← The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
The Atlassian Playbook for Building a Fast-Moving, Outcome-Driven Marketing Team
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- [00:02]
Dave Gerhardt
This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts, everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving, registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z-u- dash dash l.com exit5 to learn more. You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.
- [01:52]
Derek
Hey everybody, how's it going? Let me pull up the chat right here. We got some people here. We got everybody, everybody rolling in. So if you can hear me now, we're getting a couple minutes. It's the, it's the top of the. About to be the top of the hour here. I'm in Vermont. We've seen the sun for the first time in gosh weeks. Now somebody told me that it was 23 weekends in a row without the sun, but we had it this weekend. I had more burgers and hot dogs than anyone should. Should realistically have in, in a weekend. So. But we're back. We do these Exit 5 live sessions once or twice a month and the goal is to bring in some interesting marketers, marketing leaders, people that can help you do your job better. And what I love about these sessions is that the people who come and hang out, they're here for a reason. You took an hour out of your day to come hang out with us. And, and we don't take that lightly. So I'm excited for an awesome discussion with Ashley and, and Molly in a minute. But first, if you can hear me, can you just go in the chat and let me know where you are, where you're writing in from? There we go. I see the homie Allison is, is here in the Carolinas somewhere. Sunny day for Jesse Feldman in New York. Brooklyn, stand up. Emily's here. Catherine's in Boise. Brittany's in San Diego. Allison is in Asheville. That's right. Jen Bradley, Northeast Wisconsin. I gotta get out to Wisconsin. Has amazing golf. I don't know if you know that small audience that would care about that here. Devin. What's up? Devin? Boston in the house. Ava's in Indianapolis.
- [03:17]
Dave Gerhardt
Derek.
- [03:17]
Derek
Okay, last question before I bring in our speakers. Obviously, everything is working great. Oh, we record this, everything's gonna be recorded. I'm gonna take all your questions. I have this. I have an amazing list of questions that I want to get through with our panel today. But also this is about you. And we're here because we want to bring in your questions. And so I will prioritize them. But the best way to do that is use the Q and A feature, put your questions in there, we can upvote them and we'll get to the most popular ones. But then also put your opinions in chat. Like, since you're here, I want you to be active. I want you to be involved in the chat. I want you to be asking questions, helping each other out. Share what you're doing in your job. That. That's what always makes this, makes this great. And then my last question is just tell me in the chat. I'm just curious, like, why, why did you attend? Right. This session today is how to lead a high functioning marketing org, avoid meeting overload, fix communication bottlenecks, and ship meaningful work. We have Ashley Faust, head of Life Cycle Marketing at Atlassian, and Dr. Molly Sands, head of the team work lab at Atlassian. We're going to break down how today's best marketing leaders are reclaiming their time and building more effective, better aligned teams in the process. But why are you here? Are you struggling with. Hey. DHD's in the building. What's up? I want to. I want to know why. Why did you come to this session today? What is it about internal communication and Leading a marketing org that made you want to come in and pop into this session. Give me that in chat. Maybe Allison, want to. Want to bring out our guests while we. While we let people put their answers to that in chat. Nice. There we go. There's actually.
- [04:43]
Ashley Faust
There's morning for me, I guess good.
- [04:45]
Derek
Afternoon morning for you. Yeah, that's right. I got the middle of the day here, so. All right. I asked the question and nobody answered it. Oh, no, here we go. I just had to scroll. Too many me too many meetings. Scaling a team. Want to find the best way forward. Oh, man, these are so here's Megan spending 15 to 20 hours a week in meetings, and I can't get an actually work done team of one. So want to build a strong foundation for a high functioning marketing team. Floyd has 47 meetings per week and have to do all my work after hours. Like, man, how much does that come up? So I think we're in the.
- [05:19]
Ashley Faust
I, like, clockwise, accidentally shamed me multiple times. Like, how did you spend your week? And I'm like, not effectively. So I feel all of that in the chat.
- [05:29]
Derek
All right, perfect. Well, our goal today is to help, hopefully help you unblock some of that stuff. We have two amazing guests, and I'm gonna let you each introduce yourself. So let's do Ashley and then Molly, and then I'll kick us off in the right direction. Sure.
- [05:42]
Ashley Faust
My name is Ashley. I am a marketer, writer, and speaker by day, and a singer, actor, and fitness fiend by night.
- [05:49]
Derek
What is your preferred and your fiendness of fitness?
- [05:52]
Dave Gerhardt
What is your preferred method?
- [05:54]
Ashley Faust
Mostly bodybuilder style workouts with a touch of high intensity interval training. So I did some. My husband called it my bee box this morning, jumping jacks and burpees, so love that.
- [06:04]
Derek
All right, good. Let's go. Let's lift some weights today. Okay. All right. Dr. Molly, you're in the house. Who are you?
- [06:11]
Dr. Molly Sands
Hi, everyone. I'm Molly. I lead the teamwork lab at Atlassian. So I have a group of behavioral scientists and researchers who study teamwork and design new ways of working for teams all over the world to help with things like having to do all of your work at night because you're stuck in meetings. I also a big high intensity interval trainer.
- [06:31]
Derek
Oh, yeah, we haven't had one of us before. What's your. What's your preferred pain method of choice?
- [06:37]
Dr. Molly Sands
Oh, I honestly love it all. I've done truly, like, everything from marathons to, like, lots of ollie lifting kind of stuff, so.
- [06:46]
Derek
All right, good. We Got the right crew here today. Love that. Okay, so first, you know, one thing that stood out to me that I think this is super interesting. I don't know if you all caught that, but Matt Lassian has a PhD psychologist on the staff, which is super interesting. Molly, I'm sorry that I already asked you this behind the scenes, but can you just kind of take us through what led to Atlassian making that type of investment? What is your role there and maybe how does that relate to the topic that we're going to dig into today?
