← The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
60-Minute B2B Blitz Part 2: 8 Marketers Share Their Best Plays from 2026 (So Far)
00:52:59
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Zoom Webinars. That's right, Zoom Webinars is the virtual event platform built to engage, connect and scale. I don't know if you know this, but I actually love webinars and I'm not afraid to say that I'm not afraid to tell you this on the podcast here at my last two companies and now here at Exit 5. Webinars have been a big part of our content machine, and I know I'm not alone. Despite what you may have heard online about webinars being dead in B2B, they have this habit of saying everything is dead in B2B, including webinars. But they're not, and I can confirm we hear it constantly in our community. Webinars, when done right, continue to drive revenue for marketing leaders right now, and it's one of our best performing channels here at Exit 5. A good webinar gives you a real reason to get your audience in one place around a topic that actually matters to them. And that kind of engagement turns into pipeline in a way that a lot of other channels can't match. Think about it. How much time does someone spend with you sitting there on a webinar? That's super valuable. That's why we've partnered with Zoom to take our love for webinars to a whole new level. Starting this month, every Exit 5 live session through the end of the year is going to run on Zoom Webinars and events. Zoom Webinars has an entire platform for running marketing events that includes registration pages to match your brand, the tools you need to promote your event, and live engagement tools so people actually stay tuned in instead of half watching in another tab. And once the event is over, Zoom helps you follow up with each attendee and turn the session into clips, highlights and content so you can turn your webinar attendees into future customers. That's the difference between hosting a meeting and running a great event. We hold a high bar for our content here at Exit 5, and I'm excited to be doing it all on Zoom Webinars. Now moving forward, if you're a B2B marketer with a webinar program that needs a reboot or you're thinking about building one this year, you should consider Zoom Webinars and come to an Exit 5 live session. Check it out Powered by Zoom so you can see the platform in action all for yourself. Learn more about what Zoom offers marketers@zoom.com exit5 that zoom.com/exit5. Hey, it's me, Dave. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Customer IO. Customer IO helps marketing teams get more impact from every message they send. So you can actually reach the right people with the right message at the right moment. Some might call it the holy grail in marketing. With so much AI generated content flooding your inbox and feeds right now, it's more important than ever that what you're actually putting out is thought through, not just AIed into existence. Everyone thinks they're magically a marketer now because they have access to AI and all these tools. And the result is rough. More robotic emails, more noise, more bl. We've all seen it, but marketing is a craft. I think that I'll die on this hill. Hopefully not die, but it takes creativity, thought, taste, and no, AI can't do all that stuff for you. The best teams aren't ignoring AI either, though. It's a little bit of both. They treat it as infrastructure built the right way and it can make marketing feel more human, not less. And that's exactly what Customer IO is doing. Helping product led teams build personalized campaigns across email, sms, push in app and webhooks using their own first party data so messages feel intentional and actually land with your customer. AI handles the grunt work behind the scenes and sharpens results over time so you can focus on strategy and not setup while still sounding like an actual human. See why more than 9,000 brands trust customer IO to power their messaging, including Notion, Les Mills and Angie. If you need a new vendor to power your customer messaging, go and give them a look. It's customer I/exit5. Customer I/exit5. You're listening to the Dave Gerhardt Show, Exit. Two.
- [03:48]
B
One, two, three, four.
- [03:52]
A
Dash. Hey, D, what's up? Nice to have a co host. I had Jess Cook two weeks ago. I got Dasha on here today. We just decided, you know, these things more. They need more energy. Jill's already in the chat. These have been really fun. So it's the top of the hour here. Lunchtime on the east coast. I know people are coming in from. From all over Todd Jones already in the mix. The Double D. Dave and Dasha, the team Ds are in the building.
- [04:17]
C
The double Ds.
- [04:18]
A
If you double. I was going to say that. And then I was like, you know what, let's not start the note on that. Someone's going to clip that and cancel me right out of the gate.
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D
Sorry.
- [04:27]
A
Marissa said shush. My favorite show is on breakfast time on the West Coast. Dasha, good to have you. So you've been Exit 5 member for a minute. We've been trying to get some more fresh energy, fresh talent around here beyond the same people, the same guy, you know, that's been talking about this stuff for a decade now. So I'm happy to have you in the mix. You're going to be my co host today. For people who are joining us for the very first time, I'm just going to give you a quick little rundown. My name is Dave Garrett. I'm the founder of Exit 5. Exit 5 is, I think we've built the top resource for B2B marketing professionals. We have a community, a podcast newsletter. We do events online like this one and in person coming up drive 2026 in September. But we do these. These are called Exit 5 Live. We do them twice a month and we do them because, man, I am tired of listening to Claude. No disrespect to Claude. If you're listening, give me like advice about marketing because I think there's a huge gap in what we're seeing from our community. There's a huge gap from what people are actually doing versus what the AI thought leader is writing about on LinkedIn. So people doing the actual work inside of real companies, that's our job here at Exit 5 to bring you those stories. And that's what we do. We really have cracked something with this format here where we have eight marketing pros with us and each one is going to get exactly two minutes. Two minutes for real. We'll kick you off that stage so fast. 2 minutes to share a preview of the best marketing play they've run this year. This is real tactics with real results. And we are going to, basically everyone goes for two minutes, then we're going to vote, then we're going to pick a winner from the two minute session. Everyone's going to come back. We're going to have four people to come back and we're going to pick one winner. And that is the world famous winner of our B2B Blitz breakdown. We got Brendan, Molly, Austin, Holly, Anthony, Brianna, Jessica and Aditya to come and share that I miss anything in my, in my housekeeping. How am I doing, Dasha, what do you think? Did I miss anything?
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C
I think the only thing is if it sounds intense, it's because it is. And everyone is going to be bringing their A game. I sat in on the prep. It's amazing. You should stay until the end. That's my plug.
- [06:31]
A
All right, so stay until the end because we want you to vote. You're going to vote. And then we also have prizes. The world famous trophy. Dan is a big trophy guy. He's a big physical goods guy. Trophies, gongs. We send out this trophy engraved with your name on it. Plus send you Exit 5 swag to the winner. Plus this is the real big one feature in our newsletter which comes out every week talking about your play that you ran here live on this session. So I think we've hit on all the stuff today. What's fun is I don't have a sponsor for this. This is where I usually do a sponsor read. So Today's sponsor is Exit5.com Drive. If you're not, don't have a ticket to our event which is coming up in something like Dan said, 45, 46 days. Go do that exit5.com drive. Otherwise we got some time back. Marissa, backstage producer. Marissa, I'm ready if you're ready. We got a little bit of buffer. Brendan Hufford's our first guy up. He's the founder of Growth Sprints. You may have seen him at Drive. He's got a bunch of LinkedIn followers. A really thoughtful dude on marketing. Let's pop it off. I'm ready.
- [07:32]
B
We get it. Let's go.
