How Domitille de Saint-Exupéry (CMO at Lemlist) Turned $1.2M into $31M in New ARR

Summary

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The Dave Gerhardt Show (Exit Five)

Episode: How Domitille de Saint-Exupéry (CMO at Lemlist) Turned $1.2M into $31M in New ARR
Date: February 23, 2026
Host: Dave Gerhardt
Guest: Domitille (“Dami”) de Saint-Exupéry (CMO, Lemlist)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Dave interviews Dami de Saint-Exupéry, CMO of Lemlist, about how she and her team turned $1.2 million in marketing spend into $31 million in new annual recurring revenue (ARR) over the past year. Dami dives into the tactical breakdown of that spend across paid advertising, influencer marketing, and partnerships, sharing detailed strategies, lessons, and experiments that worked and didn’t. This episode is packed with concrete advice for growth-focused B2B marketers, especially those in SaaS, wanting to scale efficiently and experiment with new channels.

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Company & Role Background (02:25–04:17)

• Lemlist: Bootstrapped, $40M ARR sales engagement platform for B2B startups focused on outbound sales.
• Acquisition: Recently bought Clap, a $2M ARR conversation intelligence platform for sales teams.
• Dami’s Path: 15 years in B2B marketing tech, joined Lemlist after consulting with the founder on their move from PLG/self-serve to sales-led and upmarket targeting.

“It started like this and a few months later he offered the job… it’s time for me to step out of my comfort zone and start the learning curve again.”
— Dami (03:16)

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$1.2M Marketing Spend = $31M New ARR (04:17–06:35)

• 2025 spend: $1.2M marketing investment.
• Generated: $31M in new ARR across Lemlist and Clap.
• Growth: 60% YoY, fighting churn via move upmarket and adding a stronger sales-led motion and better targeting.

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Paid Media – Scaling from Zero to $500k/year (06:46–21:34)

Why Move to Paid? (06:46–08:09)

• Trigger: Need to capture existing demand & target new, upmarket audience quickly as they shifted focus from founder-led audience to mid-market decision makers.

“Paid lets you capture existing demand and move fast on a new target audience… when executed well and on top of strong positioning, you get speed and control.”
— Dami (07:03)

Execution: Insourcing vs. Outsourcing (08:09–10:02)

• Outsourced technical/ad-buying expertise.
• Kept positioning, messaging, and campaign direction in-house; tightly linked ads to product launches and GTM moments for relevance and impact.

Ad Objectives and Offers (09:17–10:02)

• Focus: Driving free trials and demos, not classic lead magnets.
• Tactic: Target high-intent keywords (search), competitor bidding, and social ad experiments.

How to Scale Paid (12:10–13:48)

• Started small: One channel (Google Ads/Bing), one geo.
• Gradual ramp-up: Expanded geos, then added LinkedIn feed and sponsored email.
• Sprint-based hypothesis testing — prove ROI at each step before scaling.

“First you choose one channel... started with Google Ads. One geo. Then expanded.”
— Dami (12:10)

When to Outsource (13:56–15:16)

• “Outsource to de-risk hiring, accelerate learning, and keep full-time team focused on high impact and strategy.”

Proving ROI & Budget Increase (15:16–16:21)

• Early wins, quick dashboard visibility—shifted leadership perceptions, reduced overdependence on brand organic.
• Caution: Diversify, don’t become dependent on paid alone.

Creative & Format – What Works in B2B Ads? (17:27–20:16)

• In-house and AI-generated creative, but strong push for “fun,” off-brand, eye-catching creative instead of corporate-standard.
• Benchmarking: Team shares “best ad” examples in Notion.
• Tested and iterated—paid is a space for experimentation in format and tone.

“I wanted to have fun... catch people’s attention... not like a cover of a B2B Ebook.”— Dami (17:51)

Mistakes & Lessons (20:59–21:34)

• Snapchat and Spotify tested, but not a fit for B2B.
• Key lesson: Not every platform is worth the effort—focus on intent-based, business-relevant channels.

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Geographic Expansion & Positioning (21:41–23:02)

• Used paid to quickly test new markets (e.g., Germany).
• Localized messaging: “Cold emailing” underperforms in Germany due to legal/cultural context—pivoted ad narrative to LinkedIn/phone outreach, resulting in much better CTR.

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Influencer Marketing – $60k for Massive Compounding Impact (23:02–43:14)

Why Influencers? (23:41–26:00)

• “Not Boring to Boring”—Wanted innovative, non-traditional B2B marketing.
• Influencers tap into authentic buying journeys—people trust peers, not brands.
• Struggled with databases—micro-influencer identification required manual, relationship-driven selection.

“Consistent, deep content with a clear POV and engaged, qualitative comments are more important than just high follower count.”—Dami (25:00)

Sourcing and Managing Influencers (29:34–34:46)

• Start with your client base, partners, and creators you trust/follow.
• Micro (<10k followers) often better than celebrity for B2B.
• Creator briefs: Not hard-sell; focus on frameworks, methods, value first—a soft CTA to product.
• Mix short and multi-post partnerships, evolving to always-on networks if fit is good.

“We never try to sell solely a feature. We sell a method that solves a real pain, and it's easier if you have Lemlist or Clap, but not required.”
— Dami (31:14)

Success Measurement (34:46–42:33)

• No UTM links—look for clear uplifts in signups after posts, blended conversion rates, and qualitative signals.
• Attribution: Directionally tracked for ROI; comparative to other channels, but aware it’s imperfect.
• Compound effects: Best-performing influencer content gets boosted as thought-leadership ads; also used as hyper-relevant seed lists for outbound.

“We don’t put UTMs on influencer posts… That’s not how marketing works!”
— Dave (40:13)

• Use influencer post discussion for targeted outbound—in some cases reaching out on behalf of influencer (with consent) led to 40%+ reply rates.

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Partnerships – $450k (Most Underrated B2B Channel) (43:14–47:06)

• Outbound agencies & coaching agencies as partners; tiered commissions (lifetime for “tier 1,” 1 year for others).
• Done-with-you (not for-you) agencies drive >2x higher LTV; builds retention and embeds the product into client ops.
• Partners become force-multipliers: accelerating entry into new geographies, expanding network, running co-marketing events.

“I see them as a force multiplier… Partners bring new revenue and make customers more successful with your product.”
— Dami (45:51)

• Partnership manager within the growth team: responsible for acquisition, enablement, upsell, and nurturing partner growth.

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AI in Marketing – Useful but Mostly for Repurposing (47:06–52:58)

General Attitude (47:06–48:21)

• Team uses AI everywhere, but never as a magic bullet.
• Strong distaste for overhype; FOMO is real, but “content as commodity” means quality matters more than ever.

Overrated Use Case (48:21–49:33)

• Content generation without context or depth. Bulk content doesn't drive engagement; needs to be differentiated with stories, numbers, real POV.

