Transcript
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Email, in my humble opinion, is still the greatest marketing channel of all time. It's the only way you can truly own your audience today. But when it comes to building those emails, well, if you've ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know just how painful that can be. I won't name names, but templates get too rigid. Editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever when it shouldn't. That's why we love Knack here at Exit 5. Knack is a no code email platform that makes it easy to create on brand high performance, forming emails without the bottlenecks. If you're frustrated by clunky email builders, you need nac. If you're tired of hoping the email you sent looks good across all devices, just test it in NAC first. And if you're a big team that's making it hard to collaborate and get approvals on your email, you definitely need nac. The best part, everything takes a fraction of the time. You can see Knack in action@knack.com exit5. That's knock.com exit5. Or just let them know you heard about Knack from exit5.
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That's us.
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You're listening to the Dave Gerhard Show.
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All right. Hey, I'm back with a solo episode. It's just me, me and my friends on this episode. I talk about the one big idea for this week, which is attention. Why did we make attention a dirty word in marketing? It doesn't have to be a dirty word in marketing. And in fact, I could argue that attention is the name of the game in business in marketing. So we talk about attention. I talk about the hard thing about hard things. We talk about an event we're doing, and I take a bunch of listener questions from the ghost of marketing past to should I start a business beyond Exit 5? Enjoy this episode. It's me solo. The sunglasses are back on. It's Dave's podcast. All right. Hey, I'm back. Solo episode. It's just me, Dave. I'm the founder of Exit 5 and host of this show. Dave Gearhart show or Dave Geart Podcast. I don't know, whatever. What does it say? Dave Geart Podcast. That's me. We named it after me because I don't. Just makes a lot of sense. And I want to do more podcasting in 2026. I know I've been doing it forever, but we're investing in this channel. It's awesome. And the reason why, it's just like the connection you create from a Podcast is like nothing else. And you never know who's listening. We just got a note last week that this CMO of a multi billion dollar, I don't know, probably Fortune 100 company is listening. That's not even a flex. I hate when people do that when they give you. They don't tell you the actual source and anyone could just lie about that. But I don't care if you believe me or not. I know the truth and it feels really cool. And I don't know, you just never know who's going to message you and be like, hey, listen to the podcast. And these little solo episodes are fun to do. We're going to have guests. We're to have people from interesting companies. The sunglasses are back on today because they made me feel great and super confident last week. And then also everybody's sick in my house. I feel like I've been sleeping. Like I look like. I like to keep a clean, shaved head so it doesn't look like I'm just, you know, balding guy. Like to just own it and be bald. And I haven't shaved and I'm still recovering from this hip surgery thing. And so I'm going sunglasses on. And so doesn't matter to me if you like this or not, if you're watching on YouTube or not. It feels great. It feels great to me. I'm not even going to lie. The shirt, if you're wondering, is from Buck Mason. Shout out to Leah. She keeps me proper. She's buying me nice clothes, which makes a. A nice difference. Let's see. So, personal updates. 25 recording this. 25 days post hip surgery. I got so many messages, but there's so many people. You know who I'm talking about? You. You messaged me. They're like, how old are you? Like, you had to get your hip fixed. And I'm like, this is a very common injury. Look, look it up. Fai, hip impingement, torn labrum surgery. It is frequent in a lot of hockey players. Not a hockey player. Frequent in athletes. Maybe. This is typically. It's something that you're. You're born with. You have like this kind of pinching in your hip and then you jam on it over time. And that's what I've done over the last 10 years. And I've been putting this off forever and finally decided to get it done. The first two weeks were brutal. I never thought I would be on the other side of this thing. And today, here I am. I'm back. I did five days in a Row at the gym. I can't do lower body, so I'm just spamming upper body right now. And it feels amazing. And I'm just so happy to be able to move and to walk. And it really just makes you appreciate your regular life. You know, it's like when you have a sore throat and you're like, you can't remember what your life was like when you could swallow normally. So. And yesterday I'm able to walk a little bit more. I took the dog out, was able to get a little snowshoe here in the woods. And I, I do really live up here in the, in the woods. It's. It's cold. We're in the woods of Vermont. And then the other thing that I wanted to mention, so over the