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A
All right, here we go. You'll see the timer. Marissa's gonna put the timer up and then you're. We're off to the races here. Here we go. Two minutes is on the clock. Ship it.
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B
Hey, real quick before we talk about these three hidden S words that print money. Who loves money in a defensible career, huh? All of us. Great. I do for sure. So usually in a content strategy that I would give to a client or anybody else, I would tell em to name the problem. Build in these discovery loops. Show up where people are searching. Show up on the feeds that matter. Build relationships over time. Fun fact. We're not talking about any of this today. We're talking about the thing I do before I do this stuff. I've been running this play for years. It works every single time. Because if you're like me, you want two things, right? You want to have impact in your career. You also want to do work that you're proud of. But this is hard. We are burned out. More burned out than ever. And it's confusing. You end up doing something like this where it's like, I don't know, just publish like 20 blogs a week. Like figure it out. Just more checkbox marketing. Absolutely not. Not today. Because the advice you're going to get is like, just talk to your customers. And I think that's easy and it is the right advice. Some people are doing everything they can not to talk. They're making chat GPT, pretend to be their customer. But some of us. And if you've ever been in a really big company, you know this is true. You try to talk to customers, you run into this, hey, we already sent them too many emails. We don't want to bother them. Sales owns that relationship. Legal has to review it first. We already have NPS data. Can't we just use that? We talked to them last year. Basically, it's the I love Lamp version of marketing. And this is me saying, stop it. Because your customers are also on 40 million calls with your team every single week. So, yes, talk to customers. But the play I want to share with you today is what I call the 3S strategy. These 3S words, sales, success and support. I work mostly in B2B tech, but this works in other B2B businesses as well. I am going to share with you step by step exactly how I do this. Who do I talk to, what do I say to them? The exact questions. You can steal them and swipe them for yourself. This stuff crushes for AI search. It absolutely crushes for traditional Google search. And if you bring me back for round two, I'll share all of it with you.
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A
Well done. Make some notes now. And because what you and me will do after is we're going to bring all four people from round one up while we run the poll. We'll have. I think we're going to have some time to ask questions.
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E
Right.
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A
And my team gut check me on the chat. We did that last time. I thought that was useful. If we have time to do that where we can have everybody come up, ask a couple more questions. That was really great. All right, Molly, is this your pickleball partner? By the way, is there bias here? Are you.
- [10:10]
C
We met at Drive and we played pickleball together.
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A
Okay.
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D
I think we won. So you think might be doomed.
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F
Yeah.
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A
All right, Molly, you're up. Set it off.
- [10:24]
D
Super excited. Hi, I'm Molly. I'm the content marketing manager at Customer IO. I'm going to run through our play that help us boost AI visibility 30% year over year by updating existing content. So A year ago, AI mentioned us in one of every 12 conversations about marketing automation platforms. Today, we're mentioned in one of every three. Our visibility score increased by 30%. And when our audience is searching for alternatives to our competitors, we're the number one most recommended brand by AI platforms. New content has helped with our success here, but optimizing existing content was just as important. So AI prioritizes content that has been updated in the last six months. And bots prefer a specific format when they're looking for information. So you'll see on the left, there's a more traditionally formatted blog post, big block of text, non optimized H2S and outdated stats. On the right, you'll see an optimized blog that has H2s that tie back to our key prompts. Content that's laid out for bots to read easily and up to date. Citations, messaging and features weaved in. To update our existing pages, we will upload a copy of the metadata and the copy into the skill in Claude and they get all of the recommended edits to boost our AI visibility. Those edits often include adding in the TLDR and FAQ section, updating our H2s and H3s, adding new credible articles to replace outdated stats, removing huge blocks of text, adding in more charts, bullets, and descriptive elements too. And these updates also make our pages better for humans, which is our primary goal. So here's an example of the impact. We optimized this page in early 2026, and it's now in the 100 percentile for citations. This page has gained 11,000 citations in the last five months. And our active users on this page are up 104% since we made the updates. You can screenshot this slide. This has an overview for getting started with your own optimizations. Or you can vote me back up for round two, and I'll show you exactly how the skill works. And I'll give you a copy of the skill to customize for your own company with 10 seconds to spare.
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A
Heck, yeah. That was great. Great delivery. Awesome delivery. The receipts. She had the receipts.
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D
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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F
All right.
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A
Good job, Molly. Austin Fuller. Austin is head of Global Product marketing at Exegure, and we're going to hear about product LED content. Let's go, Austin. Lock in.
- [12:33]
G
All right. Thanks, Dave. As he said, I'm Austin Fuller. I lead product marketing here at Exeger, and I'm going to share with you how product led content 10x our engagement and send our CEO to testify in front of Congress. Just housekeeping. My opinion's my own. Doesn't reflect Exeger, the Department of Defense, or anyone else in the federal government. For context. We prevent and reduce supply chain disruptions for large enterprises and governments. We have a small pool of Accounts in a very competitive market, and we need to punch above our weight. The play is incredibly simple on paper. So we use our own product as if we were a customer to create insights. We package those insights into a report, and then we distribute it to customers, prospects, industry analysts, media, and anyone else that'll listen for the product part. It's really important to find a job to be done for your ICP and do part or all of that job. That's how you ensure you're not promoting and that your ICP will find it valuable for packaging the insights. I define insight as one of two things. Teach me about a problem I don't know about, but probably should, or teach me something new about a problem I do know about. And then for distribution, it's largely ungated. We optimize for consumption. We distribute via all of our marketing channels. Sales, customer success. And it feeds our industry analyst briefings for Gartner from Forrester and idc. Here's the receipts. This is a picture of our CEO Brandon Daniels, testifying in Congress for some of the metrics. We get four to 10 times the engagement compared to any other type of content. And it's led to millions of dollars in in qualified pipeline. The question most people have is, I don't have really cool data like Exeger. What do I do? If you vote for me, you'll find out.
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A
Oh, what a hook.
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F
Let's go.
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A
Let's go. Good job, dash. I got 40 seconds to kill, so reaction. Reaction so far. Good job, Austin. Send them out of here.
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C
Reactions amazing. I want to know. Well, okay. There. I can't, like, ask a question yet.
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A
No, you can. We don't have a question.
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C
Or can I ask a question?
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A
I just.
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H
We just.
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A
I tried to give you 40 seconds right there to do that, but it's okay.
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C
All of these presentations are cooking. What I will. I say I don't envy people that have to vote.
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A
You don't. That's the easiest job. Sit on your couch and be a critic of someone else's work. That's like the. That's the Internet in a nutshell.
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G
All right.
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C
The dream.
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A
Holly. Oh, I'm a sucker for a good bookshelf. Holly's got two of them. I like that. Good backdrop.
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I
I do my best. All right, we ready?
- [14:45]
A
We're cooking. Yeah. Keep it going.