- [07:14]
Dr. Molly Sands
Yeah, yeah. So most of my career I spent studying human behavior. I've done a lot of research on marketing and products, but specifically really thinking about organizations and teams. And Atlassian, we have a policy called team anywhere, which means that our employees can choose where they work from every day. We run 12 global offices, but we have people all over the world, many of them don't go to offices very often and spend most of their time working from home. And it's about 40% of our staff is close to an office and everyone else is not. And so we knew that we really needed to think differently about how we work and how we communicate and share information, how we do meetings. And so as Atlassian was really thinking about what does collaboration for the future look like in this much more distributed and AI forward reality? They wanted to build a team to figure this out so that we can help our customers and so we could adopt best practices and really make sure that we were doing things in most effective way. A lot of that ties in nicely to what we're talking about today here, around meetings and how do we share information, how do we lead great teams and what does that look like now in this modern reality of work?
- [08:26]
Derek
And Ashley, you've been there for seven years. I'm just curious what your, you know, why this is a topic that is in the sweet spot for Atlassian and just, just your experience of somebody who spent their career in marketing being able to relate to a bunch of the, the comments already in the chat.
- [08:41]
Ashley Faust
Yeah. One thing that is interesting that Molly just said, which I think we'll get into once we start talking about the questions, but I think it, it dovetails nicely with Atlassian from a brand marketing perspective and then also from like a tooling and a human behavior perspective, the idea of sharing information versus connection. And oftentimes we muddle those two things and especially as more teams have become distributed, we're trying to stay aligned across time zones, across different team types. If you work closely with a product management Team because you are a product marketer, being on time with your launches, being in lockstep in terms of what the market needs and what the products that you're building require from a time and investment standpoint, but then also having that trust with your partners. There's a lot of layers to that. It's not just, do I know when launch day is, it's do I trust my pm, that in fact launch day is going to be when they say it is. Right. And then on the PM side, do they trust their marketing team to actually get that message out there effectively? Not just will they put a message out, but will the message be effective? So there's a ton of trust and rapport that has to happen, not just alignment from an information standpoint. And I think that's a distinction both on the marketing side in terms of what we have to build with our audience, and also on the internal team side and what we have to build across time zones, GEOs tooling and overall communication.
- [10:13]
Derek
All right, so let's start with just thinking about just internal, I would say internal communication with marketing to start. One of the things that I think it's rare to find a company where the marketing team is not sharing what they're doing across the org, but a lot of times what I hear is, man, we're sending, we're sending loom videos, we're sending decks, we're sharing these asynchronous updates. We're posting in the, in the channel, in Slack, we're at here, we're doing all this stuff. But people are still not sure what marketing is working on or there's maybe too much information to process. And so as a marketing person in my former life, I've battled with like the send every, you know, sales doesn't know what we're doing. So you tell them and then it's like, then you go the other end of the spectrum. It's like, well, now, now there's too much. I don't know what to. What to find. And so I'm curious if maybe we could start with like kind of just a standard operating playbook for communicating about your work in marketing. Maybe common mistakes or pitfalls or best practices.
- [11:11]
Dr. Molly Sands
Yeah, definitely. I think the first thing is really starting with goals. So I've got, I have really three principles. One is goals, one is transparency, and one is standardization, which sounds really lame, but it's actually really helpful. So we want to start by anchoring everyone on what we're trying to do. And in too many companies, people just end up not really directly tying their work to the purpose. And that makes it really hard for everyone to sort through what information is actually relevant to them and what is not. So having a really transparent way that you share goals across your whole marketing organization and taking that from everything that applies to marketing, as well as all your cross functional partners all the way down to that team level and making that information easy for people to find is one of the first steps. And that really, really helps to drive alignment about what you're doing and why and help people sort through how all the things you're sharing actually fit into that bigger picture. Anytime you're sharing information, it should be like, why does this matter? Who should care about this? Why should they care about it? And you want to give that to people as directly as you can in every communication so that they can very quickly be like, oh, doesn't matter to me. Oh, actually this is super, super important. And just helping with that filtering is such a critical skill and makes everyone.
- [12:29]
Ashley Faust
Want to work with you because then.
- [12:31]
Dr. Molly Sands
They know what you're talking about.
- [12:32]
Derek
Okay, so I got to build on that. So my, my very first job, like my, the first time that I led a small marketing team, I was at this company and every Friday we would have show and tell where basically every team would go around and show what they would work. They shipped that week something they're proud of, a meaningful project. And when I got to this company, There was maybe 20 people there and they were all engineer, engineers and designers. And so I was the first marketing person. And so they looked at me like I had, you know, six heads. And everybody wants to know, like, what the heck? What is marketing? What is this? What does this person do? He doesn't code, he doesn't design. I don't, I don't know what he does. And I remember I shared in show and tell that week. I shared, oh, the, the big project that I worked on this week was I wrote this, you know, 1500 word blog post and I showed it around the room and everybody was like, okay, and what, And I, I, I didn't get roasted. I got roasted by the silence. And it was like nobody cared. And I was like, I spent, you know, four my days writing this and researching this. And then I realized exactly what you said, which is, I came back the next week and I said, hey, remember how I told you we wrote this article last week? Well, over the last week, we've gotten six backlinks to this article. This has increased our, we, we got no, we, we used to have no website traffic now. You know, 312 people visited our site this week. Six of them converted, two of them took sales demos and one people bought. And I literally saw the engineers in the room finally like light up and understand, like, oh, wait, so you're telling me you did this thing and that helped people find out about the thing that I built. And that was the moment that I learned how to basically explain everything that I did. Not in the context of marketing, but like, here's why this matters for us as a company based on what we're working on. Ashley, as a veteran marketer in this space, I'm just curious if you've had a similar type of experience.
- [14:18]
Ashley Faust
Yeah. And one thing that's counterintuitive, and I say this both from an audience standpoint and, you know, whether that's internal or external, giving people the option not to buy, and in this case it's the option to not pay attention. And so there's actually from like a super tactical standpoint, one of our teams, I love how they do this in Slack. There's a bigger channel that is very helpful for folks to know what's going on. And so they'll literally say topic. Here's the three word topic. Who it's relevant for. Mention Molly, mention Dave, mention Ashley. Action requested, basically, whatever the action is and then context, whether it's bullet points, whether it's a confluence page, whether it's a loom, whatever. If I'm not tagged in that, that means I don't have to look at it. And so that means that when I am tagged, I need to look at it. If you tag me in everything or you at here in every single channel, that signals to me that you don't know me and you don't care about me.
