Numbers in Action

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, not a rock star, but a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.

Hello!

Is it just me, or are we hearing the phrase “it’s a numbers game” more and more these days?

In response to poor performing tactics, the answer is, just do more of it. This tactic has a 1-3% response rate, so with our AI agents assembled we are encouraged to load up the Blastomatic2026, spray, pray and burn through a list of thousands.

If you’ve stopped caring about being a relevant, engaging or useful human, it costs very little more to have your robot sales team email/inmail/comment/send a connect request to 100, 1000 or 10,000 of your “ideal” customer profile.

Yes, we’ve had scale of execution for a couple of decades in marketing automation, the Blastomatic2006 had the same range as the Blastomatic2026, but now we are being sold on the idea of scale of relevance.

That AI can personalize all of this and somehow that makes it OK.

The problem is, the same way we all got wise to the machine ingratiating itself to us with “Hello {firstname}” in 2006, in 2026 we see some “I see you are interested in x” BS alongside a really poorly positioned offer, and see the robot.

The most obvious example I am getting of this right now is “I listened to your podcast. I liked it when you discussed <some synthesised statement scraped from the transcript> and I’d like to recommend this guest”.

Two tell tale signs this was bullshit, was a) I haven’t had a new guest for years as I have a rotation of regulars (you knew that) and (b), why would a marketing podcast that talked about <some synthesised statement scraped from the transcript>want to chat with a bloke that provides AI virtual assistants to small businesses?

The offer wasn’t relevant.

This might have been personalised, with a lame “Hello Ian” and <some synthesised statement scraped from the transcript>, but it wasn’t targeted.

Points for playing, but a waste of time.

Yes…. there are plenty of times we need to apply maths (or, if you insist “math”) to sales, as the oft quoted LinkedIn B2B Institute share only 5% of your audience are in market right now and we need to reach and warm the 95% who will be in the future.

It is a numbers game.

It is an understanding of the number of people who you can help with your relevant, targeted offer.

And that might be a 1000 people.

And forgive me for being simplistic and say 5% are in market - that might mean 50 of them could care enough to respond, but only 50% of the 5% do, so you get a 2.5% response.

Loosening the ICP retaining bolt on our AI acquisition agent and sending LinkedIn InMails to 2000, 20,000 or to every single LinkedIn user, won’t change that only 50 people in the world give a shit right now.

The problem of course is that this genie is out of the bottle.

They say we in marketing can’t be trusted with nice things and everyone has their Blastomatic2026 pointed at your potential punter, so we need to figure out how to cut through.

Which brings me to the track that lends this newsletter edition it’s subject line - “Numbers In Action” by Wiley, it repeats the line “I wanna see numbers in action”, which plays in my head whenever I am looking at one of these spray and pray campaigns.

The “action” being responsiveness to intent, relevance, helpful and targeted (not just personalised).

It’s a numbers game, but you want to see numbers in action.

What do you think?

Let me know, have a splendid week!

Cheers!

Ian

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