← The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
How To Turn Your Company Story Into Actionable Marketing Ideas with Pranav Piyush
00:57:05
Loading summary
Transcript84 lines
- [00:02]
Pranav
Hey.
- [00:02]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Gearhart)
This episode of the Exit 5 podcast is brought to you by Qualified. It's no secret. AI, the hottest topic in marketing right now. And one thing we hear a lot of you marketers talking about is how you can use AI agents to help run your marketing machine. And that's where Qualified comes in with Piper, their AI SDR agent. Piper is the number one AI SDR agent on the market, according to G2. And hundreds of companies you've heard of like Box, Asana and Brex, they've hired Piper to autonomously grow inbound pipeline. How good does that sound? Qualified customers are seeing a massive business impact with Piper. A 3x increase in meetings booked and a 2x increase in pipeline. The agentic marketing era has arrived. And if you're a B2B marketing leader looking to scale pipeline generation, Piper, the number one AISDR, is here to help. Go and check it out today@qualified.com exit 5 and you can hire Piper, the number one AISDR agent and grow your pipeline too.
- [01:01]
Dave Gearhart
Who doesn't want more pipeline right now?
- [01:02]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Gearhart)
Come on qualified.com exit5 and we'll see you on the podcast. You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gearhart.
- [01:13]
Dave Gearhart
Exit. Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I'm here. I'm live.
- [01:30]
Pranav
I'm Dave.
- [01:32]
Dave Gearhart
We're both home today. Let's go.
- [01:33]
Pranav
Yes. I just finished my workout and so I'm sweaty, but I cleaned up and I'm ready to go.
- [01:40]
Dave Gearhart
I love that it's going to change your mood. It changed your whole energy right now. So. All right, a bunch of people are rolling in. Producer Allison told me that There was like 40 people waiting behind the scenes. It was 33. I always round up.
- [01:52]
Pranav
I'm a marketer.
- [01:53]
Dave Gearhart
I'm super excited for this session that we're doing because it's one of the things that I. My background in marketing is I love the storytelling, product marketing, narrative building. And I've seen this happen. And when you kind of pitched us on this topic, I thought it was great because I do think a lot of times what happens is people get the concept of having a company narrative, of having a story, but then it's like, well, what comes next from there is it. You change the homepage headline, you make a sales deck. How do you actually get the whole company rallied around this messaging? And then how do you execute on this from a creative standpoint? And I also like that less is more. I like when you have one kind of unifying message that all the little creative ideas can come out of so I'm excited to dig in that with you. Pranav is the founder and CEO of Paramark. We'll introduce him in a minute. But while everybody's rolling in right now, I just would love to have people just write in, let me know who you are. I want to know who you are, where you're writing in from. And then why did you take the time out of your day to come to this live session that we do with Exit 5? Other than the fact that these are super fun, have become wildly popular? I think people want to connect with each other and hang out, and that's a message that I'm playing into. So, like, I'm. I'm Dave in. In Vermont here because I like.
- [03:11]
Pranav
And I'm contractually. No need to be that authentic Dave.
- [03:24]
Dave Gearhart
Yeah, I got to pay the bills. Love that. So you text. I was texting you on Sunday. You're going to come to drive? You're coming in?
- [03:32]
Pranav
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Love that. I'm going to do that. Yeah.
- [03:34]
Dave Gearhart
All right, cool. Chris is in Austin. Fractional CMO. Huge believer in founder led demand creation. Carolyn, 15 years in San Francisco, now in Michigan. Storytelling, product marketing. Giovanni says sub Dave fan for a while. Dialing from vacation in Mexico. Launching a new venture soon. Love that. Jordan's in Oregon. Sarah had to see if Dave's AI bot was running the webinar. I got a side rant on that, by the way. In a second. Jess Cook is in the mix. What's up? Hoping to see if Dave was in a tux, but hearing Pranav speak is a close second. Love that.
- [04:05]
Pranav
Nice.
- [04:07]
Dave Gearhart
Jessica Kemp is here. Works in New Hampshire. From New Hampshire, Worked in medical devices. Jessica from Brenham, Texas, home of Blue Bell ice cream. Never heard of it. Maybe you heard of Ben and Jerry's. JL's a marketing guru. Always learning. Love it. Great crew. Hell, yeah. This is so fun. That's why we love doing these. Sandy is in Vancouver, head of marketing at pocus. Saw you message me this morning and I owe you a response at some point. I don't know when that will be, but I'll get there. So, random side story, we have this AI bot that we trained on my book. 10 years of literally 10 years of writing on LinkedIn. Every email, every podcast transcript. We took 40,000 comments and posts from the community and we launch it as a way to, like, give people a way to ask questions and get answers inside the community. And it's amazing, but there's something that I'm seeing, like the way we talk to AI is totally different than how we talk to each other and like expectations that we have. Like, people are asking pretty like advanced marketing questions and they're like, well, why can't you give me this perfectly formatted 45 slide deck for my QBR? And so I think we're kind of like, we're trying to match the expectations in reality. And I think we expect full service with these AI tools. And I think what we're learning is the reality is somewhere in the middle. I've seen Jason Lemkin talk a lot about this with like, you know, everybody's talking about vibe coding and it's like the reality is vibe coding is the best way to like get something to 50% and then have to have a real engineer come in and do it. So.
- [05:31]
Pranav
Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good one. I think I have a real example about exactly that that I can talk about. I'm going to give a shout out to the User Evidence team. Sorry, Dave, I'm just plugging them in here. They held an event I think last week or something. I was there, it was Highline. I was doing a 10 minute lightning talk. And my wide marketing process for that talk was kind of interesting. Two Saturdays ago, I was just hanging out at a swim lesson for my kids. I dictated the entire presentation into ChatGPT and then I asked it, hey, can you just create 10 slides for me? And not only did it create the outline, it asked me back, do you want me to just give you the titles and the bullets for every slide? I was like, yeah, go for it. And it did it. And then I opened up the template that the User Evidence team had given me and I literally copy pasted every single thing and made a few tweaks and shipped it to them. And frankly, we have 15 engineers at Paramark. I asked them like, how do you do your day to day work? And it's very similar. Right. It's like they are asking their cursor or Claude code or whatever for some very specific thing, but then they're tweaking it before they hit the production. Otherwise, you know, like people's expectations are very unreal about what's possible. So I'm with you on that rant.