- [15:14]
Derek
People wouldn't do that. They don't care.
- [15:16]
Ashley Faust
Same thing externally, right? Like you just blast things everywhere and you're like, bye, bye, bye. It signals that you do not care about the audience. You only care about yourself. If every single message I put in a channel is about me, and for me, and easiest for me, people assume that I don't care. And not only do they tune out the message, they start to tune me out. And that means if I show up in a channel, nobody pays attention to me because they know I don't respect them. So it's counterintuitive to actually narrow in the message even in a bigger channel. But it makes it so much easier, to Molly's point of who is this for? Why do they care? The other big thing I do. From a managing UP standpoint, it is not uncommon for my boss to say something, you know, she'll slack me and say, like, I know you shared this page with me. I can't find it. Or remind me where this thing is. Like, I'm getting these questions from our CMO or something like that. And sure, I could just drop the page in for her that has all the context for everyone, because it's a page that requires, you know, needs to meet multiple audience needs. Instead, what I do is I say, here's the page, here's the three highlights that you care about for her questions. And I will literally watch her, you know, copy and paste those or put those things in slides or repeat those things in meetings, because I told her this is how to connect the dots. So that's the other thing. There's all of the context that someone can get and then there's what is the information that they must have to take action. And I think that's something that, again, as marketers, the same way we have to cut through that noise externally, we have to do the same thing internally to say, if you need context and you want to go down the rabbit hole, here's the option to do that. Here's the highlights you actually care about to take action right this minute.
- [16:58]
Dr. Molly Sands
I'm a huge fan of the Brene Brown clearest kind principle there. Right. Just getting to the point. Respect people's time and give them, you know, the, the option to opt in or opt out and make wait.
- [17:09]
Dave Gerhardt
Can you.
- [17:10]
Derek
Can you explain for people who aren't familiar with Brene Brown and that, that kind of message. Can you just explain that real quick?
- [17:16]
Dr. Molly Sands
Yeah, yeah. It's this idea that clarity is actually a form of kindness to people. Just saying what you mean and saying it in, you know, like a thoughtful but direct way is really helpful. Don't make people sort through to try to figure out what you actually meant. And as marketers, we're good at that. Right. That is part of our jobs. But thinking about the ways that we interact with everyone internally too, from this perspective of just give them the information they need and it's going to be useful for them so they can move forward. And that is a way to be kind and respectful. And we really see that that makes people want to work with you more, which is huge.
- [17:55]
Derek
Yeah. I mean, so I love both of those things where I think it's like, it needs to be your job. If I could translate some of this, it needs to be your job to like, if, if everyone if, if you hear the signal that your boss or other people inside the company, despite Ashley sending. I don't want to put this on you. This is pretend Ashley.
- [18:15]
Ashley Faust
Right?
- [18:16]
Derek
Okay, I got you. All right. I got you. Despite Ashley sending, you know, 58 Slack messages about this, I would read this as a signal that, like, well, I'm sending all these messages, but clearly people aren't picking up what I'm putting down because there's still a billion questions on it. And man, this seems so simple. But I. This is such an important point. Just how you format your messages internally is so key to getting your message read. If you just treat Slack like, this is our work chat and there's our work channel and hey, here's what's going. Here's an update on the thing that you asked. I say, whoa. Not only am I probably not going to read it because it's too long, but the four. I. I like the formatting matters. Like, break up the. So I love the, you know, we'll. We'll have the replay of this anyway. But I love this as a template. And it's like, it's almost like anything in marketing. It's like with. With AI, with ChatGPT. Right? Write a better prompt, you will get a better result. And so spend more time on that internal update. You'll get a better result. My very first job was I was a PR intern and my boss at the time. If I would email our clients, this is when people actually used email. If I would email our clients, I would get an email back from him. He would forward me the email and he would mark it all up with red text and X everything out and literally rewrite my emails and show me how to communicate. And that was my first dose of like, okay, what, what I say the formatting matters here. Like, he used to kill me because my. One of his biggest pet peeves was like a long email thread when the topic changes, but nobody changes the subject line. I just sent Ashley to the, to the moon. Yeah, but like, it's. Things like that. It's. It's. And then this is truly the skill of being a marketer, which is having empathy and understanding for your audience. And so, like, having the subject line means something. Having the format mean something. I think that's such an underrated ingredient in being a great internal communicator.
- [20:03]
Dr. Molly Sands
Yeah, I see one of the comments popping up in the chat around thoughts on automating versus manually summarizing information that people need. And I do think this formatting piece is a place where AI can be unbelievably helpful. So we've built some ROVO agents that help people at Atlassian communicate in more structured ways. And this can let you take a lot of your kind of unstructured thoughts or the things you know about people that might not be as obvious or clear because from knowing what their priorities are, what they actually care about, and then really quickly put that into a format that's amazing. And that's actually been one of my favorite AI use cases here is just like summarizing things isn't always super useful, but you often know something that is not explicit, list it anywhere in your system. And so being able to add that context and then still get it to that really clear, concise point is such a helpful communication stuff.
- [20:59]
Derek
All right, I'm going to flip over to some of the, some of the questions that we have. How do you decide when something really needs a meeting versus when Async would work better?
- [21:08]
Ashley Faust
I have some practical things, but we can, we can give the like real world answer and then the science answer, which actually should go together because applicable. So I'm like, I'll say it.
- [21:18]
Derek
And then you could be like, yes, yeah, well. And I think, I think the content context of this is like I, I think we all believe that. I think many of us are like, yes, fewer meetings are better. But then what happens is everything feels like something we should meet about. And so what, how do you decide what is worth it? What's the best use of time? Curious to hear how you all approach this.
