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- [00:00]
A
Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends at optimizely. Optimizely is the AI platform built for modern marketing teams, helping you create content, run experiments, personalize experiences and optimize your website. All powered by agentic AI. I want to be the person on my team who actually knows how to build with AI. Not just talk about it, not just use Claude to ask silly questions. But I want real output, something I can point to and say I built that and it saved my team hours every week. If you want to be that person, check out this resource. The team at Optimizely is super smart in this area. They've developed a new AI marketing certification called opalu. It's a five day live course designed for senior marketing leaders who are ready to ship more with AI. This is a structured hands on program with just one hour a day for five days where you'll build three real AI agents that saves 10 hours a week. Plus you're going to learn five prompt engineering techniques that actually produce usable output. How to feed your agents the right context so they write and think like you. How to connect them to real data sources so they're pulling from what actually matters to your business. And you'll do all of this alongside 50 other senior marketing leaders just like you, dealing with the same challenges. And at the end, you'll present what you built, get feedback, see what others created and leave with 10 new ideas for what to build next. Plus, 20% of Opal U graduates have gotten a promotion or a new job after completing this. That's pretty cool. So now's the time. Check it out. Opal U kicks off every Monday. You can apply right now. Optimizely.com/5 hey, it's Dave. I want to give a shout out to the team at Vector for sponsoring this episode. Vector is a contact level ads platform. Look, you probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel. People that you can't identify or follow up with. People you can't target with any real precision. So you end up throwing ads at job titles and hoping that the right person sees them. Vector fixes that. Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people. The ones in your site, clicking your ads and checking out your competitors. And they just launched their MCP server that lets you connect AI like Claude and ChatGPT directly to their platform. It connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Which ad creatives are fatiguing right now? Which companies are engaging but not converting? Which actually driving pipeline right now? What new ideas we be running? This is an amazing way to use AI and vector together. It turns your data into something you can use in the moment. Head to Vector Co to learn more. That's V E C T O R co and if they ask you how you heard about them, tell them exit 5 please. See ya. You're listening to the Dave Gehard Show.
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B
Exit.
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A
The modern B2B buyer has gone anti social. I like that I can be antisocial. No form fills, no demo requests, no hand raises. They're asking AI about your product, forming opinions before they talk to sales and by the time they do, they're already halfway to a decision. We did an Exit 5 live session recently and got into exactly what demand gen looks like when the funnel starts without you in control and the room was fired up because this is where B2B buying is going. The whole way we use the Internet is changing and it's changing what it means for sales and marketing. Judy Kimball from Consensus made the case for ungating content and running LinkedIn influencer programs to reach buyers before they raised their hand. Hunter from Techmetric showed how to build for AI visibility. So LLMs cite you accurately and why a share of voice and AI answers matters more than Last Touch attribution. And Mason Cosby from Scrappy ABM broke down why he measures content in hours watch, which I loved. He said they want seven hours of content watch. That's what matters to them, not leads generated. Here's a live session we did on how to win with today's antisocial buyer. This was one of the highest rated sessions we've done, I think ever. Dan said 4.8 out of 5 so check it out if you need to know more about modern marketing and why the funnel is a whole mess. You're going to really enjoy this episode. AI is awesome, but you can only talk to Claude and get answers about marketing so much. I think we get a lot of value in talking to our peers and that's what we want to do. With these Exit 5 live sessions, we bring in members, people from in and around our community who are doing something right now as it relates to your job in B2B marketing. Today the topic is all about the new way of buying. Like what does the marketing funnel look like in a world where AI is answering all my questions? And we have Judy, Hunter, Mason and myself. I'll host and I just was Saying it's a really exciting day, buzzy day here in Vermont, because it's the last day of school and all of us were kind of backstage saying, like, we have fun, like outdoor outside plans after this. So we'll have a good little session and then hopefully everybody can have a nice start to the weekend. But before we get in, can you just let me know that this is working? So put in in the chat right now, I'd love to have like your name where you're writing in from and then also just like, why did you join? Why did you take an hour out of your day to be on this? You certainly could just like get the recording later. Why are you here now? What are you hoping to learn out of this session? Drop that into the, the chat. And I, I'd love to, I'd love to get some feedback because I don't, I don't have any comments right now. Marissa's here. There we go. All right, Great. Nicholas is in Phoenix. Curious what the playbook looks like. Rhea from Toronto. I work in B2B and I'm here to understand our customers process better. Okay, understood. Lisa's from Milwaukee. Calvin's out there in Utah.
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B
Okay.