“Content has become a commodity... Most posts suck because people just say, ‘Hey, write a post,’ and AI does the rest. But it’s all a bit empty. What really matters is sharing experience, anecdotes, numbers.”
— Dami (48:43)

Underrated Use Case (50:03–51:01)

• Ultra-contextual, AI-powered campaigns: Email/drip/outbound triggered off real user behavior—retention, monetization, anti-churn.
• AI integrated deeply into product use—ultra-personalized messaging unlocked once you give AI the right context/data.

Goldmine in Voice-of-Customer Data (51:01–52:58)

• Recorded calls, sales conversations, and internal meetings—rich source for copy, enablement, and insights.
• Clap (their product) used to mine these conversations for actionable CRM updates, objection handling, and building customer stories with no manual note-taking.

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Notable & Memorable Quotes

• “You don’t have to be the most creative… Just share what your marketing budget is, what you spent on it. And it went viral.” (54:13, Dave)
• “When influencers start understanding your product and using it… they will create really good content faster.” (34:46, Dami)
• “One deal can have a 10x ROI [from influencer].” (37:02, Dami)
• “Paid gives you things most channels want: speed and control… when it sits on strong positioning.” (07:03, Dami)
• “Look at how you buy as a person before you do your own marketing.” (23:41, Dami quoting Dave)
• “Attribution is always tricky… we don’t want to build this crazy, perfect model because we know it’ll never be true.” (39:30, Dami)
• “Content generation is overrated—AI is great for repurposing, but not for creating truly new, interesting stuff.” (48:21, Dami)

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Episode Timeline & Key Timestamps

• [02:25] – Lemlist, acquisition of Clap, and Dami’s background
• [06:46] – Decision to scale from zero to $500k in paid media spend
• [12:10] – Stepwise scale-up strategy for paid channels
• [17:51] – Experimenting and iterating on paid ad creative
• [20:59] – Lessons from failed ad platform experiments
• [21:41] – Using ads to de-risk and validate expansion into new geographic markets
• [23:41] – Why and how B2B influencer marketing works
• [31:14] – How to brief and collaborate with influencers for authentic content
• [34:46] – Why recurring influencer relationships outperform one-off posts
• [39:30] – Reality of influencer attribution—and why you shouldn’t force UTMs
• [43:14] – Partnerships: why it’s the most underrated channel in B2B
• [47:06] – How AI fits (and doesn’t fit) into modern marketing
• [48:21] – Overrated and underrated AI use cases for marketers
• [51:01] – Voice-of-customer data as next-level marketing rocket fuel

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Final Takeaways

• Start small, iterate, and let data guide investment. Every channel that succeeded at Lemlist began with focused experimentation, rapid feedback loops, and willingness to drop what didn’t work.
• Outsource for technical depth—own your story in-house. External experts quickstart campaigns, but keep positioning and creative internally for authenticity.
• Treat influencer and partner channels as compounding, not transactional. Multi-layered relationships drive awareness, deals, and customer success synergistically.
• AI is a force multiplier—but only with genuine, contextual, and creative human input. AI scales existing knowledge, repurposes, and complements high-touch strategy—not a magic content machine.

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Find Domitille on LinkedIn for more tactical breakdowns, or reach out if you heard her on the show! (54:48)

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Transcript

[A]

Hey, it's me, Dave. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Knack. Knack is a no code email and landing page creation platform focused on a problem every marketing team runs into. Have you ever had a really good marketing idea but then it takes forever to actually ship it out the door? It's usually not because your idea is bad, but because the process in the middle is slow. Briefs, more briefs, approvals, reviews, tiny fixes that somehow turn into weeks. And by the time the campaign is finally ready to go out, it barely even looks like what you originally wanted to ship. Yep, that right there, that is the gap that Knack exists to close. Knack is a no code email platform built for modern marketing teams. They have AI built into the platform that lets you prompt ideas and instantly generate on brand email assets so you can create, review QA and launch your email all in the same place. No jumping between tools or messy handoffs halfway through after the email goes live. Knack also gives you performance insights and recommendations so you can see what worked and how you can make the next send better. So if execution is the thing slowing your marketing down or you just want one system that takes you from idea to shipt to learning to improving, you should check out knack. Go to knack.com exit5 that's k n a k.com exit5. You're listening to the Dave Gerhardt show. My guest on this episode is Dami de Saint Yuxbury. She is the CMO at Lemlist and clap. They're a company in the B2B sales space and we talk about how she turned $1.2 million of marketing spend into $31 million of new ARR. We break down the whole thing, talk about all the channels, agencies, people, tools that she invested in to do it. You're going to love this episode. If you want tactics, specifics, this is the episode for you. Enjoy my conversation with Dami. Can you start with the background? Lem List is like this interesting company that I only know from. From the Internet. And so I want to. I want to go into all this stuff that you wrote, but tell me about the setup of the company. So there's actually. I'm not even gonna lead you with a question, I just wanna hear you explain it. You are the CMO.

[B]

Yeah, of course. So basically Lemlist is a bootstrapped 40 million ARR sales engagement platform. And it helps like B2B startups. Crush outbound, basically. And we recently acquired Klab. Don't know if you, if you've seen this either like on the Internet or in my LinkedIn post, but it's like much smaller company. 2 million ARR. Converse session intelligence platform for sales team. And, and yes, that's basically who we are. I don't know how much.

[A]

So your focus is selling like you sell software to sales. Is the, is the customer profile.

[B]

Exactly, exactly.

[A]

And what have you been, what have you been doing? How did you, how did you get to this role where you're, you're CMO of this $40 million ARR. SAS company. I don't want the whole career story. This is where people are like, they, they, they're like just you know, they start.

[B]

So I started school and then, then yeah, yeah, I can tell you actually like I've been 15 years doing like B2B marketing tech and like building marketing teams in, in scale ups basically. But yeah, there is a funny story behind like how I ended up at Lemlist. Like the founder g like reached out I think it was like three years ago and basically he wanted to discuss marketing and vices and like it was at the very beginning when Limbless was moving from a hundred percent self served motion plg motion to sales lid and as was doing marketing in a sales company, he was like okay, let's you know, discuss and exchange like advices and, and yeah, it started like this and a few months later he offered the job basically. And after saying no a few months ago, I came back and I was like, you know what, it's time for me to, to step out of my comfort zone and like start the learning curve again, I guess. And yeah, I, I finally said yes and changed my mind and here I am.

[A]

Okay, so the reason that we reached out to ask you to come on the podcast is because everybody's always in our webinars and chats and dms and everybody wants, marketers want examples. They want real stories. This is why your LinkedIn content. I think you're a great person to follow. I'll have to add you to my list of people. When they say who should I follow? And you know how you know people. But my brain does like oh, okay, so, so put you, we'll put you on that list.

