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- [00:01]
Dave Gerhardt
This episode is brought to you by paramark. Look, it's November 2026. Planning.
- [00:07]
We're already here.
- [00:08]
Somehow we're already here. The holidays are coming, it's planning season, budgets are being built, and you know, the stuff that you're doing right now is going to decide how next year is going to play out. Somehow they expect you to plan for the next, the next year. It's hard, but you got to do it. And you can't make smart budgeting calls if you're just guessing with what's working. Most teams are still planning next year's marketing strategy based on the wrong data because of things like broken, broken attribution and a misleading gut feel. If the data is wrong and you're making decisions off of that, it's going to be a challenging year. That's exactly where Powermark comes in. They can help you replace the guesswork with actual insight. Backed by over $2 billion in analyzed marketing data, they figured out exactly what drives incremental growth. And that's the name of the game in marketing across every channel, like LinkedIn, Meta, TikTok, Google, CTV, even out of home. And right now they're doing something crazy. They wanted to do a crazy offer for this podcast. This is not hyperbole, this is real. They want to do a one to one private consultation with Pranav, their CEO, and Sam, their cmo, both who have led marketing teams at companies like Dropbox, Adobe, Microsoft, Shutterfly. They're doing this now and building Paramark. I know them both well and they're actually smart guys with strong opinions in this space about attribution and measurement.
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- [02:08]
You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
Welcome to Move the Needle. Today we're joined by Dave Gerhardt, the founder of Exit 5, which is the top community for B2B marketing professionals. Prior to founding Exit 5, Dave was also the VP of Marketing and then the Chief Brand Officer at Drift, where his work helped the company achieve a billion dollar exit. Also previously CMO at Privy, which he led towards a hundred million dollar plus exit. So a lot of great experience there. Dave is also the author of Founder Brand, a frequent podcast guest and speaker. Dave, you're someone I've been really excited to chat for a while, so welcome to the show.
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Dave Gerhardt
Oh, thank you. That's, that's kind of you. It's always more fun to chat with somebody when they want to talk to you.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
Oh, you know what, as the podcast host, I only choose people that I actually want to talk to.
- [03:06]
Dave Gerhardt
That's how it should be. Heck yeah.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yes. I followed exit 5 for a while. You guys put out so much great, useful content for B2B marketer. So this is a pleasure for me to get to chat with you.
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Dave Gerhardt
Cool, thank you.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
I wanted to start by talking about community. Obviously this is core to Exit 5's offerings and something you talk about a lot and you've shared that Exit 5 grew nearly 80% last year by treating your marketing community like a product. And I wondered if you could talk more about that.
- [03:34]
Dave Gerhardt
Oh geez. I always get in trouble when I write things online and then people come back with the, the statements. I mean, so the short answer is it is our product. Right? And so what's cool about Exit 5 is that this whole thing kind of started unintentionally. I was a marketing person and I just grew to love marketing and I found there's this kind of whole sub world of like people sharing about sharing what you're doing with your job online. Whether you work in marketing or sales or accounting or gardening, whatever the domain is, if you share that stuff online, you can attract like minded people. So I started writing about marketing years ago on LinkedIn and I had a podcast and then I happened to work at a company that made marketing software. And so I got even closer to the role of marketer. And along the way I, I launched my own little private community of, of marketing people on the side. And it was just, it was called dgmg Dave Gerhart Marketing Group. My Wife likes to tell me that I'm terrible at naming things and she's right. And I had no plans to like turn it into a real business or a real company. It was just. I was a CMO and this was kind of like my substack. Right. But it was on Patreon. Now substack is more popular. It's just a good analogy. And then a couple years ago, we had basically grown to a couple thousand members. We had a podcast, we had a newsletter, we had companies wanting to sponsor people asking about doing events. And I had this kind of weird in between year of wandering after those companies that you mentioned in the intro had some exits. I was doing consulting for a little bit and then the consulting money was really good until 2021. And then the ZIRP era went away and all these founders that had all this VC money and that all dried up and there wasn't a lot of money in consulting. And I realized I had the opportunity to basically burn the boats and try to turn this DGMG thing into a real business. And I wanted to basically rebrand it so it wasn't, you know, I wasn't the center of it. I had seen other successful communities in the past. I super familiar with Max Alt Schuler from GTM Fund and he had this company called Sales Hacker. They sold to Outreach back in the day. I think Sam Jacobs in Pavilion. They've built a really cool business. And I kind of started to realize that we have that already. We already had product market fit, we already had thousands of paying members. We already had a popular podcast. I just had it under this DGMG brand. And so I wanted to rebrand it to something memorable. Exit 5, Hire a team and build from there. And so really it was more of this decision of like everything I think in the, in the trajectory of the business now goes back to like the fall of 2023 when I decided to take it from a side project of mine for since dating back to November of 2019. So was that four years and deciding to like hire real people brought on Dan Murphy to be coo, brought on a couple other people on the team, built a real company. And so the community piece is a part of the business. And so instead of it just treating it like, you know, initially with my Patreon thing, it was like, oh, if I had an additional thought, I would just kind of go and da, da, da. You know, I there I wrote my 2 minutes on Patreon for the day. But instead we tried to treat it like a Real product. We have a product owner, Matt, on our team as the community manager. We have a roadmap, we have feature, we have feedback, we do nps, we have things we want to build and so just really taking the care to treat it like a real product. The last two years, as opposed to kind of Dave's side project has been.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
Everything and still run by a pretty small team, right? Team of five or six?