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A
Kansas City. Leads have been low in 2026, so we need something awesome. We got people from, from all over. So we're going to get into today's session in just a minute. And today's we called this the Anti Social Buyer. I love this. The Anti Social Buyer Demand gen place for 2026. What does this look like in a world where AI is doing so much of the research? But before we get into today's session, I just want to give a quick shout out to our sponsor. Consensus. They are an interactive product experience platform. They help B2B buyers move from first click to final decision two times faster. Most of your buyers have already decided whether they like you before your sales team ever gets on a call with them. True. Absolutely. I'm having Claude do all my research. Why would I talk to your sales team? They've asked AI to get reviews about the product, hear what people are saying about it, and by the time they request a demo, they often already have a decision in mind. And now they have to wait three to five more days to talk to sales. Right? I don't want to wait to have this call. Let's talk now. That's why Consensys recently brought together Consensus, Peel and Salio into a single platform built for how modern buyers actually buy. When a buyer shows up wanting to explore on their own Terms you give them interactive product experiences to discover your solution. AI powered conversations to answer their questions and personalize live demos to validate the fit. Along the way you see who's engaging, what they care about and who else is influencing the decision. Stop being a bystander while the LLM sell or unsell your product. That's a crazy thing to think about actually. Category leaders like Atlassian and Autodesk use Consensus to turn invisible researchers into high intent leads. Check them out. Go consensus.com/5 Shout out to the team at consensus for sponsoring this session. And I'm really excited to get into it today with Judy, Hunter and Mason who all have a different approach to how they're tackling this problem of the anti social buyer. One thing Marissa, you want to flip to that, that next slide that we have here just to set context for this. So this is kind of like Hunter gave this to us and we'll touch on this in a little bit. But I wanted to just touch on this to set the stage here. Like the new funnel now is. And let me know if you relate to this in the chat. But the new funnel is looking something like which is the opposite of B2B how it used to be. It used to be if you want to learn about a product in B2B you have to go to the website, contact the sales team, then they'll tell you about it. Now we've flipped this whole thing on its head to be like all the research happens online self research through Google, Reddit, your website. Then I'm going to ask AI like hey, I'm considering this, this, this or this for my CRM. What should I do? And then so I think this is interesting. Judy, do you want to. Let's bring up Judy and we can kind of like segue into this. But I'm just curious in the chat real quick, are you all thinking about the flip in this funnel inside of your company? Hi Judy, good to see you.
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C
Hi, good to see ya. I mean there's no way they're not all thinking about AI in their funnel.
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A
Yeah, I mean just it's eaten all of my search. Like I just was, you know, from things in my personal life. You know, my kids got a bug bite and it's like growing really big. Like how do I challenge that to like I have so much knowledge of my business and the way that I'm working is different. So you've done a bunch of interesting things. I know you're going to kick us off. So we have each, we have three People here, we got about five minutes each. We're going to dive into a specific play some things they're doing at their companies that match this approach. And then we're going to take a. We have a bunch of discussion questions and Q and A. So Judy, you got to lead us off here.
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C
Awesome. Hello everyone. I'm Judy Kimble. I lead demand generation at Consensys and so I'm responsible for trying to get our prospects to fall in love with our product before they ever talk to our sales team. And so today I'm going to talk about why brand is actually the new demand. And so when Dave was saying like, AI is curating your short list. And so our old play of performance marketing, like manufacturing familiarity, just like, doesn't work anymore. And the buyers that are ending up on your site already have some sort of recognition of your brand or else they wouldn't be there. Right. And so brand visibility and affinity is what is ultimately going to drive demand now. And I have to caveat all of this with, obviously there's a lot more to brand than just the visibility component that I'm going to talk about. So all of this is predicated on the idea that you've put in the hard work on understanding your audience and creating messaging that resonates nice.
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A
By the way, there's a lot of love in the chat for this whole sentiment about brand being the new.
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C
Oh, good, great.
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A
It's. I said it's great to see a demand gen lead. This is where we're at as seeing a demand gen leader championing brand as the thing to generate demand is awesome.
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C
So. Oh good, good.
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A
I'm glad you're rolling.
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C
Keep feeling the same. Yeah, awesome. Okay, so I want to take a step back in time to last year. We saw Digital costs rising 13% year over year, but we didn't have the conversions that would have made that okay. Right. Like to keep our cost curves the same and everything. And so I really had to like reevaluate my plan. And I feel like this is common among B2B marketers. And so tell me if you agree or disagree here, but I had over indexed my spend on what had like measurable hard roi and that wasn't brand. And so I had this conversation with my CEO and CMO of like, we need to change something. It's not. The digital playbook isn't working the way that it used to. And so we started talking about where we get our information, who we trust, and obviously AI is one component of it. And there was A whole different strategy around that that I know Hunter will talk about their strategy on. But we started thinking about people and how do we get people to tell our brand story for us. And so we tapped influencers to help tell our story. So we started testing the influencer motion last year with just four influencers in the sales space because we sell to pre sales, sales and marketing. And so with those influencers, I personally interviewed each of them, my brand and content person. And I reviewed every post while trying to minimize the amount of edits so that it was still natural coming from them. And during that test, we had two influencers post on the same day and we saw a doubling of site traffic that day. So you can see that spike on the top chart there. And then we also saw a big spike in demo views and hand raisers which are our most valuable leads. So we went big. We then had 12 influencers for a three month period.
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A
Real quick, I'm just thinking of someone in the chat right now, like on the last slide. Do you have any ballpark of what you spent that you'd be willing to share? Like how did you work with these people? How did you decide what to pay them and what to post? I think the specifics of this are interesting.
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C
Yeah, totally. So it varied depending on the influencer. It was somewhere between 1500 a post and up to like I feel like our Most expensive is 5,000 a post. 6,000 maybe.
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A
Yep.
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C
And typically what the engagement looked like was like at least a three month minimum. Because one post, while you might see a spike from it, it's really more about some like longer term engagement. And so we do a three month and you get at least it would be like one LinkedIn post. In some instances there would also be a newsletter and some we did like each quarter there'd be an additional activation.
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D
Right.
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C
Like they'd speak on a webinar or they'd speak at one of our in person events. Something like that.
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A
Okay, cool. Helpful. Keep going.
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C
Okay. So then we went big and so we had 12 influencers running at a time. And we saw the immediate impact like I don't know if you can see it on the chart but like right in the middle where it says Colin post. This was like a crazy post that went viral. I hate that term. But on LinkedIn I think it had like 1500 reactions. And we saw this huge spike in demo views and hand raisers which really sort of helped us invest more and like continue to invest. But then we also saw systems sustained impact. Our branded search volume Just like kept growing with all of these brand activations and ultimately it was about a doubling year over year in that branded search volume.