last week, we announced dan as the CEO of Exit 5. And like I said in the announcement, you know, you get paid for the job you've already done. Dan's been amazing as my COO and promoted him to CEO to more formally run the business every day. Because, you know, I kind of, I got. I get paid the big bucks. Like, I get to just sit here and talk into a microphone and write cute little posts on LinkedIn. And so this is, this is really important. But what's really funny about that is it. It made me think because I'm. Maybe I'll pull this up real quick. Everybody. You know, you see all these comments about, like, the LinkedIn algorith, and a lot of that is valid. There's a lot of beef that is valid there how, like, you see posts from three weeks ago and, you know, they don't know what they're doing and da, da, da, da. But then I post this thing last week about Dan. This was on Friday, Friday morning, which is typically not the best time for me to post, and I announced Dan as CEO of Exit 5. This post has 1426 likes, 218 comments, and 25,000 impressions. And so, like, all week I've been trolling our team and everybody internally. I'd be like, I thought LinkedIn is broken. It just turns out, like, you just usually need better content, myself included. Right? I post a lot of things that flop out there, but it's true that, like, it's not just the algorithm. It's like a lot of times, like, you just need better content. And obviously we can't do this all the time. A CEO announcement is a perfect example of great content. And that broke through and worked, and it's still an incredible channel. So for these solo episodes, I'M going to like, do a little intro, which I just did. Talk about one big idea in marketing every week or as frequently as I do these, and then take a few listener questions and get out of there. So that's the agenda for this episode. So the big idea for this one and if you know anything about me, like, I'm not always into talking about, like, the latest and greatest hacks and, and tips and tricks and all that, like, my stuff is really rooted in what I would like to think is timeless. I feel like you, once you understand the game of marketing and business, a lot of this stuff can be applied forever. And the big idea for today's episode is the concept of attention. And I was listening to a podcast at the gym this morning and it was an interview with the founder of the Savannah Bananas. A podcast was my first million to properly shout them out because, you know, we don't need to do anonymous sources here. And it was a great interview and I've seen their stuff everywhere, but I've never actually sat down and listened to him. Dan was like, yo, you got to listen to this. This will totally, this is totally right up your alley. And it was right up my alley. And the reason it was right up my alley is because he talked so much about how ideas are the most valuable thing. And I've always kind of said I've kind of taken the opposite. Even though I've considered myself like an ideas guy, I've always taken the opposite and said that, like, ideas are cheap. The real value is in the execution. But I think I'm willing to flip flop back on that because I do think that in marketing, in business, it's like it is those crazy ideas. It is those 10x ideas. You can find people to help and go and operate and create things, but it's really those crazy ideas and, and you should go and listen to the episode if you can find it. But. Or just look up anything about the Savannah Bananas. But they've, you know, created this whole new category of a, a type of baseball. Now, I'm not saying the lesson from this is don't go create some new category, some crazy new thing and B2B. B2B software. But he talks so much about how it's a core value for them to find inspiration from outside of their industry. And as someone who's been in this industry of marketing for like 15 years, and especially in B2B, I can't tell you that every newsletter, every podcast, every webinar, we all, there's all inevitably always Someone who says, like, yeah, yeah, cool. This is great, man. Cool ideas. I need B2B examples, and I understand why people ask that, but I don't feel like that's true because I feel like whether you sell to B2B or B2C, you're still selling to humans. And so the name of the game is still the same, which is to try to get someone's attention. And so I like to take inspiration from everywhere, and I think you should be able to do that too. Now we want B2B examples because we want to be able, like, to go back to the CEO or CFO and team and say, hey, look, the X company in this industry did this and so we're going to do that. But a lot of the B2B marketing example stuff, they're also. They're not as sexy to like, say, screenshot. They're like, you know, sales enablement plays and emails that are happening behind the scenes. But I love this idea of, like, let's get back to thinking about attention and how do we stand out, especially in a world of sameness and competitors and AI slop. Like, how do we stand out? And so I wanted today to be like, I want you to think about attention. I don't have all the answers to this, but I want you to just think about one thing today, which is like, how can you get more attention for your company, right? And if more people knew about your company and you could be listening to this and you could be in B2B, you could be that Fortune 100 CMO that was listening, or you could be my friend who, you know, shout out to my guy Seth, who's my accountant, or Ryan, who helps me with my money, that's listening to this, right? This could apply to any business, the local sandwich shop down the street. Like, how do you get attention? And. And would your life, Would your business be more successful? Would your marketing be more effective if you just had more people that knew you existed and paid attention to you? I've seen this play out. I worked at a company called Drift and we came into and created this new category. We basically created a new category of live chat. But live chat already existed. There was plenty of competitors and companies in the space, from Intercom to Zendesk to Live Person, whatever. There was all these companies, but we were able to come in and get more attention than everybody else. And so what happens is when you can do that, most people, they're not necessarily buying, they're shopping. And so they're going to pick between three or four vendors. So if I'm going to pick a CRM vendor, it comes down to HubSpot or Salesforce or whatever. Most of us are not going to go through every little feature. And obviously every company is going to publish all of their features and do that little feature checklist that makes it look like, you know, we have all the things but the competitors don't. Right. And so I want to be the first person to get into that, like, consideration set. And so if you are one day going to buy a CRM, I want you to pay attention to me and know that I exist. And so in the drift world, we won early on by getting a lot of attention, by sucking the oxygen out of the market. And we didn't do that through one super creative play. It was because of a culture that the founders guided around creativity, innovation, taking chances, doing things that stand out. And so we did some crazy stuff. Like, here's an example. This ended up failing horribly for a couple different reasons. But there was a big event in Boston and we were not participating in it, but we knew a lot of people in marketing would be. We hired a bunch of actors to go to the event and protest, and we had these like, no forms signs at the time, and we sent like 10 people to go down there and protest, and they ended up getting kicked out of the event. And actually for a bunch of differences, became like an internal situation at the company. But I'm not saying this was right or wrong. I'm just giving you an example of, like, things like that. Right. And that wasn't even a new place. Salesforce had done that back in the day. Another thing that. That we like to do, which was awesome, is basically this was some form of arbitrage. I'm not that smart, so I don't really know what arbitrage means, but. But instead of spending, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars on outdoor display billboards and all that, we would find areas where we could get like, one billboard. And so I remember one year we found this. There was like, an opportunity to get like a small digital. Digital billboard, like right outside of the Super Bowl. And for anybody that's ever done any super bowl advertising, you can't say super bowl and that. You have to call it the big game. And the founders were going to the super bowl, and we got this little. This real estate. They were able to go there. They took a picture of it, like, in front of. I don't know, maybe it was like the Superdome. One of. Does that even exist anywhere? Somebody fact Check me on that. The Superdome. Is that a thing? Is that or. No, what was the old one? The Georgia Dome, Whatever dome it was, it was so clear, like a million people outside. It was a Super Bowl. And there was this little ad from Drift, right? Or when I launched my book, founder brand. Everything was self funded and I wanted to spend a little bit of money on promo, but didn't want to break the bank on it. And so I think maybe for less than ten grand, I found someone. You know those like, album release posters that you kind of see all over town sometimes you're like, who put up the, you know, Ariana Grande or like, ASAP Rocky thing right there? Well, you can find people to do that. And so we found three locations. One was at like the top of Newberry street, one was in Back Bay. I was. Wasn't even living in Boston. Just knew that people in Boston would. A small group of people might recognize my name and take pictures and show the book and whatever. And it worked perfectly. And the company also, so they, they go and they kind of put these signs up and they, they got like, you know, this. I don't even know how they put it on the wall. And we filmed the whole thing. And so I was able to then turn that into marketing because we have a, you know, I have an audience on LinkedIn. And so we took that one small play of putting up these billboards all around town for less than 10 grand. You take them and you put them on LinkedIn and it can be 10 times bigger than that. Or before everybody did the Times Square billboard thing now, which is, you know, I wouldn't even do it now. I like, everyone does it. All right, actually, I'll take. I'll put exit five on there. I got, I got mad. I saw Circle, which is a company we run our, our community on. They put one of their customers up there. And I was like, what the. Why