hunch. It's hard to say because AI tends to have some pretty good intuition as well. Like it's quite amazing. Some of the things it comes out with. It's doing some good art, it's doing.  

 
11:42 
Dom Hawes 
Some good music, and it's the worst it's ever going to be right now, right this minute.  

 
11:47 
Daniel Priestley 
Yeah, today it's scary.  

 
11:48 
Dom Hawes 
But from the point of a key person of influence and trying to build a personal brand, I get that function is not important, vitality is. Which brings us on to, I think it sort of dovetails with one of the other observations that you had. And bear in mind, this is written 15 years ago, and I think part of it's enabled by the digital revolution. But you had a heading in there saying a career is old technology. And I just loved that so much. And never more prescient than literally right now in post COVID, where if someone doesn't like a job, they just leave. In fact, they don't even worry about it. I really dislike job titles. I think they put people in boxes. They're very functional, I think. And I much prefer to think in terms of roles, like, how are you helping?  

 
12:27 
Dom Hawes 
What are you doing? How are you helping? Add value. And I've always said I want people to bring more than their time to work. If all you're doing is bringing time to work, I can replace that in offshore or AI or I can automate it. So I want people to come to work with a personal brand because that's the value add. When you were writing that 15 years ago that, like, career is an old technology, did you see that kind of digital native piece coming?  

 
12:51 
Daniel Priestley 
Well, I was imagining it as almost the Hollywood model. So the Hollywood model is that we all get together, we make a film, and then we go our separate ways. And then you are signed to a new project, and you say, oh, I've worked with Daniel before. He's good, so let's bring him into this project. And the teams form and complete a project, and then they disintegrate, and then they reform around different projects, and they disintegrate. And who gets to be on the team? It's the people who've got great personal brands. So we need Spielberg for that, right? That's a movie about deep sea, something. We need James Cameron. So people get used to the idea that there's these personal brands and they all start working together.  

 
13:32 
Daniel Priestley 
Ultimately, you think about it like there's a talent pool, and then there'S projects that spring up, and the most appropriate talent gets brought into the project. What we now see with Uber is a really good example of this. So there's the talent pool. Think of it as a talent pool of drivers, and they're just circling around London, and then a new project arises and a piece of technology says, oh, I wonder who would be the most appropriate person to assign to this. Oh, so and so is four minutes away. So let's send them over there. So that person forms around that project, and then they complete that project, and then they go back to the talent pool, and then the computer algorithm says, oh, wait a second, I think there's another project that you should be on. And they actually build a personal brand.  

 
14:13 
Daniel Priestley 
And what I mean by that is, how many stars have they gotten? How is their car rated? How's their service rated? So they end up building up a quantifiable brand. Now, I personally think where we're going is even further beyond that. So the old mindset around companies, organizations is that they look like pyramids and that a career path is essentially grinding it out and spending a lot of time to work your way up the pyramid. As people drop off the sides or something like that, you get to move on up. So that model is a piece of technology that humans invented, which is a good piece of technology if you don't have any other software systems that could help. Right? So it's kind of like, well, how do we judge where you fit in the hierarchy?  

 
14:54 
Daniel Priestley 
How long you been around, and how many advocates have you got? How much grinding it out have you got? And it's very intuitive based, and it's based on kind of hierarchy of tribes and all of that. Now, imagine a different way of thinking about the workforce. Imagine that an organization is pinned between an origin story, a history, a set of values that it has and a history that it has, and a vision of where it sees itself in the future. And in the middle is this steel thread of missions, these things that have to happen. And what happens is a talent pool jumps up, forms around a mission, completes the mission, jumps back in the talent pool, jumps up, completes a mission, goes back in the talent pool, and this just goes on and on.  

 
15:36 
Daniel Priestley 
And that talent pool may work for multiple organizations, but an organization is not a pyramid of people. It's a vision, a mission, and an origin story. And people, they contextualize where they fit within those points, and then they come together to complete missions, and then they go back into the talent pool. And I see that as being a much more realistic view of the future.  

 
15:58 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, me too. And I don't think the driver for more businesses adopting this kind of approach is necessarily the business itself. Of course, business wants to be more flexible and agile, especially during times of uncertainty, when sales are a lot more volatile. But we're also living through a time of cultural change, too. And the ambitions and expectations of the people who do the work in businesses are changing. Where a colleague understands and can project their vitality for a business, they've got a much bigger say in how the engagement works. If careers are old technology, so are employment contracts. In the book you advise, and I think in your training, you advise people to niche down to find a very highly specific thing they can dominate. Technology was sort of the enabler that allowed people to do that niching down.  