- [21:36]
Ashley Faust
From my perspective, there are some clear binaries, right? If there is only going to be one person talking, it can probably be an async update. It can be a, in, in our case a Confluence page or a loom video. Like if it's just one person talking, it can probably be async. If it is meant to just give a status update, it can probably be async. We have this functionality in Jira, it's called Goals, as Molly alluded to, both from like a process and mindset standpoint. And then also it's built into our tooling where you can give a little update and it includes an option to do basically a tweet length update. And so this is like the very quick here's what's happening. If you want more context, look in a note. But if it's basically just saying I did a thing, here's what shipped, here's what's blocked, that can probably be async. Two areas where I do think you need an actual meeting with the actual people. One is a concept that we call sparring. And if you think about the concept in, again, fitness enthusiasts, boxing, it's when two equals get in the ring and they go around boxing to actually improve their skills. And so when we think about this in the context of work, it's basically two equals getting in the ring and going around on an idea. And so we call this sparring. And the goal is to kind of figure out, like, is this idea good? Is this process working? What could we improve? Where is it falling short? Right. And it's two equals. So it's not me criticizing you. It's the two of us are going to spar on the idea that needs to happen synchronously, because the whole point is the back and forth and getting that feedback in real time. The second thing that I would say is definitely requires, you know, meeting, although I wouldn't quite call it that, is just connection. Shooting the breeze, having a coffee chat, building that trust and rapport, figuring out, how did you, you know, what did you do this. This long weekend? Oh, you're not in the U.S. okay, how was the weather over? And I saw we've got Amsterdam in the uk. Right. It doesn't make sense for me to slack you and be like, hello, Dave, how was your weekend? And then you respond, it was good. And then I say, what did you do? Right. That's kind of weird in slack.
- [23:41]
Derek
Oh, I got one friend who always texts me. I got a friend who texts me and just says, what's up? I'm like, what do you mean, what's up? Say the thing.
- [23:48]
Ashley Faust
Yeah, just say it. Right. So I think those are two areas. Sparring and anything that's meant to kind of build that connection, rapport, trust, relationships, like, have a coffee, chat, shoot the breeze. So, Molly, I think any other areas that I miss, but those are two big binaries from my perspective.
- [24:07]
Dr. Molly Sands
Yeah, I think that's really good. And a lot of those are like the perfect decision rules and exactly what we see in research. I'd say we really need three ways to think about spending our time. I think we have async things where we're creating materials we might be communicating, but people aren't responding in real time. Right. So that is the really good time to do some of your deep thinking, any deep thinking you need to do individually. So I think of that as async. Then we have meetings, which we're all familiar with. There's lots of ways to run them. There's good ones. And there's bad ones. Unfortunately, there's way more bad ones out.
- [24:40]
Ashley Faust
There than good ones.
- [24:41]
Dr. Molly Sands
But those are like, we come together. We have, you know, a purpose or an agenda, some sort of goal for the time we're doing this thing together.
- [24:49]
Ashley Faust
We do.
- [24:50]
Dr. Molly Sands
Huge myth. Those really don't drive connection. So people sitting in those structured meetings, listening to you talk at them, not a connection builder. Doing work together three times better and making you feel connected to those people, like, actually solving problems is what drives that piece. So just having people sit around together in a call is not actually good.
- [25:11]
Derek
Oh, do you know what this made me think of? So this is great, because now I can say that this is a validated, you know, hypothesis. But I've long been like, I roll my eyes at, like, a new person joins your team, and basically you spend the first three months just, like, in meetings and meeting people. And we saw something with, like, when we started hiring people at Exit 5, which is a very small company, as an example, we didn't have a lot of formal onboarding. And so there's a girl on our team, Anna, she joined last year, and basically she joined and we immediately threw her in the deep end because we had this event coming up and she needed to, like, work on the event. And that was an amazing, like, from day one, she had to do the work and get in meetings, and that was the best way of, like, building team chemistry and bonding. And so, like, I've been at a large company where, like, I think you can fake your way around the office by being, like, the person that everyone wants to, like, hang out and have coffee with. But we saw this amazing connection by, like, humans collaborating on a shared goal. And that is actually how Anna ended up getting onboarding and becoming an amazing part of the team. Is that. Am I making that up, Molly, or is that kind of what the. What the science is proven out to be true?
- [26:21]
Dr. Molly Sands
Yeah, spending spending time together with people where you really are getting deeper is what drives that connection. And so I think that's exactly what's happening. There is. You're bringing her in to the real things, the things that are hard, things that are messy, where you have conversations that are meatier than. Look at these beautiful stats on my.
- [26:39]
Ashley Faust
Campaign or, you know, whatever it is. And we think a lot about building.
- [26:44]
Dr. Molly Sands
That into our days. And this is really where I think people end up kind of missing on what meetings need to look like. You need that sync working time. And so it's very normal within any teams at Atlassian to just have dedicated time to Work on a problem together. And we see in the research too, that teams that have bursty communication patterns, so, meaning people are talking a lot. You're, like, going back and forth really quickly. You're doing that sparring that Ashley is talking about. I get a fast response and then have times where their communication goes really quiet, where they're doing that deeper work, that individual, hey, I took 12 action items from all these things I was in, and now I actually need to do that. If you ebb and flow between those times throughout your day, those are the most successful and productive teams. And so that's really what we want to build in for. And if you can start to spend more of your time not in those status update, sharing information kind of meetings and actually with other people solving real problems, you'll feel way more connected to them. You'll build a lot more trust with your team, and it's way more fun. It's way more fun and you get more time. Kind of wins in all ways.
- [27:57]
Derek
I like that as a framework. So for everybody out there, like, if we could summarize that, basically any. Any type of status update, anything that could be shared, it seems like the. The guardrails, like, when you want to. When you want to meet, is something that you want to truly collaborate on. And let's. Let's use this time to jam on something together.
- [28:15]
Ashley Faust
Yeah, exactly.
- [28:16]
Dr. Molly Sands
Building together, going back and forth on ideas in a really dynamic way.
- [28:20]
Derek
Do you have any. Do you have any opinions or data or just, you know, best practices on, like, getting everybody involved in those meetings? I feel like it's probably often men, like one or two loud voices on the zoom call or whatever, you know, sucking all the oxygen out of the meeting. And then I'm like, I'll just use Anna because she's on our team and I see her right here. Like, I'm like, oh, shit. I try to, like, call on. I. I want to be like Anna. What? Like, because, you know, it's just that the dynamics are always different. Like, how do you. How do you bring everybody in to truly get the best collaborative meeting? And especially when you're not in person and you can't really tell someone's body language, I feel like if I haven't heard someone on my team speak on our meeting, I want to try to bring them in. But I'm curious if you have any tips for, like, actually fostering that collaboration.
- [29:04]
Dave Gerhardt
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- [31:19]
Dr. Molly Sands
Yeah, we do a lot of page LED meetings which is where someone will write any context, important things to know about the topic or decision perspectives, just the background. Everyone needs to actually be able to have a productive discussion or to create something together. I'll have someone write a confluence page of that before we start the meeting. And then we spend a few minutes with our cameras off at the beginning, and people will add comments. People will, like, ask questions in writing. We might do that with a whiteboard too. If you weren't going to make a page, you could easily have a whiteboard that lets people contribute. But having a couple different ways that everyone can get that same frame of mind and then also be able to add to the conversation even without taking up speaking time is a really, really great way. A little bit more equitable and make sure you're actually hearing from all the voices in the room. And then the facilitator can take what they have there and say, okay, great. This is actually what we need to dive into and cover. And it makes it easier to engage people in a way that also feels good to them, where they're not just like getting called on out of nowhere.
- [32:31]
Ashley Faust
Yeah, I think that's a good point. I am very extroverted and I tend to be a loud voice in the meeting. And I actually love coming in hot with no prep. Like. Like, I actually love.
- [32:43]
Derek
I like you. I like this one. I like you.
- [32:45]
Dr. Molly Sands
Like.
- [32:46]
Ashley Faust
I'm sorry, you want me to read 20 minutes of something to come in so you can ask me one question? I'm not. I don't want to play that game. Like, just. Just plot me in and pepper me with questions. That's fun for me. I know I'm not weird person. Right. There are a lot of folks on my team who are not that way. They like to absorb, they like to read the page, they like to come in, they like to know the questions ahead of time. Right. And so I think, to Molly's point, about making sure that you're not just calling on people when that's not the best way for them to participate. And so doing the prep work, allowing them to add comments to the page if they have questions, and then as the facilitator being able to say, I'm seeing some themes, it sounds like we really need to discuss this one particular area. Let's take a minute, write down your thoughts on this, and then we'll come back and share. So there is some of that give and take where not everyone does their best work on the fly. I do, like, I do really well in that environment, but not everyone does. And so making sure that if I'm the person facilitating the meeting that I set it up in a way that actually accommodates the loud voices, the on the fly voices, and the people who need time to absorb. And maybe they are actually more articulate or more confident in writing. And I think that's one of the biggest takeaways about all of this, is having that flexibility of communication. It's not that videos are the best way to communicate, or a page is the best way to communicate, or slack bullets are the best way to communicate. The reality is you need same same as with external channels. You have to match the right message to the right people in the right place at the right time in the right format. And internally that might mean that you've got a loom video embedded at the top of the confluence page. You've got a little executive summary box. You've got a whole page of stuff that has expands where if somebody needs more context, it's got the additional context that kind of showing the work behind the work. And then it has that ability for folks to leave comments or say, hey, I'd love to chat with you one on one about this work and I'd love to get your feedback on it. Right? And so all of that facilitates the different types of communication that work for different personalities, different ways of thinking. And so I think that flexibility is one of the biggest things that having all of these different mediums allows. So yeah, Dave, I, as a loud person, I try really hard to be like, man, I've talked a lot, it's time for me to be quiet, or it's really quiet, someone needs to speak, okay, I'll be the person who opens up that conversation. So Peter does take on a lot of that, you know, kind of prep.
- [35:20]
Derek
I also think like just the, just the idea that someone, maybe I'm very type A and I am the same way that you are. But like if I get on a meeting and no one is clearly in charge of that meeting, I get stressed out because it's an expensive meeting, time is ticking. And so like, I think if, I think if you're going to be the one that's going to set up the meeting, you need to basically be the one that's going to act as facilitator, look at the clock, you know, involve other speakers, run things on time. But also a lot of things will come up when, when we start collaborating and talking with each other, second and third level related ideas come up. And while those are great and easy to jump off on, I think sometimes I need to be like, hey, that's a Ashley, that's great. But like, for. Let's just focus for this meeting. Let's focus on this and like, you can share an update on that later. Like, because time is so valuable, it's very easy to go and spend 12 minutes, you know, talking about the Red Sox game or whatever.
- [36:13]
Ashley Faust
Yeah.
- [36:14]
Dr. Molly Sands
And that's where I think some visual cues can help a lot too. Especially in the virtual meetings of like, okay, we've got to park the lot. Great, you brought that up. Awesome. Let's throw it over here.
- [36:21]
Derek
Like, yeah.
- [36:22]
Dr. Molly Sands
How do you cue people that, you know, this is focused on? Here's recovery.
- [36:26]
Derek
Visual cues is like Ashley and Dave are just like squirming in their seats. Yeah.
- [36:32]
Dr. Molly Sands
All right, here's here.
- [36:34]
Derek
Here's a question in the chat, actually from Alexa, which is relevant. What about recurring team meetings? How many times a week should we meet? Are daily standups better? Or a collab or collaborative brainstorm sessions? Any kind of marketing team, operating system stuff that you all have learned over the years?
- [36:51]
Dr. Molly Sands
Yeah, I would say, Ashley, I'm curious about your. What your thoughts on and how you do this with your team. I tend to anchor more on project related collaborative time. So people that are working on a thing together, having that same time to have the quick back and forth, actually build some stuff. Depending on how much that full team actually works together, I would say once every week or every two weeks, it's good to have some sort of touch point. And we spend a lot of our time in the team that I lead doing demos during that because my work tends to work across a lot of different parts of the business. I'm sure this is true for many of the folks on this call too. Some of them are deeply embedded with engineering, others with research. And so just sharing what they're learning and what they're actually building in a more tangible way has been a really good use of that time.
