← The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
LinkedIn Advertising: What's Working Now in 2026 (with Davang Shah, VP Marketing at LinkedIn)
00:46:25
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- [00:00]
Dave Gerhardt
All right, AI generated slop. I think it's the best thing to ever happen in marketing, actually, because it raises the bar, right? AI slop is going to kill deals, kill brand and kill trust. Today, marketers like we're also customers too, right? And so we have to actually put ourselves in the position of our customers and think about all the AI slop they're seeing. And it's on us to create things that actually matter, things that have meaning and impact, things that are educational, entertaining, funny, useful, specific and relevant. And, and that's everything that our sponsor airops stands for. They're helping reshape how people discover and connect with brands. Because AI slop is not going to win. Airops is built for marketers who want to create content that sounds like their best subject matter expert, not another chatbot. This is content grounded in real sources, real insights and real information gain. Their content engineering platform helps you surface your highest value opportunities in AI search, then shows you how to actually take action on them. Not just see dashboards, not just get another recommendation or SEO report, but actually go out and execute. And this is the topic that everyone is being asked to get smarter about right now, AI search and SEO. If you care about this topic, then you want to go and check out Air Ops. They're built for you. It's airops.com exit5. You can learn more about Air Ops and what they're doing in the AI and SEO space. That's airops.com exit5. You're listening to the Dave Gehard Show. Exit.
- [01:32]
Devong Shah
1, 2, 3, 4. Did you know that the average B2B
- [01:38]
Dave Gerhardt
deal takes 211 days and involves 22 people?
- [01:42]
Devong Shah
That's why this stuff is complicated.
- [01:44]
Dave Gerhardt
That stat came from my guest on this episode, Devong shaw. He's the VP of marketing at LinkedIn running their LinkedIn ads business. Before that, he spent 17 years at Google working in B2B. He came on the podcast, talked about what's actually working right now with LinkedIn ads, how to think about measurement beyond the last click. We also talk a lot about organic and brand and performance. Plus I asked him about his team, how he's thinking about AI as a VP of marketing himself. Enjoy this conversation, mostly about LinkedIn ads with Devon Shah. All right, excited to be back. Fresh new episode with you. My guest is Devong Shah. He's VP of Marketing at LinkedIn, works on the LinkedIn Ads business and I just said to you behind the scenes, I couldn't think of a more topic squarely in the venn Diagram of things that people are interested if they listen to this podcast. Thanks for giving us some time. Thank you for coming on. Tell me about who you are, what do you do at LinkedIn and just your background to get here also is cool.
- [02:37]
Devong Shah
Sure. So as Dave, you mentioned, my name is Davong. I work at LinkedIn as a VP of Marketing for our LinkedIn Marketing Solutions business. What does that mean? My job is to help advertisers understand how to use LinkedIn's ads products to grow their business. And in particular, very much focused on how we help advertisers drive the bottom line. So is that pipeline, Pipeline, velocity, deals close to revenue. That's where we spend our time, energy and effort. I spent 20 plus years in the B2B space and another 10 or so years in the B2C space.
- [03:11]
Dave Gerhardt
Very cool. What'd you do before this? You have some good companies on your resume.
- [03:13]
Devong Shah
I was at Google for around 17 years working in B2B space on advertising. Before that I was at Ford Motor Company, worked in the B2C space and then had a brief stint internship at Proctor and Gamble. So I've been fortunate enough to work at some bigger brands and learn along the way.
- [03:30]
Dave Gerhardt
I was going to save this for later, but since you mentioned this, I kind of want to maybe set the stage here. You have a lot of experience working with, you know, B2B CMOs, B2B leaders, 20 years in B2B. You know, Google, now LinkedIn. We're recording this in March of 2026. How would you describe the state of B2B marketing or the state of what CMOs and VP's about right now from your point of view?
- [03:54]
Devong Shah
Yeah, no, I'm happy to share it. I think from the conversations I've had with cmos, most important is how we're driving roi. How are we driving bottom line outcomes for the business? The types of conversations that CMOs are happening are happening at the CFO level. Right? They're getting called into room and they want to be able to prove that the work they're doing is driving real impact. I said it earlier and I mean that means pipeline, that means pipeline, velocity, deals close and revenue. And I think you have to think about that in context of the world that marketers are operating in now, which is very diverse. If you think about B2B buyers, 70% of them now, Dave, are Gen Z and millennials. You think about the type of content they consume, they're leaning more into things like video. And then when you think about who influences them not the traditional type of work we would have done in the past. Very much sort of grounded in people who have deep expertise. People have a point of view. Creators who've established themselves as being authentic and providing real world perspective on the topics they're interested in. So it's a drastically different world than it's been in the past.