 
16:48 
Dom Hawes 
Can you explain a little bit of the thinking around about why that happened? Is that accelerating now, post COVID, we've.  

 
16:55 
Daniel Priestley 
Always existed within niches, but the default niche is geographical closeness. So if I wanted to stand out as an accountant for most of the last couple of hundred years, I'd just be the local accountant, the person down the road. So my niche is that I'm in Wimbledon, right? And that immediately gives me an advantage over someone who is in Putney and even more so over someone in Fulham, right? Because I'm just that little bit closer. So these are geographical niches. And for most of human history, we like the idea of being a local champion, local club champion, the local butcher, baker, candlestick maker. So we already know how this works when there's geography. The thing that technology does, digital technology, is it changes some fundamental things about how society is organized. So for starters, it removes geography.  

 
17:40 
Daniel Priestley 
Anything that's digital is everywhere, all at once. It also gets rid of wear and tear, right? So anything that's digital can be accessed millions and millions of times and lose no quality. It also gets rid of the need for synchronicity. Anything that's digital will be available now, tomorrow, in ten years, and it'll be exactly the same. So time, wear and tear and geographical boundaries get lifted. So therefore, you have to ask the question, well, how do we organize ourselves? Well, we organize ourselves based on niches, values, purpose, vision, mission, origin, story. These types of things, these intangible assets become the defining marks. Now, some people hate the word niche, or niche, if they were in the US, here's a better word, or another word that most people find more palatable. Think about it as just a campaign.  

 
18:26 
Daniel Priestley 
So a campaign is like, if you think when Nike launched, they launched with a campaign for running shoes, and they were very focused on running shoes. As soon as they did that, they went into tennis shoes and then they went into basketball shoes, and then they went into all sorts of other things. So these are just campaigns. They're campaigning to say that they're good at this. Know, you get someone like Simon Sinek, who campaigns for start with Y, and he becomes the start with Y guy. And then he campaigns for leaders eat last, and he campaigns for this servant leadership model. And he's really just on a campaign that lasts several years around start with Y, and then he morphs into an additional campaign. And that is still his personal brand. People accept that.  

 
19:07 
Daniel Priestley 
They think of it as a logical conclusion or a logical extension. So we're just campaigning. We're essentially putting a flag up and saying, hey, I'm really good at this particular thing. I'm focused on it. I'm passionate about it.  

 
19:24 
Dom Hawes 
Oh, boy. How good is this stuff? Wow, I'm knackered. Let's take a short break to recap what we have heard. Now, I don't think I've met anyone who has a better understanding of the entrepreneurial mindset. And it's that mindset that makes most marketers the people they are. We opened the show talking about vitality, being the person that brings irreplaceable life force to work. It's a bit of a tongue twist of that, but doesn't it sound like what you have to do each and every day? I think it does. I think you are a key person of influence in your business. We also touched on the Hollywood model where teams are assembled around tasks and then dissolved when they're done. That kind of sounds like the client agency relationship under a master service agreement to me. Well, sort of.  

 
20:17 
Dom Hawes 
Right now, one of the ways you're transforming your department to deliver more for less is probably reducing the fixed nature of your talent pool. But I know we certainly are looking to increase our own flexibility to handle the volatility we're seeing in sales. So Daniel's view on the career being outdated technology is extremely prescient. And I don't think we've even yet seen the beginning of this idea, because it's pretty easy to see that as the commercial pressures on all of us tighten, we're going to keep reducing the fixed overhead. So getting ahead of the curve and thinking about more flexible resourcing. Now, that kind of makes sense. We also talked about the importance of niching down, or the idea that you can campaign your thought leadership to establish yourself as a key person of influence.  

 
21:07 
Dom Hawes 
Now, the concept of campaigning, of course, won't be lost on you because it's what you do. But how do you pick the content matter for your first campaign? Well, I was speaking earlier this week to another future guest for Unicorny, the amazing Jeffrey Moore, international technology marketing guru. And were talking actually about, well, a slightly different subject, but the answer is the same, you, niche down. Now, I'm sure you're going to know his bowling alley concept from crossing the chasm, the concept of which is you start out in one very specific market, which he calls a beachhead. Once you've dominated that market, you then look to the next two markets. And he uses the bowling pin analogy because your beachhead, if you like, is the lead pin of a bowling pin setup at your ten bowling lane.  