- [37:40]
Ashley Faust
Yeah. One thing that we do on my team is we actually rotate who owns the meeting each week and it's their job to put together the agenda. It's their job to potentially find guests, speakers. It's their job to prep the page, and they are in charge of facilitating. There's two reasons for that. One is to make sure that all of them get a chance to practice their facilitation and presentation skills. And it's kind of a safe place to do that. They know, like, okay, this is my week to do the meeting. In some cases, I'll suggest topics where I know what's going on across the team. And so I'll kind of say, hey, I would love to have, you know, Molly present on this topic. Or, Dave, I'd love to focus the meeting on this. And you are the person who knows the most about that, so please facilitate. The second piece of this is it actually keeps the meeting from going stale. And we have a really great play on the Atlassian team playbook. It's free, it's ungated, you don't even have to give your email address. But it's called the ritual reset. And I think this is something that's worth doing quarterly across your teams to look at the meetings and figure out, like, is this meeting actually serving us to Molly's earlier point? What is the goal of the meeting? Is it connection? Is it information sharing? Is it sparring? Is it brainstorming? Does it change each week? That's fine. But I actually have this happen on my team. We had gotten into this rut of just, like, generic icebreaker. Okay, everyone, go around and see what you're working on. And I'm just like, I'm falling asleep in my own meeting. Right. And I'm like, this is clearly not serving anyone. And so I talked with a couple of the senior members of the team, and I said, I would like to start rotating the meeting. You know, earlier in our tenure, the team was fairly new, and so it felt a little like a lot of pressure to start making everybody rotate the meeting. But after we had been a team for six or eight months, it was like, all right, we gotta. We gotta fix this. So that really helped. And now having people rotate, we do meet weekly, but having the different folks rotate means that everyone across the team is able to share and facilitate. And it doesn't end up just being me talking at them, which I can do that in Slack. I can make them a loom. I can write them a confluence page. Like, I don't need to just stand up and talk in the meeting. So those are a couple things that have helped the ritual reset to just make it an open conversation about what the meeting should be and how it's supposed to help us. Rotating the meeting owners and then deciding if weekly or bi weekly is the right cadence.
- [39:58]
Derek
Yep. So I love that because it is very easy to. Just as a company goes on, we have this recurring Monday meeting, and it's a ritual to have that. And then nobody ever questions like, why? And it just kind of gets stale and you should stop doing it. It. But I'm just curious what. Just from a marketing standpoint, what recurring meetings do you have that are valuable.
- [40:17]
Ashley Faust
Yeah. So I do think our team meeting now is very valuable. And one of the things that I do now as the facilitator or the background facilitator is to help connect those dots. And so if it's not immediately obvious when someone is speaking or sharing or leading a discussion, I'll literally put in the chat how this connects to your work. Bullet, bullet, bullet. And everyone's like, okay, now I know how to engage. So that meeting is very helpful. I do have some one on ones, usually those are monthly with my cross team counterparts and it's kind of just like hey, what's going on in your world? Or like I saw this big reorg announcement, like what does that actually mean for how we will work together? And so that helps keep those relationships strong and it makes, it helps me ensure that there's not going to be any issues that like come out of left field. And I'm like wait, what's happening? A reorg is happening or metrics are changing and like I didn't know about that. Okay, let me just, let's, let's just talk and make sure that we're all on the same page. And then we do have some cross functional team meetings that happen weekly or bi weekly where it is just a chance for life cycle marketing, product marketing, content marketing, in some cases event marketing or performance marketing to all get together and make sure that everybody is aligned on those shared goals. And so those, those do happen with a mix of like Async here, some status stuff, but it's mostly to discuss any blockers and if it's possible to eliminate those blockers on the call so it's less. Go through this page of 20 bullets and just everyone read their bullet and more. Hey, I see that this one is blocked. It hasn't moved for a while. Why is it not moving? What needs to happen to get it moving? Can we just get it moving on this call or do we need to solve it right now on this call? So those are actually quite helpful on.
- [42:09]
Derek
Those cross functional meetings. Do they have a structure where you're leading with some type of scorecard or goals? I think a common example in our world here with Exit 5 is like marketing and sales is often collaborating. They're meeting bi weekly or whatever. And I found that it's often helpful to have some type of scorecard which is like hey, as a reminder, here are like three to five key initiatives and metrics that we're working on for the year. Let's briefly touch them and Then we can break out into something more specific. I'm just curious if you've found something similar like at least anchoring the discussion with like how are we doing on the things that we said we're going to do and the, and the SLA between sales and marketing and then we can dive into anything specific.
- [42:54]
Ashley Faust
Yes, so we do that. It depends per meeting. If it's, you know, obviously if it's, if it's between, you know, clm, PMM and content marketing, it's, it tends to anchor on campaigns. And so looking at, if we've done webinars, how, how was the registration? How many questions do we get? Oh, we got 50 questions. There's some really good topics. There's a couple of themes. Should we turn that into a blog or a community post paired with an ask me anything session? Right. So we'll do a bit of brainstorming based on the results that we've seen. So yeah, it does make sense to anchor it on, you know, either to Molly's point, a project or performance or a campaign or something like that. But it just depends on what kind of what the focus is for those meetings.
- [43:39]
Dr. Molly Sands
I think one of the key things here too is anything that you do shift to Async so you're not having a meeting about it. That doesn't mean that you don't want that two way communication. And so we really try to make sure that all of our tools enable people to still have conversation and discussion. We don't always need the answer or someone else's perspective instantly. Sometimes we do. If you're trying to move super, super fast or there's like a lot of complexity or ambiguity, it's better to just live talk or to even write live. But if you really are sharing things and you, you do actually want that feedback. So in Loom, I love how you can add all the comments. You can add emoji reactions like you still aren't shouting into a void. You actually get that sense of, oh, what was confusing about this? Where were people like, yes, I love this, we're on track. Where are people like, oh, that makes me really nervous. I have this thing to add. And so when you think about shifting anything away from meetings, making sure that you're using tools that are going to enable people to say like, hey, I saw this or I had this question is really, really important.