am I. Why are we not on that? I don't care. It's me. Put Matt's face on that. On that billboard in Times Square. So I still want that. But we were able to get the Times Square billboard for like an hour. You could buy it in our increments. So we did that. I went to New York, spent the night in New York. The next day. Was out in front of the sign, like taking pictures with us in front of it. And it was an amazing play. Like that. Or in the Savannah Bananas examples he's talking about, they came up all these crazy, like, daily contests to get people to the Game. Like, I forget what the town that he was in initially, but it was like, I'll use Burlington, Vermont. Like, if there was a baseball team there, it was like, tonight, this week, we're running a contest for the hairiest man in Burlington, Vermont. Oh, God, that's awful. But these are the things that, like, I love and gets me into marketing and makes this fun again. And so at Drift, we did, like, no, we International. Like, no Forms Day. Today is International no Forms Day. Or I remember seeing, like, Amazon had this big thing because it was Prime Day. Prime Day. And I was like, dude, this is genius. They're just making up a holiday where they, like, give you free shipping on this one day. And so everyone buys on Prime Day. You know, it's like Black Friday. Just another marketing ploy. And so I don't care if you sell accounting software, cybersecurity, manufacturing. Why can't you build some of these things into your business? B2B. B2C. These are the really fun things that I like to think about and stand out. And the way to get there is just push yourself to just come up with crazy ideas. It's okay to have bad ideas. You need to generate a list of 5, 10, 50, 100. Just have a list going in your phone of just, like, crazy bad ideas, and you will eventually find one or two good ones and you can execute on them. And by the way, when you do one or two of these things, the hard part is, like, you can't really, like, sell the CFO and like, all right, we're going to do this crazy thing and we're going to get three leads from this. It doesn't work like that. You need to be able to carve out some time and some space to kind of do these things and maybe sometimes ask for forgiveness instead of permission and do them. And those often become the multipliers is these big steps. And they don't have to be super expensive. They can be scrappy and creative no matter what scale you're at. And so I just wanted to, like, put something into the universe on this, because why does attention have to be a dirty word in marketing? Like, we are playing a game in marketing with the whole point of marketing is to get more people to understand that our product exists and that we can solve their needs. Right? Whether you're an accountant or an enterprise software vendor. And so I want more people to pay attention to us, because then if we have a good product, if we've built the right thing, if we have strong features and benefits and A compelling story, then people are going to say, oh, interesting. I've been paying attention to you. Okay, now then you earn the right to then tell them about the product later. So it doesn't have to be like, I think a lot of times with these, like, attention campaigns or some of the bigger brand plays we often default to, like, how can we tell our product story in this? And it's like, that's not going to be interesting to most people. I would run a play that gets people's attention and then let's use the attention to then turn that into an opportunity for our business. So if you're listening to this and you have specific examples, maybe we could feature you on a future episode of this pod. Email me davexit5.com or send me a DM on LinkedIn. Aaron and I will try to grab a bunch of examples, but I'd love to just be like, are you, Are you relating to what I'm saying? And how are you going to put some of this into play in your business? So forget about B2B. Forget about B2C. Just let's be creative and seek to get attention from the people that you're trying to sell to. Now. All attention is not equal, right? If I'm doing something for Exit 5 where we want to attract B2B marketers, then sure, like attention from my aunt and my former college roommate and that guy down the street. Like, that doesn't matter because that's not going to convert. But ultimately you're still selling to people. People have a set of needs and desires and wants and interests. And there are ways you can play into that and get attention. So let's don't make attention a dirty word. Like, you don't have to be a lunatic or be some or do some, like, insane smash and grab campaign to get someone's attention. There are ways to do it that are fun and effective and can work. And that's my call to action. So send me examples. Okay, that's part one. All right. It's that time of year. Everybody's scrambling to wrap it up, justify budgets, get those plans in last minute, and quietly hope that the numbers are going to hold going into 2026. But here's the uncomfortable truth. Most marketing teams still still don't actually know what's driving real results and what's just taking credit. There's a difference. And you can't make smart calls for next year if you're just guessing about what's working, what's not, and where to put your Next dollar. Paramark has built something to fix that.