[B]

Please do, please do.

[A]

We'll put you on the list. But you wrote this post and we want to like, we need to talk more specifics about examples. People don't care where you went to college, if you did college, if you worked at Salesforce for nine years. Nobody cares. They want to know. Tell me specific things you're doing Because I'm doing marketing right now and I want to have the podcast that you listen to and you're like, oh man, I listen to this podcast and I got this idea and I tried this email that this person suggested and it worked, right? Or didn't. And about a month ago you wrote this post and you said, we spent 1.2 million on marketing in 2025 at Lemlist and it generated 31 million in new ARR. And today I'm going to share the exact breakdown and I'm going to try to draft off of that and we're going to turn that into this podcast episode. But you just mentioned to me that the company is now 40 million error, which means that you added 31. So did you, did Lemlist add 30 million in? And this whole thing on its own is like an incredible story. Did the company go from 9 million to 40 million in the last year?

[B]

No, no, it's. So it's new ARR and it's for, for Lemley's End Club. And then obviously like we had I think a 60% year on year growth. So it's pretty, pretty huge. But still like a lot of company. We also have to fight churn and which is actually the reason why we are making this move from self serve to sales LED and like a bit moving up market and serving right now like mid market and startups. And so yeah, that's, that's how the math basically works.

[A]

Okay, so you, you've done an awesome job in our, in our prep doc. I got to say, you're already my favorite all time guest because you put the most amount of effort into the prep, which I feel like I can totally understand your personality type just having gone through the doc, which is amazing. So I'm going to maybe let you drive. How. Where should we go from here? We spent a million. We spent 1.2 million on marketing in 2025 at Lemlist. It generated 31 million in new ARR. Where should we start?

[B]

I mean, I like the way you put it through in the doc, like maybe like starting from the biggest spend part and then you know, we can break it down from there maybe.

[A]

Okay, let's do that. So you went from no ads in 2024 to spending half a million dollars in 2025, which drove 4 million in first touch ARR. What was the, where did that trigger come from? What made you say we're going to go from spending nothing to $500,000 on ads this year?

[B]

I think it's very Much linked to what we've already like talked about because the trigger that pushed lemlies from $0 in paid ads to like 5,500k a year was basically realizing that paydad lets just you capture existing demand and move fast on a new target audience which is what we were trying to do. Moving from this founder audience to more sales within mid market companies. And yeah, when paid is basically executed well technically speaking and sits of course on top of a strong positioning, it just give you things most channels want which is speed and control. And I think that's what we're looking at. So yeah, that basically was the trigger.

[A]

Okay. What you said is actually the most important part when it's executed, when paid is executed well and it's on top of strong positioning. So can we kind of unpack each of each of each of those first? What was the positioning? Let's start with maybe like the offer and the thing that you were using paid to promote. And then let's talk about like what does that mean to execute paid?

[B]

Well yeah, again I think there's those two parts. Paid is, can be complex technically speaking, especially if you go on different platforms. You know you have like, if you do social, you have LinkedIn, you have Facebook and then obviously you have Google Ads and Bing ads. And so each platform has their own specificity and you need to like master you know like repetition and bidding tactics and so on. And so for that part we basically decided that we didn't have this knowledge internally, this technical knowledge. And so we outsourced this part to someone who was like much better and also you know, who was eager to do this. Like it's kind of, kind of something like quite you repeat a lot during the day. And we wanted to externalize this but still in house we would keep again the positioning and the messaging and the tactics and like the person basically managing this person who would be linking all our ads campaigns to our main product launches and like big GTM momentum for instance and make sure that we will always have something on point and to sell to the market. And so that's basically how we, we worked on this.

[A]

Were the ads trying to drive people into the, into the product or was it like a lead magnet like hey, get this ebook on how to do cold outbound.

[B]

I would say that we leveraged ad mostly to drive either to the product through the sign up because we have a free trial or even directly to the demo and to our sales team. Because again the objective with ads was to go after this new audience and feed ourselves With Pipeline. This is cool because it's something cool that you can do with ads. Basically, you could target intent on sea and you can bid on competitors. Soon we'll probably be able to, you know, like to bid on or to do ads on LLMs. And so this is obviously like a strong premise, right, to look at.

[A]

Except for anthropic. Did you see their ad?

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the ad, it's amazing. Do you, do you happen to watch Black Mirror?

[A]

No, but tell me.

[B]

Okay, no, because I thought they add like really recalls of a Black Mirror episode that's called a common people where basically, yeah, the is this technology that makes people saying ads live. And it was like, exactly the anthropic.

[A]

That's amazing. What's funny, I saw that and I just thought of it from a marketer standpoint and it's kind of like when two products are so similar, it's so hard to figure out the differentiator. And it's like, well, we're, we're better, we're faster. We have this feature. And it was kind of like someone just must have come up with like, oh, here's an angle. Like they're releasing ads. That's going to be our like, angle to just shift the conversation to our direction. I don't know if it was effective or not, but I think that's what's, that's what's fun about marketing to me. It's like finding those little opportunities instead of saying like, well, we do this thing 2.3 times faster. I talked about, I've been talking about this ad a lot, so apologies to people who've listened to the last episode probably, but there's a. Ramp is running these podcast ads and they're talking about how hard it is to get an engineering job at Ramp. They're like, you know, I don't know what the, the math is. I don't know what the ad is, but it's like they only accept.0001% of the engineers that apply to a job. And the whole ad is about. It makes you think like, wow, man, they must have like the best product then if they have the best engineers. And I just thought it was an interesting example of, of positioning.

[B]

Yeah, that's genius.

[A]

I didn't know on this paid thing. So you want to scale up, like you're ready to scale up this channel. But a lot of people I'll see in our community, they will hear this story. Now. You went from zero to, to $500,000. Most of the marketers are going to say, well I'm not just going to dump $500,000 into this channel. Did you have a scale up plan? Did you go into this? A lot of people will ask like how much? You know, what do I need to get started before I'm going to go hire this, this person and I'm going to go spend this money on it. Like what was the, what was the path to ramping up?

[B]

Yeah, obviously you don't, you don't like go from 0 to 500 in just a few weeks or even a few months. You start small, you iterate and then you accelerate. I would say that first you choose one channel because it takes time to master different channels. So first we started with ACA because again it's probably the strongest channel I would say at least for consumer and mid market because you can target what's aca? Search engine acquisition. So Google Ads basically or Bing ads because you just bit on intent and people like requests. So it's probably a bit easier to master than social ads where if you want to be good at targeting, especially in B2B you need to have like retargeting motions and so ABM and so on. Especially if you're.

[A]

Because it's not as direct response as like I search.

