← The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
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- [00:01]
A
This episode is brought to you by paramark. Look, it's November 2026. Planning. We're already here. 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. So they're going to give you a 45 minute strategy session. They'll help you measure the real impact of every marketing dollar you spend. They'll pull insights from your current media mix and design a 2026 roadmap that's rooted in data, not gut. Like, how do I get this? Can I? I need some of this insight. This is an amazing offer and it is real. They're going to really sit down with you and walk through your business and help you get more insight on what you should be doing in 2026. So go check it out. If you want to future proof your marketing strategy for next year, don't miss out on this offer. Go and grab your spot right now. Pull over on the side of the road, stop your run, do whatever you're doing. Go to paramark.com brand-consult that's paramark.com brand-consULT brand consult. We'll Link it in here in case you can't understand the words coming out of my mouth. Let's get into this episode. You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt. Okay.
- [02:26]
B
Hello.
- [02:26]
A
Good morning. Good morning, good afternoon. Oh, this is so much better, by the way. So I have this fancy camera, and if there's any. Any tech people out there that want to help me out, I do have this fancy camera, and it looks great on our podcast, but when we do these webinars, it's impossible to, like, see the chat because I got the elgato prompter, but it's small, and this is such a better setup. So shout out to my IT team for getting me. Getting me set up today. I'm excited to be here. I see people rolling in. If you can hear me right now, can you just throw a message in the chat? So I know that I'm not. Know that I'm not out here alone. That'd be nice. Nice. Hey, Shayla, what's up? Okay, here we go. Loud and clear. Everybody's here. Dave, take a picture of the setup for us and post on LinkedIn. I can't, because then you'd see all the embarrassing things that I have, like, off screen over there. Actually, just a lot of my kids aren't. I do have Mo. Mo's in the house today. Mo's joining me today. We got some people doing some stuff on our house, so they're. There's Mo. Mo. What's up, dude? He's a very good boy. Lazy boy Bernadoodle. So super excited. Dan asked, can we switch up the small talk question instead of, where are you joining from? Too late. I already said it. So my name is Dave Gerhardt. I am the host here at Exit 5. I'm the founder of Exit 5. Exit 5 is, in my opinion, the top B2B marketing community on planet Earth, as rated in G2's Forester Wave. About the best communities on Earth. No, I'm just kidding. And we do these free live sessions. We have a community of a thousand, a couple thousand marketing professionals, but we do these free live sessions twice a month. Don't you dare call them webinars. And they're super fun. Because what's different than a podcast is, like, the best part to me is being in the chat and seeing what people are saying, because, you know, we're all. We're all marketers. It's fun to. It's fun to hang out with each other, share your ideas. And so if you're here, take the time out of your day to actually be here, participate in the chat, share what you're doing, share what's working at your company. The focus of this session today is on B2B buying. And we decided to do something on this session because we've been talking a lot more specifically about the tactics like AI and SEO. We're doing one in a couple weeks on AI and email. It's AI this, AI that. We haven't done a higher level one about strategy. And we wanted to grab three marketing leaders at different, different stage companies to come and hang out and talk about, like, what is it? What does all this AI stuff mean for B2B marketing? Something that I lay in bed and think about at night. It's like, what is the role of marketing? I can do my research. Hey, we need to buy a CRM for exit 5 right now. Let's go. We went to ChatGPT, we had Chat GPT do all the research, we collected all the data, we compared this to that, and then we're going to reach out to the company, and that's how we're all buying things in our personal lives today. And so the question is like, what does that mean for the role of marketing? What does it mean for the role of sales? And so we have a great crew of three marketers here with us today. I'm going to bring them, Bring them up in a second. This session will be recorded. We'll take all your questions in the. In the Q and A. That's the best place to do it. Not the chat, in the Q and A. Maybe we'll get to some of them as we go and then people upvote them so we can sort the most popular ones. So real quick, I just want to give a shout out to our friends at Walnut. They're the sponsors behind this session today, and I really appreciate it. Walnut makes interactive product demos to help you match how people actually want to buy in real time on your website. Like, if I go to somebody's website, I want you to show me the damn product. Show me the product. Walnut makes it easy. They do interactive product demos. They're one of the best companies doing it right now. You can go check them out@Walnutio. Thank you for sponsoring this webinar and being a part of a bunch of things we've done at Exit 5 this year, so. All right, Allison, want to roll my people out here? That'd be really nice. Heck, yeah. Lindsay's here, Tom's here, Aditya's here. All right, Lindsay, let's go. You, then Tom, then Aditya. Just say. Say hello real quick. Who are you? Where are you writing it? Who are you? What do you do for work? Rough stage inside your company? Then we'll get into it.