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A
This is the money one, right? Because it's like, obviously when they post, you're going to see a spike on that day, but how do we make this a longer thing? And it's like the correlation between them talking about your brand more on LinkedIn means people are going to go to other places and search more. And I like when we can break things down to like, this is how people think and buy and operate online versus how do we measure those 1500 reactions on Collins post? Right.
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C
Yeah, exactly. And like, we do do some like mining of social media data as well, where we're using clay to like pull those reactions and comments into HubSpot and then into Focus. It's like this whole complication that's interesting.
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A
People are going to want to know about that later.
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C
Yeah. And so then it is. It's not like an MQL trigger or anything like that, but what it does is it informs the AI research that then the outbound SDR team is using. That's like one of the components would be the if they've reacted or commented on LinkedIn posts where we've been mentioned.
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D
Cool.
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C
And so then the other component of it, that's influencer, the other side of activating people was really like telling the brand story through communities. So again, we pilot everything before we go big. So we started with 30 minutes to President's Club as our first community and we heard anecdotes from our sales team about people hearing about us on the podcast. I was actually even on a sales call with a CMO who said she had first learned about us from the 30 minutes to President's Club podcast. And so like that felt pretty good. But I think the big learning that I took away from this is it's not just about the ad read like great Dave did the ad read about consensus. But what really matters is getting your people involved. So for our sales communities, we offer up our CRO. He's super charismatic, as most CROs are right to speak on things, to be at events, to meet people. And then for our marketing communities, our CMO and I engage in the communities. Obviously I'm here speaking on this, but like I go to the all of the Exit 5 webinars and I'm in the chat. You know, it's that kind of stuff of making sure that you're really engaging to get the most out of the communities. But that brand recognition eventually is still going to lead people to your website. And so it's just not about like getting them to download gated content anymore. Right. It's about starting a conversation with them. So we really focused in on how we could make it easy to self educate and convert. And so we stopped getting top of funnel. We don't get any of our content anymore. And we started adding context. So we, we obviously are a demo solution. And so we added video demos with a lot of like value prop messaging and context to them. And then we did click through tours as well throughout the site. And then we really leaned into conversational AI. And I'm happy to talk more about this if anyone's interested because conversational AI is very new for us. But it's not just a chatbot. It's this AI feature that you feed product context to and brand messaging to and then people can just ask it questions. And so that's been a really interesting thing to see. The engagement on our site. I think we went with like two and a half times our time on page by adding that conversational AI to it. And so obviously we used consensus for all of this. And so for us it had that double whammy effect of giving the context but also showcasing how our product works as a marketing tool. But I will say we had to take a little bit of a leap of faith by ungating so much and just trusting that people will like what they see and they'll hand raise. And so just one anecdote on that. We ran an A B test where we had gated content on our marketing Persona page. A gated tour. And then we had an ungated tour. And on the ungated product tour we doubled the number of people that booked a meeting. And so it works. To ungate, even though that's how it
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A
works, you just need like you need a win, you need to do it to prove it. Then you. Everyone's always obsessed with how are we going to measure it?
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C
And you'll know, you'll know, you'll know when it works. Now I will just say like last thing for me. You can't just like ungate with no plan. Like it does take time and like testing in and that sort of thing. We're still in the walk phase. Like I do have a gate on my homepage demo. I want to remove it and I will eventually remove it or just walk in the line with, with sales until I get to completely ungate. So that's it. Thank you.
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A
Nice. Good job. Good start, good start. Hot start. Good job. Producer Marissa, backstage on a heater from the lake. We're on a good start. Okay, next up is Hunter. We got to know Hunter because Hunter's boss, Claire, is a member of our CMO council. And we're like, we looking for smart people to come on and talk about this. Who's doing this at their company? And they're like, you got to have Hunter on. She runs Demand Gen at techmetric. So good to have you on. Who are you, what do you do there, and what does your company do?
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D
Yes, thanks for having me, Dave. And Exit 5 Community. And shout out to Claire for the recommendation. My name is Hunter. I am the director of demand generation at TechMetric. So TechMetric is the all in one platform for independent auto repair. What that means is if you've ever taken your vehicle in to get serviced, maybe an oil change, new tires, a new starter, chances are you were interacting with a shop that might be powered by Techmetric. And we serve over 15,000 shops across North America. And we are building for the independent auto repair shop owner. And everything that we do is tied back to their success. Because when the shops win, we win.
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A
This is just for me, but clip this, team. Let's clip this. Oh, he only talks to people who sell to marketers. Clip this. Okay, Clip this. Thank you. Next.
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D
I love it. Yeah. So Today, our pipeline, 66% of closed one deals are driven from marketing sources, which is super exciting, being on the marketing side, right? Having that. That metric tied to us. And 70% of that new business comes from paid and organic channels. So what we're all here to talk about today is the antisocial buyer, right? And that buyer has done their research without you. But our job is not to interrupt that process, it's to be in it. So we're not trying to catch them after the fact. We're trying to shape what they find while they are forming their opinion, while they are doing their research. So I'm sure many of you have heard the same thing that we were hearing is. And what we're talking about today, the funnel has started without us, right? Buyers, if you think about yourself as a consumer, you're Googling stuff, right? You're listening to your friends and your peers about what they have to say about clothing choices, new vehicles to purchase, and the list goes on and on. You might be asking ChatGPT, you might be reading Reddit threads, and by the time that your prospect books a demo with you, they have already decided if you're worth talking to or not, right? And we stopped asking ourselves how are we getting more people to show up in the funnel? And started asking ourselves, what are they finding before they show up? And that question is what led us to build our AEO and LLM strategy that I'm going to give you a peek into today. So I'm going to gatekeep a little bit on the metrics that we saw because I want you guys on the edge of your seat in the next couple of minutes while I'm chatting with you.
