B (3:02)

Okay, great. Thanks for having me on. As said, I'm Claire Schmidt, marketing at Piedmont Global. And I joined the company. The CEO was very honest with me. He said your next 12 to 18 months, biggest priority is changing us. It was category change and brand change. So we were a language services company. We had started in 2013. That was obviously well before I joined the company. They had started as just Piedmont Translations, evolved gradually and into PGLs, Piedmont Global Language Services, and then realized LSPs are frankly dying. And it's not just about what language I'm speaking to someone in anymore. It's cross cultural. There's a lot of things that go into it. And we were changing from a category of LSP language services provider, which, by the way, I didn't even know that existed when I joined the company. And then so it was an unknown, but It's. It was $70 billion category. And then we're changing into a different category, which was strategic globalization, which was something we invented. And there's a lot of learnings, which I'll get to in a few on that. But that essentially is. That's cross cultural operations. So whether it's multicultural teams, you know, global operations, whether that's a hospital system in New York City that's serving a variety of different populations, I kind of say it's whether it's across the street or across the globe is sort of that span of the cross operation. So we help at every single point on that. That can be data, that can be content, that can be market research. It's a lot of different.

A (4:34)

All right, yeah, yeah, whatever. Less about. We don't care about that.

B (4:36)

Okay.

A (4:37)

Yeah, yeah. Less about what they do. Talk about marketers like, blah, blah, blah, blah.

B (4:40)

Yes, yes. The category explanation, which I just.

A (4:43)

So, so. But no, but like that's helpful, right? The CEO says it's two things. Number one is category. Number two was. What did you say it was?

B (4:49)

Was the rebrand. So actually branding. So that was that category. Strategic globalization. And then. Okay, now who are we within that category, which is going from PGLS to Piedmont Global? We worked with a naming agency. Long story. I could talk about that all day. But we only.

A (5:01)

Yeah, well, let's hold on, take a breath. Let's pause and try to, like, unpack that. So. So this is the big initiative.

B (5:06)

Yep.

A (5:07)

Where did you start? Let's just talk through the whole project.

B (5:10)

Okay. So the first thing when I joined was we started with a name. So what's our name gonna be? We ended up name for the category. No, not name for the category. So what? We started with the rebrand. What's our new name going to be? We hired a naming agency.

A (5:23)

Yep.

B (5:24)

And then we ended up.

A (5:25)

Where does that look like, by the way? Where does one get a naming agency? What does the naming agency cost like?

B (5:30)

So I didn't know that. Those. I won't say I didn't know they existed, but I wasn't super familiar and I wasn't sold, by the way, on using a naming agency as our starting place.

A (5:39)

The CEO of I'm like, my naming agency is ChatGPT, and it cost me $20 a month. I'll come up with 20 names for you for a hundred grand. Let's go.

B (5:46)

And there's certainly. You shouldn't just use ChatGPT. But also, even the agency that we used ended up. Their business model has changed significantly. So even two years ago, that's how much AI has changed. Where it's. There's a lot less appetite for that because I don't even look for my

A (6:01)

brand, my naming agency. People that are listening to this, that are never going to hear this and not be happy, like, I'm just. That is said in jest. I think ultimately, if someone is going to help me name this very valuable thing, like, it doesn't matter to me If I paid $20 for it or $200,000, but if I get the name, then the return is going to be there. So obviously that's a serious thing. So you can get a naming agency

B (6:21)

and then there's trademarking and other considerations that, you know, the average person or even average marketer isn't going to know. So we work.

A (6:27)

And you're doing this, by the way, you're not doing this as like a brand. This is a company that had hundreds of millions in revenue There's a significant scale here. So you're trying to move this big ship, right, and tell everybody it's called something different?

B (6:39)

Yes, exactly. And so I was not completely sold on the idea of starting with the name. There's a lot of ways, as you know that you can do a rebrand. Some are name focused, some are more logo focused. There's a lot more to it. The actual identity.

A (6:51)

It's like the ultimate like thing. Like, okay, we're going to like, we're going to move this house. Like there's my house. I can see it out my window here. We're going to move it over here. It's like, well, do we have to do that or is there other things we could do first? Yeah, how did you land on the ultimately, like what's the short answer on like deciding, yeah, we do actually have to do this.