[B]

Okay, exactly. So yeah, we started with Google Ads. We started with one geo and when we extended to other geos and then we launched LinkedIn ads and in LinkedIn ads we launched only like you know like sponsored advertising in the feed and then we started over formats like sponsored email. And so yeah obviously like you go little by little like this and you need like to have like sprints of iterations and every time we had like hypothesis that we would validate with our VP of growth and obviously the paid guide manager like okay, if we spend like 10 grand and we get this type of response then it means like it's responding well. And obviously the more you launch the more you can compare and proof test like the different channels between themselves which is always super useful. So yeah, this is how we did it.

[A]

And did you bring on this paid person from the beginning or did you do some of this test and learn in house, then get to a certain point and then scale and bring in someone?

[B]

I mean we started on our own first and then we quickly realized that when our budget was going higher we definitely needed let's say someone super expert. And as we didn't want to hire yet someone, we decided to outsource this skill and we basically looked for a paid ad freelancer. And I think you had this question about how do you choose what skill you will outsource versus you will hire. And I think it's definitely linked to this for us. We try to outsource, obviously to de risk hiring because hiring takes time and until you've really proven a channel you might not want to hire someone. And also it's a fast track to basically learning and impact because obviously ramping up someone in your team on a new channel will take time. It could be a good bet. But to begin with, I think working with someone and having this person working with someone external is probably the best, at least for the first years. And last reason why we could keep outsourcing would be just to help our team stay focused on what matters. I don't want them to basically like do the same little task over and over. I want them to focus on high impact tasks and more strategic stuff.

[A]

Was it a no brainer to scale this up or did you have to go ask for more budget and were there questions around proving that this is working?

[B]

I mean we got lucky because it worked. So when we had those dashboards that leadership was looking at and they basically saw two things. First, that we were starting not to be dependent anymore on just brand acquisition, which is good because it's always good to diversify your acquisition. Obviously you don't want to be a hundred percent like dependent on paid because the day the money runs out then it's game over. But being also like 100% depending on brand is not good because you can control brand basically. Like if someone tells you like, oh dummy, I want you to like double acquisition next month. And the only thing I have is brand like what, what do I do? Like brain is like the hallow effect of a bit everything.

[A]

And obviously this is like this happens all the time. It's like, well I, I run a community now so it's, I'll just use this example. Someone's like, oh man, we got mentioned in exit 5 and like we got a bunch of new deals like from that, like how do we do more of that? And like that's the thing, you can't. There's no like button to like control and do more.

[B]

Exactly. There's no magic button.

[A]

So you said, you said, I like this. You said search works extremely well when the market is mature, people actively searching for what you offer. That's the case for most of what you were doing. But when it's not, you needed to go more upstream. And this is educational ads, thought leadership, sponsored LinkedIn posts from the CEO or industry creators. Let's spend a minute and talk about that. Because that is, it's still paid. But it is so different than someone searching for a specific term. Because here the creative is often the very. The creative plus the offer are often the variable for success.

[B]

Yes. So you're talking about there are two things that are pretty linked and there is like employee advocacy and then influence marketing. It's basically the same mechanism. It's just one is done with your own employee and the other is done with external people that basically you pay for. I think both are extremely interesting.

[A]

Oh, so those are in your. When you talk about paid like influencers, Influencer marketing is in that bucket.

[B]

Oh the, the 500 grand was just for PPC so you know, like LinkedIn. But no, influencers were never was another bucket.

[A]

Okay, let's, let's, let's go to influencer in a second. I just want to cap out because you expanded beyond Google AdWords as an example and you are, you know, you mentioned running ads in the newsfeed on, on LinkedIn. What was the process for creative there? Like what, what worked? Because my take on this is I see a lot of ads that just look like ads. They look like this kind of stock standard B2B. It's like a PDF and it looks yucky. And I don't know, whoever clicks on that.

[B]

Yeah, did you do that? I know that. Funny story. Like when we started like launching ads on, on LinkedIn, it required like some media like visuals or video and we tried doing some stuff with AI and some stuff were good. But we also happen to have like a designer that's a designer team that is really cool with two brand designers. And so they started like doing ads for us based on our brief and we brainstormed with the team and every time they would like come up with those beautiful ads but like very on brand, very safe. And I was like, no, no, no. I wanted to have fun. Like, like it's the really like probably the only, not the only part, but it's probably one of the channel where you can definitely have fun. And I don't care if it's not on brand. I don't care if you don't see the blue of Lemlies or the pink of club. Like just like make it fun, use 3D, whatever you want. I want to try a lot of things and catch people attention and I don't want it to look like a cover of a B2B E book, you know. So yeah, definitely agree with you on that.

[A]

Take who, who did the creative in house or you had somebody?

[B]

Yeah, mostly in house or AI. And again like we, we also tried some AI like tool to generate cool ads and we are doing both like a mix of AI stuff and things, things like just created by our in house brand designers.

[A]

It's an interesting thing that always happens which is like we're, we want to run ads for our company and so we make ads that look like. It's like when everybody used to have like the banners in your email signature.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

How do you shake that within team? A lot, a lot of people listening, you know they are like marketers at bigger companies. They got a creative director. The ads have to go out in way.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I always think about one of my favorite books ever was like Ogilvy on advertising and he talks about like I don't really care, I don't really care how anyone feels about the ad. I, I, I want to know that the ad made the cash register ring. Like did it work? And you said something important there which is attention. Is this thing going to get attention? Like what was like do you actually, when you go and make the ads, do you actually go to LinkedIn, scroll through the feed and think like would I click on this ad? Is this going to interrupt the pattern here?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, definitely. We have this like a library on notion where everyone in the team puts like benchmark of ads they like and they say why they like this ad. There was actually this, we are right now testing a new AI tool and basically it allows you to create those really cool ads where it feels like whatever you have on your ad is getting out of the screen. If that makes sense.

[A]

Oh yeah. Jess Cook from Vector showed us an ad like that the other day. It's awesome.

[B]

Yeah, awesome. So it's definitely this, it's like interrupt, interrupting the pattern. I think adds is there, is that

[A]

what can you shout out that tool so people can check it out? Do you know what it is?

[B]

We tried a bunch. I will let you know. I'm not even sure what it was

[A]

called, but all right, go to ask your AI. Just copy, just paste this in after whoever's, whoever's listening to this. Okay. So paid working. You're doing more of it. Any mistakes that you, that you made, if you could look back over last year and just like, oh man, I wish we would have learned faster. If I didn't waste three months doing this or did everything just work out of the gate and next, next topic.

[B]

We tried some platforms that didn't work out for Us, we wanted to be a bit creative and we tried like Snapchat ads, We tried Spotify ads. Like I remember like, we kind of, we, we were like one, one afternoon at the studio and we recording our own voices, doing like some, some Spotify ads. Those didn't really work out. I, I think like it's, it's hard to, to do B2B marketing on like very presumer channels and it's probably like takes a lot of a good tactical setup. I think we didn't like crack it yet, but. Yeah.

