The Score

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 from our community, our podcast and our street knowledge blog.

Hello there!

Welcome to The Score.

We discuss marketing metrics and measurement a lot here at Rockstar CMO, which, in my opinion, should be based on the primary mission of B2B marketing—to create Awareness, Revenue, and Trust.

If it doesn’t create ART, let’s stop it.

There is a reason for that, and it’s almost always in the context of marketing proving its value, tugging at the emotive thread of attribution. As a discipline, we are somewhat obsessed with that.

But, maybe more importantly, we should focus our measurement strategy on the idea that what is measured shapes what gets done.

At this point, it’s traditional to quote something by Peter Drucker, “what gets measured, gets managed… etc…” but I found this quote that was new to me and spot on:

On the podcast this week, my regular guests, Cathy McKnight and Robert Rose, separately shared examples of illogical behavior as they brought their opinions about doing dull B2B marketing by numbers to the show.

Cathy shared her experience of being dragged onto the hamster wheel of doing something for the sake of doing it, rather than a marketer having a bigger picture of why they should do it or maybe even care about it.

The example she used was a webinar - a marketer decides they need to do a monthly webinar and hires someone like Cathy to star in their show, but it’s a random act of marketing, success indicated by the tick box which says, yep, this months webinar is done.

Nothing deeper; the marketing lights are on, but nobody is home. I’ve had a similar experience.

Robert was a little more forthright, reveling in the opportunity to curse on our podcast (oh, I insist) with the question, “Why we might want to give a shit about marketing”.

Robert wonders why in B2B we don’t seem to care about our products and solutions, we only care about the B2B playbook, the hamster wheel, the funnel, all the marketing by numbers. When we care about the product, we create marketing that is way more interesting.

Of course, I would love for you to listen to the whole episode; let me know what you think, and maybe give a little love to my chums Cathy and Robert.

This brings me to this week’s track and the title of this email: The Score—which is a bit of a cheat, as yes, usually the subject line is a song title. While there is a track on the Fugees' classic album “The Score” called “The Score,” I am going to plunder the album for something that’ll get your Monday Marketing Mojo working, and this has to be “Ready or Not.”

The score in marketing is not doing “the thing” ticking it off the to-do list; it’s doing the thing that moves the needle of ART.

Thanks for reading this far, I’ve also included some other related links below.

Have a great week.

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…

The week’s street knowledge….

ART

In my previous CMO gig, I chatted about ART in content marketing, which looks at measurement.

I really need to have something on my website that describes this :-)

Get your Monday Marketing Mojo Working

Not The Score, but ready or not, here we come….