B (7:09)

So the short answer is that our name didn't even tell what we were doing anymore. And our entire brand was built around language services, which was went from being the majority of our business to basically one eighth of our business. So you couldn't.

A (7:22)

We had to forcing function. We always talk about like guardrails are really good in marketing because like you can do anything, anything can work. You can make this. This is a guardrail. Like we have to change the name.

B (7:30)

Okay. So it was nothing's bro broken but we're actually no longer even. Our name isn't saying what we do anymore. And so. Okay, it's a. Yeah, it's a much harder thing to tell.

A (7:39)

What was the next step from there?

B (7:41)

So the naming agency, we went through this, a bunch of rounds with them and I'll just say back to my first day where we ended up, sorry, naming agencies, we didn't actually need a naming agency. We ended up my very first day at Piedmont global on my CEOs office door it said PGLS. And he said, he gave me this long 30 minute explanation and then at the end of it he said really we just have to slash the ls which was the language services part. And that is what we came back to and said we went through this great process. It was great. We use name Stormers. They were phenomenal and they came up with a bunch of great names that would have served us. But it was. We already have a lot of origin story with Piedmont, with Global and that's our name. I just took it back. I said to the CEO, you had such conviction. We said, really? We're just slashing the ls. Let's just slash the LS so obviously we're not pg. We're Piedmont Global. So at that point we decided on that. The category piece was just basically in my CEO's head and like 400 voice memos that he had sent me over the hiring process in my first few months. And then I put it out to rfp. So I did. That was my first experience doing that. In the past, I've just used sort of inbound agencies or somebody that I had a relationship with. This was a big project. It was B2B. A lot at stake. Needed somebody that understood category and brand. Two different things. Long story short, we ended up going with Focus Lab for the majority of our brand work. Wound up with a couple of Nice.

A (9:05)

That's Bill Kenny, right?

B (9:06)

Yes, that's Bill Kenny. Cool.

A (9:08)

Nice. Bill done some great stuff. Bill Xifi member. But he's. I found Bill because I think they did like Marketo back in the day and they did sales loft and I got into that world because I. He was on a short list for brand stuff.

B (9:22)

Okay. So yeah.

A (9:24)

Okay, keep going. People want to know the tactical stuff, like you engage a company like Bill and then what's the process and what's the output.

B (9:31)

So a couple of learnings from that. I will say it really helps when you have the CEO own go to market. Branding has to be run like any other go to market. It's part, you know, the GTM for branding. And that was great. He had a strong vision. He knew what he wanted. He knew how he needed to change. He knew that it had to impact everybody in the business and he gets brand. He understands the importance of that. So that was super helpful. If you don't have a CEO who that's true for, I would say really try to educate them or have someone. Again, ideally it's the CEO, but you need somebody with a vision that is really clear on what it is that we're trying to accomplish and that also can own that GTM end to end. If it's just a marketing initiative, I think it will fail. I truly believe that.

A (10:16)

Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I haven't done things that like a big. A huge scale, but I've had a bunch of, say, little, like tiny side projects or Exit 5 is a small little business. Somebody told me this. I forget who it was. I can't properly give them credit, but it was like before my son was named Sam. The name Sam meant nothing to me. But now that he's Sam, he's Sam. Of course he's Sam. That's his name. And I feel like so much of the whole brand and naming process is like, it's really hard. It's very rarely like so obvious or so good. It's like your brand is going to become that. And so I'm kind of a believer in that. I think you can pick the wrong name, but I also think inability to act is going to hold you back. And so it seems like because you and the CEO, he had this clear vision for this and like a lot of thoughts. Okay, there's probably four or five names you could have chosen and could have made it work. It's most important to like pick a lane, take some action. Let's get every. Because otherwise you could just go on in circles with this thing forever, right?

B (11:07)

Yes. One of the challenges too was that we kept our decision making council very small deliberately because there's a lot of stuff in brand that it doesn't actually matter.

A (11:18)

Okay, who was in it and how did you make it small intentionally? This comes up all the time and I love this as an idea.

