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
Growth at All Costs Is Costing You the Right Customers
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/
A top strategist walked into Jacob's office, closed the door, and told him he hated logging into a client account worth over $1 million a year. Disruptive walked away from the contract.
Most marketers have never asked how core values help them do better marketing, which is why for most companies they stay words on a wall that cost nothing. This episode fixes that. Jacob gives you two questions to ask your CEO that surface their real values and their anti-values, a third to run with your executive team,
and the test that separates a value from a preference. Then you run the same exercise on yourself, because marketing is the best job in the world or the worst one depending on whether you believe in what you're marketing. This is the Vision pillar of VSET.
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CHAPTERS
0:00 The $1 million contract we walked away from
1:21 If a value doesn't cost you something, it's just a preference
2:56 Why core values are a marketing tool, not an HR poster
4:15 Question 1: who inspires your CEO, and what that actually tells you
4:56 Question 2: the sassy one that surfaces their anti-values
5:46 The third question to run with your executive team
6:44 "It's not my job to set the values." Correct. It's your job to extract them.
7:08 Now run the same exercise on yourself
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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's sat in every seat at the table: marketing analyst, head of marketing at a publicly traded company, and now the CEO on the other side of it. 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: 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/
We chose to walk away from over a million dollar contract for my agency. One afternoon, one of my top marketing strategists walked into my office, closed the door, and immediately my heart knew when this happens, there's typically a client account that's blowing up, they're about to quit, or they're about to have an emotional moment with me. He told me about an account that he was managing and leading. This was over a million-dollar contract for us. It represented a huge amount of lifeblood and oxygen for my agency at the time. As he was walking through, he told me what so many marketers experience, which is this is a private equity-owned business that has a target to hit at all costs. We are getting urgent texts, slacks, emails at nighttime for reports that need to be created by first thing tomorrow morning. And then those reports don't even end up getting used. And they finally had just reached their limit and said, this isn't working. And I hate logging into this account. I hate working on it every day. Something that happened in this moment was profound. They had the courage to actually raise the flag and say, this is not in alignment with who I am, with who we are as a business, and something needs to change. And it is these types of moments that reveal to you as a marketer and to the CEO that you work with what your values really are as a company. Because if a value doesn't cost you something, it's simply a preference. And in this situation, one of our core values is authenticity. And we only work with people and brands that we believe in. And this was no longer a situation that held that value. And he and the team working on this account were concerned because it represented so much revenue that they would just have to keep working with them anyway. We realized we would need to walk away from this contract. And what I want to tell you as a marketer is that if you can understand the values that ultimately drive behavior in your organization for your CEO when they are actually willing to walk away from revenue to uphold them, you have unlocked something for your marketing that will position the company very uniquely in the marketplace and set you up for success for the customers that you're built to serve. I'm Jacob Basgard. I'm the founder and CEO of Disruptive Advertising. I've been at every seat on the table as the marketing analyst, the leader of marketing at a public company, and then building my agency from scratch to over 150 million in lifetime revenue. And I have now been the CEO on the other side of the table. I have a unique perspective that helps marketers bridge the trust gap with their CEO so that they can both build something that they're proud of. Most marketers have never actually thought how do core values help me do better marketing? And that's exactly why we're talking about this today. That is what contributes to a strong business vision that you and the CEO are both aligned to. But for most businesses, core values are words on a wall. They cost nothing. They're nice platitudes that do not influence the business and that do not influence the marketing. And that is a secret that you have not had at your disposal to elevate your marketing to the next level. What we'll be going through are some simple conversations that you can have with your CEO to understand what these really are and how they manifest and are exhibited in the business, even when it costs them something. Now, look, I don't need you to be a core values expert, but there are some practical things that you can do to extract this from the CEO so that at least for your own sake, you understand A, if you're in the right place, and B, if you're set up to do the marketing that you need to. Let me tell you two questions you can ask your CEO, and that you can then ask yourself to reveal what the core values are for the business and the CEO and what your own are, and to see if they're in alignment. The first question that I love talking to people about, especially a CEO, is I say, tell me someone alive, dead, fictional, real, that inspires you. When you think of someone that inspires you, just tell me who they are. And they'll usually come up with a couple of quick names. And then once they give me that name, I say, can you tell me the attributes of that person that inspire you about them? And they might say something like, Oh, they always took the risk, or they deeply cared about the people that they had relationships, or and they're gonna give you a list of like why that person inspires them. You're just gonna note those things down. It's gonna be great. Now, the second question you get to ask them can get extra saucy. Tell me someone, alive, dead, fictional, real, that just rubs you the wrong way that you're frustrated by. That frankly, you judge harshly and tell me why. Some people will be very comfortable answering this question for you. And some people might be hesitant, roll with the punches here, but you're going to say, Why are they frustrating to you? And you're going to note these things down. And in going through this exercise, what you've uncovered for your CEO are the values that they have and that they look up to and that inspire them. And then they're anti-values. What would be contradictory to those? They actually both point to the same core value. This is like the third option, and one that you probably should also do as well is go as far as you can with the CEO. But then you can also ask the question of tell me about some employees at the company that are awesome performers and that feel very aligned with who we are and where we're going. And tell me about the attributes of those people. And you could do that just with you and the CEO. You could do it with the executive team. This is another way to ask the same question, because now we can reveal how those values are already showing up. And in going through that exercise, which very few marketers and CEOs have done, you are able to clarify this is what we're passionate about. This is what we will hold true to, even if it costs us money. But that allows us to position our marketing very strategically to attract the right talent, the right types of customers that we're really built to serve, and that keeps us in alignment with what our core values actually are. I will say many marketers are hesitant to have these conversations because they say it's not my job to establish what the core values are for the business. And I want to say you're correct if that's your concern. It's not your job to create them, but it is your job to extract them and to market them. And so if you don't know what they are, how are you going to market the values of the company in a way that differentiates the business and attracts the right business? I ask you the same question. Who is a character alive, dead, fictional, real, that inspires you and why? Who is someone that irks you and that frustrates you and why? What you'll do when going through this exercise for yourself as the marketer is here are my list of values and anti-values. I now have the list of values and anti-values for the business that I'm doing marketing for. And I can see where I am in or out of alignment with those so that I know if I'm at the right place or if I'm not. If I need to challenge our organization to hold more true to our values when push comes to shove, otherwise they're just preferences, not actual values. Because marketing is the best job or the worst job in the world, depending on if you believe in what you're marketing for and the values that that upholds. So you owe it to yourself and you owe it to the organization to make sure that these have been clarified, documented, and aligned with your marketing strategy. I know that you are the type of marketer like the one that came to me that understood his core values and the company's core values well enough to address it directly with the CEO and to uphold them and to bring that to me. That's the type of marketer that transforms the business that they're doing marketing for. That is an indispensable marketer. Look, most marketers have not done this before. And you are not alone in how you can go and address and be successful in having these types of conversations, which is why we've developed a lot of the tools and resources to aid you on that journey. The first one is the assessment that you can take at the link below that helps you understand where you're stuck on your indispensable marketing journey, and then getting the free tools and resources that we've provided for you to show up and have this type of conversation successfully with your CEO. Because when you are aligned with the values of the company and the CEO, you're going to build something that you're proud of and you're going to love being a marketer. You owe it to yourself and you owe it to the business to do that.