- [44:43]
Derek
Yeah, right. How many? How many? The amount of times that I've thought I did everybody a favor by making a Loom video instead of a meeting and then I actually have no idea if anybody watched that video. And so I do something with our team where if I make a, you know, say two minute. By the way, everyone said that I'm going to make a two minute loom video and it always ends up being like eight to ten minutes. Yeah, it's like there is, there is scope creep in like the I'm gonna go async. But now all of a sudden I just rambled for 12 minutes. And so like to the point about Ashley, what Ashley said in Slack about like preparing your message. I'm like, if you're gonna make let, let's, let's not get lazy with the looms. Now if you're gonna make me a loom, you also better, better come correct too with the format.
- [45:24]
Dr. Molly Sands
Your notes help so much. Like I make my team of loom every Friday morning just to check in. Like, hey, here's what. How we're doing here is some shoutouts for stuff that really amazing that we accomplished. Here's a few things that are coming up or top of mind for me. And I pretend that they all watched at drinking coffee and many of them don't drink coffee.
- [45:42]
Derek
So I don't even.
- [45:43]
Dr. Molly Sands
I don't know what's going on with that. But.
- [45:47]
Ashley Faust
That'S the same thing.
- [45:53]
Derek
I wouldn't know about that. Okay, I got a question in the chat. Actually a couple. This one's from Mike. Are brainstorming meetings actually a good use of time? If so, what are some ways to make them more productive?
- [46:06]
Ashley Faust
I think it depends on what the purpose is. Right. From a brainstorming perspective, you have to have the correct problem to solve. Like if I just come in and it's like how can we do better? And you're like, with what? Just any idea. Like I can sleep more and drink more coffee, right? Like I can balance my sleep and coffee and I feel better. Is that what you wanted? Clearly not. Right? So coming in with the right questions. I also think that there's some really good brainstorming exercises that help you kind of get out of the box. One of those is an exercise that I love which is basically like how to solve the problem the wrong way. What's the worst way to solve this problem? And give everybody a couple of minutes. Put it on the whiteboard of if you were going to do like the absolute worst thing, what would that be? That helps for two reasons. One, it helps kind of break that ice that there are no dumb ideas. Right. And two, you might actually find something in those ideas that could lead you to an actual solution. And so, you know, the, for example, one idea. How do we make our meetings better? And a wrong idea would be just let everybody talk all at once, right? Where nobody can hear each other and there's no agenda and we all just start spewing things. That would be the absolute wrong way to make your meetings better. Right. But it might actually help you dive down and say, okay, the meeting is too big. So maybe the reason everyone has to shout is because there's too many people in the meeting. So one way to make it better is to focus the attendee list. Right? Like you can kind of go down that path. That's just like one example of a way I think you can make it better. But it's focusing in on the right problem and then giving people the space to say the dumb ideas by opening with that. And then I think the final thing I'll say about that is the format. Is it truly an open format? And there is blue sky. There's no budget requirements, there's no location requirements, there's no headcount requirements. Like, is it truly blue sky? Or are there constraints? And you need to be honest about those constraints. And so that's another piece of this that I find. Sometimes brainstorming either is completely useless because the ideas are just not feasible at all, or it's deflating to people because their ideas get shot down because there's not proper context on the constraints. So a couple of things again, I have found brainstorming sessions to be useful when you have framed them up the right way.
- [48:32]
Dr. Molly Sands
Yeah, the thing I see go wrong with brainstorming most often is people are like, hey, let's think about the super important thing for five minutes. And these are not the right people to think about it. Right. Like customer's biggest problems, like, I don't know, internal team that works here. You're not the right folks to answer this. Like, we actually need to be pulling in information from other places. We need some folks that are in, you know, with our customers, like figuring out, do you. I think, to Ashley's point, what is the right problem, but also who has good input for that problem. Get those people together or give people a little bit more time and space to get the. Gather the info. You really need to come up with solutions and then 100%, yes, spend time talking about them. Get creative. Pull the guardrails off, put them in when you, you know, to like, actually refine things. Those are all fantastic suggestions.
- [49:26]
Derek
That's a good one. That's a really good one. It's like, that's back to the measure twice, cut once thing, which is like, yes, let's have a brain to learn about this team. But is this going to be something that we're actually going to be able to change? I've been in a company in the past where the CEO was very vocal, very involved in marketing, and I could go do a excellent brainstorming exercise with the team and come up with three ideas and then go the CEO and they're just like, no, absolutely not, we're not doing that. And then that is demoralizing because then I just wasted an hour of the team. We pitched all these ideas and we're not going to go do them anyway. And so I think let's do them if we can actually. If we can actually make change. Okay, this question's from Christine, Marketing team of one with a bunch of engineers at the helm, what level of info do you think is appropriate for people who don't really understand the nitty gritty of marketing and wouldn't be excited by, say, an increase in click through rate? Lol.
- [50:19]
Ashley Faust
My spicy comment on this is why do you need to talk to them about this? Like, do they all need to know this? Or this is your CEO is an engineer and is also running marketing and so keeps asking you like, how is marketing going? Right. I find that this sometimes happens again with the information overload that we think we need to say everything to everyone all the time. And so because of that, you end up with people getting bombarded with information that they don't know about and they don't care about, but because you keep bombarding them, they think they should answer you. And so they come back with like, basically, why do I care about this? And the reality is you don't and you're not going to take any action on it. So why am I telling you? So I think step one is what action are they going to take and are they actually asking you for information or you just feel to Dave's point, like, well, they have this meeting every week and everybody's supposed to say something. So I guess I'll say something and I'll say metrics. Because engineering brain, what are they actually going to do with this information? I think if you go with that lens, that will help you choose which activities and which metrics to bring up in, you know, that meeting or the monthly business review. Quarterly business review, whatever it is. But I would also question how many of the people that you're sharing this information with actually need that information to move forward Take action, make a decision, et cetera. So that's kind of my spicy take on that is like, will people actually use this information? Do they actually need it? Are they actually asking for it? And then if so, okay, then you can go down and say, you know, here's how that connects to their work. If you have the ability to say the way this connects to your work is. So, for example, you've got engineers, they've built out features talking about monthly active users of that feature. The way that connects is obviously there's a revenue component from a business perspective, but it's also, you built this thing and people are actually using it. That feels good, right? So you could just come in and say, MAU is this mao is that, you know, it's changed this much week over week or month over month. If I'm an engineer, I don't really cool. I guess that people, we have people, right? But if you come in and you say, molly, that feature that you built, when it first launched, within a week it had this many users and now three months later, it's actually grown by 100, 200, 300%. Thank you so much for building your feature. That is actually a helpful connection. If you're able to make it.
