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
You Can't Market to a Demographic
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
FREE: the tools and templates to become an indispensable marketer: indispensablemarketer.com/free/
"Moms 25 to 45" is a targeting parameter. It is not a customer. And if that is what your profile looks like, every campaign you build on top of it is guesswork your CEO gets to second-guess.
Jacob Baadsgaard walks through the costume company that thought it sold dress-up clothes and discovered it sold a mom's freedom to say yes. He gives you the three questions that pull your real customer out of your CEO's head, the anti-customer exercise most companies are too scared to run, and the reason Disruptive refers away roughly 80 percent of the companies that come asking. This is the Vision pillar of VSET, and it is the conversation you cannot have alone.
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CHAPTERS
0:00 Do you actually know who you're marketing to?
0:59 John Deere was spending millions on leads that never converted
1:44 The $7 million they saved by marketing to fewer people
3:14 Your best customers are most of your revenue. Most of your budget isn't on them.
3:58 The three questions to ask your CEO about who you serve
5:20 Why the "who" belongs to the CEO and the "how" belongs to you
6:34 What to do when the data says you've been wasting budget
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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 built Disruptive from scratch to over $150 million in lifetime revenue.
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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: https://www.indispensablemarketer.com/free/
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/
Connect with Chad on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-de-lisle/
Do you actually know who you're marketing to? Most marketers and the CEOs they work with have lost touch with who they serve in the pursuit of endless volume and growth at all costs. And then they wonder why they don't like marketing anymore, or the CEO doesn't like their business anymore. I'm Jacob Adsgard. I'm the founder and CEO of Disruptive Advertising. To date, we've done over $150 million in revenue. For our clients, we've managed over $3 billion in ad spend. And I have worked with thousands of marketers and CEOs to really nail down who they are built to serve. Early in my career, I was a data analyst. I actually would implement web analytics, connect it to the customer data, and bring CEOs and marketers from Fortune 100 companies the insights that they needed to know how to more effectively spend those dollars. An experience I'll never forget was working with John Deere. And when we connected all of their data, which took a lot of work, that they were spending an enormous amount of annual budget on driving volume of leads through their marketing funnel, of which there was almost no conversions. And there was a subset of more targeted campaigns that were a lot more expensive per lead, but were actually tied to driving sales for their industrial equipment and farming equipment. And so the payoff was dramatically better. And so at this point, while I wasn't the marketing expert in the room, I could see in the data what they couldn't. You're spending money on customers you are not built to serve over here, and it's not getting you anything. Even though it looks good on paper to have a low cost per lead, it's not getting you what you want. What I would do if I were you is spend it all over here, because at least you're selling tractors, and it's still relative to the price point, a phenomenal deal. Several months later, I remember the meeting where they came back and said, Jacob, we are blowing our sales targets out of the water and saving $7 million in our ad spend by implementing the changes that you recommended. And at this time, I'm working with John Deere or Home Depot or American Express, and all of them had the same issue. They didn't have the insight into who they were really built to serve with the data to back it up so that their marketing could be aligned with it. And I thought if the biggest companies in the world aren't doing this effectively, what are the small and medium-sized businesses doing? And that is ultimately what birthed my business, disruptive advertising. The first business that I tried this for was someone that I just deeply cared about. They were the CEO of the company I worked at in college. And I said, I care about you and your small business and would like you to be successful. I implemented that same system for them, and they went from a 25-person company to almost 300 employees because it helped them spend smart, not hard. It helped them spend their money on the right customer, not the wrong customer, and it unlocked their growth potential. So the first challenge as a marketer that you're going to have to practically work through is actually alignment. One of those is what customers are we truly built to serve? And does the data actually back it up that our marketing is producing those types of customers for us? Because in the examples that I've given you, sometimes we know who are built to serve, but our marketing and targeting is actually not aligned with that. And the numbers don't back it up when it comes to revenue and profitability growth for the business. Best customers are actually the majority of your revenue and profitability, while most marketing, like the examples I gave you, are being spent on not the ideal customer. So it's just churning through revenue and costs and not really getting you where you want to go. So a conversation that connects you and aligns you better with the CEO and sets you up to do significantly better marketing and how you move those dollars in the right direction comes down to three simple questions that you can ask and answer that will help inform this. What were the pain points that you saw people experiencing that you are passionate to help them solve? Why wasn't it being met a different way in the marketplace? How are you doing it differently? And this is one of those conversations that reconnects you back to the roots of this business and who you're built to serve. Now ask specific questions about the customers that have received the most benefit or the most transformation by using the products or services that this business has put together. Hear the stories, reconnect with those. You might have heard them before, but ask to listen and really understand the transformation that the CEO and that this business is passionate to provide those customers. And then the last one is where most marketers get generic at their detriment rather than getting more specific. Because this is where you can say, okay, I've got a broad understanding, great. No, get really specific and ask the CEO who specifically is best suited for this outcome, for our product or service. Name them specifically, what makes them different? Because the more clear we are on who they are, the better I can do as a marketer on how to best target and market to them. This is the type of conversation that doesn't happen enough between the marketer and the CEO. And it is one of the best parts about being a marketer. But sometimes we hold back because we think we should already know this information. We should be the ones leading this. When that's actually not true, who the company is built to serve typically comes straight from the founder. How to best target them, how to best resonate with them, how to best progress them into a purchase. The how is your job. The who is typically set by the CEO. And yeah, you're going to get some information along the way as the marketer that better informs that and helps it evolve over time. But don't feel like you have to completely define the who on your own. Talk to the CEO, get clarity on that, and then you get to figure out how to market to them better. I hope that you can feel that sigh of relief when you say, I don't have to target everyone anymore. I just need to get great at targeting the specific customers that we are best built to serve. And then you go data verify it because on average, those are the customers that are the majority of your revenue. And if not the majority of your revenue, for sure the majority of the company's profitability because they're the lowest maintenance, the happiest customers that keep coming and buying again because they really do get what they need from this business. One practical challenge that you might run into working through this with your CEO is if you identify, like I have with many of the customers I've worked with over the years, we're spending a lot of money in areas that aren't actually producing for the business, whether that be short-term or long term, it might be challenging for you to take the risk of making that change. It might be challenging for the CEO to be willing to take that risk and make those changes. Because there could be implications to short-term performance in your marketing campaigns as well as the business. But I am telling you, long-term, to just sit there and continue struggling and churning through the types of customers that are not profitable, not providing sustainable growth, does not lead to a winning, growing, sustainable business in the long term anyway. I would say it's worth the pain, but just understand that from your perspective and the CEO's perspective, it can feel risky and it can feel hard to want to do that. And even from a vanity standpoint, maybe we want to show high numbers because it just looks better to a board or whatever that is, but that's not really what gets us where we want to go. So this is your opportunity. Talk to the founder and CEO. Understand who you're built to serve. That's what makes it meaningful to work through challenging times as a business. That's what makes it worth it in the end because we know who we're built to serve and the outcomes that we can genuinely provide them that will make a difference in their lives. And so this is where we stop chasing performance at all costs, get aligned on who we're built to serve as our stable foundation to do excellent marketing work and then build from there. If you want some additional support resources, check out the indispensable marketer assessment that we have below, as well as the questions that you can ask, the resources, the tools that we provide, every marketer on their journey to being indispensable for the businesses that they're doing marketing for.