- [14:47]
I
Okay, so go back with me, everybody. It's Friday in June. I've got a launch coming up on Tuesday. We've got a new product, new icp, a whole launch's worth of content that we got to get qa and we're almost at the finish line, but we got to make sure that everything's locked in, ready to go. And I know we have all been there and felt the stress a little different than maybe the stress of presenting to Congress, but no less real. And luckily for me, this time around I had an agent ready to help me review everything. So a little bit of background. Markup was rebranded from acrolinx back in September of last year, and when we rolled out the new brand, we were targeting developers in Q1. We pivoted to marketers instead, and that meant we had a whole library of content that was technically correct but not actually right for our new audience. And to make our content work for a new icp, we ran everything through a Persona agent so that before anything publishes, we can run it against the buyer we're actually targeting. So in our case, that may be a marketer, a developer, a tech docs writer, and every writer on the team is using the same editing agent in order to check against the person who's actually going to read the content. So, real example here. Back to that June launch. Our homepage had this language API, first architecture and MCP integrations. That's great for a developer, makes sense that no issues flagged. But for the marketing Persona, I got a notification and the recommendation to change that to plugs into the tools you already use. It's the same feature, but written a way that actually resonates for this Persona. The agent caught this across dozens of places on our web copy and in our blog post ahead of the launch. And I was able to review that list, figure out where to make the changes and get them done in a matter of minutes rather than having to do it over that weekend ahead of the launch. And what I love most about this is it's not a wholesale swap. It's developers still matter for us. In some cases, I just get to make the changes without having to dig through everything manually. So before your next content launch, ask yourself this one question. Who is it actually for? And then make sure your content actually aligns with it. And if you want to hear about an AI editor, we have that also helps us for AI search. If you vote me through, I can tell you how we make our content more citation friendly.
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F
Wow.
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C
Beat the clock by literally one second.
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A
I'd love to see Claude try to do that.
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C
Claude still has no sense of time, I'm pretty sure.
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A
Ah, exactly right. Yes. Okay, so that's round one. Round one is a wrap. No disrespect to anyone who's ever done one of these with us before. But that was like the hottest four for four. Round one. People were so tight prep. The chat is electric right now. Some are calling this the greatest webinar format ever invented. I. I mean, that's pretty amazing. All right, this is it. Who is going to move on to the next round? I just need confirmation from my squad real quick. Are we picking one? Last time we had, like, a mystery person. Are we doing one from each round right here? My co host. Do you know the answer to that? I see our team is furious.
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C
Yeah.
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A
All right, if you don't win, just
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C
we pick one, and then if it doesn't work out for them in this round, I think they still have a chance in the second round to make it into the final.
- [17:47]
A
Oh, there's a mystery pick. So we do that to keep you engaged. All right, it's the hot. Get your votes in. Let's go. We got one. We're going to close the poll in a minute. It's really close. 41%, 39%, 7%, 13%. Are we going to call it? Should we call it any more votes? Last time to vote. Don't vote and drive at the same time. But this is it. Here we go. Austin got slept on. That's completely just the disrespect at 7% for, like, he hit me with the department of defense disclaimer, and I automatically voted for him. But it's okay. All right, looks like Molly's moving on to the next round. Let's give it up. Give it up for Molly. I think. I think Molly, you know, she came with the receipts on the. On the AI Citations and that. That's always going to. Going to be great. But I'm already like, how are we get. Can Austin speak at drive too? I'm already messaging the team. We got the whole crew, so this is really great. Okay, so hang around. We're going to have a mystery mystery guest, a third winner. And now we're going to roll right into round two because you know, this isn't one.
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C
Before you roll, one important announcement. There will be a Q and a inside the Exit 5 community. So if you have a lot of questions like me, you should come to the hangout tank. Come hang out in the Exit 5 community and ask your questions there.
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A
All right, you're hired. Good job. All right, Mr. That's going to get
- [19:03]
C
me some brownie points with fun fact.
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A
I was reading your wiki page, your Wikipedia page this morning, Anthony and It said you're the only person that's ever been on three of these. So that's crazy. That's crazy.
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H
3p.
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E
3p.
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A
Here we go. You're up. Talk to us.
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H
All right, so we're. This is like content day. Lots of, lots of AI search optimization. So we're talking about AEO with LinkedIn content. So anyone who's been on LinkedIn recently, you've probably seen lots of these different reports and charts. LinkedIn, depending on which data source you look at, LinkedIn might be number two after YouTube and ahead of Reddit for citations. It might be behind Reddit and above YouTube. Just depends on what data source you look at. Let's say, hey, they're probably in the top three, top five, always getting lots of citations for professional queries. Some of this we rely on LinkedIn's data. They say that their traffic's increased by over 40% from AI search. So we can assume high profile domain LinkedIn. If you're posting on there, you're probably going to be getting more traffic. But the question is, how do you rank? How do you get your content out there? So we have a personal example from the last couple of weeks. We just launched a new platform, free LinkedIn ads, audit.com, brand new domain, brand new web app hosting and all, everything here. We got this ranked within a week, so got it on LinkedIn. I'll share one specific tactic in this first round and then in the second round we'll go through the rest of the list of tactics that we deploy for getting content ranked in search. On ChatGPT. Within a week, we were the number one result for where can you get a free audit on Google AI search. Also we got into the box and then on the right hand side too, within a week. And then the first tactic that I'll show you is hashtags, content wise on LinkedIn are kind of dead. They don't really do a lot, but they do feed into your URL of your content. And anybody that's worked in SEO or search knows how important your URL of your content is. So hashtags are making a comeback because now those hashtags feed into the URL of your content and that makes a big difference into what's going to rank for a different search in LLMs. So if you want the rest of these AEO tactics, vote this into the next round and we'll talk a lot more about LinkedIn content.
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A
I haven't even used the buzzer once.
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H
I know.
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A
All right, good job. All right, Mr. Blattner, get out of here. Get off the stage. Jump. Briana Doe with the proper plant background.
- [21:25]
J
All right, this is a play we run for our clients all the time. It's scaling from a small budget B2B influencer pilot up to a full program. So the play we're running now has generated or generates between 500k and a million impressions per month. Our creator driven trial signups are coming in at a 40% lower cost per conversion than paid social and creator content has become one of their top three paid channels for trial signups. So I always tell everybody, you don't start with a gazillion creators and four channels. We started with a 10k a month pilot, four creators, LinkedIn only three posts each. One post per month. And now it's three content tracks which will dive into a larger creator mix. Three channels and expanding to events Next. So first we stopped treating every creator the same. We built three tracks. It's the evergreen content for always on visibility, product launch content tied to the client's release and then UGC that the client can own and repurpose across paid, organic and the website. The reason we can scale to three content tracks is because with the pilot you start with just refining your messaging. So who are we trying to target, what messaging is resonating, what kind of content and what channels? We validated the motion and the approach and then scaled it from there. And we're using the UGC to kind of overhaul the dated content they've been putting out themselves. So it's 10 to 15 pieces per month and we're using that to kind of shift their brand perception. The next thing that I recommend doing is focusing on within each content track, what are you trying to communicate to your audience. So with Evergreen, how I use X platform to do X thought leadership, always on with the product launch, we activate a certain number of creators with coordinated drops time to feature releases and then UGC for testimonial videos. And like longer form product walkthroughs, each channel has a different role. So LinkedIn is that short form thought leadership. It drives the awareness and credibility YouTube is for those longer form integrations, the product deep dives. The tutorials and the newsletters are what land in everybody's inboxes so they're closest to conversion. With the creator mix, it's micro and mid tier and macro. Oh, and vote for me if you want more.