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A
Well, we need a marketer. She's a proper marketer. I appreciate that.
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D
I'm trying my best. So what we did is we built a dedicated LLM Visibility page. We have AEO Content Spritz in place. We've done some technical schema markup, the SEO technical elements that everyone's familiar with. We implemented tracking and shout out to Judy. I was clapping backstage. I have similar thoughts on the ungating strategy and we have applied that as tech metric as well. So you might be asking, what the heck is this LLM Visibility Page Hunter? Well, it is a page that's structured specifically to be cited by AI models. Plain language, answering the exact questions that your buyers are asking AI. And it's organized the way that models will parse through and quote the content. So here's the quick hit of things that I talked through as far as what we've built. This slide will show up at the end again with the metrics. Here is the LLM Visibility page. So URL, top left, what the page looks like and it's full length on the right. And then a close up where you can see we've removed all of the flashy headers, images, things like that, so that we are talking to the AI bot that we want looking at this page and not a consumer. So that is a dedicated LLM page. And this morning I went into ChatGPT and I asked what the best auto repair platform was and you can see that techmetric shows up first. Sure, this might be due to what I've been asking and researching within my own instance, but just wanted to give that visibility as to what's happening there. So next up, when I've talked about our AEO content Sprint, the challenge isn't creating AEO content, right. It's that the model might cite the content and the buyer might never visit your site. So how are you converting a buyer who's leveraging AI and they're never coming to your site, never raising their hand. This is where we've built out comparison data, FAQ questions, and we're actually powering some of this by G2. So we're using the actual words of the community to build out these comparison charts on our website. And it's structured as techmetric versus our competitors to give models a clean, quotable answer. We when somebody is asking this question directly within AI and we want to make sure that we are, you know the answer before somebody raises their hand. And through that is kind of where I'll go into my soapbox moment about the ungating strategy. I, prior to working in marketing, worked as a retail operations manager. And one of the biggest things that we had told all of our team is you can't sell something with when it's in the stockroom, right? If your buyer isn't able to see it on the floor, how are they going to know it's available for them to purchase? I have that same mentality when I think about gating and ungating content throughout the website. If you believe in your organization and the product and the content that you're creating, why are you hiding it? Why are you creating barriers to entry to allow your audience to consume that information, right? Create that journey where they're able to consume and better understand what you offer and the value that you provide to them while they're in their discovery of kind of their customer journey. So I'm a huge fan of ungating and I know that this creates a whole nother door of questions, right? How do I get stakeholder buy in? How do I prove that it's working? So open to questions when that moment comes. But that is definitely the approach that I take as well. So as I mentioned, holding out on some metrics with everybody at the bottom, you'll see a screenshot here. This is how we've been tracking our AI and LLM visibility to understand if what we're doing is actually working. And the numbers I have listed on the right hand side are from 2025 to 2026. So you can see that some of our numbers have decreased. But what this is telling me is our channel mix is actually diversifying. We've introduced web chat and that's emerging as a meaningful contributor to our strategy. And our conversion is strong. Organic holds roughly the same percentage from SQL all the way to closed one. So our lead quality is stable and there's not a significant drop through the funnel and it still remains the number one channel by volume at every stage from 2025 and 2026.
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A
You're a Celebrity in the chat right now.
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B
Sorry, perfect.
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D
I can't see it right now in my Screen.
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A
Yeah, I know. I'm telling you this because I know what the feeling is. Like, you know when you're like presenting it in all hands and you're like just on your slides and you don't know if everyone's like, boo. No, it's really good.
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D
I love it. I love it. Well, yeah, big fan of AEO over here as well as ungating, so would love to continue the conversation once we get back to the Q and A
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A
section of this, by the way. So our goal for DRIVE this year is to do more real, hands on, tactical, specific content like this. Because this is why the chat's blowing up. This is what people want. And this is the whole pitch of like our stuff at exit 5. Not to make it about us for a second, but I will because I'm a marketer. These are the things that you can't just go into Claude and ask Claude about this. You need to hear from someone who's actually doing the job like you. And that's what we're basing all of our. That's what we're pushing to make all of our content like. And then in particular, DRIVE is going to be this in person. And Hunter speaking in there. I know Dan just dropped a, dropped a link for DRIVE tickets, but this is what we want Drive to be like. And I think now more than ever, there's just. You don't know who to trust, you don't know what to believe. So the best way is to see other marketers, like, who've done something, like you being like, oh, like you learned something from Judy. Judy just learned something from you. Like, that's the whole game. So this is awesome. Good job.
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D
Yeah, awesome. Thank you. And learn from one another's mistakes, right? Not everything's going to work within every industry and at every organization, but what nuggets can you take from all of us to build a strategy that works best for you and your audience?
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A
Amen, sister. Well said. All right, great job. Hunter's going to pop in the chat right now and take all your questions. And then we got one more fellow by the name of Mason. Mason's thing is abm and he's got some cool stuff that they're doing here. He's going to talk about this. Mason, you got the mic, sir.
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B
Awesome, Dave, thanks for having me. Hi. Mason Cosby, founder and CEO of Scrappy abm. We build account based marketing programs for Primarily mid market SaaS companies. We built about a hundred programs in the past 3ish years and have sourced about 130 million in revenue. So it's good what I'm going to walk through.
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A
It's okay. I, I, you know, 150 sounds better,
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B
but 130 is pretty, I, you know, the 130 is real.
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A
Yeah, fair, fair.