- [52:51]
Derek
Love it. Okay, let's wrap. I'm gonna, we're gonna wrap up. We'll let people get a couple minutes back in their day. But before we do wrap up, Ashley, Molly, anything that you want to say about this topic that we didn't naturally come up with? We didn't get there, that you'd be like, dang, if we hung up, if we hung up before hitting on a point or two. I want to give you that opportunity now.
- [53:10]
Dr. Molly Sands
No, I do think that creating focus for your team is really important and that that's one of the ways you can be an effective leader, is help people. The part of the problem with the information and the meetings is that everyone is trying to solve a zillion problems at once and they don't have clear ways to prioritize those. So the more that you can be explicit about how you think about decisions, how people should make trade offs, how you're making those trade offs and really create some of that clarity and focus, your teams will do truly amazing things. They need the space to be creative. And when you're just stuck in back to back meetings and you get to 5pm and you're like, oh my God, now I have all this work to do tonight, that is not where we're our best working selves or Best helps in any way. And so I think most leaders, many leaders miss that. The root cause of that is that they are pulling people in way too many directions. And your team will move fast if you create focus.
- [54:11]
Derek
I love that you said that because we often talk about how, yeah, it's so easy to talk about all the tactics in marketing, but so often the show me a successful marketing team and I'll show you one that has a very clear and often simple strategy. And so I read your answer there not just as focus in like making sure your team doesn't have lots of meetings, but focus in like the. Are we very clear in like the one or two key initiatives for marketing where, you know, Tim Ferriss has this quote that's like, what's the one thing that makes everything else easier? And it's kind of like the. Or Stephen Covey, Big Rock. And it's like there's usually one or two. If you hit one or two of your goals in marketing, the rest of the stuff is going to take care of itself. And so I love that as a push. And then also for those listening out there, if you don't have that clarity from your leader, I think it is your job to push if you want to grow in your career, at least to manage up and say, hey Molly, I'm not sure what I should be working on right now. Here's my list of 15 things you can push and you can manage up to get that clarity and that focus. Ashley, what about you? What do you want to wrap on?
- [55:13]
Ashley Faust
Yeah, I think I will wrap on. Again, similar to Molly's point of keeping the audience at the time, same center, and I think marketers do a good job of that when they think externally, they don't always do a good job of that when they think internally. So whether that's communicating up to leadership, whether that's communicating across to your peers and stakeholders, whether that's communicating down to your team, who is that person? What is the message that they need to hear? How do they need to hear that message? And tailoring all of that communication, whether it's about goals, whether it's about tactics, whether it's about career growth, being very cognizant that you are delivering the right message to the right person in the right place at the right time and adopting that kind of external care for your audience to your internal communications.
- [56:04]
Derek
Love it. Well said. Okay, Ashley, Molly, we'll send out all the follow ups. Everybody can go do the best thing you can do, which is go find each one. Each one of them on LinkedIn Connect, send them a message. Be like, hey, I heard you on that Exit 5 live session. You were great. Thank you all for hanging out with us. I hope this was a useful and productive hour. If anything, to just give you the confidence to go and question the way that you do things inside of your company with the goal of being more efficient and maybe making your looms shorter. If that's one takeaway. All right, good to see you all. A bunch of regular faces here. Ashley, Molly, great to meet you. I hope you enjoy the rest of your week and we'll see all soon.
- [56:41]
Ashley Faust
Okay, bye. Thank you.
- [56:42]
Derek
See you later.
- [56:46]
Dave Gerhardt
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast.
- [56:48]
Derek
If you like this episode, you know what, I'm not even going to ask.
- [56:51]
Dave Gerhardt
You to subscribe and leave a review.
- [56:53]
Derek
Because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you.
- [56:56]
Dave Gerhardt
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.
- [57:29]
Derek
Are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group.
- [57:31]
Dave Gerhardt
Or maybe just venting about your boss.
- [57:33]
Derek
When you need to get in there.
- [57:34]
Dave Gerhardt
And get something off your chest.
- [57:36]
Derek
It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check.
- [57:39]
Dave Gerhardt
It out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year.
- [57:45]
Derek
Go check it out.
- [57:46]
Dave Gerhardt
Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community. Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2, half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's gonna be here. But let's be real, most teams are still guessing when it comes to what's actually working in marketing today, which channels to double down on, which campaigns are worth running again or not, and what's just noise, what's actually contributing to Pipeline and what's not. It's Messy. This is B2B marketing and that's exactly where Paramark comes in. Paramark is a marketing attribution platform that show what's working and what's not so you know exactly where to invest your next dollar. They use marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to give you a full picture of performance across every channel, tactic and region. And it's built by a marketer made for marketers. And right now they're hosting a special office hours on helping you with your second half of the year, planning, forecasting and putting your best foot forward for the rest of this year and into 2026. It's not a sales pitch from them, but this is your chance to get real help from their experts that are at the intersection of marketing and planning. Bring your data, bring your questions, your roadmap and the Paramark team is going to help you figure out what's driving results, where to cut and where to invest moving forward. So stop guessing and you can plan smarter right now with the team at Paramark. But you got to grab an office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get this space. You should go check them out. Go to Paramark. Com Office Hours. That's Paramark. Com Office hours.