- [06:50]
Dave Gearhart
Yeah, but Dex is a good one and that use case is a good one where like something I've always. I have this story in my head or I can sit down with a, you know, pen and paper and write it out. But from getting it from zero to one is hard. So anyway, all right, I'M going to let you drive a bunch of this today. So one of the best parts about having Pranav on is I really enjoy his thinking. I think a lot of you do also. And so we want to make sure that this is interactive and we have a bunch of your Q and A and stuff in here, but I'm going to let you drive. And basically the goal is we're going to talk a little bit about this overall topic and then what's cool is you're a startup founder. You know, you're doing the marketing for your company in real time as you do this. And so I know you're going to talk through some of the ways that you all are executing on this, but we'll do what we do. We'll bring all you in, be active in the chat. I think one of the things that's great about showing up and coming here is, like, you're all marketers. I. I just read through all of the chats here. This is amazing. Put your own opinions in the chat, help out each other, challenge question things. If it gets bad, boo us. I like to tell our presenters, like, we're doing a prep call earlier with someone for a future webinar. We're like, I don't think you realize the bar on these things. Like, if you don't come correct, the chat is going to let you know, if I'm not worried about myself, I'm worried about you. And that's why you're back. Seasoned presenter. But put your questions in the Q and A. That's where we'll get to. I can sort them by upvotes. That makes it easier, but. All right, Pranav, why don't you drive us here?
- [08:05]
Pranav
The secret message from Dave was like, pranav, don't mess up. Come on.
- [08:09]
Dave Gearhart
Just now he knows he's been proven. We're in the scaling phase of our relationship now.
- [08:14]
Pranav
All right, cool. Let's see if he can put the presentation up and I can do a quick intro. Hey, everyone, I'm Pranav. I work at Paramark. And you'll see our little logo there. I'm going to talk about nothing related to Paramark. Today we're going to talk about how you turn your company's story into very actionable, concrete ideas that you can use. Like today. And, you know, I've never really done this. I'm going to do a live session on how I would go about it for Paramark itself and why did I think about this idea? We are a measurement tool. We're a measurement company. And we help brands, both B2B companies and B2C companies, run experiments or understand what's working, what's not working within their paid media, organic, social, what have you. And the challenge almost always isn't a measurement challenge. It's do you have enough creative ideas to go test? And so I thought about, okay, how can we help our customers? And also sort of generally marketing teams of all shapes and sizes have a more repeatable process to come up with ideas that are not just like average mediocre ideas, but really sort of good ideas that are tied back to your company story. And it also, guess what, helps me because I get to learn by building this process for Paramark itself. You know, we're a 20 person company, we're growing fast, we're turning on all types of marketing. So that's a quick preamble. If you go to the next slide, what do you need to start? Dave, I'm curious about your take here. What I did for this session is we've had a company narrative from day one in the company. My co founder and I wrote out this is what we believe in. We actually published a manifesto on our website, I think on the day that we launched. So we've got that manifesto, we've got a company narrative. And the company narrative is really just a strategy doc. People hate strategy. I love it. So it's a strategy doc. And then we wrote out over the last couple of years this idea of jobs to be done and category entry points, I don't know if you've come across these, but category entry points, essentially this concept that, you know, when should people think about you as a brand? Right? And here's a very simple example from our consumer life. You think of the beach, you think of Corona, you think of having a break, you think of Kit Kat, you think of Heineken, the beer, you think of football. Or maybe the opposite way. I got that one wrong. So what are the category entry points for Paramark? When do people think about paramark? When do CMOs think about paramark? And being very crisp and clear about what mental associations we want to create. So that's a prerequisite that I'll show you some examples of how we wrote that. But that's a prerequisite for today's session.
- [10:58]
Dave Gearhart
I love that I think you said this line in Jess, but I actually think that's so key and so underrated. And we've been doing this for a long time now and I've seen so many conversations and discussions among Marketers, I actually think this is often the missing ingredient. It's easy to be like, most people hate strategy or roll their eyes at strategy, but I think that if I were to cover up my eyes and guess, like the root cause of the majority of the questions we see from marketers or where they're stuck, it almost always is a strategy thing. And it's often not their fault. It's actually because the founders didn't do these things in the beginning. And so they start a company without a clear narrative, without a clear point of view, without a clear vision, without thoughts on the jobs have you done? We just kind of start this product, start a company, and then we ask marketing to come in. I think that it has to be. The point of view has to be driven by the founder. It literally needs to be the. And I know it's true from you as a former head of marketing, to go start a measurement company, Right? It's like core to why you exist. And I think that has to be key to the rest of this stuff. And then I love that. I think there's more of this that needs to be done. The category entry points, actually, my brain went to the. This is bad. My brain went to, oh, he's talking about creating a category. He's talking about what category does Paramark play in? It's like, no, no, no. He's talking about the head, the real estate in someone's mind. And when does Dave, as the marketer, when does he consider something like Paramark? And then how do we be in that consideration set? So this is super important.