- [04:58]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, that's interesting. So it's like my brain obviously goes to. Right to AI and like what that's going to mean. But you mentioned this. There has been this big disruption. The whole, you know, creator economy. I mean our whole business at Exit 5 is like built off of this kind of influencer community. But cmos now in B2B are navigating like, hey, which influencers do we need to work with? What's our social strategy? What's our, you know, we need user generated content. Like that's a big shift from how it kind of always used to be. Work with Gartner and Forrester. You know, you still got to run those plays but the whole game has changed. And then, you know, AI is the other thing on top of that. Well, while you said that next week we're going to, this will be recorded, but we're all going to Arizona. We have this marketing leadership retreat we're doing in. In Arizona. There's a hundred B2B CMOs and VPs, most like mid market SaaS, companies that are going to be there. And we surveyed them just to figure out like, you know, what's top of mind right now. Number one is AI. Not surprising. And everyone's under pressure. Basically every respondent was like, I'm under pressure to learn how to like do more with less. The board and the CEO kind of just want us to like say AI in a lot of these examples to say that we're doing it. But then the other big one is, and we obviously summarize this with AI, but it was like we need to grow more, spend less and then prove that marketing didn't. Right. So it's not just grow, but we need to grow and prove that marketing was a key player in this game.
- [06:17]
Devong Shah
I think it's interesting if I can share a couple pieces of insight and perspective based on the conversations. Right. AI is at the forefront and for all the reasons you articulated. Of course there's the efficiency. How are you going to drive more with less? That's sort of consistent. Right. Especially in a world where there's margin pressure and you're in those conversations with CFOs. There's also just the real world of what's happening with buyers, right? So if you think about B2B buyers, I mentioned 70% plus or Gen Z and millennials, we also know that when you're going to search, it's different now, right? So 60% of searches are zero click searches. Now, if you look at where people are going to get information, 94% of B2B buyers are getting information from LLMs. And so how do we as marketers think about influencing those LLMs? It's really important to make sure the content we create, the messages that we want to deliver, are being delivered in a way that the LLMs value. And what is that? And the insights that we have are it's content that comes from trusted voices, it's content that comes from people with expert perspective. And we're seeing, and there's some data that just actually was released yesterday from profound, that LinkedIn is a place where that's happening. It makes sense intuitively. You've got a platform with 1.3 billion professionals, 70 million companies, 100 million verified users. The conversations that are happening on the platform are really what drive B2B. And.
- [07:40]
Dave Gerhardt
Well, and it's interesting because there's like this shift now, but if you rewind back, I was one of the earlier people who was using LinkedIn as like a social network, as a my blog basically, like, sure, here's what I had for lunch, right? But when everyone was like, what's this idiot posting his lunch on Link? This is, excuse me, this is LinkedIn. Fair enough, but it really shifted, you know, last four or five years, everyone that's been successful in the platform is using it that way. Like, I look at your page, right? You have almost 30, 000 followers and you post a lot of content. And so LinkedIn has also become this. It's not just this professional network, but it's actually this social network where you write about work stuff. And it turns out the people who work at B2B companies, whether that's, you know, HR, finance, sales, accounting, marketing, manufacturing, like, we like to use the Internet and talk about what we're doing at work.
- [08:32]
Devong Shah
People care, right? The reality is, if you think about a macroeconomic environment and everything that's happening right now with the world of work, people need a place to go where they can learn, where they can share perspective, where they can also build businesses and connect with buyers. And there really is only one platform where you can do all of that in a way that's validated, authentic, and coming from people, real people with real perspectives. And we've seen that. And that's resulted in, I think, a lot of growth for our platform. And importantly for us as the people who are responsible for creating that platform and maintaining the integrity of that platform, is making sure that those types of perspectives are getting surfaced and that we're helping marketers understand that's actually what people want. And when you give it to them, as opposed to the highly polished type of work that maybe we thought we had to do in the past, that's actually what generates the best results.
- [09:26]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, I mean, so many people in our audience the last couple years, I don't know when they actually came out, but they're running thought leader ads. Right. And so the content and thought leader ads is not coming from the company page. It's coming from a person at the company. We're actually doing a. I just did a kicked off a little contest. We have a small team. We have six people on our team at Exit five, but we have all these testimonial videos from our members and I want to get our team to post them. And so I just made up a little contest for social. I said, hey, here are these testimonial videos. I want you to write a post with the testimony. Pick one of your favorite, I'm not going to tell you which one to use. Pick your favorite testimonial video. Write copy on LinkedIn explaining, you know, why Exit 5 is great and why people should join Exit 5. And then everyone's going to submit theirs this week and I'll pay you a cash prize for whoever has the most engagement. Right.
- [10:14]
Devong Shah
I love it.
- [10:15]
Dave Gerhardt
But the real reason we're doing it is because that also then is four or five unique ads that we can then give to, you know, we can then put our buddy behind because we run thought leadership ads. We as an agency that helps us do this. Those can now be four or five thought leader ads. And so what's really cool about this as a strategy is that, like, I love how it marries organic and paid. So we're going to like, do something, we're going to get benefit from that organically, then we're going to promote it and target. I think that's what's really interesting about this slice of ads that I think people really like.