- [06:06]
C
Sure. Yeah. I'm Lindsey o'. Brien. I'm head of marketing and operations at Predictive. We are a bootstrap B2B company helping marketers activate their revenue through our revenue activation framework. I have a very lean team of two full time employees and a content contractor.
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A
So happy to be here, Mr. Tom. What's up, Dave?
- [06:29]
D
Thanks for having me on your webinar. It's great.
- [06:31]
A
You're such a jerk, man. Right away. It's not a webinar. This is a live session. This is like a cool. It's like how everybody is doing events now. But they're like. It's like a festival for marketers. That's what this is. This is not a webinar. It's a festival. It's a digital festival for marketers.
- [06:45]
D
Yeah, it's gonna be a great webinar. So I run marketing in a series B startup called Incident IO. We sell incident management software when things break like AWS outage. Last week we helped companies resolve it. I work at a small company. I came from a much bigger company, a company called Recorded Futures. So I've gone through the journey of having to run a huge team to now having to actually do all the marketing. Which has been exciting but also scary. And looking forward to chatting today.
- [07:10]
A
Who invited him next?
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B
Hey everybody. Aditya of Empathy here. I run marketing for Moengage North America. We're about to hit 100 million ARR. We sell customer engagement products to other businesses that engage their audiences. Certain brands like Poshmark, Chick Fil A as well as SoundCloud or a few of our customers to tell you how we think and who we target. And Tom, the haircut looks great, man.
- [07:36]
D
That's right. I wasn't lying to you guys.
- [07:38]
A
That was some founder mode stuff. Tom took the. Tom took our prep call from the barber's chair the other day. I wouldn't. I wouldn't know what that's like. That'd be like. Let me call you from the. The shower. Okay, so I'm gonna. I'm gonna kick this off. I got a bunch of questions. I'm not gonna call on you. I just want you to like, if you're passionate about it, answer it. And we'll. We'll. We'll use it as a jumping off point. But what do you think? What's the biggest shift? Like, how are you thinking about your marketing strategy because of what's happening with AI? And not even tool specific, like, hey, we're using this SEO tool, but like, has anything actually changed in how you think about go to market inside of your company because of of AI?
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C
Although I think that for us it's really. We've moved way past the point of pretending like our competitors don't exist and we really need to be focused on our clear messaging. It needs to be who we are, what we do, who are for and who we compete against. Because we know that over the years we've continually lost more and more control over the buyer journey. There's no guarantee that they're coming to our website. So we need to make sure that those AI summaries, that AI research is picking up on who we are and what we do so that we can surface that information. So it's more about the orchestration of all the information rather than being in promotional mindset.
- [08:59]
D
First slide I put up on our company kickoff this year was a math formula that was essentially some mathematician. It was essentially marketing success is dictated by AI adoption times taste squared. What that means to me is you have to be good at adopting AI. And I think right now there are opportunities to do that better than your competitors. But at some point everyone's going to use the same tooling, everyone's going to have the same prompts. So the idea that taste has an exponential impact on marketing is the thing I'm trying to double down on. And I have zero taste. I'm a mathematician AI guy. So I've had to rethink about my entire team is people with great taste. And I think we do a really good job of that at my company. So we've really tried to make our strategy be the unscalable taste. Things that are hard to put into a notion, doc, but you know it when you see it. It's hard to measure, but like, I'm convinced that that's the thing that's going to drive marketing in the next five years.