- [23:20]
A
Love it proper.
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C
Snuck it in.
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A
Co host. You got any comments, reactions, questions, comments, concerns?
- [23:27]
C
I love the three track idea. I love that Because I feel like it's so obvious we do that across. Like, we don't treat social media platforms the same way. So why would you treat your creators the same way or what they're posting? That's so smart. I love it.
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A
All right, let's go. Jessica, what about you? I don't know. I got too many things going on right now.
- [23:47]
C
Like, I'm just trying to keep up.
- [23:49]
A
Yeah.
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C
Jessica, take it away. Wait. Actually, wait for the buzzer. I don't know why I said that.
- [23:54]
E
Okay. Hi, everyone. My name is Jess. I lead brand at airops. Today I'm sharing a play revolving around brand awareness centered in customer love and appreciation. So this drove awareness for our brand as well as significant amount of marketing qualified pipeline. This campaign started with something we kept hearing from customers. They were winning an AI search for their companies with Air Ops and along the way actually becoming a different kind of marketer altogether. So more fluent, more confident navigating something, moving faster than all teams could keep up with AI. And to us, that felt like it was worth celebrating. So we built this campaign to effectively celebrate them and their wins on Air Ops. And the Olympics and the super bowl were running at the same time, so winning was already in the air, which made the language feel natural instead of forced. The creative theme throughout this entire campaign was marketing teams win here. And what made this ultimately super successful, that we actually strategically crafted three interconnected plays across various channels. The first is an out of home campaign in San Francisco that featured several of our customer champions. We then had each customer take a selfie and post on LinkedIn, which we then boosted with paid spend. So this effectively took out of home into the digital realm. An interactive quiz that delivered your unique market type. So your marketing archetype with a digital collectible player card that you can then share on social tag in colleagues and friends to share those too. And video creative that highlighted some of these champions with a completely unhinged approach to customer testimonial storytelling. Shout out to Studio Lewis, Connor Lewis and his team for the partnership on the video. If you vote for me, I will share more details around this entire campaign as well as play one of the videos. All right, Sweet few seconds left.
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D
Talk really fast.
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F
Love it. Looks great.
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A
I love it because I think a lot of times when people do these, it's like so obviously a branded campaign. Like, it looks like the brand and you led with like, yes, your logo was on there. But the. Yeah, I like the green. Green is money and wealth and happiness and success. It's a Good color. All right, there he is. Are you awake now? Are you good? We're good.
- [26:06]
F
I'm awake now.
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G
All right.
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F
Things got me going. All right, let's go, let's go.
- [26:13]
A
Good headline.
- [26:15]
J
Cool.
- [26:15]
F
I'm gonna talk about today, how we got a 65x return on making a book for ABM and this is actual revenue. So jumping into it, one of the questions we always ask is how can we build trust with our audiences and the channels they're in and talk about the problems they want to solve? And this all comes back to distribution. How do we basically drive more people to know our brand, what we're doing? How do we accomplish that in a way that makes them feel like we're not selling to them, but giving them value? So we thought of this and this is where we decided to make a book. We actually did a physical book. You can see it here, literally. And many vendors write books. Who gives a shit? It's another book I roll, move on. But how do you make this different? Design was the core element. If you look at every single element in this book, it is done from first principles of what our authors care about and how people have to adopt. And basically, if they don't, they die. And we sell to marketers. And we did this such where immediately you get a digital copy of the book, but you sign up for the print that comes to your house. And the book is the start of these things. That's where the campaign kicks off. And we ran this for about a year. So how do we bake in distribution? We had 14 authors from Meta Wealthsimple, Hulu Grammarly as well as few partners like High Touch and Mobile Inc. And there was 14 channels of distribution baked in. These people did videos. We had a launch event, they showed up on day one. And that way we had reach baked in without having to just hit up email lists or distribution or syndication. And became a source of truth and education. So distribution is an integrated campaign. We used authors as channels, as I mentioned, and influencers and thought leaders. Then we added in virtual book tours, which were webinars that we hosted with people who are authors, as well as launch events where we did a prelaunch event in New York, had all the authors come in, invited guests, took pictures, they signed autographs, took live pictures with it. Also as well post on launch day and videos. We sales of the channel. They actually use the authors and the lookalike audiences to target people to send the book to. And as a result we got 4000 downloads. 278 target accounts came in and so far it's generated 7.8 million in revenue from those accounts. So 65x increment. The book worked, but it wasn't alone. We have another part too. So if you vote for me, I'll talk to you about how we did the magazine, how that continued, fueling it.
- [28:13]
A
Ah, good hook. Love that. Lot of. Lot of buzz.
- [28:16]
C
You know what time it is?
- [28:17]
A
What time is it? What time is it?
- [28:19]
C
Might be poll time.
- [28:21]
A
12:26 hey, it's me, Dave. I want to give a quick shout out to our friends at Vector for sponsoring this episode. If you run an ABM motion. Tell me if this sounds familiar. Marketing spends weeks building a program. The accounts are selected, channels are mapped, budget gets approved, then it launches and sales ignores it because it's too complicated to actually use. If that's relatable, your ABM strategy probably isn't the problem, but the operating system underneath it is. That's what Vector fixes. Their platform lets you build ad audiences from actual people, the ones on your site clicking your ads, checking out your competitors. That means no more guessing based on job titles and hoping the right person sees your ad. How good is that? DataDog is a $1 billion revenue enterprise behemoth. And they run their ABM motion exactly this way, targeting real signals instead of generic titles. Vector built a playbook with their head of global ABM and campaigns at Datadog, breaking down his whole entire approach to enterprise abm. So if you want to learn how to build a proper ABM program that scales this playbook is worth a look. It's Datadog. It's a great one to study. Check it out. Vector CO exit 5. You can see all this info there. Go check it out. It's Vector Co exit 5. Hey, it's Dave. Look, I want to tell you about Drive 2026. This is our annual event we do for the Exit 5 community. It's a two day B2B marketing conference in Stowe, Vermont. We built it for marketers who want to get smarter and actually connect with their peers. This isn't a generic industry conference. It's a small, intentionally assigned event where the programming, the venue and the schedule all work together to create the conditions for real conversations. Attendees spend two days getting into the tactical details of B2B marketing, what's working, what's not, and how the best teams are thinking about the problems that actually matter. This is all about workshops, sessions and discussions that are built around participation, not passive listening. I want you to actually come and be there if you're going to take the time to leave your family, leave the office, get outside of work, like, actually be here, take notes, pay attention. It makes it all worth it. And here's the thing, though. The B2B marketing stuff, that's what's going to get you to justify the ROI on your ticket. That's why you're going to be able to tell your boss that you. You want to go to this. But the best moments that drive don't happen on stage. They happen at breakfast, on an afternoon, hike, over a drink, after dinner.