- [10:44]
Devong Shah
I think that's right. And there's two, I think, insights to what you just shared. One, there's that authenticity, the people who are creating the content of people who live and breathe and build Exit five. Right. So there's an authenticity to what they're creating, to the type of format that you're using, using things like video to help communicate what people are feeling and what they're experiencing and why they love Exit 5 and why others should be part of the community. That actually translates quite well. So when we look at thought leadership ads and how they perform, they perform at a rate of roughly 2.2 higher click through rates compared to single image ads or that have maybe the same objective. So we know that people find them more engaging and we know that people find results and there are a number of examples. One of the companies that we've worked with that's had great success is Smokeball. It's a legal tech company. They needed to figure out how to build brand or mental availability. And so what did they do? They leveraged thought leader ads paired with testimonials similar to what you are doing with your team, Dave. They saw 186% increase in ROAS and an 8.7x increase in video completion rate. So I keep hammering this because it matters, Dave. It's people who are authentic, sharing real perspective and making sure it's reaching the right audience. It's a pretty simple formula, but when you master it, we're seeing the impact.
- [12:04]
Dave Gerhardt
Well, I think there's also like a level of I like the creativity that you can have here because you could write. So there's the obvious play which is like, hey, we have some set of creative and we want to spread that through the LinkedIn AD network to companies that we want to see it. But then there's also this like when you get a social post, it has a lot of comments and engagement. My brain goes to like, oh my God, this should be an ad. Because when people see something like the social proof of the lots of likes, lots of comments, lots of engagement. You can now play this other game which is like CEO writes something interesting, it kind of goes viral in your niche. Let's go update that post. Drop a link to like subscribe to the CEO's newsletter. Then let's go boost that with paid. And so I like marrying those two approaches. And we're seeing this. I had Ryan Narad, who's the VP of marketing at Rippling On a couple weeks ago and he was saying like our best performing creative right now is like having our social media person go down to the street. They were doing a webinar with like Heinz ketchup. And so they went down to the street, found a hot dog vendor in New York and just filmed a message that said like, hey, tomorrow at 2:00pm, you know, with the iPhone, and that becomes not just organic, but also brand. It's like brand formants, the combination of the two, which is really cool.
- [13:16]
Devong Shah
Yeah. If you don't mind, I'd love to talk about that. I think, you know, we often hear about the distinction, and I believe it's genuinely like an artificial distinction between brand and performance. All of the data that we have indicates super clearly that if you want to be successful, you have to build your brand. You have to become viable, you have to become a trusted brand that people will stand behind. You have to be top of mind when people are in the process of buying. And to do that, you actually need to be present. And we also know from our data that 95% of our B2B buyers aren't in market at any given time. Only 5% are. So you have to build that awareness. You have to invest at the top end of the funnel so that when people are ready, they know your brand. You've leveraged trusted voices, you've created a connection with them that's authentic. You've leveraged creators who are helping them see the real value in the products and solutions you offer. And then that helps warm and nurture those leads so that they're able to close at a later point in time. Branded performance aren't two distinct things. They're sort of very integrally connected. And the more we try to pull them apart, I think the more you see brands tend to be less successful.
- [14:21]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah.
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Devong Shah
And I think there's a point in time, Dave, where this happens more. Never. And that's when things get tough and people are thinking about how they need to optimize spend. They tend to focus on bottom of the funnel objectives. And that's probably the biggest.
- [14:34]
Dave Gerhardt
Well, it's just, it's so easy to be like, we need to optimize spend right now. You know, everything is tight, everything has to be direct response. But then it's like, if we only do that, we don't ever get the other stuff. I just know from our own data, two years ago, we were spending no money on LinkedIn advertising and things were kind of flat. And then if you map. Just when we started increasing our spend on LinkedIn ads to also our branded search, direct search views to my profile, like all of the kind of other brand metrics, it's not a perfect match, but it's pretty damn obvious that, like, there's a lift there that's beyond people actually clicking on our ads. And then I, I have to think about that math because it's. People might Listen to our podcast, they might subscribe to our newsletter. They might then join the community, they might go to an event. We don't have all those things, like, equally weighed out, but it's just so obvious.
- [15:24]
Devong Shah
Yeah, Dave, at the end of the day, it's not about, like, sort of one format or another. I'm fully aligned in the sense that there are a lot of things that are going to drive Exit 5's growth. Right. I. I scrapped your newsletter. I was really intrigued, by the way, by the 16 things you wish you learned before you became a CMO. I took away a couple of lessons that I shared with my team. But, you know, I learned from that. I listened to the podcast, and then on top of that, you know, I might be exposed to your perspectives on LinkedIn. All of those things are important to help nurture me throughout the funnel so that I end up maybe being part of the community and coming to one of those events that you have in Arizona in the future. But the data also bears it out, right? So we know that when founders like you come out and they talk about how they're going to post on LinkedIn or when they actually post on LinkedIn, you have an authentic voice, one that's trusted. You do something we internally call say the damn thing. You have a real perspective when you say the damn thing. People listen, and it's something that translates to their behavior. And so when you do it regularly, Dave, when you post at least two times a week, what we see is that you'll see a 5x increase in things like profile views. So this is all part of the full funnel of how we're going to get you to engage meaningfully. And then ultimately, how that translates down the funnel to people who are going
- [16:41]
Dave Gerhardt
to buy this data is really helpful because I think people can. A lot of times, people intuitively know that this is right, but what they need is, like, they need to realize, I got to go back to work and I got to actually just like, I want to explain our whole LinkedIn strategy to my team into the company, because I think what happened is we're like, okay, well, ads. We know how to measure ads. Because, you know, you're driving to a landing page, it's whatever. We can track all that. But then it becomes on the other side, all the branded stuff. Well, like, how do we measure the CEO writing on LinkedIn? And I like when we can put them together and teach people, hey, like you said, over a billion people on LinkedIn, we believe our buyers are on LinkedIn. And so our LinkedIn strategy is going to be twofold. Let's dive into the ad stuff specifically. Sure, we talked about thought leader ads, we can add more to that or come back to that. But maybe just in general, the marketers that are listening to this are probably spending on LinkedIn in sub capacity. So I don't want to give them like you know, 101, do this, not that, but maybe are there some kind of mistakes? You see people making things people should be thinking about. Give me something to talk to that group about.
- [17:47]
Devong Shah
Yeah, no, I think there are a lot of mistakes that people make and I think that tends to be when you're short term focus and you're not actually thinking about that entire buyer journey. And so what that means is that people often will over optimize to things like clicks. They won't think about the full journey of how you've got to nurture someone all the way from exposing them to your brand, making sure you're top of mind to how you build things like viability. This concept of viability is the core of what's going to matter, which means building trust, building the relationships, getting people to know that the brand you offer is one that they can defend when it comes time to purchase. Because that concept of defending your purchase is real. When you're a B2B buyer, that's what you care about. And if you do that well, then you get to the moment in time when considering the product or service you're selling. I'm primed and ready to know your brand trusted by the right people is a brand that I'm willing to take a risk on, that I can defend. Because that's at the core of what we want to do and as humans to be successful in our jobs, that's sort of the way that we view things.
- [18:50]
Dave Gerhardt
So how do you put together a strategy that does that? Is there like a recipe for different funnel stages for ads? How do you think about a campaign holistically as opposed to like I just want to show, I just want to show up in the feed like what ad formats work, what types of offers, like anything interesting there.
- [19:09]
Devong Shah
So I, I'll share a little bit about formats in a second but I think from a strategy perspective, first thing you got to do is get super crisp and clear on who your ideal customer profile is, know who you're wanting to target. Second, getting clear on your unique value proposition. These things sound foundational or fundamental because they are. Understand your value prop. Understanding who your ideal customer profile is and then actually building out what the engagement strategy will look like. And that starts with upper funnel, top of funnel types of things which are obviously lending themselves to things like video ads and solutions, or thinking about how you're going to leverage thought leadership ads at the next stage to try to drive consideration. Right, which is this notion of viability, getting people to speak on your behalf and talking about your products. And then you could also use video through that stage as well as the final stage. When you're thinking about how am I going to drive ultimate conversion? People think about video as sort of top of funnel, maybe middle of funnel, actually quite useful all the way through the funnel. We see that in our data. And importantly, I think there's two things that you need to do. You have to think about what nurture looks like. So at each of those stages, how am I moving you from one place to the next? That could be thought leadership ads, it could be how you're using retargeting. It might be and it should be how you're using your own first party data to start nurturing people through that process. But the most important thing on all of those fronts is to make sure that you've got the right measurement in place. What I see and what our teams see is that often people are still living in a world, Dave, where they're focused on the vanity metrics instead of the value metrics. And that means, yes, things like clicks and impressions, there's some value to it. But you really need to make sure that you're measuring how that translates to actual pipeline velocity, deals close and revenue.
- [20:53]
Dave Gerhardt
How do you talk a team through measurement of that? If you're building more of like a holistic campaign where you're say you're showing videos, there might not be a call to action on that video or it might not be a direct response ad. Is there a way that I will know that that video got a touch in this journey?
- [21:09]
Devong Shah
Right.
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Dave Gerhardt
We still need to understand all of the everyone wants to know, like, well, but then did they watch? So we map out the customer journey, but then I want to know, okay, but did they watch the video? Is that working? Are the right people watching?
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Sponsor/Ad Read Voice
What's the story?
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Dave Gerhardt
I can tell my boss about the money that we're spending because everyone's not buying today, but they might buy eight months from now. How do I prove that this is working?
- [21:28]
Devong Shah
That's a great question. I'll start by sharing two other data points that I think will be useful for the audience. One, the average B2B deal cycle takes 211 days. Two, the average deal is influenced by 22 people and of those 22 people, half of them are within your org, half of them are outside of your org and you think about how you're going to influence that many people over that duration of time. It requires a very thoughtful process and measurement that's aligned at each step of the way. Two products that for me I think are absolute must haves. If you're thinking about measurement and want to really prove the efficacy of your work on platforms like LinkedIn or any other platform, make sure that you've got CRM sync in place and that enables you to see, you know, what's actually happening on your end. With the first party data and the data that we see on our end you define, then you're in leverage. The conversions API. Two examples of products that are absolutely critical because then once we've aligned on what actually matters to you and then we're tracking that and measuring that, we can then understand what the process looks like to nurture those people based on the conversion stages they're at and then optimize your spend towards accomplishing it. There's one third tool that I will tell you is a must for people to explore and think about Company intelligence. You know, one of the mistakes people often make, Dave, is they're limited in their view of the impact and influence the media has and moving pipeline through the process. Company intelligence actually gives you a completely different view and helps you look at what's actually happening at the company level based on your organic and your paid media presence. And what you see when you leverage something like company intelligence is there's actually exponentially more conversions and more people influenced than you typically think are. And so that gives you a bigger aperture to understand how those two things work together and then how you optimize those things moving forward.