[A]

What plans do you have for, for this year? Like, how might you expand this if you're going to double down on this? What does that look like? Is it just more.

[B]

I guess there are two things. First, when I try new markets, because ads are again an incredible way to learn fast about new markets. For instance, we have this plan to extend in Germany because we already have like a pretty natural traction without doing basically anything, which is like a good sign that you should probably push it a bit further. And it's like super recent. But We've tried in Q4 pushing some ads there. And it's funny because again, back to positioning, you really learn a lot about your market. First, we were launching some ads that we were launching in the US like multichannel prospection for your sales team. Pretty basic and classic with cool design, but basic messaging and the CTR was really bad. And then we realized that cold emailing is just poorly tolerated in Germany. And so we started investing heavily in other kind of messaging saying, okay, with Flamelist, you can, you know, like bring your outreach to LinkedIn and be better on the phone and, and it worked just so much better. So it's funny because it's, I think it's a good way to, to just proof test messaging hypothesis you would have for markets. So yeah, this is definitely one thing we want to double down. It's just like going after new markets. We've, we've paid.

[A]

Okay, let's shift and talk about influencers. Influencers play off of the paid strategy a little bit. And what's super interesting now about influencers that I think I see a lot of people doing, and we've talked about it on this podcast, is you almost get more security with influencers now, especially if your audience is on LinkedIn because you can take, you know, you can get someone to write a post and it's not just like one post that has to deliver X number of leads because now we can run those as thought leader ads. You spent this year in this it said $60,000 on influencers. Tell us about your approach to influencers. Where did it come from? How did you, how did you tackle it? And what was the play with influencers?

[B]

Influencers. We wanted to test it out because we thought first that we always say at Lemlist want to have a marketing that's not like boring to boring. So often B2B marketing, you get them for pretty classic marketing. And it can be classic in terms of format, but it can be classic in terms of channels too. And influence marketing is probably something people think more, you know, in the, in the prosumer world. And we wanted like to test it for, for B2B. And second, I think it's, it's like a really, really cool channel to be. To build both lead gen and demand gen. I think that it's you who said that early on in the days on LinkedIn. Like how, look at how you buy yourself as, as a person before you do your own marketing. And what do we do whenever we want to buy something? Most of the time we ask someone else, someone we know, someone we trust. And so I deeply believe this is how people buy and even more nowadays where you don't really like trust the sources of information. And so yeah, just having trusted people, you know, you can relate with. I think I deeply believe in it and that's why we wanted to try it out. And so yeah, how did we launch this? I wish there was a magic recipe for finding like influencers and like the best influencers and especially before they blew up and before they became like out of reach in terms of money. But we discovered that most existing databases were pretty bad. I mean at least five icon and offers and like none were super like relevant for us. So it wouldn't, it would give us like influences with a lot of followers. But then when we would look at the type of posts it wouldn't like, it wouldn't match and because we basically look at three things that I think that ibase had a hard time like basically spotting which is the consistency and the depth of the content that those influence would post are a clear point of view and in a clear niche. And also like qualitative comments, you know, like not just hey dude, great take like comments like, but people that are able to spark discussions and questions below their posts.

[A]

Well there's like, there's, there's no database that's going to give you that. I know that.

[B]

No, no, look, we're in, I wish there was.

[A]

We're in B2B and I do, I Forget who I was talking to, but somebody like a big, bigger consumer market was like, no, this exists and it's called blah. But everybody that I've talked to, like, at least in our space and podcast, it's like we want there to be. Even if there was, guess what would happen? Every company would just sort by followers and just try to go after the, the same like top five or 10 people. It's just like every channel. Eventually in marketing it's like, how do you figure out what works with influencers? It's like, and who to target? Well, you got to know, you got to know the audience, right? Like you got to spend time there and know like, oh, I, I want to go work with this person. And I think in your, in, in our doc, you, you actually labeled them as micro influencers, which I think is really important. And especially in the context of B2B, you don't have to have someone with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. You don't need a Kardashian to post about your thing. You need, you know, someone who writes about B2B sales with like 7,000 followers would probably be a good target for a LEM list, you know, thought leader ad. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is also brought to you by Optimizely. Okay, everyone is using AI right now. Point blank, that part's done. We're all using all the tools for copy ideas, baseline stuff, but there's still a gap. Most marketing teams are using the AI tools to think and not actually do. That's where things are headed next. And our sponsor Optimizely built this platform called Opal that lets you use autonomous AI agents to go and do the stuff you shouldn't be doing manually versus just being another chatbot. Here are some examples. Opal can create and optimize on brand web pages, emails, SEO content and campaigns by audience segment. It catches brand, legal and accessibility issues before anything else goes live on your website. It pulls data from your other systems like Google Analytics, your CRM and sales tools to auto build reports, summaries and recommendations and more. And guess what? It's completely no code. So marketers like you and me can build and leverage agents for any use case we dream up without having to rely on developers. That is freedom. So get this. Optimizely has this incredible offer for Exit 5 listeners. They're offering a free personalized 45 minute AI workshop to help you identify the best AI use cases for your marketing team and map out where agents can save you time with a Practical plan that you can actually go and use right away. They're giving everyone who attends Live a free pair of meta ray band which are awesome if you haven't used them yet. So you should go grab a seat right [e-mail] exit5 it's optimizely.com exit5. Check out the workshop get smarter about AI. The future is here.

[B]

Exactly. And most of our influencers have like around 10k followers at the maximum. We are working with some big ones that have like a hundred, you know, but like underdog sales or content is the new sales and so on. But most of them are small and actually I think that's a good bet to try to find influencers you will grow with because they have a high motivation basically to grow with you, which I think matters a lot.

[A]

Let's dive into the mechanics of it. Like what did they need to be? What were they posting? Did they need to be using the product? Were you driving people to an ebook? Was it some report you wanted people to share? Can you take me into the mechanics of. Or you got the influencer. You know, we identified influencers somehow. How many times are they posting, over what period of time, what are they posting, how you, how are you measuring, how you tracking success?

[B]

And just to wrap up on the identifying, basically we did it. I think it was pretty manual, but we would start with our own network and that means like partners, clients, clients are a good sweet spot to start with. And I mean we have like tens of thousands of clients so it's a good way to start when you're not too small. And obviously like as you said, creators we would already know and follow. And then you know, like you just train the algorithm to basically surface lookalike influencers because like you interact more with those con with their content. And so then LinkedIn would just push more content lookalike also in other platforms and also we were running outreach campaigns targeting the creators that are existing influencers would follow themselves. And this actually worked pretty well because often like your own influencer follow other influential people, if that makes sense. So you have tactics to kind of like scale. It's not really scale, but to grow a bit faster. I would say your follow like influencers audience. But yeah, back to your question. Basically your question was like, how do we work with them? How do we brief them? That's, that's what you want to know, right?