- [12:22]
Pranav
Exactly. Like, you know, and. And we'll show examples. So we'll get more real just in a couple of minutes here. The third piece is jobs to be done. And it's not a mental association. It's not a category entry point, but it's like I have probably five or ten things that I need to get done that Paramark helps me get done, right? As a cmo, as a VP of marketing, as a head of analytics, whatever it might be. So being very crisp about what those jobs are, I'm not talking about product features. I'm not talking about capabilities. I'm talking about from my perspective, I have to prepare a deck for my qbr. I have to submit an annual financial plan. I have to make sure that I can measure the impact of my YouTube test. Whatever those jobs to be done are, be very precise about writing those out, and that helps in coming up with the next step. And then a couple of other things like blog posts. We've written maybe 15, 20 blog posts and we will take those and put that into the process and I'm going to walk you through it. Brand positioning is interesting. The reason I put it in there and hat tip here to our VP of marketing who's. I don't know if he's on the chat or not, but I asked him in his first quarter, hey, look at everything we have. I think we need to tear it all apart and redo it and come up with a new way of thinking about our brand positioning. So I think if you've done that exercise or if you have some write up that can be super helpful as an input into this process. And we're talking about things that are a little bit more fuzzy. It's like, okay, what is our personality, what is our tone? Things of that nature, but also things around how we show up and what are some archetypes that we can attach ourselves to. And then the last piece, which I think is critical that a lot of marketers don't maybe think about often. There's a lot of material on the Internet, on ChatGPT, there's a lot of people who talk about behavioral psychology. So if you're not a student of behavioral psychology, number one, go become a student of behavioral psychology. And that and listing out things like loss aversion or scarcity or reciprocity, like things like that. Go study those and list out 15, 20 of those. That can be a helpful aid when you're coming up with marketing ideas. So we take a combination of all of these different things and then we put it into an AI tool and we see what happens on the other side. So that's like a prerequisite. What do we do with it? You're going to see me, I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do. You're going to see me take sales call transcripts, like real transcripts. So we're going to get some fun interactions here. We're going to look at a LinkedIn post, we're going to look at an event presentation, we're going to look at a podcast transcript. And then, you know, we're going to look at a bunch of email series that I want to create. And these are all either inputs or outputs. And the reason I picked these is they're very repeatable. Right? You will get new sales call transcripts every week. So you can repeat this process every week, every month and seed it as a prompt into your process to come up with new ideas. Same thing for LinkedIn posts you'd see a nice, interesting LinkedIn post from a competitor or from a thought leader in your space. You can take that, put it in there, and start to come up with new ideas. Right? So you can customize this for your own consumption of content and then turn that consumption into something that you remix and produce. So that's the thought process that I want everybody to be in. Do you have any reactions to this before we.
- [15:47]
Dave Gearhart
No, I. Dude, I love it. This is how I think and I try to explain it this way. And it's like, specifically, like, when we're talking about LinkedIn or I think something flipped in my brain years ago when I started to understand marketing. And it's like everything can be marketing once you're inside of the company. And so really, it's like everything you list here, like the insights from a sales call that can be used in marketing. Right. Someone else's post. I see someone else write a post. Oh, that's an interesting format. I want to take that and riff on my boom, boom, boom. So I actually feel like now I'm an endless fountain of creativity. And it's often not because I'm some creative genius and I sit in this room and I brainstorm creative ideas, but I'm just always observing. I just see things everywhere. You know, you see someone else's email, you're standing in line at the grocery store and you see how that package is like, these are the timeless things about the skill set of becoming a great marketer. And I actually love where AI fits in this world because I think as a creator, this makes these things easier and more possible now. And so it's not such a manual process where I can build a custom GPT to be able to do all these things. So I totally agree. I'm with you. I like it. Let's keep going.
- [16:49]
Pranav
And the one thing I would say is, you know, you don't need to be a GTM engineer for this. You don't need to know coding for this. You don't need to some OPS mastermind for this. Like, I literally came up with the slides and all of the content this morning at 5am I just woke up, created it, got going. So let's go. I am going to share my screen. This is where things get real. All right, so what are you looking at? You're looking at literally my ChatGPT instance. And you can see that I have this project. It says Exit 5. You'll see some other projects and you can now snoop on all the other things that I asked ChatGPT for nothing embarrassing there. Great.
- [17:27]
Dave Gearhart
I had to do that, by the way. I'm like, it shows all your search history. It's like, exactly, exactly.
- [17:35]
Pranav
Let's keep it real, right? Okay, so how did I set this project up? First thing, if you haven't used projects, I would highly recommend you use projects. You can do a custom GPT. It's just a fancier version in my opinion of a project. But I added a bunch of files to prepare for this session. So the manifesto, the jobs to be done, the category, entry points. I actually really like this notion of these hooks. You can think of them as like advertising hooks. I dumped like our top five blog posts, our brand positioning PDF. And then I like this person, I'm forgetting her name, Caitlin. I think she has a website. I'll link to it later. And she has a whole bunch of psychology tips and tricks for marketers. And I just copy pasted like 20 of those from a recent tweet that she had done. So that's the stuff that's going in. So that's step one. Then I gave it some instructions. So I wrote this out and basically said, hey, you can customize this. There's nothing that much of a secret here. You can even use ChatGPT or Claude or whatever you use to come up with the custom instructions you want to feed into the project. And essentially we're just saying that, hey, generate new ideas, connect the dots between all the different files that I have uploaded and give it a little bit of, here's the tone and the brand voice that we want you to be in and keep it super simple, keep the output clear, approachable, so on and so forth. So that's the setup and you can obviously add even more files, you can add even more instructions, but that's the starting point. Dave, any reactions to this? Anything that you would do differently that I maybe, you know, ideas that come to your mind.
- [19:17]
Dave Gearhart
What I think about with this stuff, it's like every time I've failed with an agency or a contractor or freelancer, it's almost always been my fault because I wrote like a lazy brief or I just hired someone and expected them to do it. We do get to save time with ChatGPT, but it's like ask a better question, get a better answer. And I find that if I do now my exercise, if I put in the work to build the right project files to give it the right context, then I have what I need to work from that. And so I think like people used to joke like, oh yeah, you just become a prompt engineer. But like that kind of is the work right now. It's like I'm going to spend 30 minutes to an hour like organizing all my shit. And then from there now I have this like super intelligent intern that's going to help me go and create this stuff.
- [19:58]
Pranav
That's exactly right. So I want to show you an example of what's inside these files. And you know, obviously this is like all of our secret sauce, but there's nothing really that secret about it. Right. So I'll open up the manifesto and this is literally what we wrote a couple of years ago. I just copy pasted it from our website. It's just very simple. Here's what we believe in. Marketers need new way, better way, we're building this, blah, blah, blah. I'll show you category entry points. If you haven't read the book How Brands Grow, I would highly recommend reading that book. Right, okay. Diversifying from bottom of funnel channels. Whenever you're thinking about diversifying from bottom of channels, you can think about Paramark. Whenever you think about investing in brand marketing, you should think about Primark. Whenever you think about annual plans and scenario planning, you should think about Paramark. When you're launching new channels, you should think about Paramark. Right. So we've been very precise about why and when you should think about Paramark. And that's an input into this process. If you don't have this, you're just going to get generic, frankly garbage out of any of these tools. So that was an example of what a manifesto is, what category entry points is. And then we have a similar doc on jobs to be done, and so on and so forth. So that was step one. I pre populated some ideas here. So the first one I'm going to walk you through is just ad campaign ideas. So this is super easy. I just didn't even give it anything. I just said, hey, can you please use all the project files and come up with some ad ideas for specifically LinkedIn, YouTube and podcast? The reason we said that is we think that those channels would be a great fit for us. Our audience hangs out there. I'm pretty sure all of you are on LinkedIn, are on YouTube and listen to the podcasts. And so that's the starting point. And look at what it did. It, you know, went and created these ideas so clicks don't tell the whole story. Gave it a description, it talked about why it came up with that idea. Right. So it's talking about the category entry point of diversifying from Bottom of funnel. It's referring to the blog post. End of attribution. It's got a hook which is distinctive and curious. Clicks don't tell the whole story. Okay, what's the whole story? Right. That whole sort of concept. I really love this one.
- [22:05]
Dave Gearhart
I love that one. I'm going to steal that one. That's a good one.
- [22:08]
Pranav
Yeah. There you go. Right. So I thought that was a genius idea. It's like, oh, my God. I can think about, like, five different ways of activating that idea in different formats. And then this concept of boardroom ready every quarter. Like that confidence. And I talk about this a lot with our team. There's a crisis of confidence in the CMO club. And the reason it is is because of the lack of the type of things that Paramark helps you do. So right off the bat, you got some really interesting ideas. And yes, you know, it says LinkedIn, but you could use these for other channels. We can keep going. Right? End of attribution explained in 60 seconds. $10 million misallocation. That's a great hook. Anytime you have numbers and metrics, those seem to kind of get people to watch something. And then, you know, the experiment every CMO needs. Oh, I need to know that. Like, every cmo. Yeah. I'm curious about what experiment I. So there's some really interesting ideas right off the bat. I didn't have to do much, and I can probably ask it to come up with 10 new ideas, 15 new ideas. But here's the thing. All of these are very, very central to the work that we had already done. If I hadn't done that work, these ideas wouldn't necessarily be as good. They would just be generic about any marketing measurement company, as opposed to things that are truly something that we care about as Paramount. So simple idea. I'm going to show you another one. Okay. This. I love basketball. I play basketball a little bit with my kiddo. And so I was like, hey, can you write out a script for a YouTube explainer video, not more than two minutes, that uses basketball as an analogy for marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing. And marketing. Mmm. And incrementality testing is what we do. But those are hella boring terms. I don't want to use them to really put them front and center. So how do we do this in a fun way? And it did a great job. Again, it's leveraging all the content that we already have and talking about the fact that player hitting a three pointer, but another is diving for defense. And was it the three pointer was it the defense that actually caused them to win the game? And then talking about just like you can't evaluate one player on the team individually, you can't evaluate one channel by itself. You have to look at the entire marketing mix. It came up with ideas about testing where it said we'll switch one particular player for another particular player and see which combination of team does a better job. And so all of these concepts, again very simple. I can take this, send it to our video producer. Now there's a whole bunch of workflow our video person uses. Shout out to Aditya that you know, then converts that script into an actual sort of produced video. All done through VO3 and Flux and what have you. So another like great idea. Okay, here's the most. I was very disappointed with this idea. This one was I basically said we did a lot of leads and prospects who engage with us on a regular basis. Can you come up with a one on one email series that teaches new engagers about our methodology? This idea just completely sucked. So this is an example of please don't take everything that you get out of ChatGPT and just use did a good job. Like it said all the right things but it was so boring. So again, not everything that you get out of these tools is going to be useful. But it gave me a little bit of a starting point and I'm going to riff on it a little bit and iterate on it. But it got me to a 1.0 and I have to do a bunch of refinement. So these are things that I had pre prepared. Any reactions Dave? Anything comes to mind when you see this and then I'm going to give you like real time sort of couple of examples that I'm going to drop in some new files.
- [25:54]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Gearhart)
This episode is brought to you by walnut. It's 2025. Something has to change based on how people buy today. Why are we pouring all of this effort into marketing just to hand prospects a PDF or push them behind a book, a demo wall? Come on. Today's buyers, just like you and me, we don't want to wait. We want to explore the product, see how it works and understand its value. Before booking a meeting with someone, I want you to show me the product. Come on. 70% of the B2B buying journey is already done before a sales rep is even contacted. So your buying experience needs to match. And that's where Walnut comes in. Walnut helps you put your product the center of your marketing. They make it easy for marketers like you and me to embed interactive demos on the site, drop them in campaigns or personalize them for sales in minutes. No engineers acquired love that is that, is that called vibe coding? Once a buyer is interested, they don't just want a one off walkthrough of your product. They want a place to actually evaluate, compare notes and make a decision that they feel confident in. So Walnut has deal room that make it easy for your internal champion to sell your product to their team. With interactive demos at the core, the result is fewer stall deals. Fewer stall deals, consistent buyer experiences and intent data that shows exactly what features are winning. That's why companies like Adobe, NetApp and more trust Walnut to shorten sales cycles, scale pre sales and drive millions in new pipeline. Want to see it for yourself? Go check it out. Walnut IO. That's Walnut IO and they have a cool offer for you. They will actually build your first demo for free. So you can see how demos and deal rooms actually work. So you get to see the product, test it out. They're going to do it for free because we're sending you there from exit 5. So go to Walnut I.O. today and tell them that you heard about them from Exit 5.
- [27:37]
Dave Gearhart
So a couple things I think, number one, I do think that we waste a lot of time trying to go from zero to one. And it used to be like the old cycle would be like marketing team has a need, marketing team has a team meeting and they discuss the things that we need to do. You spend a week and then you come back and then you pitch ideas. And it is a much slower process. This is a much faster like 0 to 1 and then you know, you don't have to take all these things verbatim. You know, marketing is a creative art in some ways, right. And I think a lot of times you don't know what you. I like when I can see four or five options to know. Like I actually don't like any of these. I kind of like this one. I'm going to take this one thing. So your point about not taking these things verbatim is really well heard. I think that the future of marketing is about which is a positive trend is the creativity and the execution of these things. And so just because you have this YouTube ad script and just because you can go use VO3 and Flux and whatever doesn't mean that the ad that you create is going to be any good or going to be funny, right? Or creative. And so you still need to know. And it's not just about knowing how to write the Prompts, you still have to have that idea. You still have to have that taste, which is an overused word right now. And so I think that's what this is. I don't see this replacing any jobs. I see it as allowing us to move faster and ship better. And then, man, let me tell you, there's a lot of AI conversations out there. It's very refreshing to hear. Like, actually, this one kind of sucked. And I'm not, I'm not going to use that one. Like, it's great. That's okay. An agency pitches you 10 ideas, maybe you like one of them. Like, that's the ROI on that relationship.
- [29:10]
Pranav
So totally. The principal and marketing mix one is very interesting, right? Because it's like it's a personal interest of mine and connecting it with another personal interest of mine, which is this business. And I think that's where the serendipity or the randomness comes around in marketing. And that's what makes it interesting and different and not just like corporate speak. So the more you can do that, which is get your teams to include their lateral thinking into the more rational thinking, the more sort of creative ideas they're going to come up with. So, and I'm by no means a creative person by the way. So, like, I am the worst at this. So this is my attempt at getting better. Okay, I'm going to give you a very simple example. I have not tested this, so bear with me. It might be a complete failure. It might be very good. I'm going to take these two sales transcripts and these are real conversations that I had in June. Both of these were examples of customers that we have signed since June. And don't squint too hard. I don't want to reveal who it is, but I'm going to add those into this prompt and say the prompt here is going to be. Can you please review. Oh, I said please look at that. How nice of me. Can you please review these sales calls and come up with new ad hooks that I can use on LinkedIn to attract similar customers? Please also add ideas about visuals I can use in these ads. All right, let's see what it does. I have no clue. I've never tested this product before, so we'll see if it does anything and I really hope. There we go. Look at that. So first thing, it looks at the sales call transcripts. It cross references them against the brand for him work, the jobs to be done, the category, entry points, the blogs, the psychology tips, this is exactly why we did that work. But hey, look at this. Faith versus proof. Still investing on faith at the top of the funnel. Let's show your CFO the proof. I love that one. That's great.
- [31:17]
Dave Gearhart
There's a whole creative campaign where you could like take all of these real life examples and basically be like, do this. Not that it's like you wouldn't blindly do X. Right? So kind of comparing and contrasting all these examples, right? Like you wouldn't build your house without measuring. I don't know. I'm not good coming up on this in the fly. But yeah, this is cool.
- [31:35]
Pranav
You know, branded search looks amazing until you realize it's analyzing real growth. And the reason I love these is I'm sure I could have come up with these ideas on my own. But having a sales call transcript to refer to means that these conversations actually happen.
- [31:50]
Dave Gearhart
How do you think these responses would be without your specific context to paramark? Would they just be more generic? What do you think?
- [31:58]
Pranav
I think it's going to be the summation of what's happening on the Internet. So the blog posts and the videos from every other marketing measurement provider and hey, maybe it's going to come to the same outcome. But the fact that I am feeding in my sales calls and my brand positioning gives me the confidence that it's a lot more targeted and not just random. And I'm going back and trying to remember the conversation I had with this particular prospect. Unfortunately, their name is revealed here. And these are exactly the conversations we had, right? Talking about touch based activation, telling stories, but we need to be able to show the proof. Talking about the cfo, talking about the fact that we need to reduce spend but double the speed of execution. Be boardroom ready in one slide, right? These are real conversations. These are real frustrations that came up in those calls. That's faster results than diy. This is a real conversation that happens in our sales conversations. So I think this is actually pretty good. I'm going to share this with Sam and Addie and everybody on our creative team. And this is super simple to spin up, right? And every week, every two weeks, I can go back, put in a new sales transcript and kind of see if things are changing. This is very B2B specific. We also have B2C customers, we have E Comm customers, we have public companies. So we'd, you know, try different types of transcripts to come up with different answers.
- [33:21]
Dave Gearhart
I love rooting this in like the what's actually coming up in sales conversations. I had to do this more manually back in the day. And I would ask sales reps, but I would say this. When I was working at Drift, I would say I would sit down with three or four of the top performing sales reps and I would say, hey, let's just hang on for a second. Let's just whiteboard this. Like, why? Give me the top three reasons people decide not to buy Drift or don't buy Drift. And that stuff was so good from a content perspective. Because I think a lot of times. And this goes back to, like, buyer psychology.
- [33:54]
Pranav
Right.
- [33:55]
Dave Gearhart
Let's dive into buyer psychology for a sec. Like, we're all being marketed to all the time. And so we are so skeptical of marketing. Company says we're the best, we're the fastest, we're the whatever. We don't believe that. And so there's something very endearing. I learned this in the this book called the Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan Kennedy. He basically says, like, address all of your flaws up front, you know? And so, like, if you're a local pizza shop and the. Oh, yep. You don't have sandwiches. All you do is pizza. It's like, yep, we have nothing else. All we do is pizza. Because that's the only thing we care about. We make the best pizza. Yep. Actually, we only have pepperoni because we make the best pepperoni. And so there's so many things like that. And then one time we wrote this article about, here are the top 10 churn reasons, like, which company would do that? Who would actively publish that? And it worked like an incredible piece of marketing. People always ask me, I love that now. And it's. It's been all, these are the things. Let's dig into the objections. Right.
- [34:46]
Pranav
That's great. And I just did a live exercise of that. Right. Same chat. I just said, hey, were there top three unsaid reasons that gave these prospects pause? And it said it out loud. Trusting credibility.
- [34:58]
Dave Gearhart
This is a good one. Look at this. Meg worried about Paramark being a newer player and her CRO's concern about spending a big line item on a young company. This is classic B2B buying. This is the like, nobody gets fired for buying Salesforce thing. Right. So it's like, how do you inject that energy into, like, Paramark storytelling? Like, and that's where you'd lean into it. The Dan Kenny thing would be like, yep, we are brand new. Yep. We don't have the credibility of X, Y and Z. But here's why we're going to work. It's the Avis. Like, the Avis number two. Like, we're number two, so we work harder. Like, there's. This is sick. Yeah, right.
- [35:31]
Pranav
So you see the desire for building something in house or having more control, the change management, like, these are the things that are unsaid. Right? The mindset shift that you have to go from, you know, direct attribution to this concept of incrementality. This is the stuff that makes it really, really interesting. So again, it asked me, do you want to just flip these into new hooks to diffuse those hidden hesitations? Fantastic. We don't have time for that, but I would absolutely take this intern up for an offer on that. Okay, so I have a couple of ideas that I wanted to cover. So I do a lot of podcasts, and I did this podcast about a year ago, and somebody in our. How did you hear about us? Or like, somebody just volunteered that, hey, I heard about you on this podcast, and that's what made me come to you guys. So I'm going to take that and basically just feed that entire transcript. Again, I've never tested this before. The transcript quality might be all, you know, messy and just say, hey, can you create an outline of a white paper? By the way, Dave, why do people use white papers? Have you ever thought about this? Like, I've been thinking about this a lot.
- [36:41]
Dave Gearhart
Sorry, did you say, why do they? Or why don't they?
- [36:44]
Pranav
Why do they? Like, literally a prospect asked me, hey, do you have a white paper? And I was just so confused. I was like, do people really read these?
- [36:52]
Dave Gearhart
My very first job was I worked at a tech PR firm in 2009, 2010, and it was all life sciences companies and healthcare and tech, and that. That was the big thing back then. It was white papers. If you could tell me the difference between a white paper, an article, a blog post, a PDF, it literally does not matter to me. It is words on a page that explain, like, who you are, what you do, how you can help your customers. How is it not an article? I don't understand.
- [37:22]
Pranav
I completely with you.
- [37:23]
Dave Gearhart
So what's the opposite of a white. And why is it called a white paper?
- [37:26]
Pranav
What paper is not white? Good point. Maybe we could start a new yellow paper. That would be fun. Like my yellow paper right here. Yeah. So, okay, great. So I just, you know, fed in this podcast transcript and I said, can you create an outline of the white paper? This is a real thing. I need to create this because somebody asked for it. And if a prospect asks for it and I don't have it, that just looks bad. So I need to have it. And, you know, there we go. We, you know, gave it a prompt. I said, make it fun rather than a boring academic white paper. Include some ideas for visuals to make it more magazine like, because I think that's what our audience is going to like. Okay, great. So there you go. You have a starting point. The rise and fall of attribution. This is nice because it's talking about the rise. I didn't talk about the rise of attribution in any of our materials, so this is fantastic. Oh, my God. It said visible pizza slicing error. This is hilarious. Look at that. The Latin phrase post hog, ergo proctor hog. I've talked fallacy. So maybe that came up in this podcast and it's referencing that. The cracks in this model, the three killer flaws of mta. Then you have. Mmm. Okay. It's not new. It was born in the 1970s. And this is what I said on the podcast. I had no clue. I said all of these things. So this is now starting to look pretty good. And, you know, I can take this and build on top of it, and then it's got some ideas for visuals. But this is a great first brief that I can send to our content agency and be like, hey, can you take this and take the recording, take this outline and let's run with it. So, so many ideas like this. I'm sure your executives are spending time on sales calls, on podcasts and events. That one looks great. I'm definitely going to use that one to actually create a white paper, even though I have no clue why white papers exist. All right, let's see. Do I have another idea? Had one last idea which was, oh, yeah, this is a presentation that I had done. So I'm going to upload this presentation. This happened just a couple of weeks ago, and the title of the presentation was Experiment or Die. And I'm going to say, hey, can you create a LinkedIn carousel idea based on this presentation, include titles, visual aids, and also include a LinkedIn post in our brand style? I have no clue what that's going to do. Never tried this before, but here we go. So again, this is all about repurposing, right? That content already exists. And yep, again, it's already sort of referencing specific slides. It's coming up with a visual aid. It's talking about the five pillars of an experiment. A lot of this is content is that's already in the deck, but it's giving me a copy paste. Take this, put it into a figma buzz and ship it. So this is the Type of stuff that's already possible. And I know that I was leveraging a lot of existing content, but all of this should be in your control. Right. Again, it goes back to starting with the company narrative, the category entry points, the jobs to be done, your existing content, and now you're ready to kind of take each of these and convert it into new formats that are usable pretty much on any channel. All right, I'm going to pause. I said a lot of words, questions, reactions, maybe. Let's see what the audience thinks.
- [40:53]
Dave Gearhart
Yeah, perfect. I'll pause for a sec. There's a couple questions in the Q and A, but, like, I'd like to spend the last 18 minutes taking all of your questions. So this is your opportunity to, even if you haven't asked a question yet, get live marketing advice from Pranav and myself. If you want it, take advantage of that. So there's some questions in there and we'll get to them. Couple things that this just to build on what you said. I think I'm writing notes now because there's something that I'm working on, and I realized that I didn't do enough of the work upfront to make something awesome. And so I think, like, this is a perfect example of how, like, if you do the generic ChatGPT, you will get generic ChatGPT level answers. Right. If you take the time to do this stuff now. Also, the catch here, though, is not just that PRANAV uploaded these PDFs, it's actually the hours and hours and hours and hours of work that you did before that. And so it's garbage in, garbage out. Right. Like, if you don't have these docs, like, my takeaway from this webinar is like, Pranav uploaded this, like, clear company philosophy. What were the two or three core docs you had the jobs to be done.
- [41:56]
Pranav
We had the company narrative and manifesto. The manifesto is a little bit more external facing. Right. It's an appeal to the audience and say, hey, you should pay attention to us. The narrative was more internal facing of, you know, here's what we believe in, here's what we think is the market, the problem, the opportunity, like, more strategy type of stuff. We had the category entry points, we had jobs to be done, and then we had our first, like, 10 or 15 blog posts.
- [42:23]
Dave Gearhart
Yeah. So that step one, it's like, let's go build that now. That's one of my big takeaways. Second big takeaway is, I think, as a marketing manager, marketing leader, even as the owner of Exit 5. Like, we've entered a new level of work where, like, if the marketing team is not doing this level of pre work, then we have the wrong people or we're not taking this stuff seriously. And so I love that you showed this. I would want my team showing me this stuff. Hey, we wrote. Here's this deck that we created. Okay, cool. Take me through how you created this. Well, I had an idea. No, show me your work here. Like, this has to be the future of how we're working. And I think. I think there's a lot of flaws with the AI stuff, like, obviously. But I think the positioning that I like the best, I've been thinking about lately, I was sharing this with Dan earlier in the week, is like, if you had a super intelligent. If you had, like, the best marketing intern ever working with you on stuff, that's what this is. And I think you got to reframe it like that to do your job. You, Pranav, still has to own it, still have to ship the work, still has to take, you know, do it. But I got this unbelievable intern that's doing this. Yeah.
- [43:26]
Pranav
What? Yeah. No, there's a very important point that you just sort of landed on, which is you still have to apply human judgment on top of all of this content. You all got to see it live. There's probably like 50 to 60 to 70%, which was, like, pretty good. But it could become excellent with Sam's input, who's a real marketer. I just pretend to be one. And our creative team who might take some of these ideas and come up with even more crazy rifts. And that human layer of judgment and the energy, the creative energy between AI and human has to be there. Otherwise, you know, if I'm doing this tomorrow, you're going to do this. Maybe there's another marketing measurement company out there that's going to take their narrative and their positioning. How different is that going to be from our positioning and narrative? Let's be real, right? Maybe a little bit. But, like, so you do have to add that spice, and that only comes from humans.
- [44:21]
Dave Gearhart
Yeah. What's cool is, like, you could work with AI to get clear on that spice. You could say, hey, here's all of our information, here's all of our calls. Here's what I think our core differentiator is. But let's pressure test that. Okay, let's rapid fire, hit some of these questions. Palashi says, is there a format? Can you give a quick share of, like, the format for the narrative that.
- [44:41]
Pranav
You used I think it's quite simple. So what I start with is it's going to sound super boring, but it's who is your audience? What is their problem? How big is the opportunity? How are you uniquely going to capture that opportunity or solve that problem? And what is your specific point of view? That nobody else has something of that nature. Very simple, top down market strategy, business strategy, product strategy, whatever you want to call it. One spicy tape that I have is business strategy, marketing strategy, product strategy are all the same things. I will die on that hill. It's all the same. So put on your product hat or your business hat or your marketing hat, write those things out. That's it, that's your narrative. And the more creative people will come at it from a brand promise perspective, the more sort of engineering minded people will come at it from a more like market structure perspective. So you can shape it in a new form. It really depends on where you're, you know, what you're training and experiences in. I'm more of an engineer, so much more rational and I wish I was more of the brand thinker. I'm sure Dave is more like that.
- [45:51]
Dave Gearhart
I don't, I'm like, I'm like that. What's that meme? Is it like a bell curve of some kind? And it's like at this point I don't do anything. No frameworks, nothing. I just sit and I just write. Like, I just believe that like there's, you can get frameworks and read books until you're blue. Maybe I have that subconsciously. But now I'm like, if I can come up with a strong narrative, that is, who is this for? Why does it exist? Why should you buy this? And like, who cares if I didn't use the like Ehrenberg Boss Research Institute, God blessed framework. Like what does that matter? I mean some of the best messaging ideas ever that I had in my career was like in a WhatsApp with the founder and we'd be like, oh, here's a great line. It's like, yeah, go run with that. So let's not get too married up in the frameworks. A couple questions on, interestingly enough comes up a lot. A couple questions about privacy, security. Seeing this startup CEO upload all these docs into, you know, Sam Altman's black hole. Do you worry about security? Does it matter? Do you care?
- [46:50]
Pranav
We are on the business version of ChatGPT and what that means is your data. At least somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think they use Our data for training purposes. We have enterprise level controls and what have you. So I wouldn't do this without that. I'm not doing it into the free version because your data is definitely going to get used on the free version. But we pay for these tools because, hey, you just saw why we pay for these tools. It makes complete sense. So I don't think there is any real concern on privacy unless, obviously, if OpenAI is not being forthcoming about what they're doing. But I have no reason to discuss that.
- [47:30]
Dave Gearhart
Yeah, I feel the same way. When I go on a plane, they scan my face, they know everything about me. It's already out there.
- [47:37]
Pranav
I mean, let's just think about it. We've been using Google for 20 years, 25 years. Do you think that they don't know everything about you already? Like, come on, that's the craziest piece of it.
- [47:46]
Dave Gearhart
We're going to go in a sidebar, like, they have all our emails, everything. They could have the killer AI. I don't know why they don't. But anyway, actually, I've heard Jason Lemkin riff on this and I kind of agree with this, which is like, yeah, there probably is some risk. The reality is. But I think we kind of sign up for all that and I think there's, I think at this stage, the benefits. And by the way, what you showed today is like, here's how we do marketing at Paramark. Here's jobs to be done. You're not uploading, like sensitive, personally identifiable information. It's marketing materials.
- [48:17]
Pranav
So I do apologize to the prospects because I did let their names out. So I'm sorry, if you're listening, I wouldn't.
- [48:23]
Dave Gearhart
Yeah, I wouldn't have even known. His prospects are Apple, Google, Microsoft.
- [48:29]
Pranav
There we go. Yeah. Who else?
- [48:33]
Dave Gearhart
Can you explain the category, entry point, Doc, or what's in that?