- [09:54]
B
Yeah, yeah. So I think for us it's twofold. One, obviously getting people to use AI, that's 1/2 of the equation. So they actually see how these tools work and how it fits into the workflow internally. And this comes down to like sales and getting them to use aspects of AI. Like we use Notebook LLM and we put all our content stuff into Notebook LLM. We're like, you don't get an airtable anymore here. Use the LLM, it has all your content, look up what you need, put in the phrases, don't come asking for us. You have all the access, will be constantly updated and getting my teams like, hey, change your workflows. That's one aspect of the internal side, the external side. We are completely obsessed with distribution. Anything my team does has to start with distribution. Like, Derek, we have a blog post. I'm like, don't care. How's it go with distribution? They're like, wait, why? Because AI literally only gives a shit about where it shows up and how many places it shows up and who's talking about it. Your authority has gone out the window. So like distribution, distribution, distribution, everything you do comes down to that. So you want to write a blog post, who's the partner on it, who's the practitioner that's going to give you a quote, or who's going to share it when it goes live? That is all we are obsessed and care about. Because that's the only way we think we'll reach our audience. Because everyone, as we said, does research before they even come to you. As Dave, you mentioned you did all your research and you're like, cool, I'm ready to go. Yeah, you've done all the work without even talking to me.
- [11:06]
A
So I'm not going to sit through your process because, because that's how it has to be. No disrespect. You're. I'm not going to waste an hour of my time talking to some 22 year old BDR, because that is the process that it has to be. And I, I was 22 once. I'm not, I'm not discriminating. I'm just saying, like, like we got better things to do than sit through that demo. Maria in the chat said, Love CMOs who are okay to do unmeasurable things. It's so crazy to say that out loud because I think the, the longer you've been around marketing, you understand that these are the things that matter. How do people actually buy? Is it because they went through some perfect funnel, they saw all your ads, they converted in all the ways, or is it because a lot of times, like, well, the product's really good and then the CMO knew the CMO of the other company and she told them that it was really good. And then like when they went to the event and they had this really cool, like it's all these steps. And so I love this idea of like this phrase that Tom had. The, the unmeasurable, the, the unscalable things. But it's also weird. It's this weird juxtaposition because, like, you're all using AI a lot in the actual, like, workflow of your business. But then from a. As a mark, from a marketing standpoint, you're trying to think of these unscalable, harder to measure, harder to quantify things. It's like, it's this balance of both. I. I feel that in our business right now, we're doing this event in March, and we're like, we're literally finding a hundred addresses by hand, handwriting a hundred envelopes, hand, selecting a hundred people to invite. And it's like, this is taking a lot of time, but it's almost like that is. That is the opportunity today is to. Is to find more things like that in. In the business. Right?
- [12:35]
D
Yeah. Do you want specific examples? I heard your audience likes numbers and specifics.
- [12:39]
A
Yeah, no, they love when people just come in here and just use B2B marketing, like, platitudes.
- [12:44]
D
I just. The. Earlier this week, we just went live with an $80,000 billboard that you see coming into San Francisco on the. On the. I guess it's the 101.
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A
Yeah.
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D
And it's a big old bright orange. We call it the alarm laid color. And after this thing is done in four weeks, I'm not going to have any way to measure it. Like, I'll know some anecdotes, I'll have some data points, but, like, can I go to my CFO and say, for this $80,000 billboard, we got 1.3 million in pipeline out of it? No. And I don't care because I know, like, my audience lives in San Francisco. They're commuting into their office every day. They're going to see it. I'm 100% convinced of that.
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B
So along those lines, we did something earlier this year. We launched a book called the Customer Engagement Book, Adapt or Die. And we could not measure it in the sense of we printed it out. We had, I think, like, roughly we spent probably 80, 90k making this book. And each book to print, the first edition was like, 40 bucks. We got the cost down like 10, 11, and it was like 120 page book.
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D
Think I have it.
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B
I have it right here. There we go. And it was like, 13 different authors. And this goes back to, like, how Tom was talking about taste. But the big part of this was we've had over 2,800 people download it, and we've shipped out 800 physical copies to people. And, like, I. They're like, where's the pipeline. What's going. I'm like, listen, give me time and this will show up. And that's where, back to Tom's point, it may not be unmeasurable. It'll be unmeasurable in upfront, but now we can attribute over 5 million in pipe to this thing and like about 4.8 actually, to be specific. But from enterprises medium to small businesses across the board. And so, but to do that, we had to get the buy in to do the unmeasurable thing so we could actually measure later. I think you can do the measuring, but it just shows up on the scoreboard at a later point because how people buy, as Tom was saying now, Dave was saying, Lindsey saying, has shifted completely. And they're not going to follow your pretty little funnel that you want them to. They'll do their own thing, but it'll show up on the scoreboard, I believe, just not in the way that people are traditionally used to measure.