B (11:23)

Yes.

A (11:23)

We made the decision making group small. Who was it?

B (11:26)

And you also can't just have executives. I've seen councils where it's all executives and then there's such a disconnect from the people that are actually selling or marketing, you know, that we joked about in the last podcast about.

A (11:37)

You have to at least fake it and make people think it's like my. It's my. No different than my children or myself. If you make me think it was my idea, I'm going to probably do a little bit better at it.

B (11:47)

Yes. So there was a couple of ways we were able to keep it small. One was CEO was completely on board.

A (11:52)

Right.

B (11:52)

There was also a little bit of apathy in the organization around it. Not a lot of people were excited about it until we got very close to the end. They didn't understand. So I would say on the executive team, I felt like my CEO was really the only person that actually got it, got the importance of it, got it, how much it was going to impact. But we were very aligned, which was very helpful. We also knew that we had to get a lot of the information up front in the research stage. So we did a very comprehensive research stage with every department, both executive interviews and also boots on the ground interviews. Not everyone has the time or the budget or the appetite for that, but I highly recommend it if you can. And Bill Tenney and his team did a great job on the research piece and interviewing everybody. We also, of course, interviewed customers et

A (12:36)

CETERA which is what are they going

B (12:37)

to learn, the research folks?

A (12:39)

Yeah, like all these people that get to be interviewed across the company. What's the goal? What's the point of that?

B (12:44)

So the goal is to get the input of sort of. It's a little bit of an internal brand audit of both, especially for customer.

A (12:50)

Who we are, who we serve.

B (12:52)

Yeah, who we are, who we serve. And then also the perception. Right. So there's the what we think we know, but then it's, well, what are you actually hearing from our customers? Or what do you think the company is? Because you get a different answer across operations. Sales, marketing, product, et cetera. So we did a lot of that research. We got it without having everybody on the council. They felt like their voices were heard, they got an opportunity to weigh in. And we did have check in points where we brought in a broader audience like hr, product technology to weigh in. So we had checkpoints. But the actual day to day working group was just me, my CEO, of course, the Focus Lab team. We worked with Lauren Warnick of Villain Branding as our sort of brand strategist. So she kind of came on like half agency, half internal strategist with us and then my content manager who is incredible. Mattie. So it was really just the four of us as the core council decision makers.

A (13:43)

How much was the CEO involved with like the Focus Lab stuff? Were they on those calls?

B (13:47)

So he left a lot of that to me. I mean, of course he had opinions, but we had a good working. Part of the reason we chose them was they were so good at project management. They were a little rigid. So I will just say that they don't cater to your process, you cater to their process. But I wanted that. That was a big part of why I chose them because I knew with the way we operated as a company building the plan as we were flying, we needed that structure.

A (14:07)

Well, everybody, it's like having a.

B (14:09)

He's the one that's doing it an hour before. We're having the all hands, not the guy that's, you know, prepping two weeks ahead of time. So I knew that needed, you know, it was like. And I had to stay on him. He was, you know, vision and you have to have that strong operator that understands all the logistics behind. He didn't want to deal with what's going to go on our columns in our office and how are we going to roll this out. He wanted the big decisions and then he trusted me to work with Bill and his team and Lauren to actually bring this to life. So there were things, obviously, colors and imagery and the brand identity and how we talk about ourselves that he cared about a lot, and he was in all of those decisions. But we kind of had. He joined all of our weekly meetings, which I think is an absolute requirement. You have to have that. Our sort of strategy meetings and then the execution meetings, we kind of separated those out so that it was. We could just have sort of the things of. Okay, Jordan, can you give us the, you know, specs for a decal for the values that are going on in the office and, you know, things like that that he doesn't need to be involved in? So I think dividing that work up into that strategic and execution and not having him need to be in the weeds on those was really helpful. But he was. He watched all the videos, because I don't know if you. How much you know about their process, but they sent. So you have your meeting, but they deliver you loom videos each Friday, and then you have until Tuesday morning to basically react to those, watch them respond. So it was kind of neat to have that asynchronous. You can then get your thoughts. You watch it, you process it, you get your thoughts out, and then we review it in a meeting together. So several times that he just sent me asynchronous feedback. You know, we joked that we had, like, 4,000 hours of voice memos. And so that was how we. He and I work well together. So I would just kind of take that, combine that with the council feedback, and then we'd do it that way. So that was really helpful. But he was very involved the entire process. If he had been doing some of the M and A work that he's, you know, doing now during that process, I don't think it would have worked.