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Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, team of five or six. Although in the age of AI, all of the LinkedIn content and the VCs and everybody will tell you that probably even five people is too many. So it really should just be fire everybody and it should be me and like a chatgpt or something like that. So I'm very self conscious about the teams that. No, I'm just kidding.
- [07:07]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
That's what they tell us.
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Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, it's five. Five people. It's a good size for where we're at. And most importantly, I'm having a lot of fun and I feel like I've been growing again professionally, which is really cool.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
That's the best part. From your perspective, what are some of the keys to launching and growing a successful community?
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Dave Gerhardt
Okay, well, we can't answer that question without first peeling back, like, what is the definition of community? And I don't have a perfect definition. I feel like I wrote this down at some point, but I'm not going to try to recite it. And I have it in like an Apple note because I wanted to try to write a definition first. Actually, I'll see if I can look it up while we're here. Because a lot of people ask, you know, obviously I'm a huge thought leader and I'm building community. That was a joke. You didn't laugh. You never know. Some people think that's funny. My team gives me a hard time. It's an internal joke and I say it externally. Like, wow, he really is an asshole.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
Love it. Thanks for the clarification.
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Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, yeah, it's okay. So the community question is interesting because there's a community which is like a slack group. You know, we have. Ours is on circle. It could be WhatsApp, it could be whatever. And then there is community. Like I live in this town in Vermont and there's a local community because we all kind of live in the surrounding area and we want to take care of the land and we pay taxes and we go to the school. And so I think that first question is like, are we talking about should you build a private walled community user group place? And I think you can make the case that maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't. Right. But I think the broader thing is, like, community to me is the most. One of the most powerful ingredients in marketing because basically you're tapping into this shared interest. So let's forget about, like, where it's hosted, what it is, private community, public, whatever actual place somebody goes to log in and more just like. Yeah, like dads who run is a community. That doesn't mean that we have a circle product that we're gonna go log in. But I think this is what the unique opportunity is from a business standpoint, which is like, you're selling. You're selling a product. Right. You work at Databox. How would you describe the product? One or two lines about, like, the space you play in. Data analytics.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, business intelligence.
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Dave Gerhardt
Okay, business intelligence. Perfect. And so there are plenty of people in the world who work in business intelligence. There is probably something that they can rally around that has nothing to do with Databox. But you can be basically the stewards of that conversation. Right. They all go to work every day. They all have problems. You are in the middle of those because you have customers. You know this world really well. You know, Pete's been working in this industry forever now. Like, you have all this information and knowledge, and so you can basically be the one to host the party. And people built that. That's one form of community. Right. Another form of community is, like, people just love certain products. Like, Strava is a great example of, like, people who run or bike. They have this great app. You can track your runs. That app by the nature of it has community built in. Because we're going to be friends, we're going to connect on the app. You're going to see all my details. And then there's the other example, which is like, okay, do we want to build a private walled space for people to hang out? And there isn't one, really. I can't give you one snippet for social media to answer that question, because I think it's kind of like anything in marketing. There's a lot of nuance. And I would. I would kind of run down the plays there. And then you look at a company like HubSpot, they built this category of inbound marketing. Back in the day. They had raving fans, and they weren't raving about HubSpot software. It was. HubSpot said, hey, there's. This was 2010. Obviously this is all changing now, but 2010, they said, hey, there's a new way to do marketing. And it's about, like, creating content that people love and it attracts them to your brand. That was such a powerful message at the time because it was like, I'm one of those marketers, like, I love writing, I love creating content. I'm not in it for all the outbound and ads and all that stuff. And so, yeah, like, I Rock with HubSpot. That's cool. I was a fan of them for 15 years before ever buying their product. But I was a fan. They told me this mission, this, this kind of vision that they had about inbound marketing, and I. I would consider myself a community member of HubSpot, despite the fact that I never logged into a community.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
Right.
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Dave Gerhardt
So that's. That's not an answer. That's me trying to explain all of the nuance there, and I'm happy to jump in, into it from there. And then I'm assuming most of the audience of this is in B2B. And I think what's cool about B2B is the opportunity is that, like, where the opportunity from a company standpoint is to help people do their jobs better. And I believe that, like, knowledge and expertise and education is the best ingredients for successful B2B marketing. You have to have a great product. You have to have a product that works, and people want to use and love and enjoy. But if you can create content and education around the bigger problem that you're trying to solve, help me as a salesperson, help me as a marketer. That is how you build community. And ideally, when you build community, you build loyalty, trust, affinity, so that when somebody has the time and place that when they're ready to buy that product, they're gonna. They might not necessarily always buy you, but they're gonna put you first on the shopping list.
- [11:55]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, that makes sense. I like that you covered the whole spectrum there of different ways to think about community. And I would imagine if a company is not doing a good job building that broadest definition of community, stewarding good conversations, attracting people to the story and the point of view that you have, then there's really no point in jumping to trying to build a walled or a paid community because you haven't done groundwork.
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Dave Gerhardt
I love that. I like the way you reframe that because that, to me, is where all of this starts. Right. And I think I get a lot of questions about how to build a community because that's the business and world that I've happened to be in. But I'm not an expert in this. I didn't. I Don't have an opinion like every company because I have a private community with Exit 5. Yeah, I think everybody often thinks that like my point of view is like every company should have a private community. And it's like, no, you actually shouldn't. Because what happens is like most often like all communities. My biggest fear with Exit 5 and I'm eventually every community goes to, goes to zero at some point because it just becomes spam, it just becomes noise or the community starts off strong. You want to launch a community at Databox and you know, you hire. This is no disrespect to you all. This is just how this usually happens. And I'm just using, I like to speak with examples. You know, you hire Pete's 22 year old niece to like manage the community and it's a slack group and like it starts off nice but then like after kind of four weeks it just ends up being like people promoting their own blog posts in there. And so I don't think that every company should have a community at all. We got into this because I think it's a unique business opportunity that we got in where like I had 2000 subscribers on Patreon. A member of mine, Henry Johnson, messaged me one day and he's like, hey man, it's cool to listen to you. But like, since there's 2,000 of us in there, like how about you let us all talk to each other? And I was like, oh, that's genius, dude. And so we added the community from that standpoint. So I don't, I don't feel strongly. In fact, I actually probably recommend most people don't. And I think instead most people focus on what you talked about in the beginning of that question, which is like, let's focus on like, let's just take a level up from where our product is. Like if we're Data Box and we are Business Intelligence, like we want the people who work in Business Intelligence, Business Intelligence to spend their time with us. How do we get them to do that? Well, it's not going to be about talking about the features and all the nonsense in Data Box. It's going to be like, well, what do BI folks care about? What do they do? You know, they have their own language, they have their own humor. What we're seeing with Exit 5 is like beyond all the marketing stuff that we're talking about, it's like people want work, friends, virtually even. Right? Because nobody else, like none of my like dad friends care about that B2B marketing.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah.
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Dave Gerhardt
No, it's it's very surprising, right? I just tell people I work in the Internet.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
There you go.
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Dave Gerhardt
But we have 6,500 people inside of Exit 5 who do care deeply about B2B marketing. So what's cool is like, it kind of flips the conversation. So now it's like, oh, you know, this is Charlie. Charlie is VP of marketing at this AI company. Charlie also likes to run. Charlie also has three kit. Now we're building a friend. So. So it's not just about, like, that. We share, like, hot marketing tips in there. Like, we're really seeing this. That's the power of community is connecting people. And so that, that's like the approach from like, the data box side is like, how do we connect people in the bi world? And then the result of that downstream is hopefully they'll end up buying our product one day.
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
I love it. I mean, music to my content marketing ears.
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Dave Gerhardt
The hard part, though, is so everything I just described is like, that's how marketing works. But then, like, the CEO and the CFO offer like, awesome. So how are we going to measure that?
- [15:27]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Oh, how did you know that was my next question? I didn't, but it's like, I mean, we are.
- [15:31]
Dave Gerhardt
I don't know, we're going to try. We're going to cookie everybody and we'll make sure that anytime they talk about our company, we will use a UTM blank and we will be able to perfectly measure this, I promise you.
- [15:42]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
You mean you haven't figured out how to perfectly measure all of it? That is a question.
- [15:46]
Dave Gerhardt
Do you want to ask the question? Why don't you ask the question?
- [15:48]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
How about imperfectly? How do you try to tie, we'll say community social, the broad definition of community engagement, back to business outcomes?
- [15:58]
Dave Gerhardt
Okay, so I feel like whenever we talk about this question, we by default assume that the people in our community and in our audience are just complete morons and have no idea and no recall, and they'll never tell you. And what I found, I'm certainly not an analytics expert. I'm good at writing and storytelling. I haven't done this at a humongous company. And so I'm sure the rules are different for how you'd measure the ROI of a billboard by Cisco in the Austin airport. I don't know how to do those things. It's not what I'm good at. But I find that a lot of times, believe it or not, people will tell you that's it. That's number one. We can riff on that more. But that is the number one thing. And in fact, I worked at this company called Drift, and we had this amazing podcast there that we did. And the podcast ended up. The podcast was not about our product. It was about work and life and entrepreneurship and startup lessons. And, no joke, the first million dollars in revenue that we did as a company, we probably had five sales reps at the time. I would bet you that 75% of them would tell you, like, hey, I was on a call with a prospect today, and she told me that she listens to Seeking Wisdom and she's a super fan. So how do we measure that? How do we know that is how we know? She just told us. Literally just told us, right? But it's like, we want to try to, like, break down all of the ingredients and. And it's like, okay, well, this part costs $20 and this part costs 10, and we need to add them all up and then, like, make the math work by the part. But it's like, no, this is good marketing, which is. It doesn't feel like marketing, because it's really not. It's community building, it's audience building. It's content, right? You know, content is your thing. Imagine every single article you wrote, you had to, like, try to tell someone in your team, like, what the ROI of that article was. It's like, no, that's not how it works. The goal is, like, over time, we publish lots of great, relevant, useful, specific content on the data box site. We get more traffic, we get more links. People talk about us. Now people just start to show up without us doing anything, and they hear about us. And so what's really cool now is, and we didn't have all this in that era, which is, like, all this is going to come up on sales calls, and you can record them with whatever you're using and get that data. Like, that's what I would be looking for. I'd be like, how many of the hundred customers that we close this month? If you have a motion where you have sales reps that are in that process or even customer success or whatever, like, just ask them, how did you end up hearing about us? And they're going to tell you, oh, I went to this event or I listened to this podcast. And so I think you can find ways to measure anything, really. I read this question as more of, like, how do we justify it? And I think. And I think the way that you need to start by justifying it is like, if your company does not inherently understand that this is how great marketing works, then like, you need to sit down and need to draw that out. And I think this is the job of a good marketing leader is to be like, hey, let's first like talk about the customer journey. Let's talk about how people are going to buy our product and let's get in agreement with that. Right? Because it's not just this entirely coin operated machine. And so the very first thing I'm going to do, and I used to do this all the time at Drift. Internal marketing was a big part of our, of our job. There was basically like, explain to the company and the CFO and sales team, whatever, like our philosophy on like, hey, here's how we think people are going to buy from us, right? They're doing research, they're going to go to events, they might do some Google searches. So yes, we got to show up in SEO, we got to show up in ads, but there's kind of all this other stuff that we can influence them. They buy from text, you know, their friends are influencing these purchase decisions. And so you have to teach people how good marketing works. Right?
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Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah.
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Dave Gerhardt
Like, did you buy that Claire V bag because you saw this direct response ad and immediately clicked on it. Bought. It's like, no, you, well you, you got a friend who had that bag and you like that style and then you end up like hearing this thing and you, you heard this like, the founder actually like is a big believer in like women's rights and she donated all this money to this call. Oh, that cool. That brand is really cool. Then you happen to be sitting on the couch one night and you see an ad and you're kind of like, you know, watching Bravo and it's kind of boring. And then you buy the bag, right? Yeah, the ad is going to get the credit for that. Same thing in B2B is being able to tell that whole story. And so I think people are going to tell you by doing it. I also think the way you measure this is one of the simplest ways to think about brand in this sense. And I think about brand meaning like your reputation, not your, you know, logo or colors is how many people showed up to your website directly.
- [20:11]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Mm.
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Dave Gerhardt
Right. I've heard the term data box. I know they do business intelligence. Like how many people went directly to databox.com because large percentage who's doing that if they don't haven't heard. Now the challenge is you don't know if the thing that got them there was like your Instagram post or Pete's like LinkedIn rant or whatever. Yeah, but I think we're just looking at broad strokes. Like 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. 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 at 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 rooms 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 stalled deals. Fewer stalled 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 works. 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. And then the other, the other part is like with social media today, you can feel it. This is what's amazing about social media marketing. And it's not a secondary part of a brand strategy anymore. It's the core part. It's like, and I'm sure I've seen Pete's content as an example. But like I'm sure you can write about things and the response to a topic now becomes a signal for like man, when we write about blank, right? Give me an example. I'm sure that's happened inside the company lately.
- [22:41]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Well, I take a little bit of pride in this one. So I will give you an example. I will say Pete's post that blew up the most within the last three months was one that he wrote up about our content playbook, actually, and talked about specifically how we do podcasts, repurpose that into newsletters, you know, in support of our multi channel omnichannel strategy, but got very specific about how exactly we do it. Laid out the playbook. And that one, that one did really well.
- [23:08]
Dave Gerhardt
So that did really well. Doing really well doesn't necessarily mean that you got seven new customers from that coast.
- [23:14]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Right?
- [23:15]
Dave Gerhardt
But it means that probably more likes and comments and then the actual qualitative of the comments matters. Like again, back to the we're not morons thing. Like, wow, I'm getting a lot of VPs or heads of marketing or like people at legit companies commenting on this post or like asking me to send them the recipe or whatever. Those signs all matter. Those are all signals. Probably getting more DMs. Probably over time. It's getting shared. Yep, those are signs. That's how we know that this is working. Mm. We need to stop trying to like, compare what's working with like direct response marketing. Right. What's working with like a PPC ad is gonna be like, are we spending money on this traffic? And is the traffic converting what's working with content? Brand community? Is this stuff that's gonna build and take time? And then the last thing I'll shut up on this is I also think like, just the brand and awareness is just so underrated and we don't think about it enough. Or we think that awareness has to mean, like, we engaged some like, research firm and all these comp. You know, we did this big study. I would put it as like, look, if you have a sales team, like, do you want to work for the brand where more people know that your company exists or not? Right. And so when we're doing outbound, have people heard of us before? Roughly then like, marketing basically opens the doors for all those, all of those conversations. Like we used to say at Drift, it's like, this is like, you know, you kind of get that rusty squeaky door that's hard to open, and then like you come in and spray some WD40 on it and it's much easier to open. That's what great marketing and great content content can do for the brand. You just gotta be able to like package all of this up and explain how you're doing marketing. Internally to the company. If you're just out there and you're talking about how you're writing three articles a week and that's all you ever talk about, then of course everyone's gonna be like, well what do we pay this person? And like what does it cost to produce these articles and how long they take and what's, what's the result? But if you can paint this bigger picture, I think that is where you'll be more successful in having these conversations about what works.
- [25:11]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Love it. Since you are a community based product, I'll ask what are the measures of success, the metrics and KPIs that you look at and that are important to you?
- [25:22]
Dave Gerhardt
Number one is NPS NET promoter score. How likely are people to recommend this product? How happy are they? That goes back to that because all the stats and everything doesn't matter if people don't, don't want to be there. And so we look at that number one. Number two is probably monthly active users and just engagement and then obviously it's a paid community. We're not trying to like sell you a software license after. So it's for us it's not really like a lead gen tool. It is the product and I think having it be a paid community helps create a bunch of value and keep a lot of like the riff raff out. Peplaya has called it that and I've taken that. It keeps the riff raff out. So new members, revenue churn. Then like the leading indicators would be traffic. Our email list is a big part of our business and so looking at the health of that list opens, engagement, unsubscribes and then just like where traffic is coming from. Like for example, it's today we're recording this, it's the third week of July. The first two weeks a big portion of our traffic, probably 50% of it comes from advertising and it was slow and so we weren't generating a lot of contacts. Traffic was down, contacts were down, everything was down. That's kind of what we, we would go look at and then the, the longer term view on it is like twice a year we'll measure mps of the community and, and use that to determine like are people happy with their.
- [26:42]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Product and if they're not, based on that feedback, what do you do with that data?
- [26:47]
Dave Gerhardt
Well, we don't, we just gaslight them until they are happy with the product.
- [26:50]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
That's, how's that working?