[A]

Yeah. How do you, how do you work with them? Like the brief. Right? I'll give you an example. I get an email from a big company, get an email from like a HubSpot or. And they're like, hey, we're, we're sourcing influencers. Here's the deadline. You know, here's what the post needs to be about. Here's the deadline. And I've just found that that stuff, at least for us, it doesn't work. So I don't, I don't do those anymore. The best things happen when we're, like, really working with someone. And so I'm curious, you see, you seem like a thoughtful gal, so I'm just curious to hear what your, your approach is. Take me into. Like, we got our 10 influencers. What are we going to do with them?

[B]

Yeah, of course. I think something you said, it was with Jess from Vector, like, no one knows their audience better than the creator. Which is why, like you, Dave, whenever you do like an ad for your newsletter or the podcast, like, it works best if you are the one basically scripting it. I 100%, like, agree with that same point. And so we don't try to control creators, but we try to feed them and we do two things and they have like an onboarding and then an influence influencer kit. Whenever they start with us first, we align on the philosophy, which is we never try to sell solely a feature. We sell a method that solves a real, real pain. And it happens that this method is easier to execute if you have Lemlist or Clap, but you can reproduce the method although you don't have Lemlist and Clap. And this is very important because we want them to use this structure and most of them, they're influencers that they naturally, like, would do it. But we really don't want, like, this post. Like, Landliz is the best because it wouldn't work. Like, we weren't like.

[A]

Well, actually, this is, this is kind of the first part of my question. So is it, Was it a product? Like, would it be a product post verse. Like, I'll see companies now being like, hey, we're going to use these 10. You know, we're going to use Jess Cook to. We're going to pay Jess Cook, VP of marketing, a vector to promote. She's gonna do a post about like a webinar we're doing. Or we just. We did this. You know, my company wrote a state of X, Y and Z report and we're gonna use them to promote it. You were doing more specific, like, product, go use Lemlist.

[B]

Yeah, it, it could be linked to some content if we have like a specific webinar or a study. But most of the time it's linked to the product and we try like to, to match also the, the capabilities to a certain type of influencers. For instance Lemlist, you have like calling capabilities. And we have a lot of sales influencers who are really like in the cold calling niche and they're like creating amazing content, video content where they basically like film themselves cold calling. And it's really funny. And so for those, for instance, we definitely go to them whenever we have something new around calling capabilities. But again we would tell them, oh, this is like the kind of narrative we were, we were thinking about. And this is how like we think you should like share this kind of use cases and to make sure that whenever they post it's like useful and so they share like frameworks or scripts if it's like something around AI and templates, copywriting examples. And at the end they say by the way, this is done with Flamelist, but it's like super useful.

[A]

And how do you measure the success of, of those campaign? And sorry, is it, is it one post? Are you buying like one post a month over three months? What are the mechanics of the campaign?

[B]

So it depends when we start working with an influencer. Most of the time we like, we negotiate for at least three posts because want to show them that it's like long midterm commitment at least when you start because obviously you have to proof test for both sides that it works. But then when, whenever we repeat because we think it's success and we'll come to this how we measure this. We can, we can like for some influencers we pay like we negotiate for six months of posting or a package of 10 posts because we really believe like this should be like an always on creator network. And also like it compounds like when influencers start like understanding your product and using it and seeing like the advantage of it like he will create really good content faster also. So it would be a shame to just like do one off projects all the time and it will be like super hard just to, to, to handle.

[A]

Wait, so are all these influencers using, using Lemlist in the back on the, in the background?

[B]

Yeah, they, they all have when, whenever they start they have like this free license and we encourage them to test it. We should like again depending on their niche, if they're like really good at doing copywriting, then we would like have them. Yeah, exactly. Using it for more like LinkedIn.

[A]

What's funny is it's like it's shaking out to be. We're learning this with all of our content channels. It's like shocker. The more effort you put into something, a lot of times the better it's going to be. You know, I think there was kind of like a V1 of this where you could just kind of pay someone to write a post and you'd get a bunch of leads from that. But now the copy matters. Like it can't just be like, yeah, they paid me to write this post, I wrote this post. It's gotta be like, it's gotta be the, the post without LEM list has to be awesome. And then if you integrate Lemless into that, that's how you're gonna get the maximum like engagement that.

[B]

Yeah, 100. And I think that's also why we are targeting operators. So basically people that are doing the job right now. So 90% of the influencers that work with us are doing sales like every day. And so they are in the field in the battlefield of rejection and low reply rates. And, and that's why like the product is going to be first really useful for them. But also they can talk about the pain because they just experience it every day. And for us it's super important. We happen to work with like big influencers that are book authors and not, not that much anymore into the field like of cold calling every day. But for most of them we want them to be salesperson basically.

[A]

Okay, you mentioned multiple posts. I think this is so important, especially in B2B. I think what's really cool about what's I run a business in this space. So that's why I'm passionate about this topic. It's interesting but like we do newsletter sponsorships or we do, you know, long term engagements. In B2B it's different because in consumer everybody wants to know what are the CPMs? What are the CPMs? How am I going to get, you know, how many eyeballs am I get? But when you're selling something in B2B, the, the price especially, right. You're talking about Lemless is going up market. Right. You might do an influencer deal with someone and they might get you what looks like seemingly low engagement, but you get a massive account from that post. Exactly.

[B]

One deal can like, you know, like have a 10x ROI.

[A]

So that's, it's not direct response but it can be like, oh, I took this demo because I saw LEM list in you know, Mary's post or whatever.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I think that one thing that really matters is the One off posts to me don't really seem to work where it's like over the course of three months. Is it like Lemless, Lemless, Lemless, Lemless. And now because then you also, it changes the measurement discussion a little bit too. It's not, it's not like all right, you know Mary's, it's Thursday, Mary's doing her post like I got to get my seven leads today. It's over the course of three months. Did more people hear about us and do we get inbound from that? Which I, I think is interesting. So it's interesting to hear you say like yeah, we want to, we want to work with people. Not, not on a one off basis.