A (15:56)

Yeah, I feel like having interviewed lots of people on the other side, just involved. It's like. It's so obvious that the key ingredient in the success here is having someone at the CEO level being invested in this project because it's hard enough on its own with all the moving pieces and all these opinions that affect everybody else. You almost need that hard charging, like, nope, we're doing it. It just makes it easier. Where I think a lot of this stuff falls down is half the management team is kind of bought in. There's kind of this other direction. Then it just falls on Claire, and then Claire ends up being kind of like the committee leader who's got to go make all these people happy. Like, the fact that it was like, all right, you and your CEO fist bum like we're gonna go do this is like one of the biggest ingredients to this thing. 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 webpages, 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 brainer 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 ban, which are awesome if you haven't used them yet. So you should go grab a seat right now@Optimizely.com exit5 it's optimizely.com exit5. Check out the workshop get smarter about AI. The future is here.

B (18:18)

That is one of the biggest ingredients that I would say probably the reason that we were successful.

A (18:24)

So how do we make that actionable for someone? Like, yeah, if you know this now and you were giving advice to someone, is it push hard, like show them this is the level that this has to be at. How do we. I don't want someone to be like, well, my CEO just doesn't care. And that's the takeaway. How do we help them?

B (18:36)

Claire, you have to educate. I mean most CEOs, if they have a marketing team and they're going to approve the budget for the rebrand, I'm assuming that you're at that stage where they have said yes, we're going to do this, helping them understand, making them 100% believe that this is not just a marketing initiative. So there's some great research out there which actually I can send. I don't know if you include links in it afterwards that I can send. But the idea is you have to understand that a rebrand is infrastructure and it touches everything. From the moment that talent, you're sending out that recruiting notice, you're giving them the brochure all the way through from where Ops is doing their quarterly business review with the customer. So walking the CEO before you get anybody else involved, you and the CEO, if you're leading a rebrand, you're locking in with that CEO and saying, this is every step of the journey. You know, often most CEOs are familiar with the customer journey. You paint that picture of them from that. We want the people, you know, most people understand we need people to run our business right all the way through to. You want our customers to have this same experience across everything.

A (19:39)

That's a perfect way to sum that up is to make them think of it as infrastructure.

B (19:43)

Yeah, right. It's not window dressing. It's not changing a logo. It's not that stuff. I mean, that matters. But it's. That's the window dressing part. It's actually the identity and making sure that everybody can speak from HR through operations, sales and marketing. If everybody's telling a different story, it's going to hurt your bottom line. And for more financial CEOs I've had worked with some that were more CFO background and some that were more CMO background. Obviously, you have to cater your story to who your audience is. But for the financial ones, I will say that I'm not as good at that. Luckily, I had somebody that understood the importance of the storytelling and why we needed to have the same line all the way through. But you can paint the picture of. There actually is a way to say, hey, this is actually going to cost us dollars. And if you do a graph essentially of, hey, these are all the leakage points, and then that costs us business. So you have to tailor the story to your audience, obviously. But if you can, just before you go down the path of sending RFPs or selecting your agency or bringing in more of the management team, you gotta make sure that the CEO understands. And I would say as many meetings as it takes to get them 100% bought in so that they're the one. And I'll give my CEO a lot of credit saying when somebody says, well, this is a marketing Initiative? Well, that's just marketing initiatives. He's saying, no, everybody needs this on their quarterly goals for the next three quarters. If you're an executive at this company, you better have the rebrand as part of your goals for this work.

A (21:02)

Let's talk about timeframe. How long did this whole thing take and what's a reasonable goal for people to have for this type of project?

B (21:08)

I would say, typically, depending on how fast you work, I would say six to nine months for the actual start to finish. I know, folks, there's a woman in our CMO council that I think did it in three, and I know folks who have done it in 18. So those are very different numbers. But for us, I sent out all the RFPs and selected the agency right before Christmas 2024.