- [26:51]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's great. It's great. Totally recommend it. No, I mean, so obviously like we measure NPS once or twice a year, but we don't wait to make changes. What's amazing about a community based business is that the feedback loop is kind of always going. I mean I am, I'm in the community every day. I'm getting messages from members all the time. Our team is getting messages, we're seeing posts, we're seeing comments like, the feedback loop is always there. Every week we get, if somebody churns, hopefully they leave a note about why they churned and those get fed into your slack. And so we can see the churn reason about why. And so there's all those like indicators along the way. And then we have a regular community discussion, community meeting where we look at the community metrics, we have goals. And so we're kind of, you know, it is a product. Right. So we're always talking about it. And so if it's like, hey, like churn has been brutal the last two weeks, like let's do something about it. Or like, hey, we did this thing inside the community and it flopped, like let's have a conversation about it, let's do it. We're treating like a product. There's, there's sprints, there's goals, there's a roadmap.
- [27:47]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yep. It's nice being at. I don't know if you feel the same way. I know for me being at a smaller company again where like those changes can happen quickly is really refreshing. Been in a few larger orgs where those wheels turn very slowly.
- [28:00]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, I don't know if I could kind of only worked at smaller, fast moving companies. Big for me was like 300 people. Well, I guess I worked at HubSpot. That was a lot of people. But I was on a small team.
- [28:10]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Okay.
- [28:11]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, that would drive me nuts. Especially just with the speed of like how things move today. Like I'm just, we just believe in like daily shipping, weekly shipping, constant like small iterations to make things better.
- [28:21]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
It's a much better experience for the customers. So I love that you are in the community. Every single day people are reaching out to you. You said you're, I'm sure watching the discussions that are happening there. So I would love to know, like, what's the chatter right now? What are the top things? I know AI has to be one of them. But what else are the top B2B leaders talking about in your community?
- [28:42]
Dave Gerhardt
I mean, I wish there was an else, but that is, it's AI.
- [28:46]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah.
- [28:47]
Dave Gerhardt
There's no else. I think the else Is like, I would say I kind of bucketed things in my head right now into like, there's the kind of time I, I don't even. Maybe timeless is the wrong, is the wrong frame for it. But there's the, the stuff that marketing leaders and marketers are always talking about, at least until all of our jobs are replaced by AI, is like strategy stuff. Hiring, firing, goal setting. Hey, like, I just, I just got asked to take over this new like geography and we've never had a sales rep over there before. How would you think about structuring comp? And there's kind of those like strategy level type of stuff. And then all of the other stuff is very much AI related. And it's not just AI tool related. I think that the challenge is like, what's happening with the AI stuff is that it's not about the recipes of how you're using these tools. That is a hugely popular. We do a ton of content around that and that is going to continue. But what the AI discussions have caused is kind of this existential, like, where is marketing going? What is happening? I talked to a CMO two weeks ago and she was like, my company, like, I got 70 people on my team and like our board and our, our founders and everyone is pushing me to be like, what are we doing with AI? Where does it, you know, what does the future of the team look like? And so it's not just like, here's how you can use AI to send an SDR outreach email and we're going to show you how to do that. Those things are interesting and we show a lot of those. But I think it's really, people are rethinking about the role and the goals of marketing in this world. And I think it's, you know, I was in like 7th or 8th, 8th grade when the Internet really maybe 6th, 7th, 8th grade when the Internet happened. So I can't. I wasn't thinking about this. I was trolling Smarter child on, on. But it feels like that. It feels like, okay, we all work at these businesses where we just got access to the Internet, like, what's going to happen? Yeah, that is the macro thing that I think everybody's talking about and thinking about.
- [30:47]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Would you say in general the sentiment is optimistic, pessimistic, somewhere in the middle?
- [30:54]
Dave Gerhardt
I think the pessimists are pessimistic about it. The optimists are optimistic about it. I think if you put them all in a bucket and you blended them together, I think it would be right down the middle that's probably, you know, I see all sides of it. I see you open up LinkedIn and there is the person who's always mad at someone and always angry at someone. That post is going to be about how this is the worst thing ever and, you know, AI and you know privacy and you just. I'm not saying those are not true. Cl. I don't know. I'm just saying. And then on the other side, it's like, no, this is amazing. Here's what's going to happen with marketers. And so I don't know. I'm an optimist. I am. Somebody's got to believe that, like, you can create your own future. And someone's gonna go, well, of course you can. Like, you know what, what privilege to say that. But that's not what I. I'm just saying, like, I believe that I have a very entrepreneurial mindset, which is like, okay, I don't know, go ahead, take my job away. We'll figure it out. I don't know. That's how I've always been. I'm like, I liked. I like the challenge. I like the competition. Go ahead, like, replace exit 5. Exit 5 goes to zero because of AI. Like, I promise you, I'm not going to be out on the street. I'm going to freaking find a way to create something of value. I don't know. Maybe I'll go buy a car wash. I don't know. I don't know. But that's just my mindset.