- [48:37]
Pranav
It's literally sort of statements of times when our prospect could be thinking about us. And so you can look up this concept, you can chatgpt this concept, but the idea is that, hey, if you are stressed before your quarterly business review, you can think about Paramark helping you with that business review. If you're stressed about annual planning, you can think about Paramark as the way to make annual planning easier. You're stressed about launching a new channel, you could be thinking about Paramark so that launching that new channel is far easier. So it's the mental associations that we want to create with the prospect and just writing those out. Right. What are those example scenarios, times, places, however you want to show up in people's minds at the right time, at the right place and then all your marketing is doing is planting those seeds in your prospects minds that hey, you have a QBR coming up. Powermark helps you create the QBR deck. That's a very simple sort of way of thinking about it. So write out those entry points that you can use to get inside your prospect's mind.
- [49:47]
Dave Gearhart
Those questions earlier from Angie. How do you recommend marketers take their company's story and translate it into digital content that not only resonates with their audience, but is also structured and distributed in a way that large language models like ChatGPT begin to reference the brand? So do you read that question as how do you make something and make sure the LLMs are like crawling?
- [50:05]
Pranav
Yeah, the AEO, GEO, whatever people are calling it these days. I mean, listen, it's such a, I don't, I'm not an expert. We don't do anything that's geared towards AEO yet. Maybe that's a mistake. We're too small to be able to really flex our muscles on that front. We put out good content that's going to resonate with people. And guess what? Just as a function of that, ChatGPT is in our top three or top five referrers of traffic. So I think as long as you keep putting out good content that your prospects care about and you're answering the questions that your prospects have, it's going to show up in ChatGPT. Because ultimately everyone's trying to answer the questions that humans behind those screens have and so get really good at understanding what those humans care about. Answer those questions in the best possible way. Whether it's SEO or aeo, it'll be fine. I'm sure there are technical hacks and tricks that you can do, but that's a short term arbitrage game and I personally just don't play that game.
- [51:03]
Dave Gearhart
All right, here's a question from John. Good one. John appreciates a timeless principle in marketing. What, if any, limitations have you found with using AI in this way? Are there any situations where you might want to use a more old school approach?
- [51:16]
Pranav
We would not use it for brand positioning. I want Sam, myself, Pete, Pete's my co founder, he's the cto, our team, to sit down in a room in front of a whiteboard and talk. Because those things are the human elements. And even if AI would do a great job at it, I just don't want it to do a great job. I want our minds, our human emotions to show up in our brand positioning. So that's an example of where I would not use. That's one example. Yep.
- [51:49]
Dave Gearhart
I like that. I've been noticing that, like, sometimes, especially with some of the things that I write on LinkedIn or even how I write email copy, I even edit myself less than I would because I think, like the kind of ratchet, like, non polished way that I write it, like, becomes a pattern interruption. And I think that matters. And it's like, yeah, this was me. I really did write this, like, sitting here on my phone while waiting for my coffee.
- [52:11]
Pranav
Totally. This is a real life example. I think last week on Friday, my co founder, our VP of marketing and I were like, looking at the brand positioning and there was a line in. I forget, like, specifically what the purpose of that line was, but there was a line that had a grammatical mistake and all three of us were looking at each other. It's grammatically wrong, but it sounds right. And that's the stuff that I think you don't want to lose in your marketing and in your strategy.
- [52:35]
Dave Gearhart
All right, well, look, my takeaway from this, the consummate professional that I am, I am taking notes during the session. My takeaway is like, like, I have a bunch of chat GPT projects, and the way you're using them kind of gives me, I need to block some time next week or so, maybe, maybe post drive. I need to do spring cleaning, I need to do a cleanup. I think there's a lot of times that, like, I think that stuff just needs to constantly be updated. And I think the better those resources are, I could be getting a lot more out of it. So that was awesome. Thank you, man. Okay, Allison, let's roll the poll. Feedback is key in the life of a marketer or business professional here. So just real quick, rate today's session. One to five. Five being the highest, one being the lowest. Impossible to give it a one unless you're a hater. So this is obviously one, but I thought this was great. This is like a master class in how to use this stuff. Really practical use cases for using ChatGPT in a real way. So nice. Good job, Pranav. And by the way, let me just put this in the playbook. I don't know if you heard this. Did you hear how this guy pitched his company? He's like, yeah, I'm Pranav, the founder of Paramark. But like, don't worry about it. I'm not going to pitch you at all today. Like you've always said, I don't treat the audience like morons. It's like of course this is how I pitch it every time. Like yeah, I'm pronoun the founder of Paramark. Like we help B2B companies with measurement. But like I'm not going to pitch that at all. If you, you know, just go look us up if you want. It's like hit him with the negative and then like that's going to work first. If you did the like the big pitch right out of the gate, piss everybody off from the get go. That was perfectly handy.
- [54:02]
Pranav
I'll tell you a fun story, Dave. A CMO called me two weeks ago on a Friday at a 4:30 just unknown number, right? So I get this call, I pick it up. I'm like super tired, want to like close the week out. And she says to me, hey Pranal, I'm calling you because you've never tried to sell me, but I need you.
- [54:20]
Dave Gearhart
That's sick.
- [54:21]
Pranav
I'm like, all right, great. Mission accomplished. I think I'm becoming a good marketer now and so yes, I think that's the right way to do it. But really appreciate this session. I learned a lot, so thank you. Good.
- [54:32]
Dave Gearhart
All right, good job everybody. Good luck out there. Put your chat GPT, your super intelligent marketing intern to work. Pranav, see you later.
- [54:40]
Pranav
Good job, Walt.
- [54:45]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Gearhart)
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.
- [54:52]
Dave Gearhart
Because I don't really care about that.
- [54:53]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Gearhart)
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 marketing who.
- [55:28]
Dave Gearhart
Are doing the same thing you are.
- [55:28]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Gearhart)
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. 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 performing 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 NACK 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 NAC in action@nac.com exit 5 that's KN exit 5 or just let them know you heard about NAC from Exit 5. That's us.