- [23:21]
Dave Gerhardt
Hey, it's me, Dave. Our friends over at Customer I.O. are sponsors of today's episode. They're a really cool company that helps marketers turn first party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS and push. And they built their platform for marketers who actually care about the craft because marketing is a craft. It takes creativity, thought and taste. Right now, everyone thinks they're magically a marketer because they have access to AI and the result is kind of painful. More robotic emails, more noise, more bleh. AI isn't magic. It's not going to fix bad strategy or write great copy for you magically. But the best teams also aren't ignoring it. They treat AI as infrastructure when it's built the right way. It actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. And that's what Customer IO is doing. Their AI handles repetitive work like setup, orchestration, and tasks that should be automated so that you can focus on what actually matters. The craft of marketing, the strategy, the creativity. This is how good marketers are using AI right now. Not to replace thinking, but to support it.
- [24:19]
Sponsor/Ad Read Voice
If this landed with you at all,
- [24:21]
Dave Gerhardt
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.
- [24:32]
Sponsor/Ad Read Voice
Today's episode is brought to you by Converter. They're an enterprise lead data management platform. If you're running marketing at a large B2B company, like many of you listening right now are, you know this problem well. Leads come in from LinkedIn, webinars, events, content, and the data is a message. Because one form captures job title, another one doesn't. One says United States, another one says usa. By the time it hits your CRM, records are incomplete, fields don't match, and your routing is broken before the lead ever touches a sales rep. It's annoying. And now that everyone's plugging AI into their tech stack, bad data isn't just an inconvenience, it's actually a real liability. Because AI is going to scale. Whatever you feed it, feed it garbage. It's going to scale.
- [25:11]
Dave Gerhardt
Garbage.
- [25:12]
Sponsor/Ad Read Voice
Converter is the layer that sits between your lead sources and your systems. With Converter, every lead gets validated, enriched and standardized before it touches your CRM or marketing automation. This gives you clean data every single time. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and Stripe use Converter today. So if you're dealing with this, you're not alone. And there's a great fix. You can check out Converter right Now at Converter IO exit 5. That's C O N V E R T R IO exit 5. Converter IO exit 5.
- [25:47]
Dave Gerhardt
I've always wanted to just like, take my LinkedIn posts and like, export all the likes and comments and run that up against like, icp. Because it's all there, the engagement is there. We just don't get credit for it in the same way. Well, I didn't know that they directly signed up for a deal, but it's like, man, I've been seeing the VP of Marketing. This company has been commenting on a bunch of my stuff recently. Like, that counts.
- [26:08]
Devong Shah
It counts more than you can even imagine. Of course, intelligence tells you that, right? It helps you understand job titles and what their engagement looks like. And then if we're connected to things like your conversion. We use conversion API and CRM sync. Now all of a sudden I know that that VP of marketing, she's actually gone to my site, downloaded a web page or a white paper or has viewed a video. I've got those conversions. I see it. And when the deal closes, I can actually look at what attribution should be. Not from a last click method which candidly screws up everything, but look at it from the journey and where those touch points and influences and that will transform the way that you market moving forward.
- [26:50]
Dave Gerhardt
All right, that was good. There's a couple places people can go back. And if you're listening to this and you're asking yourself questions in your head right now, like, I don't know, are we doing that? Are we using that thing? This would be a good opportunity to revisit that. People will ask for this. I just want to come back to it. You mentioned that the average B2B deal takes 211 days and the average people involved in the deal is 22. Is that LinkedIn data?
- [27:10]
Devong Shah
Yeah. We can share the details with you afterwards on the study because I think it might be useful for you folks to see. But they're LinkedIn Commission studies and we work with third party partners to understand what those processes look like. So we'll share that data.
- [27:22]
Dave Gerhardt
That's useful. I think the reason I'm asking is people. Anytime we can get a benchmark from a reputable source, like the way to use this is to be able to go back and marketers need this to go back to like explain the marketing strategy to the team. Hey, cfo, like the reason why we're doing this thing, not this thing, is because look, the average deal takes 211 days, right? That is 70% of the year. We got to be marketing to these people.
- [27:46]
Devong Shah
You've got to market to them. You have to measure along those seven, you know, months plus. Right. That's what matters. And then I don't want to lose the nuance in the 22 people day because to me this is, you know, I've been in B2B for a long time. This was sort of an eye opener for me. Right? 22 people influence the deal. Half of those people are within your company, half are not. And that's like the people in your network who are influencing, if you're a buyer, how you think about the product or service. And so as a marketer selling one of those products or services, I need to be really thoughtful about that buyer group. And how do I influence that buyer group? How do I build the notion of viability for my brand with that broader group? And that entails a lot of work that needs to happen early on in the process. Because to your very first question we were talking about, or the discussion was around LLMs and AI. You know, if a lot of that purchase process gets condensed and they're going to LLMs to get information, you need to make sure you're top of mind. And so when you're top of mind and they're going to get that information, that's when you become viable, because you have to be a trusted source and you have to be relevant at the right point in time. And if you're not, I think you face existential risk going into the future because at the end of the day, changes in the way buyers are behaving, if we don't react and we don't sort of think about the process holistically and the points that we have to influence, you're not going to be on that short list. If you're not on that day one list, the chance and probability of being the brand that's bought is quite low.
- [29:13]
Dave Gerhardt
I want to Talk specifically to CMOs and marketing leaders for a second. Just thinking about the execution of all this stuff. Back in the day, you used to have to have, you know, a team of paid. There's a digital team and there's paid people on there and they run the paid channels. Or maybe there's an agency or outside just seeing how fast everything is moving with AI. Like, is there a world where the owner of the company just logs into LinkedIn and the ads are just running and I just write with text prompts and tell them, like, what to do and what to change. Like, where is this going on, the back end of advertising? I'm curious. I really have no idea. For anybody listening, like, I've. I've never run a LinkedIn ad in my life. So take away my resume, I'm the king. I've always had people that do that kind of stuff for me. All right, Obviously, I love it.
- [30:03]
Devong Shah
Well, here's my perspective. I think you're going to see an evolution and that evolution is going to be grounded in the capabilities that AI can enable. That will translate to Dave coming at Some point to LinkedIn and saying, here's my business, it's Exit 5. I make money through conferences and association and membership, and here's what I'm willing to pay and help me figure that out. Right?
- [30:26]
Dave Gerhardt
And then it used to be the VP of Sales. Like when I was already marketing, the VP of Sales used to come to my desk, be like, where are the leads? Now it's going to be like me logging into LinkedIn, talking to my AI and be like, where are the leads? Things are slow today.
- [30:38]
Devong Shah
Look, it's going to be the sort of bend of the future, how long it takes to get there. No question that we don't know the answer to it. But I will tell you we're investing aggressively to figure out how to simplify things, how to make the product more intuitive and easier to use so that we can just deliver the outcomes that matter to you as a B2B marketer. And you'll see that across the ad types that we're talking about, building the functionality that might help you with things like audience development and all the way through measurement and how we can help you optimize and nurture in a turnkey and easy way. That's going to be the key for the future.
- [31:10]
Dave Gerhardt
What are you seeing with creative and how demand gen teams are deploying different creative based on exploring new things with AI.
- [31:18]
Devong Shah
So I will share again another piece of internal data. We looked at thousands of pieces of creative with our teams and our data scientists trying to understand what works, what doesn't work for an ad. We found that 60 to 70% of an ad's effectiveness is actually tied to creativity. So when you think about effective creative, that generates a response with buyers that's going to be grounded in something that's truly emotive, that is something that connects on a human level. We've talked a lot about AI, but let's not forget about the fact that, you know, you and I are buyers, we're people, we consume content, we're influenced in different ways. And that human connection and being able to convey what you want about your product, not in a way that's just about features and benefits, but in a way that's more authentic, in a way that's more grounded in expertise, in a way that might be through creators is how you're going to win. And you know, you can have the best ads in the world in your mind, but if they're not winning on the creative front, 60, 70% of your efficacy is thrown out of the window.
- [32:19]
Dave Gerhardt
One of our last guests was Dami. She's a CMO at Lemlas and they're an interesting company in the B2B SaaS space. And she showed me these ads that they're doing. I have a couple of brands of seeing that where it's like A. It's 3D. It looks like it's coming at you off the screen. Have you seen that?
- [32:34]
Devong Shah
I haven't seen it. I'll take a look. I'm always excited to see great B2B creative. There are a few things that have sort of stood out to me in the past. I think the work that ServiceNow does, the work that Workday does, those are great examples of exceptional creative. I think the work that we're going to do on the B2B front for LinkedIn is pushing in that space because there are some real human truths to how you buy ads and what it's like to be a marketer. And sometimes you have to hit those head on and have a little fun at doing it and tell a story around what it's like to be a marketer nowadays.
- [33:06]
Dave Gerhardt
The reason why I mentioned Rippling before, and I think this is a good example because I've seen the Workday stuff. Colin is great. He's brought a bunch of energy into all their stuff. But I do think what's unique now. But even at that fortune, whatever level of a service now, you know, I see a company like Rippling who's doing hundreds of millions in error. And granted, I think it depends on the niche that you're selling to. They sell to hr. It's really cool to also hear that like we live in this world where something shot on your iPhone can be as just as effective as like the high productive agency thing. I think if you talk to any cmo, you, you need both. There's a certain level of like realness. You know, Rippling did a Super bowl ad. They didn't shoot the super bowl ad on an iPhone. They could have. Right. But it's cool to see the mix of stuff, Dave.
- [33:51]
Devong Shah
I say that's actually probably one of the most important insights because you know, if you think about being a small to medium sized brand, it can be intimidating to produce what we're talking about like this best in class creative. The reality is it doesn't have to be overproduced. In fact, the stuff that's overproduced tends to probably not perform as well as the stuff that is again grounded in authenticity, grounded in expert perspective and candidly is real funny, humorous and connects with people on a real basis.
- [34:16]
Dave Gerhardt
That's the whole thing about connecting the organic side of this. It's like you should at least have a good sense that the joke is going to land before you go spend all the money on like producing it. You know what I mean?