A (21:30)

Look, if you're listening to this, though, if you are a small company, a startup, and it takes you six to nine months to do this, then you just hang up this podcast, Go, go do something else. Speed is your friend. But if you're at a company that has real scale and stage and you have employees and revenue and you're talking about doing this at the level of like, we need the columns wrapped in the office, then, like, you're saying, to do this right, it's gonna take at least six months.

B (21:56)

Yes. If you're doing it from a startup and it's scrappy. Yes. You can do it a lot faster. And chances are you don't already have name recognition. You're not having to convert clients from this to this. It's a little bit of a different approach. So, yeah, for those listening, this is really for those 50 million plus established companies that have been in business for at least five years and have some. Okay.

A (22:18)

No, in the market, six to nine months.

B (22:19)

Yeah.

A (22:20)

And then as far as, like, the actual rollout, how did you block and tackle there? Because. All right, now we got all this stuff. It feels like you get this huge package back, now you're ready to deploy it. You got to change the website, you got to change the polls in the office, you got to change the email signatures, you got to change the social media managers, the ads creative. What. How do you make sure that happens? Like, I, you know, I'm sure you wish I had a magic wand. And it just all happens overnight. Like, how does it work?

B (22:44)

So get yourself a great project manager. If you have budget, which I had an amazing one. Kristen, who I've worked with before, and she helped us execute, what does a

A (22:50)

great project manager do?

B (22:52)

So the great project manager is obsessed with the details. They're the ones that will be checking and making sure, measuring the decal length on those columns that I talked about. They're the ones that live in spreadsheets that are thinking through every single detail. So I was sort of that bridge. Right. Like, I'm visionary but also execution oriented. But not. Don't ask me to write a checklist for launch day of all the things that. From T shirts to pens to all those things. So somebody who understands the vision, understands the outcome, what we're trying to do, but is very detail oriented, is obsessive.

A (23:23)

And are they the, like one point of contact on all this stuff too? Working with all of the teams? It's not just like they're keeping a list of activities.

B (23:29)

Yeah. So I was point of contact for what I will call the ideation. Like once we went from, okay, we've selected our vendor to we had our category identity, then we had our brand identity, then we had our verbal and our visual. Visual was the final thing. So that took about six months. Then as soon as we flipped the switch into execution mode, then Kristin became the point of contact. So every department is going through her of, oh, I need my HR onboarding templates redone. Oh, I need my sales decks redone. Oh, we have a conference in October, two days after the rebrand. But we don't want to use old branding. But we can't advertise to the, you know, we can't in August take the veil off because we haven't announced it yet. So all of those things. Then she became that person. So then I was still focused on some of the bigger pieces of a rebrand, which is employee engagement, brand training, the website. And we did that internally, by the way. So that was a thing. A lot of the folks I've talked to, they had an external agency doing their website. We did that internally. So we took the assets that Focus had given us and actually worked with. It was, you know, me, Lauren, Maddie, Bretta and our developer, the five of us. It was this small working team.

A (24:33)

Okay.

B (24:33)

So they didn't got that done.

A (24:34)

They didn't give you a website. They gave you elements. Then you decided how you're going to turn that into the website.

B (24:39)

Yeah.

A (24:40)

Cool.

B (24:40)

Yeah.

A (24:40)

Okay. And then let's wrap this up and just put a bow on this and talk about measurement. I think you talked about this as one of the key things at the beginning.

