Easy!

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a CMO, trusted advisor, strategy consultant, and Chief Bottle Washer at Rockstar CMO. In this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of what’s caught my eye, topics from our podcast, and our street knowledge blog.

Hi there!

I hope you’ve had a great week and 2025 is working out well for you so far; thanks for opening this - I hope you find it helpful.

I’ve been working on positioning recently, enabling a sales team to articulate positioning and then working on different messaging for different markets.

As you would expect, the conversations can be detailed and nuanced as our job is often to prepare a team to engage with a buyer who may know more about your category than you do.

And we have to do this while avoiding the temptations that most senior B2B marketers are familiar with, such as diving into rabbit holes that we do not need to be diving down.

We are very close to the topic and may worry too much about some of these details, especially those related to features, functions, and competitive differentiation, which the buyer probably cares very little about.

Or at least care very little about it until they are very close to buying.

Before that, it’s noise, getting in the way of the simple story that should be “If you have this problem, we can help”, that can spark a conversation about said problem.

As I’ve quoted a few times here and on the podcast, there is good B2B buying research that seems to be pointing to the brand's strength, that B2B buyers are making decisions about a preferred solution before they speak to the vendors.

For example, 6Sense’s B2B Buying Research revealed that “Buyers do not speak with sellers until they are approximately 70% of the way through their journeys”.

The assumption here is that buyers get their information from all manner of sources before they get to a slide deck where each bullet point is so on point.

Well, aside from the bit where the sales guy went rogue with the clipart.

So, prepping our sellers with the very latest, most in-depth, nuanced messaging is essential for when the buyer does raise their hand, but possibly not where we should be spending all of our messaging efforts.

Sometimes, when defining a value proposition or elevator pitch, in a desperate attempt to strip some bullshit, buzzword-laden messaging to plain language, some bright spark says, “Image if you were explaining it to your Mum.”

But, I think if you are trying to influence a market and cut through, you need to think about how you would explain this to someone, who will then explain it to your Mum.

Assuming your Mum is in the market for your B2B doohickey, of course.

The key is we need to make it easy.

We must make it easy for the influences and people who are beyond our little shared drive of perfect presentations to represent us.

The people the buyer is speaking to or reading their reports, blogs, or reviews for the first 70% of their decision-making process.

So, for this week's track, I am going with Easy from Groove Armada. I was tempted by Easy Skanking by Bob Marley, but the idea of the tune is to get your marketing mojo working, and Bob’s a bit too chilled!

Like I said at the top of this, I hope you find this useful - I would love to hear from you if you do.

Cheers!

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer Rockstar CMO

Say hello, reply to this email or find me on LinkedIn or my personal website.

This week’s podcast…

If you are a listener, you might have noticed we’ve split the podcast and this was the first week. There are now two shows The Studio and The Rose and Rockstar:

The week’s street knowledge….

Get your Monday Marketing Mojo Working

This will get your Monday marketing mojo working for sure - especially this fantastic live version….