- [34:27]
Devong Shah
Yeah. Well, There's a benefit of organic. You get out there, you post, you can see what the engagement looks like. That's a pretty damn clear signal that you want to lean.
- [34:36]
Dave Gerhardt
I have a story you'll like about this. So when I was starting exit 5, the value prop was like. I came up with. It was like, because nobody went to school for B2B marketing. Now there are some people. I always get one email from one guy I was like, actually did go to school for B. I'm like, sorry, sorry. The point is that, like, you know, most of us, you just got to learn on the fly, and you didn't. You weren't born as a young kid, say, I'm gonna be a B2B marketer, but you got to learn this stuff and you figure it out. And so that was the value prop for the community. And one day, I just kind of wrote that off the cuff on LinkedIn, like, because no one goes to school for B2B marketing. And it blew up. And that was the signal for me that, like, yeah, oh, this is the homepage headline. Like that. It's like a comedian testing material. And then. And then we made a video based on that concept, and then we ran a bunch of paid behind it, and the video worked. And so I think that's what's cool when you can marry the organic and paid stuff is like, you should have a good sense of whether something is going to work or not before you have to go spend your money behind it.
- [35:30]
Devong Shah
The smartest marketers in the world do exactly what you just articulated. Leverage the platform, test your message, see if it aligns with your icp. It's driving engagement. Then we know that truth. Let's think about how we amplify that through paid media. How do we extend that importantly through the buyer group? And then ultimately make sure that you're measuring it, because you're going to see the same results that you just articulated. You know, I think we often feel as marketers, there's some secret formula out there. This isn't that complicated, right? Let's get focused on driving real outcomes that matter for the business, measuring the right way and learning across the journey.
- [36:04]
Dave Gerhardt
I love when a really smart person says, like, let's simplify marketing. It's one of my favorite things because it is so much of where everything gets gets out of whack. I want to shift gears and talk about your role as a VP of marketing. Today. You're running a team at LinkedIn. What's top of mind for you right now? Where does AI fit in the management of your team and what you expect your team to be doing. And what's winning from a marketing like separate the you work at LinkedIn thing from like people want to hear about, you're a high level operator. How do you run your marketing team? Maybe we could spend a couple minutes there before we wrap.
- [36:38]
Devong Shah
Yeah, happy to. I will start by saying I work with the world's best B2B marketers. I am so fortunate to work with the team of people that I get to work with. And I say that genuinely and it's something that gets me excited every day. When I think about our team and how we can leverage AI. We're along the same journey as everyone else, which is let's look at how we can improve from a content creation perspective. How are we looking at media and media optimizations? And then where can we leverage AI from an insights perspective across the portfolio of work that we do. So, you know, we have people who are product marketers, people who are growth marketers, people working in industry marketing, vertical marketing, people working on thought leadership, agency marketing, ecosystem marketing, you know, whole host of folks and every one of those people is impacted in a material way by what AI can do to help them be more successful in their role. What I will tell you is that that journey is one where we've started testing and now we're accelerating to transformation. And I think that is the journey that most of us as marketers and the organizations we're fortunate enough to lead are going on. It does mean that there's a lot of testing, there's a lot of learning
- [37:47]
Dave Gerhardt
and a lot of iterating.
- [37:49]
Devong Shah
Things won't be perfect. But what I'm leaning into and what our cmo, Jessica Jensen is leaning into is how do we accelerate that so that we're learning more, learning faster. And second thing, I'll tell you, and I think it's incredibly important, is that, you know, you can't expect this to happen sort of overnight. And the reality of is what the technology can do and what humans are capable of doing are two different things. And so how do you merge those two to make sure it's progress over perfection? And I think that matters a lot. And lastly, what I would say is that at the core of what AI does is it's enabling, right? It's not replacing. And so from a perspective of how we're thinking about things, it's much more about how we can leverage AI to continue to deliver real human work that transforms the way that marketers leverage LinkedIn to win and to grow their businesses.
- [38:40]
Dave Gerhardt
Do you think we're going to have jobs in five years?
- [38:42]
Devong Shah
Heck yeah, I do. Do I believe they'll be different? 100% they'll be different. But technology's evolved over the years. Probably the same types of questions that came up when, you know, it was
- [38:52]
Dave Gerhardt
in your words, let's make the bull case for not laying off every marketer, not shrinking all the mark. You know, I posted something earlier that was like, if you go to YouTube or on LinkedIn, it's insane. You know, Claude Code replaced my marketing team in 20 minutes. Right? Here's how I replaced a 75 person marketing team in five minutes with Claude. What's the reality? If you said heck yeah. So what do you think that humans like, let's make the bull case for
- [39:17]
Devong Shah
people, let's be optimists, creativity, real connection, are grounded in human to human interaction. And that's not going to be replaced anytime soon. Can we drive efficiency in all of the fields that enable that to happen? Absolutely. So it's going to be a marriage of those two things, but I don't see a replacement in the next five years of every marketing org by any stretch of the imagination. And again, if you think about what you and I do, what we consume, all the people who listen to this podcast, sign up for your newsletter. These are marketers. We are people. We consume content and experiences, we talk to each other, we are influenced by each other, we're influenced by creators. AI is not going to replace that can make it better. That's not going to replace it.