[B]

One really cool things about influence that I would, I would like advise marketers want to launch it to, to tell their leadership to convince them it's that it compounds super well with other channels. And I think that's the beauty of it because it compounds super well with both ads and outbound. And this is something we've been like, we've, we've been pretty successful with. So basically when you have a few posts that work super well, naturally, organically, you see like a lot of discussions under like the comments questions, you can just sponsor it and it becomes like what LinkedIn calls a thought leadership ad. The CTR like are amazing on those because I guess like people are just like more inclined to click and comment on ads that comes from real people than just a brand logo. And second, doing outbound with it, it's been like incredibly successful for us. We were able for instance we had this influencer, Giulio, he's a cold calling influencer and he made one post about Lemlist and we started like reaching out to some of the people that commenting, asking questions about Lemlist and why he would like partner with us. And we had like amazing reply rate, like 40% something you don't see usually. And something even crazier that we are just trying right now is actually to outreach to those people on behalf of the influencer. Obviously we do it with their, with their agreement because it's a win win. They, they get like to have more engagement and one on one engagement which seems like one on one engagement with their audience. And so they like it because people are happy actually to receive a message from their sales hero. And so yeah, I think it's, it's really cool and it's a really, really interesting channel for this.

[A]

Did you make money? You spent 60k on influencer last year. Did you break even.

[B]

Oh yeah. Again, attribution is always tricky. We try to be like very serious about attribution at lemi's, but at the same time we also believe that we don't want to build this crazy model attribution model because we know it will never be true. Even more like in B2B mid market where you have like several touch points and the funnel is a bit complex still. We look at first attribution at least just to compare channels between the, between themselves and see how they evolve over the time, which is like very important. But we know like it's not 100% true. And for influence it's even. It's more tricky because two things we don't want to put UTM on, on the, the influencers post because.

[A]

Oh, thank you. Thank goodness. Thank gosh. That, that's like the ultimate, like, that's the ultimate like hedge, right? It's like we're marketers. We want to work with this outside channel of which we have no control. But we want everyone to make sure you click on the link in this influencer's bio and use this perfectly labeled UTM so we can track that the six people. It's like, ah, that's not how marketing works. It doesn't work like that.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

And, and wait, you said it like we, you said we try really hard. But attribution is, it's not really about like what, what you want to do as the company. It's like the, the customer. What if I never, what if I never click or engage or do anything? But I still saw that post from, from Julio. I still saw that or whatever his name was, but I ended up booking a demo like months later. I never told you about it. It's like, oh, that doesn't count then, right?

[B]

No, exactly. So we have a system to kind of estimate the impact of influence. We started with something super simple when we launched it because, yeah, we wanted to launch fast. And so our first model basically was looking at a signup baseline. And whenever we had a post and at the very beginning we had just a few, you know, we would look at whatever uplift we would get and sometimes we would see like pretty, pretty crazy uplifts, especially with like post sharing frameworks template, very concrete, like step by step inside the product. And that was already a good sign. And then, you know, we're like, okay, so it gives like this number of signups in terms of uplifts compared to the baseline. Then we would just apply the classic like conversion rate, free trial to paid that we have in average and the classic ltv and we'll just estimate the revenue it will give us. Now the, the growth team and they, they were a bit crazy about it, but they built like this a bit more complex like attribution model where they do a mix of like rich and comments and so on. And yeah, they, they like like refining it and I think it's cool. But still again, for me the most important is to see the trend and to be able also to compare influencers between themselves. It's also a good way, you know, whenever you want to start with an influencer because it's not working out and sometimes it happens to be like, look, we have this table and you just consistently underperform. Plus we believe like it's not the, the tone of voice we want and then, you know, it's a goodbye. It doesn't happen a lot, but it does.

[A]

You have underperformed. I picture it's not, it's not even you. It's just like someone comes out and is like, hello, I'm from the growth team at Lemless. This post has underperformed Goodbye. Wait, what is the growth team? Is it another part of growth is not marketing? Like are they just. Their job is to figure out attribution or why do they do that?

[B]

No, growth is marketing. Basically our marketing team is like 10 people and it's basically two sub teams. It's very classic. It's like content, brand and product marketing on one side and growth on the other side. And growth basically owns the website, the drip campaigns and all the distribution channels. And obviously like they work very closely together.

[A]

Okay, Influencers. We put a bow in that. The other big thing, the other big thing, the other big spend of the 1.2 million was 450k on partnerships. You said it's probably the most underrated B2B growth channel. Leveraging your network to sell is insanely powerful. Partner partners bring new revenue and makes customers more successful. With your product, you pay lifetime commissions. It's a win win. This is super interesting because this is never. I'm always of like the more. Let's, let's do the, let's do the sexy stuff like influencers, AB tech, you know, optimization, da da da. And it's like, oh man, half a million dollars in those partnerships. But that's, that's massive and obviously made a big impact. Tell me about partnerships and how this worked for you.

[B]

Yeah, first of all, disclaimer. We don't pay lifetime commissions to every partners. It's just for the tier one partners. For the other ones it's like 25% for a year. So yeah, it's, it's only for the big, the big outbound agencies that we would have like lifetime commissions because we know they are the ones basically like increasing lifetime value and retention. So again you cannot see them just as demand capture. Basically they're here just to increase. I think like LTV for those tier one agencies is more than double than the one we have usually, which shows that they are here to help our users that they acquired be just more successful because they build like use cases basically and they, they, they basically coach them to be better.

[A]

So do they sell Lemlist through there? So it's, it's a, it's an outbound sales agency and they resell Lemlist.

[B]

Exactly. And for club for instance, it's like coaching agencies because one of the use cases is like coaching sales. And so something very important that we did the shift also like last year is to really work with agencies that have done with you motion and not done for you. So the client basically sees the end product and grow with the agency and basically use it with them. And it's not the agency using your product for them, if that makes sense. And I think this is super important. If you really want it to compound and you want like your client, you don't want to be basically invisible for your client. This is super, super important because the last part about partnership I think is that it builds up your brand because partners when, when you know, obviously you have a good relationship with them. We spend a lot of time like training them. They have access to our product managers.

[A]

Is this in marketing? Is partners part of your marketing org?

[B]

They're in the growth team. And so we have this strong relationship with partners and then you know, they start like organizing events with us or webinars. And it's really strong because they allow your brand to shine.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Even in geographies where you're not. And so I see them as a force multiplier. And clay, for instance has been like incredibly successful with partnerships. And I think they have a playbook that we should definitely try to replicate.

[A]

Yeah. Oh, they're, they're. The clay partnership thing is a master class. And just like I'm not, I don't know a lot about partnerships, but I love how they name everything. They call them clay gencies. Yeah.

[B]

Clay agencies. And then they have the clay clubs and they kind of clay.

[A]

Yeah. You need someone like that. Lemless. Lemless. I don't doesn't work the same Clay Lemless Club.

[B]

It does work.

[A]

Lemcliffe Lemclub. That's a good name. Do you have that?

[B]

No, but we have Limitless and Friends, which is, which is like the, the reunions we have with them to show them the product.

[A]

Pretty good.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so how do you think about partners as a marketing channel? Like is someone. So someone. Is someone on the growth team in charge of like you know, finding new agencies. Yeah, closing deals with them.