- [30:37]
G
Right?
- [30:37]
A
Somebody's gonna be roasting marshmallows at this place. It's that type of event. We designed this for this connection. This is on purpose. Long breaks, unhurried meals, and opt in activities where people spend time together outside the session room. Because, look, we're all people. Where else in your life can you talk to someone else who understands your job as a B2B marketer? I go to my kids swim lessons. I can't sit there and talk to dad next to me about B2B marketing. But you can through the Exit 5 community. And that's what drive is all about. It's September 8th through 10th, 2026, at the Lodge. It's Bruce Peak in Stovermont. Check it out. Exit5.comDrive to learn more about it. It's Exit5.comDrive and I hope to see you there. All right, so we're back. So we got. Who is going to join Molly? We're going to pick one. We got one person from this. And then we also have a. We got a little wild card, don't we? That's what I've heard. All right, get your votes up. What's your votes? Also, we need. We need. We need music. We need a soundboard. I feel like there should be some energy right now. Like, we need background music for the next iteration of this.
- [31:38]
G
Let's.
- [31:38]
A
Let's think about those things. Which play would you like to hear more about? Play number one. What genre? There's only one. I mean, I got a genre for all moods. Matt's from Canada. Matt's a big Rush fan, so I was listening to Rush to support him, my teammate. But I'm. I'm mostly a. A rap, hip hop, R B, edm, dance music type of guy. So I'm the DJ you want. Okay, so Anthony Blattner, Briana Doe, Jessica on Brand Awareness by Design and Aditya on 65X. Return on a book for ABM physical goods. Get your votes in. Everybody's Sleeping on influencer marketing right now. Good news, don't sleep on it because Briana do will be a drive to do more on that. One more vote. Come on, let's cap it. Here we go. Roll it. Roll it. All right, we're calling it Anthony. Congratulations. Congratulations. And then. So we got two. Is this true? Dasha, can you confirm this? We have two wild card winners in the chat. Dan's in our chat right now.
- [32:34]
C
Correct.
- [32:35]
A
Can you announce them for who else? So we got Molly Y and we got Anthony, who will be joining.
- [32:41]
C
They will be joined by none other than. If anyone watches Love Island, I feel like they do like five minutes where you're like, all right, just tell me. And that's what I'm doing. All right. They will be joined by Brendan and Aditya
- [32:57]
A
Instant Rap Air horn noise dot com.
- [33:00]
F
Not.
- [33:00]
A
Not a sponsor of this.
- [33:02]
F
Wait.
- [33:03]
C
That was pretty good.
- [33:04]
A
That was pretty good. You surprised yourself.
- [33:07]
B
Yeah.
- [33:07]
C
I was like, whoa, where did that come from?
- [33:09]
A
All right, Molly's back. Here we go. We're right back on the horse.
- [33:12]
D
Back again. All right, so I will show you the actual workflow in two seconds. But I do think it's important to set the scene for why we trust this skill and its output so much. This was built on top of a lot of trial and error and many hours of manual optimizations and tests. I fed out our geo strategy, the topics that matter to our business, our audience, our voice and tone guide, and examples of our best content and pieces that rank really well in AI search today. Most importantly, I have our skill focused on our goal. Making sure that our brand is showing up whenever a customer or prospect is asking a question related to what we do. So with all of that context, we've seen really great outputs from the skills, but we will always have a human in the loop, reading, editing, updating pages to make sure that our content stays helpful and fun to read. So here is the prompt and the workflow in action. I'll paste everything that the skill needs, our live URL, the current title and meta description, and then I'll give it also the full body copy. I'll prompt this to optimize the post for better AI visibility, making sure that it's properly formatted, updating it with any new features or case studies that we want to weave in, and making sure that our unique perspective is also weaved into this. I think a lot of our outdated posts have some kind of dated or just very neutral takes. We want to take a stand. I'll also always ask for optimized meta titles and descriptions as well. With the skill, you can also just paste all of that info in. It'll get started and ask questions as you need. Once I get the output, I am looking for a couple of key edits. First, I'm making sure that the changes to the page fully answer the questions of the prompt that we're optimizing for. Second, I'm making sure that we've weaved in our new case studies and features, making sure that we have in our unique perspective and fresh messaging if needed. The output that I get is this example here on the left. This is directly from the skill. That's the explanation of what edits are made and why. And then I'll also get the doc that tells me kind of exactly what copy edits are needed. So pre optimization this is what a page looks like. It's kind of boring, and after it is a lot more engaging again as a human. But then bots seem to love it too. So some of the edits are structural. Those are the most visible differences. The H2s are optimized. We have a TL Dr. Section that we add to almost every page. Updated stats tables to organize data, new call outs and everything is there to highlight the most important parts of the blog. A lot of the edits are copy though a stale stat will always get swapped for something new, will work in real case studies instead of vague claims, and then our intro will always again get a point of view instead of a neutral summary. To get this new version, I'll take all of those recommended edits from our skill, put it into our CMS and update line by line. I'm the human in the loop and all of that. Again, even though the purpose of this process is to support our AI visibility efforts, the resulting changes make this much more engaging and relevant for humans and our customers as well. So once a page has been optimized, I will take note of when the changes were made so we can track the impact before versus after optimizations. This is an example of that page I shared earlier. The top here is Google Search Console, their new generative AI report, and that'll show us how it's performing and being cited from AI Overviews. We also use a tool called Profound to understand how that page is performing, making sure again that it's readable for bots and that it's being cited by AI. We check in on this page level occasionally, but ultimately we're looking at our overall visibility score to keep track of how we're trending in AI search As these optimizations are just one piece of that much larger strategy. And I think the results speak for themselves again. So I'll drop the skill in the chat now and if you have any questions, reach out in the Exit 5 chat. I would love to talk about this with you, Molly.
- [36:38]
C
One of the questions you got was, are you running this for your landing pages or blogs or both?
- [36:45]
D
Right now it's been just blogs. Landing pages are a bit of a different beast for us. They're hosted on a different site, so we need to figure that part out. But blogs is kind of where we started.
- [36:55]
A
So sweet.
- [36:56]
C
This is so cool.
- [36:57]
D
Thank y'.
- [36:57]
C
All.
- [36:58]
A
Just to confirm with my team, y' all are sending me all these questions, but I'm not asking them to people. Okay, Anthony, you're up.