- [40:03]
Dave Gerhardt
Well said. I'm trying to balance the line of like, I'm a techno optimist, I believe in technology. But I also think that humans play a really unique role in what makes a lot of stuff work in the world and especially in marketing. I think you can't just run everything with an AI agent. They'll play this at my funeral, I'm sure. But do you think there's a world in like this B2B buying thing? Is there a world or like you're going to have an AI as the VP of marketing at LinkedIn, are you going to have an AI agent that's going to go and shop and research all the Martech tools to you for you and do all the research and that's actually who we're trying to influence in our marketing? Do you believe in that?
- [40:39]
Devong Shah
I believe we will have to influence those agents that will do some of that work. They will be an input to the decision. But I am 100% certain. I'll probably ping you at some point to understand what you're using from a MARTECH perspective. And all the other people in my network that are going to help guide me and help me understand what was successful, because at the end of the day, to be viable, you have to be human, you have to be trusted. And that's going to come from experiences and connections that we have that give me the confidence to make that purchase that I want to make.
- [41:08]
Dave Gerhardt
Is there, like, LinkedIn is a massive company, right? I'm assuming you can't just, like, take something like an AI agent and just, like, throw it in your workflow. There's a whole lot of like. And we. We have this private group of CMOs in Exit 5 called the CMO Council. And there's an interesting discussion because this one woman was like, you know, this is super interesting. Like, I read all this stuff and then I take all this stuff to, like, my IT team. You know, we're in, like, this highly regulated industry, and they're like, no, no, no. And so it just makes me think, like, there's a huge gap from what I see on social media than, like, what's actually happening in bigger companies. I wonder if you feel that in
- [41:40]
Devong Shah
any way, 100% they're guardrails. We have to be using tools that have passed all of the right sort of test, if you will, from privacy, safety and regulation perspective, and we won't ever jeopardize that, and so we'll live within that contract. But we're fortunate enough to work with an amazing martech team, an amazing legal team and amazing engineering team that pushes the boundaries of what we're capable of doing, but in a way that's very much grounded in privacy, safety and regulation.
- [42:09]
Dave Gerhardt
Okay, Any parting words before I let you go? I got everything out that I wanted to talk to you about.
- [42:14]
Devong Shah
You know, one of the things that I often think about is what does success look like? And for the team of people I get to support, we wake up every day wanting to think about how we can help make marketers more successful using LinkedIn as a platform. So I'm obviously present on the platform, engaging on the platform. So perhaps it has to your readers and the folks listening to the podcast to reach out, share perspective, share feedback on what's working and what's not working. Our job is literally to help make you more successful. Earlier today, I posted that I was looking for information about people and what ideas they have and how we can actually get better on the platform or build Things that are more useful for them. So you know the ask is out there and know that we're listening and you'll see us engage.
- [43:00]
Dave Gerhardt
Okay, So I expect you, if you're listening to this podcast, I'm putting your LinkedIn profile linked in the show notes. I want you to send me a screenshot weeks after this podcast. Be like, man, you guys do have people that listen. I got a lot of ideas. So send them your LinkedIn ads, ideas, everything you want to know. We didn't uncover the myth that is. I'm sorry to. I should have put this in the headline. Would have been great. Clickbait. We. I was going to have like LinkedIn out. LinkedIn let's. We should do a thumbnail like this. Like LinkedIn algorithm revealed. LinkedIn exec shows me absolutely nothing about the LinkedIn algorithm.
- [43:31]
Devong Shah
I love it. It's clickbait. But let's actually add value. Let's focus on the value over the vanity.
- [43:36]
Dave Gerhardt
We did. We added a bunch value. I got some good stats, got some good insight, and I appreciate you giving us some time and coming on the podcast.
- [43:43]
Devong Shah
I love the conversation and I do genuinely love what you're doing for the community. So thank you for doing that.
- [43:49]
Dave Gerhardt
And you'll see, look, if every podcast listen, take notes. I saw you listen to the podcast, join the newsletter weeks leading up to the interview. You did a great job.
- [43:57]
Devong Shah
I appreciate it. I'm sincere. So well done.
- [44:00]
Dave Gerhardt
Thank you. I appreciate it. All right, we'll see you later. Take care of. 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 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.
- [45:17]
Sponsor/Ad Read Voice
Today's episode is brought to you by Compound Growth Marketing. They're a full funnel demand generation agency that I've actually personally hired to twice.
- [45:25]
Dave Gerhardt
That's right.
- [45:25]
Sponsor/Ad Read Voice
Before I was a thought leader, I was an actual marketer, an operator, a VP of marketing myself and CGM was one of the best agencies that I've ever hired. They help High Growth Cybersecurity, DevOps and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are actually forming opinions about which products to use. CGM is great because they offer the combination of AI, SEO, modern paid advertising strategy and a dedicated go to market engineering team that you need today. So everything CGM does gets tracked, measured and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by a former VP of marketing who gets this space. They really understand B2B. So if you're in search of a new agency that can help you hit the number this quarter and you need help with things like AI, SEO and paid media, you should definitely go and check out Compound Growth Marketing. I call them CGM Compound Growth Marketing. Go and check them out at compoundgrowthmarketing.com and tell them that Dave and Exit 5 sent you.