 
21:57 
Dom Hawes 
And then once you've dominated that, you move on to the next pins the pyramid, if you like. So one is selling new products to an existing market, and the other is selling the same product to a new but connected market. Now, the bowling alley in this instance reminds us that owning territory, whether that be ideological and opinion or physical, starts by owning a small territory and then growing out from there. So you need to niche down to become the expert in a small territory and then grow your platform out from there. Coming up, we're going to look in a little bit more detail at the Playbook Daniel uses to create key persons of influence. It is your playbook for reestablishing your vitality with your peers.  

 
22:44 
Dom Hawes 
But first, I asked Daniel whether he thought the right starting niche for marketers who want to become a KPI was the niche their business is already trying to dominate. Here's what he said.  

 
22:58 
Daniel Priestley 
It shouldn't feel like something you get stuck on. It's not like you're cementing your feet to this particular square. I think the reason people like the word campaigning rather than niching is niching feels like you're stuck. Campaigning feels like you're on the move. I think of it as having a very clear couple of next steps and getting known for something and then broadening that out. Yeah, absolutely.  

 
23:21 
Dom Hawes 
So I think one of the other interesting things about niching or niche market is particularly for entrepreneurs that aren't necessarily versed in the concept. It's like, but what about everything else? I can't say no to it. Whereas campaigning, I think, gives the impression that you're after that. But if something else comes in through the side door, hey, we'll take it.  

 
23:37 
Daniel Priestley 
Thank you very much. We might be open to.  

 
23:40 
Dom Hawes 
So let's go on to look at the method a little bit. There's a five stage method that you outline in the book, the first of which is the pitch, and it being really important to be able to understand and articulate. Talk to me some more about the process of working out what your pitch is going to be.  

 
23:56 
Daniel Priestley 
Well, let's talk about a few things first. If you're an executive or a leader, you really need to understand why the hell are you going to build a personal brand at all? I'll quickly cover this, because a lot of leaders think of this as a colossal waste of time. And they're sort of saying, well, what objectives does it meet? The big objectives for a business leader is the ability to acquire talent. Right? Talented people want to work with a key person of influence. And the reason that you might go and join Iris Software is because you really like the blogs written by the CEO alone. And you go, okay, yeah, I might not see her very often, but I want to be part of that organization. So it's the accessing talent. The next one would be capital.  

 
24:40 
Daniel Priestley 
So investors get excited about key people of influence. That person who's got a trusted brand, they've got a reputation to uphold. Investors love that. They flock around that. And then speed to market is the kind of the other side which we've been talking about, which is getting things out to market. But it's not just speed to market. Speed to market is important, but there's those other two things that are there as well. But a great example of speed to market is you take someone like Elon Musk, who says, hey, we're going to do this cybertruck. It's three years away, but if you want to put down $100 deposit, you can reserve one. And everyone wets their pants and says, okay, great, I'll count me in. So that is speed to market. Like, what other car company could sell a million cars that don't exist?  

 
25:23 
Daniel Priestley 
It's the personal brand that is the glue that makes that happen. So the first thing is I want to kind of make sure that anyone listening is enrolled in this idea, that this is not some waste of time. This is getting your most important objectives met in very real ways, at speed, with less hassle and less consultants and less spend. So the first step in the method is constructing a great pitch. There's a few things about pitching that are important. Number one, you want to start enrolling people into new ideas, new ways of behaving. So a pitch is about enrollment. It's about getting someone who woke up this morning not thinking about this particular thing to go to bed at night thinking about it. That's what a pitch is about.  

 
26:04 
Daniel Priestley 
You think back to those days where you might have seen Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone, and you woke up that morning not knowing what an iPhone was, and you went to bed that night thinking, I've got to have one, right?  

 
26:14 
Dom Hawes 
Do you remember it?  

 
26:15 
Daniel Priestley 
Yeah, I remember it well. So that's a great pitch. You also might have heard a business leader talking about a trend, and you go, oh, wow, I'd never thought about it like that. I want to be part of that trend. So in some way, they've enrolled you in something, they've gotten you thinking differently about something. And ever so often, you just get these people who have that power. I heard one recently, a guy called James who runs Client Earth, and it's a law firm dedicated to protecting the environment. And he talks about the power of the legal system to protect environments and that you can sue on behalf of the forest and you can sue on behalf of the ocean. And it was like, wow, that's really cool.  