- [32:08]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Mm. Not the first time things have been totally shaken up. And not the last time it'll happen either. Right?
- [32:13]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah. Look, I also feel like there's like. And I kind of go back and forth in this every day, which is like, the rate of change of AI is insane right now, but at the same time, it's still not perfect. And you need a human in there to take things to the last line. Right. And so everybody's obsessed. Like right now, Google has this like, VO3, you know, I'm sure you've seen it where you can basically write a prompt in Google and they make this like, 8 second video for you, right? If you don't know what you're doing and you go do that, it's terrible. I've tried. I cannot make a good VO3. If you are funny, witty, creative, know how to prompt it in the right way, have read, done a bunch of research on it, then like, yes, you're going to get a better output. The variable there is still like, I can't just sneeze into Google Gemini and get this like amazing ad for my company that, that's what you see on LinkedIn. You're like, yeah, like everybody, someone made this like fake liquid death ad that went viral. And it's not like Dave Gerhardt just sat down at his computer and like, you know, wrote three sentences into some AI tool and got that, like, there is real work and real creativity. And so I'm choosing to take the optimistic view of like, I think of this as like, I love marketing, I love creating. I'm treating this stuff as like a video game or some super intelligent software that's going to allow me to like, do my job to the max. Or like you as a content person doesn't mean that you're all of a sudden all the data box content is going to be AI slop because you have access to all these tools. It's like, oh, now as a team of one, look at how many things I can do by myself and how much faster can I go and how much better can I get things? And like, oh my gosh, I can actually build this website by myself without having to be like, you know, get halfway. And then also, you know, Jason Lemkin from Sasser has been writing about this recently. But like, everybody's talking about vibe coding. Almost everybody that's ever tried to actually vibe code that's not an actual engineer. Like, you get somewhere along the way and you're just stuck and you stop and you never finish anything because there is still some technical knowledge you need, there is still some complexity. And so I think there's probably going to be a year. You know, I don't know if it's two years or five years, but a buffer of like, not all of this stuff is going to change overnight, but it's definitely coming. And if you can use these tools to your advantage to make your job better and more effective and more efficient. And then also on the optimist piece of this, like, okay, let's, let's just say that like, yeah, this AI stuff is going to take all of our jobs. Well then like, do you just want to ignore it or do you want.
- [34:45]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
To get ahead of it?
- [34:46]
Dave Gerhardt
Get ahead of it and fully understand it and have an opportunity to be, you know, how valuable, like if you were like a digital marketer, Internet marketer was to a company to figure that out, you know, and so, and then there's also like all these legacy companies I don't think are just, they're not going to go out of Business overnight. Hopefully not. I really don't know. I hate giving like predictions because like I don't know and I change my mind all the time. But I'm just answering your questions on the podcast. No, I love it.
- [35:10]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
It's really helpful. I mean you see a lot of the conversation, so it's helpful to get your thoughts and it's nice to get an optimistic point of view. I. I sent this to my boss yesterday. It's a Forbes article. Five chat GPT prompts to completely replace your marketing team in 30 days.
- [35:26]
Dave Gerhardt
Nice. I would say. Well, who reads Forbes? So what are they?
- [35:29]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
It was probably, it was probably written by a bot anyway.
- [35:32]
Dave Gerhardt
Of course. Forbes. Yeah, Forbes is garb. Sorry, Forbes, if you're listening.
- [35:36]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
All good. All right. I have gotten through most of my questions, so I will just ask if there are any. Anything I didn't ask that you wish I had. Final thoughts?
- [35:46]
Dave Gerhardt
No, I've been enjoying more long form conversations because I think it's. People see social media content and three, you know, a post for LinkedIn and like obviously there's nuance to that discussion and so I think like having real conversations is, is important and I don't know, I don't have all the answers. I'm figuring everything out every day. Every day.
- [36:03]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Thought leader. Thought leaders are supposed to have all the answers.
- [36:06]
Dave Gerhardt
Well, yes, I do. I do. Perfect. I still have two years to make the 40 under 40 thought leader list. So that's, that's the only reason I went on this podcast.