- [37:08]
H
All right, round two. Here we go. Feel free to ask any questions in the chat. We'll get them answered. All right. So excited that you guys voted for this. Everyone here probably knows they need to be posting on LinkedIn more. Step one, step two, how do you optimize that so that you're going to get ranked in these searches? So kind of the one big finding that we've had and that LinkedIn has shared a lot about is that the most cited content by AI search is long form articles. On LinkedIn, up until like a year ago, everyone ignored articles and rarely use them. But now that with this data, we're leaning into articles a lot more because it's so clearly the most cited source. So of course posts are good. You should definitely do posts. You should post from your company page, you should post from your executives, but you should also lean into articles because across all the platforms, they are the most ranked piece of content. And it makes sense. It's long form content on a very high authority domain and tied to a verified source, tied to your LinkedIn profiles, tied to your company pages number two. 75% of the LinkedIn citations were from individual creators. So when you're choosing how much effort, how many posts should you be doing for your executives or for your company? Lean into your individuals, your executives, your people. For 75% LinkedIn pages, you still gotta have content there. People are still gonna research you, but maybe that's like 25% of your efforts. So lean into your executives, get your people to be posting. That's what's getting, that's what's earning the citations there. For Google, we know Google indexes posts very fast. You can set up alerts so that you get alerted when your name or when your company Pops up. I know I see these for us and our clients, like within a day, within 24 hours, we get these alerts that Google's already, already found that piece of content. So it's, it's about speed. So the faster you can comment on current events in your industry, the more that your piece of content is going to be, you know, cited by those LLMs. Let's go back to articles a little bit more. So articles, you know, for every company out there, you guys are probably already have a blog. You probably are spending a lot of time creating content on that blog. One easy tactic is go take those blogs and repost them on a, as a LinkedIn article. And it's essentially the same format, long form content, all your, your HTML headings and bolding is going to carry over there. So your formatting is going to carry over. And what you can do, what we'd like to do is post maybe 90% of that blog post there. And then if you're posting seven tips or steps or tactics, withhold one of them and say for the original blog post, click here to go to the main website to get that the rest of that content. So very easy thing to do. Take your blog post, go repost them as LinkedIn articles. You're going to get a lot of the benefit of the LinkedIn domain and then you're going to get more links and traffic back again. We know the LLMs are reading all this data on a very high authority domain. Next, for like content tips, what else do you post on top of that? It kind of comes back to like SEO best practices number one. Just like pure formatting tips, use headings in your content. Even the way that you're structuring your LinkedIn posts, put headings, put bullet points of lists there. Hard data and numbers always get cited very highly, especially if it's proprietary or something that you have found like at your company and then tag your company people and take others. This is kind of a very important tactic because lots of people will post but maybe not not tie it back to their company. So this is called the ghost citation. When, when you get a citation but it doesn't actually tie to your name or your company, it's. It's kind of just data for the algorithm. So tie that back. So best list side by side comparisons, how to chew guys, whatever people are going to ask an LLM. I got 20 seconds there that went by really fast. So next is boosting posts. LinkedIn has a lot of data that when you boost it you get more Engagement, more comments, more likes on it, and that ranks at higher in LLMs. So take your good content and boost it. 41% of boosted posts are cited. 41% more. And then thought leader ads. If anyone's heard any of my content on LinkedIn, talk a lot about thought leader ads. Boost your best posts into thought leader ads from your people and then you'll get even more visibility out of that. So I'll drop this here. If you want to go read that other article or feel free to ask me any questions, I'll drop these slides in the chat afterwards.
- [41:18]
C
Anthony, I've got a question for you. Echoing a few of the questions in the chat. When you say long form content on LinkedIn, what are you talking about? Like the newsletter feature, the article feature, just a really long post.
- [41:31]
B
What do you mean?
- [41:31]
H
Both of those are good. There is a sweet spot. 800 to 1200 words is the sweet spot. So that's the sweet spot. There's definitely times you might go longer, you might go shorter, but that's the sweet spot for content to give it enough content that it's gonna use that when it's ranking.
- [41:47]
A
Did you also say that LinkedIn content is being cited by the LLMs? We lost him.
- [41:53]
D
He did.
- [41:53]
C
He sure did.
- [41:54]
A
Because I'm just wondering like if that's a way you could also make the case for like why CEO exec, key people at the company should be writing on on social now, not just like the, well, how many likes did my post get? You know? All right, Mr. Brendan Hufford is back.
- [42:09]
D
Cool.
- [42:10]
B
So we talked about this earlier. The big thing that I want to talk through and make sure that we're all on the same page with this. The stuff that I'm going to share with you here in a second works for AI search. There's a lot of different ways. You're hearing a bunch of different things. Right? We're not all 100% sure. There's all the vendors out there that sell trackers and things like that are saying, here's how you optimize this. Here's how there's a lot of correlative data. The most important thing is do we have coverage on our own website on these topics that we want to influence? An AI search or traditional Google search. These are three different clients. This is not your old school SEO. It's going to take six to nine months to win.
- [42:45]
G
Right.
- [42:46]
B
The question is, in a world of limited time and resources, where do we spend those resources? Like I said, this works. This is AI search. These all come out of profound, which somebody mentioned earlier. It also crushes for organic search. This is literally a competitor versus competitor. Two other competitors that somebody's evaluating. And if you look, the ad is user evidence. The AI overview is influenced by user evidence. They have two citations on the right and then the organic link first all the way at the bottom. This is the modern state of Google. Outside of B2B, it's even more messy. At least we have some sort of organized mess right now. What I'm going to share with you is exactly how I created this. So I mentioned earlier we're Talking about the 3S strategy, sales success and support. I wanted to give you the actual questions that I'm asking them. These are literally. These come from fathom these screenshots here on the right. This is me talking to user evidences sales success support. Your head of product marketing, Alex Edney is now the new like head of marketing there and he's awesome. But I'm talking to sales. So when I talk to Mel, what I'm asking Mel is number one, you please, if you do this, ask them this question first. Like, what is something we can do to uniquely help your team? Then I'm asking sales questions around our positioning and our narrative. What are objections people are raising? What are the like moments they physically lean in? Like when you're doing a demo, if you're doing it over zoom, which I'm sure we all are. When are they actually leaning in? When does their facial expression change? When do they look less distracted? Right. Find what those aha moments are. Are there competitors that are coming up more than ever? Is there anything changes? The one question I love to ask, I don't think I have it on here, is like, what's something you're hearing? What's a new phrase you're hearing people use more and more that maybe they weren't six months ago. Sales is a really obvious team and don't let your boss, or if you are the boss, don't just like smush people together in a room and be like, well, I set up a meeting between sales and marketing. Well, we have a. This is what I hear from a lot of clients. Like we have a sales and marketing recap every week or every month. Or that's not the same thing as you actually taking time with them and talking to them and then asking follow up questions like, hey, tell me more about that. Hey, what does that look like? Can you give me an example of that? That's how we get the language for figuring out stuff that we're going to create that actually prints money for us. I'll give you another example here. With success. This is the other thing that drives me absolutely bonkers when it comes to marketing is we tend to just be focused on this acquisition addiction. How do we acquire new customers? New customers, new customers. And if you're working in any sort of retention product or whether that's a software or service, you have to care about the things people are searching and need in their renewal process and stuff like that. I have a full breakdown here how it works, but I know that we're coming up on time. Essentially, I'm recording all of these. I'm taking notes, I'm analyzing them in Claude. I'm synthesizing that into a document that I can share back with the rest of the team and then giving a team insight stock. This makes you the most valuable person in the company. Please create one of these. You become the customer whisperer. You are no longer the furthest from the customer. In marketing, where sales success and support are closer, people start coming to you when they need that voice of customer. You're not going to be the person that gets laid off or let go because you are the closest to the customer. Two ways really quick. I know I'm out of time. How do I automate it? Number one, I pipe it all into Slack. You can feel free to screenshot this or steal it. I pipe it all into Slack through Claude and have it do an analysis. And then I'm also using Air ops, shout out air ops to use actual customer evidence from user evidence. And all of their customers are going to be able to do this soon as well, to feed right back into the content. And because of that, we crush slay.