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B
So, you know, some people are claiming revenue numbers and it's like, that's unverifiable. So what I want to walk through is two different angles. So angle one, we're a bootstrap business that has actually done about 5, 2 million in sales in three years with myself, one sales guy and one marketer. So walking through exactly how we've done that while also then sharing some of the tips and tricks that we are giving all of our clients. Hopefully that sounds helpful for everybody. I'm a big fan of verifiable metrics. So this is our actual HubSpot dashboard of revenue closed in the past 12 months. So you can see 2.5 average deal age of 58.5 days and again, overall revenue at about 5.2. So I promise what I'm going to walk through is real and works. So basic premise is we lean super, super, super heavily into Async video. There's a lot of stuff here that I'll walk through. But at the highest level, we are a business that thrives on showcasing actual expertise and actually being a subject matter expert. So we just give all of our information away to the best of our ability.
- [28:54]
A
Hey, it's me, Dave. Our friends over at Customer I.O. are sponsors of today's episode. They're a really cool company that helps marketers turn first party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS and push. And they built their platform for marketers who actually care about the craft because marketing is a craft that takes creativity, thought and taste. Right now, everyone thinks they're magically a marketer because they have access to AI and the result is kind of painful. More robotic emails, more noise, more Blair. AI isn't magic. It's not going to fix bad strategy or write great copy for you magically. But the best teams also aren't ignoring it. They treat AI as infrastructure. When it's built the right way, it actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. And that's what Customer IO is doing. Their AI handles repetitive work like setup, orchestration and tasks that should be automated so that you can focus on what actually matters. The craft of marketing, the strategy, the creativity. This is how good marketers are using AI right now. Not to replace thinking, but to support it. If this landed with you at all, this idea about the Craft of marketing. I want you to go and check out Customer IO. It's Customer IO, Exit five. Go and check them out. Customer IO, Exit five. 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 conference. It's a small, intentionally designed 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 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. Right? Somebody's going to be roasting marshmallows at this place. It's that type of event. We designed this for, 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 Stouh, Vermont. Check it out exit5.com drive to learn more about it. It's exit5.com drive and I hope to see you there.
- [31:41]
B
We have done that primarily through a podcast. We've done that now through social and I'll talk through how we're doubling down on some things. The basic premise I'd also give everybody is you're thinking through, like, okay, what are the lessons that I can apply for my own marketing program? I'm stealing this framework. But it's more better new. So if something's already working, just do more of that. If you started to cap out, when you do more, do it better. And the last thing you do is new, because new is the worst bet because you have no historical data on anything new. So for us, we have largely scaled our audience through social and attending events. So for example, we did two events last year. This year we're doing 13, and we're just going and hanging out. And in every event we've done so far, we've walked out with on average eight opportunities by simply being present and being there in the moment where people are talking about the things that we can help with. So that's the first thing. Second thing, we actually just hired a dedicated social media marketer. We happen to have about 300 hours of content for the past three years and he is going through and finding all of the best clips. And his job is to actually start posting across YouTube, LinkedIn, Meta, Instagram, TikTok X between 20 and 30 times a day.
- [32:49]
A
Just side questions. Because I'm the host, I get to ask sometimes questions that are interesting to me. Where do you start on a project like that? Is there a tool that can help identify like, okay, I got 300 hours of this content. How do you find out where to start clipping?
- [33:01]
B
Yeah, what a great question. So how are you?
- [33:03]
A
How are you approaching it?
- [33:04]
B
Yeah, so we're fortunate that we've already got all the transcripts and all those transcripts are organized. So one of the things that we're doing is our team has consistently used Claude or Chat GPT to feed in all of our content. And we've got very well documented brand points of view and specifically outlined what we view are somewhat differentiated perspectives from the market.
- [33:24]
A
So we've already documented going through the transcripts.
- [33:27]
B
Yeah, so we're uploading every transcript. Yeah, yeah, we upload every transcript and then have a rating system of tier one, which is like, this was succinct and short and to the point. And then we go and manually validate anything that's in a tier one or a tier two, and then tier three, we just actually like push off to the side. Tier 3 is like, it was a long ramble that wasn't super easy to clip. So if it's a concept that's like three minutes or greater, we're actually putting that in like a tier two or a Tier three and then tier four, which is just there's lots of filler content that happens to it exist when you have 300 hours. We don't even clip any of that. So our main goal though first is essentially get out in the next four months up to 20 to 30 posts between six social channels, see what works and then just consistently repurpose those content clips to get better hooks so that we can actually increase overall visibility. So it's a process. But I'm fortunate that we've been able to hire a person who's that's their whole job. And again we did that.
- [34:28]
A
That was the exact answer I'm hoping for. Like I like to hear when someone has just a philosophy like, you know, we' going to tear it out. That was really useful. Thanks.
- [34:36]
B
Cool. So all of those clips though are actually going to drive towards specifically our newsletter. Our newsletter is going to start releasing playbooks every single week. So after 100 ABM programs we've summarized it down to about 45 core playbooks that exist. There are obviously nuances, but there's about 45. So we're going to actually create open ungated playbooks anyone can access with videos that go along with those so we can educate people at scale. The whole goal of all of our Async video is again get people to trust us. I know that there's this concept around the number of touch points. More recent day that I've leaned more heavily into is it takes someone on average seven hours of engagement with your brand to actually trust you. So I'm looking less at how do I get the 28 touch points and more to how do I get the seven hours. So again, if I can do that through Async video that's both short form and long form that is going to actually expedite their trust in our brand. Also they buy into a person that they know actually has done the work versus again AI. So we're everyone else is talking about like their AEO strategy. I'm actually just leaning really heavy into in person and like video.