B (24:46)

Yeah. So as we know, brand is a little bit harder to measure. And one of the things that I think is really important is that A lot of folks stop at launch day, right? So they say, okay, we launched, everybody knows it, we've done a couple of brand story hours and that's it. And then you're going to see some fall off. There's two things that I would say that I want you to take away as far as post launch. One is you need at least three to six months as part of your plan after launch day to make sure that everyone you're sort of doing QA on the sales team, the ops team, making sure that what I talked about in the beginning about getting that CEO bought in about every step of the way, every department this touches, this is infrastructure, it's making sure that we actually did launch it, that sales is only using the new decks, that you're not having product pull up on a live demo, an old PGLS branded deck, which has happened. That's a real example that you're not still having somebody go, hey, can you put on the website minority owned lsp? No, I can't because we're not an LSP anymore. So that kind of thing where we're eradicating all of that old language from every department, you're not going to just on launch day. Oh, now everybody's, you know, even if you train them well, you're still going to have sort of the old school slipping back. The other thing is you have to evolve, right? So you've got to iterate and make sure that you may do this and you get some learnings from clients, from team, from customers that you're going, oh, we need to tweak this. Or they're not actually understanding. We thought we had this great idea, we did all this research, but it's not actually sticking the way we want it to. So you need to put in some time to be iterating and testing that. And then also this is probably less of a factor for folks, probably. But if you are changing category and brand at the same time, I highly recommend trying to separate that. And when you're doing training, really do category training separately from brand training because otherwise they kind of get mixed in and conflated. So that was something that how would

A (26:35)

you explain the difference? Like how would those two break things be different?

B (26:38)

So in our example, it's category we are a strategic globalization and our brand is Piedmont Global. We're the pioneer in this. But there's going to be other strategic localization companies.

A (26:46)

So teach people about the industry, the competitive landscape.

B (26:49)

Exactly, yes. And so not every regrant is going to be category defining, obviously. So That's a smaller percentage. And then from an execution standpoint, so it really is sort of seeing that through and making sure that as you're measuring that you can really tell the story to finance. So I prep them. Three to six months is the minimum that you're going to actually see any kind of financial results. Typically, again, we're not talking startup world, we're talking about established, you know, 50 million to 250 million dollar companies. I would say give yourself a little bit of time, but be tracking those things to be able. You'll see an initial dip a lot of times, especially with a big change. People don't like change. People are people, right? We're selling to people, they don't like change. So I say to budget for about 15%. It depends on the industry, it depends on a lot of factors. But prepare your finance team that you're going to see a little bit of a dip. And that was the other thing. I'll say. Our CEO knew that we were putting this a stake in the ground and he was not afraid of that. He said, we will be misunderstood. There will be people that will be confused, but we are going to see this through. And so having that commitment, that isn't going to say, oh, we're a month in and we saw website traffic dip 15%. Nope, it didn't work. Let's go back to the old. You have to be willing to do the wait to actually see if this worked. And again, depending on industry and who you're selling to, it can take longer or shorter. If your sales cycles are longer or shorter, it's going to take time for ours. We knew we were committing to a year, so we'll be looking, you know, a year's time from September in this September, hey, how did we do, what percentage of our services, how have we been able to expand, etc. So I think that the two things that I'll say are make sure your CEO owns the GTM and is fully bought in and will be with you every step of the way. And also make sure that you budget for that education post launch day and do all of the QA so that you really are telling the same story. From HR telling a candidate about our company all the way through to OPS doing that quarterly business review. And they're getting, each department has their own flavor, right? You want to give people enough autonomy to be able to tell the story in their own way. So it doesn't sound like a script, but they have to understand the brand at each level to be able to tell that story through. And then also, you know, looking at things like I think we talked about this on our SEO one about AI, but looking at is the market picking up when we type it into GPT? Are we getting back the narrative that we want to be getting back? So that's another thing I think to look at is sort of is the market reflecting back to what you have put out there or not? Are we still in the old language?

A (29:11)

Awesome. Okay, Claire, that was great. Some specific tactical advice on how to navigate a rebrand. Super useful, especially for the people that listen to this that are in that kind of mid market 50 to $250 million revenue range. Go find Claire on LinkedIn. Claire Schmidt on LinkedIn. Tell her you heard about her here. It was helpful. Send her a message if you're going through a rebrand too. Claire, always good to see you. I appreciate all your contributions. Thanks for giving us a great little episode on how to think about a rebrand.

B (29:36)

Thanks so much for having me, Dave. It was a fun conversation as always. Awesome.

A (29:43)

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 that takes creativity, thought and taste. Right now, everyone thinks they're magically a marketer because they have access to AI, and the result is kind of painful. More robotic emails, more noise, more 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.