- [46:22]
C
I have a question for you, Brennan. The clients that you're rolling this out with, what are some, like, missteps that you've seen where you're like, oh, don't do that. Do it differently.
- [46:30]
B
So the thing I mentioned earlier with like Brick from Anchorman, where it's like, well, we don't want to like, reach out directly to customers or we don't want to reach out to this. Or like, we already have a meeting. Like, that's the biggest thing. Like, I'm fighting. I know this sounds silly. Like in sales, you lose most of your deals to status quo. I lose most of what I'm trying to do inside of companies to status quo. We already have this. We have, you know, mom, I want Drake. We have Drake at home. And it's like, we. Okay, it's A mess, that sort of thing. So the biggest mistake is like thinking they already have this process and not realizing how incredible. Like they're sitting on this gold mine of information. Especially when you start automating it and you take every single sales success and support call, put it into a slack channel and synthesize it. This is like the one of the best uses of AI so that just imagine everybody in marketing has an immediate download every single day of everything that's happening with sales success and support.
- [47:23]
C
Have you seen the opposite problem where like at our company, for example, everyone can hook up Claude to gong and now everyone is the source of truth for voice of customer. What is the actual source of truth when everyone has the same hookup?
- [47:37]
B
Ooh, I love that. Is that a real problem you're dealing with where like everybody's like, oh, a hundred percent.
- [47:43]
C
Yeah, there's product messaging sources.
- [47:46]
B
This is a great problem to have. But you are like the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. So I would love for everybody to be there where everybody's, well, I listen to this and they said this and they said that and they said this. I think then it would be like, it's the person who can do without getting. I call it altitude sickness, where you're like super zoomed in or super zoomed out all the time. I think for you, because you're so zoomed in, it becomes the person that can zoom out a little bit and be like, hey, I know you heard this on one call and you heard this on one call, but I actually looked at it and they can like zoom out and give you some better numbers on like 23% of calls. This is the type of thing happening.
- [48:21]
C
Yep, that makes a ton of sense.
- [48:22]
B
Which we could all. Is also a great use case of
- [48:24]
A
AI related to this idea. We used to say we would always call this like their words. And I've always found that their words is the best source of copywriting. And so I've always kept a swipe file or even just an Apple Notes. This was back in the day before this was all like recorded and AI and gongified. But like, sometimes you're trying so hard to explain what you do and then you find on a customer call that like someone who just says it and explains it. Oh, you guys do this, this and this. I'm like, yes, that's the headline on the website. That's where so much of this comes from.
- [48:54]
C
So I feel like, especially with AI, like AI will take. It will strip the customer words out. So like I've started prompting AI to say, do not strip the voice of the customer. Like use their words verbatim.
- [49:05]
A
Right now as of 12:47 on Friday, July 24, Dave Gerhardt is of the camp that AI sucks. And I'm sure that's just how I'm feeling right now. So with that, let's talk about it.
- [49:16]
F
Let's talk about it right into what my next thing is and what we did to get to those numbers.
- [49:22]
A
Okay, great.
- [49:22]
F
So kick it off here. So we did the book right, we talked about it, we got the launch, we got people downloading now. We had a base, but we found a few things that didn't work well the first time that we thought we'd tackle the next time. And that led us down to actually building a magazine. And I'll talk about that. So I was missing the first round. We noticed that we had one hit. We had a bunch of events following it. But the problem was that it was just one book and one asset and it covered one core theme. And we got feedback from people who downloaded the book as well as those who came to the virtual events. They wanted to go deeper, they wanted to understand how it related to them in their industry and the problems they were having. And that's where we started looking at industry based problems and with practitioners we work with and new ones also as well. And then the other part is they want to understand how our own customers were doing it. They actually asked for this. And we first time avoided customers on purpose. We brought them into the mix and start sprinkling them and connecting them to their industries and how they solved them, the problems they had. And that's why we started to think of as a magazine. And the way we de risked it was we stress tested with friendlies, asked them, hey, what are the topics you care about? And we weren't even sure if human or AI was the topic. We wanted something that was substantial. And we came to this after talking to five, six folks who were like, yes, I'm a leader, I'm an exec, I have problems on where I should use AI. Dave, I know you hate AI today, but where I should use human. And that's where all the taste and judgment stuff came up. But then the themes actually resonated was, hey, for human AI, what are the key things I struggle with? Is it data? Is it personalization? Is it what are the risks that come with taking one or the other? And me as a leader, I want to dig into more and understand how people in the space are doing this and thinking about it. And that's where we started taking that feedback, tweaked it, got the right people in place, leveraged. Our partnerships team called us out. That's the secret weapon. If you're in marketing, you have a partnerships team, use them to get practitioners and influencers and other products to work with you. They are going to have baked in distribution. So now the issue was on the first goal. Like I said, we had one big launch, we had virtual events. But timing is a challenge, right? Accounts don't buy when we want them to buy, they buy when they want to buy. And they're going to do it on their timelines. So we need some way to nurture the account. And then we thought, hey, why don't we do a magazine? And the database isn't going to be rated by right away, but we give sales a reason to reach out to our target accounts with the practitioners who are in the book that are from look likes of the target account. So simply put, hey, this could be my customer. There's an author in this magazine. Let's talk about the problem. Let's use this to reach out. We actually made the hat that I'm wearing human AI that we ship with every book physically. So then this moved us towards more and more like the campaign ends where we have more physical assets to ship. The book still gets shipped out. To this day, I'm not with Moengage anymore. But now we have three editions of the magazine that are coming out. So the first one went live in May. It was human AI data that were part of it. And every one of them represents the industry we went after. And I can't call it how critical it is when you look at these practitioners, influencers that they are resonating with the target accounts you want to go after for your sales team. This does not work if you don't combine those two. You can't just put whatever you want in there. You have to make sure your sales team is trained to go after target accounts with the folks who talk about the problems they have in there. The next one was personalization with the same methodology here. When after personalization in industries, we know personalization matters, which was food, which was mortgages, right, which was credit unions, and also retailers like blah blah. And the last one was what are the risks? And this is universal. This is more for leaders that are traveling, that are dealing with just deploying AI and what are the downsides, what matters for it, and so forth. So when we did that, we launched the magazine in May I'm not there anymore. When we did that, we had over a thousand downloads, 500 more additional copies shipped, and 112 new ABM accounts engaged. And it fed into the 7.8 million that we closed. So I'd always say, always start with the audience. Start with their problems, where they buy and how they buy it. And then go from there to drive distribution.