 
26:57 
Daniel Priestley 
And I suddenly wanted to raise money for client Earth, and I bought 200 copies of the book and I gave them to people I knew and all this sort of stuff. So here I was, not thinking at all about legal rights of the environment. And then I hear his pitch and I go, oh, I want to buy 200 copies of the book and give it away. So the first part is about enrollment. What are you enrolling people in? So you've Got to make a decision. What ideas and behaviors do I want people to change? How do I want people to think different? How do I want them to behave different? The second part of pitching is to groups. So you might be good at enrolling people one to one, but you need to start thinking, how do I do this with groups?  

 
27:34 
Daniel Priestley 
How do I do 250 people at a time? How do I do 1000 people at a time? How do I get a million people at a time? So I was on a podcast with this guy called Ali Abdal. In the first few months, like a million people watched this. So it's 2 hours of my time, and a million people watch it. And I get flooded with all these people who have changed their mind on entrepreneurship. So that is this ability to change people's minds at scale. So you're thinking about, how do I pitch to groups? If we think about, like, typical year has 250 work days, if you were to talk to four brand new people every single day, which would be pretty hard to do, one to one, you'd only get to 1000 people in a year.  

 
28:16 
Daniel Priestley 
Whereas you could be one stage and be in front of 1000 people. You could be one podcast and be in front of 1000 people. So you need to be able to do this, not just enrollment of new ideas and behavior, but doing that to groups. That's the first thing you need to figure out.  

 
28:31 
Dom Hawes 
So, funny you mentioned scale, because just this morning on the way in, one of your posts popped into my feed on LinkedIn, and you were on stage at an event in front of 1500 people talking about score app, and I listened to your pitch through my earbuds. And when I got to work, I sent Nicola, our producer, a link to that LinkedIn saying, you need to see this. We could use this for the podcast.  

 
28:54 
Daniel Priestley 
There you go. That's the example. Well, there were 1500 people in the audience. I'm pretty sure none of them woke up that morning saying, I need to get a scorecard campaign set up. And by the end of that day, 400 had already set up their first campaign.  

 
29:06 
Dom Hawes 
Wow.  

 
29:07 
Daniel Priestley 
So that was great. And then I put it on video and put it on what you saw on LinkedIn. I think 20,000 people have watched it.  

 
29:13 
Dom Hawes 
Have they really?  

 
29:14 
Daniel Priestley 
Yeah. And I think a few hundred people have actually already set up a campaign off the back of it. This is the idea of pitching to groups, enrolling people in new ideas, and getting out to groups.  

 
29:23 
Dom Hawes 
Personally, I understand the importance of having that kind of influence, and certainly in my role I should be. But finding that pitch, and I think understanding the difference between, it's not about what you're saying to an individual. You've got to have something that's going to change people's minds at scale.  

 
29:38 
Daniel Priestley 
Yeah, well, because this is the thing. If you're talking to an individual, you can ask them questions and you can find out what their hot buttons are. The difference with pitching is if you're pitching to a group, you got to figure out universal hot buttons, and that's.  

 
29:48 
Dom Hawes 
What allows you to scale.  

 
29:49 
Daniel Priestley 
Yeah, that does.  

 
29:51 
Dom Hawes 
So what else is there? They're all P's.  

 
29:52 
Daniel Priestley 
I think they're all P's. The next one's publish. So publishing a book, a lot of people are going to say, oh, but what about in the age of AI? Well, all the top AI people are publishing books this year, so they know the power of books. Right? Authority, author, it's very much tied up. I'm a big believer that you don't necessarily try and sell books, you should just give them away. So when I work with executives, we get them to write a book, but then we give away 1000 copies a year. That does wonders. There's something that happens called Book Magic, where you give away 1000 copies of the book and hundreds of thousands of pounds come in just magically, which is great. And then signature products. So I'm a big believer in creating products that are signature products, like Porsche 911, Fender Stratocaster.  

 
30:37 
Daniel Priestley 
So these are the signature products that you need to create, which are going to be the enduring, iconic, named products that people associate to your brand, the Apple iPhone and iPad. Creating that ecosystem of signature products, raising profile is the fourth one, I'm a believer that you will probably encounter big opportunities that will go ahead if you Google well and not go ahead if you don't Google well. When someone Googles your name tends to be three things that happen. Could be negative, so you could actually have a situation where you've got the same name as a serial killer in Florida or nothing. It's tumbleweeds. It could be confusing, or it could be negative, as in, like, people are complaining and you've done nothing to address. It could be confusing, as in serial killer.  