- [35:47]
A
That's cool to hear you talk through that because I think that gives a metric. I think a lot of times when we marketers we need to justify something like this. We often don't have a metric. Like it's hard to be like, well the metric is not like direct sales because you're not just going to buy our thing because you saw a clip. It's just not how B2B works. But it's cool to hear you kind of like and there was a question earlier, we'll get to this with the panel. But it's almost like a lot of what this job is sometimes is like you kind of have to make up a metric to show why you're doing it. And it's like you have this made up and not made up in a silly way. But you're like, I think that we have this point of view that if people spend more time with us, they're more likely to buy. Therefore, we're going to optimize for time spent with us. We're going to do that through videos online. And we think the magic number is like, if we can get someone to roughly watch seven hours worth of video, then that's who we just determine Engage. Like, that's an amazing answer to give to the CEO, the cfo, whoever. I think a lot of times it's about. They want to feel like you have a point of view and you have a strategy that you can articulate versus like, yeah, I know, we're just gonna film a bunch of stuff and like, yeah, it's gonna grow our newsletter, you know.
- [36:46]
B
Yes, that exactly. The other thing that we've seen is when somebody starts to engage with us in Async video, inevitably they have their own questions, so they actually want to come and hang out live. So we are still leaning in pretty heavily to like webinars. So we host a monthly webinar that's on a deep dive on a topic. And then the goal actually of our webinar is to get people to a seven hour workshop. So if you're like Mason, you really believe that seven. We host a seven hour workshop roughly every six weeks to help people build out their full ABM program. Now the reason we do that is. We may talk about this later of like third party intent data. I'm actually not a fan of third party intent data. I'm a big fan of like first party signals. So if somebody shows up for a seven hour workshop, the likelihood they have a pain is pretty high. So there's no real way around that. So our main goal is again, optimize for Async video so we can increase perceived expertise and trust to then get them into live engagement within. The goal being once they've actually engaged with us live for an extended period of time, they will inevitably want to come and work with us. The other things that we do that I don't think a lot of people think about is if you go to our services pages, we actually literally have videos that walk through exactly what we do for clients. So every single one of our pages on our website has a video that just says, if you were to work with us, this is what we do for you. And we also are very transparent on pricing. So like no one ever has to guess what our pricing is. So like it's just right here on the website. So we actually try to answer as many questions as humanly possible and then make it also super easy for people to book. And if you just go to the call page, I actually have a video here it'll take a second to load that tells people who we're not a fit for. So the whole purpose of all of this is to make it so that people that don't want to waste time on calls, don't waste time on calls. What that then does for us is our close rates are higher, our sales cycles are faster. So we move from that. 58.5 days, 28.5 of those days on average are actually legal and contract review. We get to a proposal within four weeks. And we want to work with you because of how much we do on video and make life really easy for people inside note, this is another one. We even record the pitch. So we haven't done a live pitch in two and a half years and our buyers love it because they actually get the pitch in full that they can then just drop in slack. And what we do after they watch the video is just a Q and a call where they can bring anybody that they want to. Then we'll just answer all their questions. So again, we are trying to make this as easy as humanly possible and lean as heavy into video as we can so that it just makes things easy for our buyers. So that's all that we are doing. Now you might think this is what
- [39:27]
A
a lot of people.
- [39:27]
C
Oh, that's it.
- [39:28]
A
That's all we're doing. That's it.
- [39:29]
B
That's it. It's a good time.
- [39:31]
A
Most people want. I'd like to do one of those things.
- [39:33]
B
Well, well, here's the one. Here's the one that I'd recommend you do, Dave. Perfect up there. A lot of our clients say that sounds great for you, but we don't have a subject matter expert that wants to be on camera all the time. So one of the things that we recommend is most people have a very consultative call to in their sales process where they do a deep dive diagnostic to better understand all the problems that that customer is facing. If you take the call script from your call to and turn that into an audit diagnostic process, that people can fill out and then you deliver a result to them and then you actually review their results in an async video with a subject matter expert. What you now get is unique information that you can use to follow up specifically with those accounts. That is them literally telling you their problems. So you can't run that as an awareness play. But again, once you've already gotten people to your website, if you have an exit intent pop up that's like see where you stack and you actually tell people exactly what their problems are and how they rank up against their other competitors. It raises their awareness of the problem and then they have to deal with it. Because if you're aware of how bad your pain is and you choose to ignore it, they were never going to be a good buyer in the first place. But if you then raise awareness of their level of pain, you then also have the ammunition to follow up effectively and say, here's exactly what we would do with you if we were to have the opportunity to work together. So our whole goal is just like how do we get our target accounts or our best fit customers to tell us all their problems so that we can then walk them to a solution.
- [40:57]
A
Awesome. This is great because like you're really specific and tactical and so like I think there's people that are like, oh well, yeah, I don't run an ABM agency so of course you do it this way. But I'm actually taking the meta lesson out of this, which is it's more now more than ever. How much can you cut, cut, cut, refine, refine, refine, refine, refine. It's more important than ever to be specific to who do you provide the most value to? Who's a really good fit for you? And then build your whole marketing funnel around how do we make it easy to get those people. We're not just talking to everyone. I think that's, that's my kind of like macro lesson from that does that. You get what I'm saying for sure.
- [41:29]
B
We're actually about to release new messaging on our website that says build your first successful ABM program. An agency specifically designed for 20 to 250 million mid market SaaS companies. Yeah, like getting as granular as possible.