- [53:15]
C
Dave, can I ask a question?
- [53:17]
A
I'm letting you lead today, sister.
- [53:18]
C
I'm okay. Aditya, I'm sold on this play. How do I get started? I want to know, like, the logistics. When you did this, how much, if you're open to sharing, did a single magazine cost? Were you shipping them directly from the manufacturer? Like, how do you do this?
- [53:34]
F
Yeah, so I think like magazines here too, right? We had a physical copy. The biggest thing is that you wanted to think about logistically. The magazine was like three, four bucks. The book was substantially more. But we got just three years in printers and we actually used Sendosa to ship them out. So basically the logistical point is we launched them and we had a pre launch where we would get others in friendly. So on the launch day, you'd have a magazine out in everyone's hands and be in the wild and be sharing outside of the authors. And so that's where logistics came in. So like before launch day, a month before is when we coordinate all launches and designs and get the physical assets shipped out.
- [54:09]
J
Sweet.
- [54:10]
C
Cool.
- [54:11]
A
We got to roll it. Producer Marissa's on our ass right now. Dasha, let's go. We got to get the winner out here. All right, do we have a winner? Where's the poll? All right, so this is an opportunity to pick a winner here today. Picture like the hottest song you could imagine playing right now. Okay, so is it going to be Anthony LinkedIn thought leadership as AEO Brendan 3s words that print money. The winning AI answer box or the 65x return on a book for ABM. What do you got? Molly's hot in the chat right now. All right, I'm ready to call it.
- [54:46]
C
Let's.
- [54:46]
A
Ladies and gentlemen, let's give it up for Molly. Congratulations. Congratulations. Let's talk about why do you think the crowd. Why do you think this crowd of B2B marketers related so hard and really appreciated what you shared today day.
- [55:01]
D
I think everyone is being asked to be visible in AI search. So trying to find ways to hack that system and like not just produce more, more, more, but rework what you already have, make it good for bots and for humans. I think that is something we all can appreciate. That's awesome.
- [55:18]
A
Co host, you got any final, final words, closing thoughts? Molly will be the brand new winner of the trophy, a newsletter feature and a bunch of Exit 5 swag, which, by the way, is an excellent source of hydration, if I can say so myself.
- [55:33]
D
Amazing, Molly, you crushed it.
- [55:35]
C
Will you be at Drive this year? Are we going to pickleball again?
- [55:37]
D
We're going to pickleball. We're going to do s'. Mores. I'll be there hosting a workshop, talking about email, the death of it or how it's not really.
- [55:44]
A
No, there's no, there's no pickleball at Drive. But you two could smack that thing
- [55:47]
C
around like we're going to do our own thing. Sorry if it wasn't clear we're we be pickleballing no matter what's going on on the agenda.
- [55:55]
A
All right, yeah, so we got a bunch of follow ups. We'll send all this out. We're going to do a Q and A in the community next time. We'll figure out a way to do more Q A in here. I've already shared that feedback. That's my. I want to be riffing with the panelists right now. I don't know how we'll do that because we only have six minutes left anyway. But we measure everything here that we do at exit 5. And just curious if you could give us a quick rating on today's session. Was it valuable? Was it worth your time? Would you have a better an hour if you just talked to Claude for an hour or was this actually useful, hearing real examples from real marketers? Give us a rating here. We do track all these. We look at all them. We analyze all the, the ratings, the scores, the chat and dash. A shout out to you for coming on and, and being a great host here today. Good to see you. I know a bunch of you. We got 45, 46 days till drive. We'll see you there. Exit5.com drive I'll see you in the inbox in our newsletter, in our community on the podcast. Dash is going to be hosting some podcasts soon for us too. So there's more to come there and keep rocking with us. Look, if you want to hear from actual B2B marketing humans that are doing this job and are actually inside of companies doing the work, shipping real campaigns, then you pair that with what you're doing with AI. That's the ideal combination. That's the company we're building, that's the brand that we are Exit 5, the number one resource for you in your career in B2B marketing. I hope we got an awesome team. And just shout out to the Exit 5 team. A ton of work goes into these sessions behind the scenes. The run a show, the prep, the speaker prep. It happens this way because of all the work that gets done behind the scenes. And I don't want to underrate that. So shout out to Marissa, Maria, the team here at exit 5 dash. I'll give you a parting work.
- [57:30]
C
One last final piece. Sorry to interrupt you, Dave. All of these people on the screen, if you have extra questions for them, do not forget, you can ask them in the community. They are all part of Exit 5. I can tell you that for free. They will all be in the community, so you can ask them in the public chat. You can DM them if you don't want to have your question out there. But they are all in the community, so feel free to give them a shout.
- [57:52]
A
Awesome. We're out of here. See you later. We're back here in two weeks and the next topic that we're going to do, we're doing this format, but it's exclusively about webinars because we've learned webinars are not dead. So two weeks, we'll be back. We're doing the webinar, the blitz version of the webinar. And we're back. The community is exit5.com you can find it.
- [58:10]
I
Come on.
- [58:10]
A
I know that in the chat. Okay, we're out of here.
- [58:12]
B
Goodbye.
- [58:16]
A
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode. You know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com. Our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are. So you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's a 100% free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community. Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Walker Sands, an integrated B2B marketing and growth strategy services agency. Growing your business is hard. Even if you have a full time team of marketers behind you, predictable growth is tough. Yeah, tell me about it. The good news is you don't have to do it alone. In my experience, and I've interviewed more B2B marketing leaders than probably anyone on this planet, there's often a powerful agency or two or three behind every great CMO or VP of marketing. That's where an agency like Walker Sands comes in. They help B2B marketing leaders get clear on what actually matters most. Business Outcomes Instead of starting with what channels should we use, Walker Sands begins with one very important question. What business outcome are we trying to drive? They work with you to build every part of your strategy, messaging, channels and measurement around that Northstar goal. With support from their marketing toolkit that spans strategy, content, creative communications, digital marketing and revops, Walker Sands has been helping leaders turn disconnected channel activity into measurable business impact for over 25 years. With customers across enterprise software, AI, manufacturing, supply chain and many other industries. Their outcome based marketing model is built around the idea that brand demand and revenue are one conversation, not three separate silos. I love hearing that. If you're ready to make growing your business feel easier, Walker Sans is the agency you should consider adding to your team. Go and check them out@walkersands.com exit5 to help your business drive measurable growth. That's walkersan.com exit5.