 
31:27 
Daniel Priestley 
Or it could be really positive that you look like a key person of influence, in which case the big deal goes ahead. And then the final one is partnerships. So I don't think we've got time to do everything. We need to partner with those who are good at what they do, and we need to look at those multiplier partnerships where three times three is nine and my value times your distribution. You make more money because you've got a hot product going through an existing channel. I make more money because I've got my hot product going through an existing channel. So we both win. So it's this idea of teaming up and structuring great partnerships and great deals. I love the saying that somebody woke up this morning with the thing that you need, so go partner with them.  

 
32:10 
Daniel Priestley 
You want money in the business, someone woke up with that, you want time. Someone woke up with free time. You want fame, someone's famous and they want to endorse something, whatever it is you think you would need, partner.  

 
32:20 
Dom Hawes 
So those are the five P's. Anyone that wants to find out more about them, they can Google them because I know there'll be loads of stuff on Google. Or they can even go and buy the book. Exactly. Buy the book and read it. It's a good read. Told you it was going to be good. I hope you enjoyed listening to that as much as I enjoyed recording it. Daniel's a truly remarkable man. He seems to see things that others don't. Now, as usual, you're going to find some takeaways and a timeline for this episode on the show notes. You'll find a bridge show notes on the pod platforms, but you'll find full show notes at Unicorny Co. UK.  

 
32:54 
Dom Hawes 
I was really taken with Daniel's observation that vitality is a defining characteristic of the best and brightest in business, he called it, and it's a tongue twister. The irreplaceable life force. Who wouldn't want to be that? Key? Persons of influence, it turns out, are attractors, they have a gravitational pull. That means they can do things others can't. What his book KPI seeks to do is help anyone with the diligence to apply his technique develop that gravitational pull. He was clear to point out that the vitality and irreplaceability isn't at a functional level. It energizes the whole. And you know, that sounds like the job of a marketer to me, to energize the whole. Next we looked at the Hollywood studio model. I'm sure you're already familiar with that when you think about the flexible resourcing model in functional or process oriented terms.  

 
33:52 
Dom Hawes 
I hinted at this in the mid roll, you kind of get in house agency, offshore and freelance, or a mix of some or all of the other. I think what KPI does is bring a focus to that, though, because at a time when we're all trying to do more with less, and you can't really take risks, building a reputation for being a KPI in a particular field is going to bring enormous power to you, but you have to choose your field and then you have to know how to project your power. Equally. If you're trying to build a team to get things done, you are going to favor people who lean into the concept of KPI because they're the ones you're going to trust to be the experts.  

 
34:31 
Dom Hawes 
Now, in the second half of today's show, we lent into the model a little bit more and we looked at the five P's Daniel details in his book. Those are pitch, publish, product profile and partnership. What struck me most today, and it was an aha moment for me, is the pitch. As you develop your own pitch, you need to be very clear about what ideas or behaviors you want to change in people. When your audience goes to bed, what do you want them to think differently about from their waking state? That's such a simple and clear benchmark for an effective pitch and that concept to say, am I making someone think differently? And if you're not, change your pitch. That's really powerful.  

 
35:23 
Dom Hawes 
I had to edit out there was a long moment of silence after he said that because I was literally lost for words in the second part of this episode, which is available now on the blog at Unicorny Co. UK. Or you can wait for it to be published on the platforms next week. We look at 24 assets. While today was about you, 24 Assets is about your business. It offers a novel way of thinking about planning, building and exploiting the digital assets you need to build to help your business create value. Daniel also drops a properly mind blowing metaphor for AI and the impact it's going to have on us all. And that metaphor serves to highlight how important the things we've talked about today are. And by the way, the second part of this episode is no different.  

 
36:12 
Dom Hawes 
Now remember, if you don't want to wait to listen, you can find it right now on the blog page listed on the show notes. But for now, that's all we have time for. If you've enjoyed the show, why not hit follow? We'd love you to rate or review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It only takes a few seconds, but it does mean an awful lot to us. Or if it's easier for you, please recommend us to a friend or post on LinkedIn. Tagging at Unicorny I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nichola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor-McAllister is production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor, and Ornella Weston and me, Dom Hawes, are your writers. You have been listening to Unicorny, which is a Selbey Anderson production.