- [41:41]
A
Okay. Hey Lamurisa, let's bring everybody up here because we have a bunch of questions. So that, that was great. So, so everybody's been in the chat, but we have some, we have a bunch of questions that we have in our, in our doc based on some things people were asking about on, on the way in. But I wanted to bring you all up here and try to answer this question because we got this question from Matt which is the. The biggest reaction. And I think this is kind of the highest level strategy question we can help. Matt says love all this, but our entire model is built on needing x leads and MQLs a month. Yep. Still in the year of our Lord 2026 for ungating. How are you able to get leadership on board when they're so used to seeing lead and MQL numbers? So. So I wanted to bring you all up and just have a discussion about like, okay, so. Yep, totally, totally bought in. This is where marketing is going. But we're stuck to this old way. It's really hard to change my org. Where do you start? How do you help lead this change? And feel free to take the mic and whoever wants to run with that,
- [42:30]
D
I can hop in. I think testing it's going to be different for everyone based on the relationship you have with your stakeholders. Right. But one of the things that I always try to do is ask for some Runway. What's the risk of if we don't run this test? Or how can I get autonomy to make a decision and give me X amount of time to show you this might work. And leading with that again, it might not answer everything. Right. If you have business metrics that you're held accountable to, the conversation probably starts elsewhere. Right. How do you get the insight into what's being created at that top level to know what you're contributing to?
- [43:13]
C
And I would just add to that. I do have some of the metrics that are driven off of the marketing source model and all of that that I'm accountable for. And so we did small shut offs of things like of paid content acquisition leads and were able to show that it didn't impact down funnel metrics when we shut off little bits here and there. And so then we were slowly able to turn off more and more because it wasn't actually impacting down funnel. They were honestly garbage leads that they shouldn't have been capturing to begin with. They were way too top of funnel to turn into anything anyhow.
- [43:48]
A
It's interesting. A lot of times this ends up being a reality check for like, you might not have had as many leads as you thought. When you trim all that out, Mason just you're in a different position. But I like the way that you think about marketing. How would you answer this question? If you're. You're in house, you're a director of Demand Gen and you're trying to make the case to the team and the company to take this approach. How do you sell it?
- [44:09]
B
Yeah, I mean I'd actually throw out, I probably have this conversation every other week with a different organization.
- [44:14]
A
You're like the therapist on the sideline helping them.
- [44:16]
B
Yes. Yeah, we're for sure the marketing therapist. So if you actually look at what I recommend of the, the audit process, there is still a gate aspect. We're just saying push the gate further down and make it something of actual value. There's a level at which I'm a fan of gating, but when it's unscalable. So if you're going to gate, you should have a clear follow up. That's like a one to one or a one to few type approach. So that tends to enable people to feel a little more comfortable with it because they still have their gate but the volume does go down and they're typically higher quality and the conversion is more quick from gate to actual pipeline. And again, it's still for lack of a word for some people. Does check that box. And Judy, you said it earlier, you can't just ungate everything all at once. This is a way to breadcrumb towards a more ungated approach. And then the final thought that I always think through is just if you're going to ungate, there needs to be a new metric that you can track. And for many people, they don't have the technology today to track the website engagement at a contact level that you would need.
- [45:13]
A
That's the root cause of the question, I think, which is whatever, however you define it, it's like it's not about gate or not. It's when you have something gated, it's very clear how to measure that. This number of people requested it, here's their contact information. When I take that away, how am I going to talk about measurement? And so do you all think, like part of this also is being able to have this conversation with your leadership team about like, here's why we're making this change. Wouldn't you have this conversation with them? Like think about how you all buy things. Why should we be so silly to think people don't buy our product this way? Therefore we have to make this change. Here's how we're going to do it, here's how we're going to roll it out, here's how we're going to measure it is like you have to have that conversation first and then you can go do this.
- [45:51]
B
My quick thoughts, when he made a comment about it and I appreciate the they were like the flowcharts are so helpful. So I think so many people don't fully understand marketing which is why we try to have visuals or like there's tons of tools out there like mural or lucid chart. They're very inexpensive. If you can create a visual so that people can understand the flow of what you're now recommending your buyers go through, it makes buy in a lot easier because right now most people only hear the well we're going to stop doing this. And they don't fully understand what it's being replaced with and as a result they just latch on to what they know. So again I don't fault people for it. It's just like change is scary. So if you don't know what you're changing towards and you can't get excited about what you're changing towards, then you're going to continue to latch on to what you've always known.
- [46:30]
C
I will say we're not perfect right now. Like our measurement is not perfect. What I do always lean back on is hand raisers and when I see a spike in people that are saying they want to talk to sales, that's a good sign. The other thing is with our conversations like you know that last touch attribution is so problematic and can make us underinvest. I saw you put that in the chat like makes underinvest in channels that may be working just because they weren't the last thing that touched them. And so we've also started moved to our sales team is always asking how did you hear about us or what made you come ask to talk to us or what made you take my call? All that kind of stuff. And then we do we look in GONG and use trackers and GONG to see if people are saying any of our channels or any of our activations.
- [47:21]
A
One more piece on that metric thing. Is there some middle ish funnel leading metric like Mason, you mentioned something about engagement with content. Is there something that you would people would measure there?
- [47:32]
B
So measurement is dictated by where the buyer is in their journey. So when I look at like our account progression model here, there's a different measure of success by stage. If they're at the awareness stage, the whole goal is do they know we exist? Because fun fact, someone that knows you exist is exponentially more likely to buy from you than someone that doesn't. It's like that's just goal one. And then at the initial engagement stage it's are they starting to engage in actually problem related content, meaningful engagement. Do you actually start to have multiple folks within the buying committee? There are eight core roles on the buying committee. So you have multiple of those people actually engaged with your brand, ideally more towards like solution oriented content at that MQA stage or the conversion stage. They're actually doing some form of a hand raise that might be coming to an event that might be. They actually fill out this audit process. But it's more than just like they were on the pricing page. I view pricing page as a thing that we follow up to, then do one to one value added content. At that point, you then book the meeting. So it's not what do we measure, it's what do we measure at this stage based on where the buyer is in their journey. Because otherwise we're just going to throw out on page engagement and like, maybe, but if they don't know you exist and that's the core metric you're going for, that's really tough. So put measurement in context of the buyer's journey to then outline what you should be measuring on at that stage. All right, I'm off my soapbox.