- [36:13]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Nice. I am sure we can do something about that. Awesome.
- [36:18]
Dave Gerhardt
What's going on inside of Databox? Like what's the conversations around AI and where marketing is going?
- [36:23]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
All the things I would say on the go to market team side, it's very much like, you know, we're a small team, how can we do more with less? Everybody's using it. I'm playing around a lot with custom GPTs and we're working with a freelancer to build out some like agentic workflows and things like that to just try to speed stuff up. I'm shocked every week at the amount I can get done in a week or even a day that I'm like a year ago, two years ago, that took me. That took me a month. That was a month of work and I just did it in two days. Like that's pretty aggressive.
- [36:58]
Dave Gerhardt
I think my favorite optimist with AI stuff right now is Dharmesh from HubSpot and I was listening to him talk on a podcast the other day and he basically said, like, you need to at least start every project with. I'm gonna use, like, ChatGPT to at least help me get this project going.
- [37:12]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, for sure.
- [37:13]
Dave Gerhardt
And I've been trying to adopt that, and I think that's. That's helpful.
- [37:16]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
But it is a great brainstorm partner. And I. I think the best piece of advice I got was from a good friend of mine. She's been very active with custom GPTs and testing stuff. And you know how ChatGPT especially has that habit of just telling you what you want to hear, and it tells it to you in such a nice, like, affirming, encouraging way. And so she programmed hers to, like, be a sparring partner. Don't tell me what I want to hear, but, like, challenge me. And I did that to my personal favorite GPT, which I call my. It's Ally's clone. And it transformed it. It so good. It's really helpful. And it's like just having, like, another version of yourself, but one that doesn't agree with you, one that challenges you and it knows how you think, but it pokes the holes and it find the gap. It finds those gaps. And that's been.
- [38:02]
Dave Gerhardt
Oh, that's a great point. Like, I do that all the time, which is like, tell me all the reasons why I shouldn't do this.
- [38:07]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah. I say, tell me all the things. If I present this to my CEO, tell me all the questions he's going to ask and all the problems he's going to have with it. That's a great one, too. And it literally, they are like, the exact questions that he will then ask when I present stuff to him. And I'm like, I was ready for it. I was ready.
- [38:22]
Dave Gerhardt
That's good. That's good. Yeah. The ability to see the problem from the other side is really.
- [38:27]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
And then on the product side, you know, everybody wants AI and built into their products, too. So we already had some AI, you know, insights and features built in, but that's a big priority, too, is taking that to the next level. So nice. It's on everybody's minds. Yup.
- [38:42]
Dave Gerhardt
All right, well, six months from now, it'll change again, and we'll see.
- [38:46]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Let's just hang on for the ride. That's what marketers do.
- [38:48]
Dave Gerhardt
That's right.
- [38:48]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
All righty. Well, thank you so much. This was a pleasure.
- [38:51]
Dave Gerhardt
Thanks for having me.
- [38:52]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
You bet. Bye. Bye.
- [38:57]
Dave Gerhardt
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode. You know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website exit5.com our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are. So you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community. Hey. This episode is brought to you by our friends@customerio. Do you remember? I'm old enough to remember this. You remember when a personalized message meant slapping someone's first name into an email? Hello David or hello Gerhardt? Yeah. Well, those days are long gone in marketing. AI has raised the bar for lifecycle marketing because now you can deliver smarter context aware communication that actually feels personal and you can do it at scale without hiring five more content people. Personalization today doesn't just mean using my name. It actually means having context about any previous interactions. But the problem here happens because even though this sounds great in theory, most teams aren't actually doing it. They're stuck with broken reporting, siloed data and outdated stacks. It's often easier just to keep doing things the way you've always done them, right? Isn't that kind of the the norm? Default to the status quo. So customer IO they did a survey on this. They surveyed 600 marketers just like you and me to figure out what's actually working and what's broken in. This is what we call lifecycle marketing and they detailed how the best teams are actually solving these problems. The report breaks down 2025 priorities, where budgets are moving and how to tame the measurement mess. Real world examples from brands like Notion and Monarch Money that use AI personalization experiments and understanding the next chapter of AI, what's on Marketers wishlist right now, and how Customer Journ can get smarter, not just faster. It's packed with examples, data, and strategies you can put to work right now. If you want to get smarter about lifecycle marketing, this is a great free resource, so go check it out. You can get it@customerio exit 5 and you'll learn how to build lifecycle marketing that keeps up with today's expectations. That's customer I.O. exit 5.