- [14:39]
C
Yeah, I think revenue is obviously the big one that everyone wants whenever you're going to measure time. Efficiency is another one because that equates to revenue as well. But I think one that people don't measure enough and because it's difficult. Is team morale. Does that new workflow or does that tool make your team happier? Are they doing more of the things that excite them and bring them joy? Are they more passionate about their role? Because that's a big one, that they're likely going to be there longer than you're going to have a team that wants to stick around. So it's not just about the time savings and the revenue.
- [15:18]
A
Okay. So I'm just trying to take notes and organize my thoughts around this because we, we came out of the gate hot. We want to focus on, like, what's changing in B2B buying. I'm hearing that a common theme is this unscalable stuff. But I want to. And I'm taking notes, so we'll get back there. But I want to take a detour back to something, a part that kind of connects all of your. All, all of these things right now is this like, idea of patience. Like, how do you, how do you stand up? Maybe this is easier for some of you who have more experience and have more wins under your belt than are proven. But can any marketing leader or any marketer on this webinar.
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B
Damn it.
- [15:52]
A
Live session. Can any marketer on this session today, you know, go back to their team and say, hey, I actually, I want to think about measuring this in a different way. I want to have more patience. I want you to trust me a little bit more. Like, do you have to earn that trust or how is there a way you can stand up in front of the company and say, hey, here's how people buy? And so here's what our marketing playbook needs to be. Because Brendan Hufford, I love, he calls this checkbox marketing. He's like, so many companies just do this checkbox marketing. So how do you, how do you break from that? Because it does take courage to say, like, hey, we're not going to measure that this way. We're not saying we're not going to measure it, but we're not not going to do it this way. We're going to try this thing. We need to do things like a billboard, write a book, do unscalable things. How do you go get that buy in? I want you to talk to the people who are listening to this right now being like, okay, I hear you all, but like, you're all proven people, whatever. It's easy for you to walk in the room and go get those things done. Help us walk somebody through that in the company.
- [16:47]
B
So I'd go into this because I deal with this a lot, like how the company's set up. We have most of our exact team in India and then North America is our fastest growing region. And so they're not so familiar with the region. So whenever I put ideas out there, where the team puts ideas, there's always like, wait, will this work? We don't know, et cetera. It hasn't worked here. And before we do any campaign, it doesn't matter what level or, you know, you have experience or not be obsessed with your customer and their problems. Before, like literally I launch any big campaign or my team does, they'll come to an idea. It's like one distribution, right? And the second part is like, how do we de risk it? And I asked them, like, have you talked to any prospects or customers? And so like over the year we started building a base of like 15 people I can text that are either people who are not our customers, but are friendlies, but are in different platforms and ask them, like, what do you think about this? Does this resonate with you? Does it align with what you're thinking? Would this get you to take a meeting, a demo, or tell someone else to attend?
- [17:38]
A
Yes, can I? I love this. I think about this all the time. I go to somebody's website and I'm like, would anybody at this company actually do this? Contact sales now it's like, why, why would I do this? I'm not going to do this. Do we, do we think of that? And I, I beat myself up over that all the time. If I rush to send out an email and then I see it in my inbox, I'm like, damn, like I just sent that email to, you know, 23,000 people. And like, I probably wouldn't have opened that email. Like that is, I think that is a common trait among people that are good at marketing. It doesn't matter what industry you're in, what stage, whatever. It's like, how do you think like that.
- [18:10]
B
Yeah. And that's come down. Like your customers will tell you whether they are customers or your audience will tell you if that's a foolish idea. And you have to talk to multiples. Obviously don't just talk to one and you know, and of one, but go after them. And like, at least I've learned to de risk that way. And it saved me and be like, look, I talked to this many people. Here's the names, the companies, the titles is what they said. