The Indispensable Marketer
Become the marketer your CEO can't run the business without.
You bring the CEO a plan. The numbers aren't bad. You're still explaining yourself instead of leading.
That's the Trust Gap. The work comes back wrong, results stall, and neither of you can say why. It's why talented marketers get treated like a vending machine instead of the architect of growth.
The Indispensable Marketer is hosted by Disruptive Advertising for marketing leaders at $3M-$50M scale-ups done managing perception and ready to build real authority. Every episode runs on VSET: Vision, Strategy, Execution, Team, the framework behind the Indispensable Marketer book and Assessment. Closing the Trust Gap is a skill you can learn, prove, and measure.
Some weeks it's a solo teaching on extracting real Vision. Other weeks it's a conversation with a leader who closed their own Trust Gap and can tell you what it cost.
We turn away most prospective clients and 96% of marketers who apply. Selectivity protects the standard.
If you've wondered whether you're the right person for the job, start here.
The Indispensable Marketer
Your CEO Can’t Tell You Why The Company Exists
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FREE: the tools and templates to become an indispensable marketer: indispensablemarketer.com/free/
If you and your CEO can't say why the business exists beyond making money, no marketing plan will ever satisfy them. You'll throw spaghetti at the wall for your whole career and never know why.
Jacob Baadsgaard has been on both sides of this. In this episode he gives you the three questions that pull a CEO's why into the open, the story of the moment he realized he'd fallen out of love with his own agency, and how to turn the answers into a why statement you can actually market against. He also breaks down the four founder stages, because the same question lands completely differently on a CEO who's still proving it than on one thinking about legacy. This is the Vision pillar of VSET.
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CHAPTERS
0:00 Why "we exist to make money" guarantees you'll never satisfy your CEO
1:23 Brazil, 2020: when I realized I'd fallen out of love with my own business
3:19 Question 1: the founding story, and why nothing works without it
4:46 Question 2: the customer success story that reveals what they actually care
about
5:31 Question 3: the employee outcome they're proud of
5:58 How to turn their answers into a three-part why statement
7:19 The four founder stages, and how to meet your CEO where they actually are
9:51 The question to ask yourself once you have their answer
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WHO'S TALKING
Jacob Baadsgaard is the founder and CEO of Disruptive Advertising and the author of The Indispensable Marketer. He started as a data analyst, became a marketing director at a publicly traded company, and now sits in the CEO's chair asking marketing for a number. He's had this conversation from both sides of the table, including badly.
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ABOUT THE SHOW
The Indispensable Marketer is Disruptive Advertising's podcast. We're a performance marketing agency, and our mission is to connect great marketers with the brands they believe in. The goal of this show is simpler than that: we want marketing leaders to win. Not just hit the number, but earn the trust and the seat that comes with it.
For anyone who has no reason to trust us yet, some things you can check:
We've managed marketing for more than 2,000 client accounts.
When we studied those accounts, we found that on average 76% of ad budget had no attributable revenue impact. Not low impact. No impact. That's the problem we exist to solve.
We reject 96% of applicants, because the wrong person in the wrong seat costs everyone.
We publish around 8 videos a month. We want these to be the episodes you forward to your CEO or drop in your team's channel, because you're both better on the other side of it.
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FREE RESOURCES: indispensablemarketer.com/free/
Indispensable Marketer assessment: https://assessment.disruptiveuniversity.com/imaudit
Disruptive Advertising: https://disruptiveadvertising.com/
The Indispensable Marketer (book): https://www.indispensablemarketer.com/book/Connect with Jacob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakebaadsgaard/
If you and your CEO cannot say why the business exists beyond making money, there is nothing you're going to be able to do that will ultimately satisfy the CEO and the business from a marketing perspective. Period. You will be throwing spaghetti at the wall your whole career and wondering why you're even doing it in the first place. So that is exactly what we need to talk about today. Why the business you're doing marketing for exists beyond making money that you and the CEO believe in, so you can build something you're both proud of. And how would I know that this is what's going to make the difference for you and the CEO? Because I have been you, and I am the CEO. And I have been on the other side of these conversations where I can't get aligned. I'm feeling frustrated with my marketer. And I saw that play out in my career as a marketing leader at a publicly traded company. And I've seen that play out thousands of times as I built and scaled my agency to over 150 million in lifetime revenue and all of the clients that we worked with. And I've now intimately lived that with my own business and my own head of marketing. And I am telling you, none of my marketers were set up for success until it was clear why I do what I do. And once they had that, we could align. Without it, we couldn't. So let me bring you back to a moment where life revealed to me that my business was not aligned with my why. I was in Brazil. COVID was dropping like it was hot. We didn't know if we were going to be able to make it back into the country. We didn't know if our businesses were going to survive. We didn't even know if humanity was going to survive. After some drama, we make it back into the country. Everything has changed overnight. And yet I felt strangely at peace with the whole thing. Why? Because there was something I couldn't quite put my finger on about my business that I didn't love anymore. All of a sudden, I remembered my why, which is to see and activate greatness. Because I really do believe in a world where everyone can break through their fears and experience their full potential. At this time of the business, we had over 650 customers. We had gotten every award you can possibly think of, one of the strongest independent agencies in the country. I didn't love my own business. Why? Because most of our clients we were not seeing an activating greatness for. And once I saw that clearly, what I realized is that I was hoping COVID and a world disaster would make the hard decision for me. Because I knew that I wouldn't feel energized in my own business unless we made a change. And that change felt risky and that change felt scary. For you as the marketer, you might be working with a CEO that finds themselves in the same state of mind. They've fallen out of love with the business that they built and created. And how will you ever do excellent marketing for them if you don't understand their why? Let me tell you three questions, and that's all it's going to take for you to start to get to the essence of why this business exists in the first place, and how you can actually enjoy that process and these conversations with your CEO. The first question that every marketer needs to understand about the CEO that they're working with is the founding story of why this business exists in the first place. Why did you care so damn much that you are willing to take the risk of starting a business around this? Help me understand that. This is nostalgic. This is emotional. This is fun. Maybe it's transactional. That's okay too. But just getting to the truth of why did you start this business without understanding that you will never be the indispensable marketer that you are capable of. And for me, I started my career as a data analyst and web analytics consultant. I was working with Fortune 100 companies, pairing their marketing data with their customer data, so we could see which part of their marketing was actually driving the results that they cared about. And when I'm working with some of the biggest brands in the world and realizing they are really bad at doing this, what are small and medium-sized businesses doing? That's where I saw my opportunity. And so who did I reach out to? My employer from college that I developed an awesome relationship with, I just said, I wonder if what I've learned how to do helps small businesses. That's the why. That's the first question. Tell us what got you starting your business. That's why disruptive advertising exists. Because we help people outsmart, now outspend their competition by using good data. And when we're aligned with that, we love what we do. The second question that I have marketers ask their CEO is tell me about a customer success story that inspires you and why. And give me a couple if you got them. And when they give you some examples of let me tell you about Bob, let me tell you about Jane and the outcomes that they experienced and the passion that that gives me for this business and wanting to help other people experience the same thing. You've now gone from a founding story to really understanding the impact that they want to have on their customers. When you ask them, okay, how do you feel about the business when we're aligned with driving these types of customer outcomes? Oh, the CEO remembers, this is why I'm here. This is why I do what I do. You might have just given them such an amazing gift. The next question that you can ask, remember, there's just three. Tell me about an employee outcome that inspires you. The people you work with, maybe that's employees, contractors, whatever, depending on the size of the business, and listen, reflect, and say, are there any more? Because when a CEO can tell you why, they're there. The outcomes they're proud of for their customers and their employees, you have everything you need to understand about why this business exists beyond making money. Now, after you've asked those three questions, generally a great why statement comes down into three distinct statements. The first one is why we exist. For me, that's to see and activate greatness. And that is the purpose of my company. There is a worldview that we want to contribute to. So we envision a world where, if everyone's seeing and activating their greatness, what kind of a world does that contribute to? And for me, that is a world where everyone can break through their fears and experience their full potential. That's what seeing and activating greatness means to me and the world that I want to contribute to, not just in life, but in my business as well. And the third one is to simply answer how we do that practically in our industry. So at Disruptive, it's developing indispensable marketers and then pairing them with the people and brands that they believe in. We do that through our university. We do that through our agency. And what you can see is the why beyond making money is deeply embedded with the founder and the CEO. And once you understand their why, we exist to see and activate greatness. We want to contribute to a world where everyone breaks through their fears and experiences their full potential. And how we do that is by developing indispensable marketers and pairing them with the people and brands that they believe in. This video is a testament to our why as a business. And the reason why I keep showing up and working on this stuff, because if I can help you become an indispensable marketer and help you find the business that you're excited to do marketing for, then I have lived my purpose. And that is why I'm here. Now let's get practical. Because with founders and with CEOs, there are different stages for them as a person, and there are different stages for the business. And so, yes, those are the three questions you want to ask and answer. But there's some context that if you go into this conversation, it will manage your expectations on what you might get back from them. Because some founders are in different stages of their journey. The first one is that hungry stage, the part where they need to prove something to themselves, to the world that they matter and that they can get this business going. If you're working with a founder that's just getting their business off the ground, their why statement might feel a lot different. And it might feel a lot more like needing to prove something. You've got the growth stage, entrepreneur, founder, or CEO. And these are the people that have landed on a business model that's working and now they're scaling it. And they're excited to see how far they can scale it, make some money, reap the rewards of all of the hard work and energy they've put into it. That might be more of a less proving and more efficiency and maximizing profitability and stable growth. You then get CEOs and founders like me that have gone through some level of midlife crisis to remember why am I doing any of this? I kind of forgot along the way. And it's not enough anymore to just achieve business performance. It needs to mean more than just growth at all costs. It needs to be aligned with my purpose and something I believe is bigger than me. And then there's the fourth stage of CEO, which is the legacy leaving. They're the ones that are more interested in building the next generation of leaders in their business, in the community, whatever that might be. When you go into that conversation, just understand where they are at. Is this a startup CEO? Is this a growth stage? Is this a I need growth and meaning? Or I'm here to leave a legacy that's something bigger than myself. And when you understand that, it will just help you know how to approach the conversation a little bit better. And all you have to do is ask those three questions. You can distill that into some statements that give you orientation for the business, for the CEO, and for yourself. And the magic that happens for you as the marketer is this will bond and connect you to the CEO that you're working with because you've connected on what really matters to them. And it will highlight to you if you connect to their why. Because when the answer is yes, watch out. You become indispensable and you've just activated something in the CEO, in the business, and yourself. If you go through this exercise sincerely and realize I am not aligned with the CEO and where they're going and why they're running this business, that is also a gift. Because that means you now have the clarity to go find somewhere that you do feel aligned with. And as always, you are not alone on this adventure. We have developed free resources to support you on the adventure of being an indispensable marketer and really helping uncover the why for the CEO and the business that you're doing marketing for. We have linked below the assessment that you can take to understand where you're at on your journey of being an indispensable marketer, some practical tools and resources to help you go and have this why conversation with your CEO. And as always, we'll be routing you on and want to hear about the success stories that you're experiencing as an indispensable marketer.