- [48:50]
D
I think that was a good soapbox to stand on and I wanted you to go first because I feel like sometimes I was gonna say, if you're
- [48:57]
A
a loser, that's a good soapbox to stand by. Get off that soapbox. Hunter's up.
- [49:02]
D
Well, we're all in marketing, right? Sometimes there's vanity metrics and I've come from an agency background and there's a lot that right, wrong or indifferent, you can make something look good no matter what the numbers are. You take the percentage instead of the actual and you build context around the narrative that you're trying to paint. So when it comes to metrics, for me, I think Mason, to your point, it's like, where are they in their journey and what are you actually trying to get them to do? What do you want them to achieve? From our perspective, within our marketing department, we use okrs and it's tied into company okrs and it lets us know, are we doing the right things at the right time? Should we set something down like, what are we all working towards? But I think there's a lot of fluffy metrics that exist even for demand gen. And sometimes they're helpful to be a leading indicator on what you're actually trying to track and other times they're just noise. So I think, unfortunately my answer to the question would be, at the end of the day, what are you trying to achieve? And what are the things that you need to track on almost like a benchmark or a timeline to help you achieve that thing? So I couldn't say like, oh, you need to track MQLs. Oh, you need to track AI visibility. I think it's a combination and everybody's story is a little bit different based on what your organization's goal is. And sometimes there's a lot of vanity behind those metrics.
- [50:27]
A
Well said. I'm not letting any rebuttals come to that. I'm moving on to another. Another question because you each said that beautifully. One other thing we had in here that's really relevant today is can you walk us through one specific thing? You've changed in your demand gen program over the last year because of how buyers are researching differently. What was the play? What drove the decision? What happened? Hunter, why don't you, you have a good answer in our, in our little doc. Why don't you tell this story, please?
- [50:52]
D
Yes. So we adopted Qualified. Previously we were using a different chat tool and we weren't seeing much success. So we had adopted Qualified and we went from seeing 2% of total SQLs to 11%. We launched last November to give you a rough timeline there and we have since seen a 12. Excuse me, it's been a 9X. So we started at 1% of total closed one. It was essentially zero and we've gone to just under 13% of closed one coming from web chat on our site. So it didn't just improve that as a channel, it created one. And we were able to get double digit volume month over month. And now this is rivaling some of our paid channels as far as SQL contribution. So look at your chatbot tool. Do you have the latest and greatest and is it keeping up with AI agents and how users are asking questions once they land on your website?
- [51:53]
A
Judy, you got anything?
- [51:55]
C
So I would say there's. We made a big shift in our LinkedIn strategy. So we had been doing content leads out of LinkedIn. It was a holdover and I wanted to get rid of it forever. But I didn't have a replacement. We figured out a replacement doing conversation ads in LinkedIn. So we run a lot of thought leader ads. Like when I was talking about the influencer stuff, we always like boost those as thought leader ads as well as our internal folks and customers. But then we also run conversation ads booking a meeting. And so that sort of replaced the volume that we were seeing from the LinkedIn. Not on the MQL front because who gives a shit about the content leads, they weren't going anywhere anyways. But on the meetings front, like they were actually turning into meetings and qualified opportunities now. And so by making that shift, we've like doubled our meeting set rate from the MQL stage, which we still call it MQL stage, even though it's mostly hand raisers and demo views. It's just easy shorthand. But that's been our big shift.
- [53:00]
A
Cool. I see some things in the chat. I think you answered this, but can Hunter explain a bit further about the AI info pages impact is on overall website traffic? You say you don't know the answer to that yet. Maybe.
- [53:10]
D
I would say we're still in early phases here. We have seen an increase in traffic driven from AI and LLM sources and it took about three months from when we first implemented the strategy to when we started to see those numbers climb. So I would say that's where the impact has seen the LLM AI traffic driven to our website. And as far as overall impact, it's still a very, very small percentage. But this is one element of the larger strategy for us to improve that visibility.
- [53:43]
B
Cool.
- [53:43]
A
Hey, real quick, we're going to wrap this up in two seconds. But one thing that we do just given that we're data driven folks like all you, but while things are hot, we want to just get a quick poll in there because we, we measure all these. We just want to rate. Justin said, thank you for all this. I've got a full page of notes to take to our team. The chat was really useful. I don't know how to bias our votes, but this was a really awesome session and our team has been in our little slack thing the whole time. Like it feels like there's something bigger than more here where like we should do an AMA of some kind. There's a lot of like follow ups that we can do, you know, to get a little bit more specific. So this is the bar. I'd love to have this every time. Full pages of notes coming out of these things. Just real quick. Thank you to Mason and Judy Hunter. Great job, Chat. Good job, Chat. You did your job today. Let's do more of this. This is a new bar for these live sessions that we're doing. We got notes. You all rocked it. Thank you for giving us an hour out of your day. It's school break around here, man. We're gonna go jump in the pool. We're gonna have a nice little afternoon. But now that we got our homework out of the way, we go have fun. So see you all later. Okay. Great job.
- [54:41]
C
Thank you.
- [54:46]
A
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode. You know what? I'm not even gonna 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 market 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 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.
- [55:50]
B
Sam.