[B]

Exactly. That's our partnership manager and she's in charge of both like doing acquisition and finding new partners and she's working a lot on growing basically this, these pool and making sure that they do upsell and that they grow the clients they have. And so yeah, it's a full time job and we believe it like super, super powerful.

[A]

Let's talk about AI before we wrap up. What, what role does AI play for, for you in your. In your marketing org right now? And do you hate it as much as I do? That is what I'm on this week that says I've had enough. I love AI. I've used it so much like to, to. We've talked about it so much. But I just, I'm out this week. I can't keep up anymore. I. There's just too much happening. I feel so insecure and so inefficient and like someone is probably like wait, do you. Dave, you did a podcast with an actual person? Don't you know I could have done that, you know, in Claude and yeah,

[B]

no, I think we all have FOMO with AI. But yeah, obviously we use a lot AI. The first use cases is probably content generation, but it's not the only one. Basically for every channels that we've mentioned we would use AI. So for ads, it's a lot to create visuals or just like do different. Like a B test.

[A]

Let me ask you this in a different way because my guess is you're using AI in this in, you know, similar way to a lot of, a lot of people listening. What is one. What's an overrated. An overrated use case of AI that you see marketers talking about and an underrated thing. So something you've, you've maybe implemented internally that's been like sneaky good overrating.

[B]

I think it's again, content generation because I think just I don't believe that AI is that good at creating content. I think it's good at repurposing. Rephrasing.

[A]

It's good if you, if you suck at. If you're not a good content creator, then it's definitely better. But if you have a good, you know, personality, tone of voice and. Yeah, for sure, for sure. I'm like, oh my God, who wrote this?

[B]

Yeah, and I mean, like, it has. Content has become a commodity. So you could just take the example on LinkedIn, everyone posting on LinkedIn and I think most posters suck because people would just say, hey, I want to write about this. Just write a post. And AI would do a hook and then three parts of it and the conclusion and asking a question. But the whole thing will be a bit empty because what really matters in the end is sharing something, like an experience, an anecdote, numbers. And this is basically the context. And AI cannot get that context unless, like, obviously you gave it to them. So, yeah, I don't really believe like in like generating a hundred blog posts because if you don't give like context, then yeah, you will have blog posts on your blog, but they will, they will basically suck.

[A]

That's, that's where I want to say see it? I see. Show me. I see people saying, I used your. You know, I fired my content team. We just created 100 landing page variations using. I'm like, show me the landing pages. Can I see? Can I see now? Maybe, maybe everyone's smarter than me and they're just creating content for a different world or humans don't matter. And actually the whole point of creating content is so the LLMs can just like crawl your content. Maybe that's. I'm going to get lapped there, but I don't know. What's the, what's an underrated use that you've put into play at Lemlist?

[B]

Yeah, I think one underrated is. Is probably for either outbound or drip campaigns. Something that we've been like pretty successful with is reaching out to users, maybe free trials or paid users based on their activities or results. And with AI, you can really like because you have the context inside your product. You can give AI this context and say reach out to them with something super helpful and tailored. And you can like this, you can like reduce or prevent churn. You can increase monetization, like for instance, like selling more credits or just improving your conversion to free to paid. And I think this is like, it's not like super sexy like drip campaigns or like outbound, but I believe like being able to bring more value, tailored value to people because you just use their own context with your own knowledge. This is, I think this is pretty, pretty cool.

[A]

Yeah, there seems like the mode is gonna. Not even the mode. But the huge thing for marketers would be like this data layer. I was thinking about this the other day, like, and I'm not a big AI influencer, but if we have all of our customer calls recorded, all of our sales conversations recorded, all of our internal meetings recorded, all of our notes and everything recorded, there is a gold mine of stuff that we can use for copy, for sales enablement. That's, that's sitting on that, you know, you know what I'm saying?

[B]

You're, you're basically pitching clap.

[A]

All right, let's go. Get me clapped up. Let me get it.

[B]

No, but basically this is what club does. It records sales conversation, but it doesn't record it for the sake of giving like insights. Like, hey, you spoke like twice more than your prospect. It's basically gathering super useful, valuable information that you only can get in those conversations. And it can be like key information to update your CRM. Like, for instance, it's super critical to know the number of employees from a company from an account for both sales, marketing and everyone in the company. And often it's really hard to get this number right. But if you speak with a prospect, you can ask and they were like, oh yeah, we are like 500 in company. And then boom, you can update your CRM and you have like an updated information that you can act on. So this is like super strong case to repeat what you said. For instance, in terms of sales enablement, you can use all the discussions. You have to see what are the main objection objections rising up the main competitors and then like just surface the best way to anticipate those. So it can be super strong for sales and implement and as it's a tool for sales. But I use it because I have, you know, we don't, we don't pay anymore because we bought them. I use it for like customer stories. And this is really cool. Like, I interview clients with it, I ask questions, I don't take notes, and then I just give my template and boom, I have my customer story. So, yeah, that's, that's pretty cool.

[A]

And yeah, even just like our, our internal team calls. Like today, just before this, we, we had a events meeting and we were talking about, we were working through the revisions on a. On the landing page. Just the ability to like riff on the idea and then the team gets the transcript from that call. Yeah, it used to be like, did you write that down? Did you take notes? Like, make sure you take notes. It's like, no, we, we talked about the Copy in. In the call.

[B]

And it's a relief that you don't have to focus on the note taking part and you can be like really focused on, on the discussion having, I guess for sales, that's indeed a huge plus.

[A]

But for anyone, like, okay, we got a wrap. This was great. Tommy, thank you for coming on my podcast. Anything, anything. I should have asked you before we go. I'll give you one, one, one parting thought if you want it.

[B]

No, I think we covered it a lot already.

[A]

All right, everybody will go follow you. Follow you on LinkedIn. Filled with. Filled with. I keep writing like that until, until Lem. Until your company is too successful and they say, stop sharing all of our, you know, spend and everything publicly. You have to cut back.

[B]

No, actually funny anecdote this post. It was an idea from my CEO. He was like, hey, Dami, you should, you should post a breakdown of our marketing budget. And you know, and we're like, okay, let's, let's do it.

[A]

So it's amazing. Perfect example of like, what good content can be today. You don't have to be the most, like create. You didn't have some crazy cute, like, carousel or all this nonsense. You're just like, here's what our marketing budget is, here's what we spent on it. And it went viral. And now we're on the podcast talking about it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

All right, good job. Keep up the good work. I will see you soon. Thanks everybody for listening to this episode. Go find Dami on LinkedIn. Send her a connection request, send her a message and be like, I heard you on Dave's podcast. Because the best thing, the thing that makes me feel the best is when someone who I had on my podcast messages me later. It's like, man, people actually listen to your podcast. That was legit. That was really good.

[B]

So thanks, Dave.

[A]

See ya. 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 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. 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. It 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 bleh. 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 5. Go and check them out. Customer IO, exit 5.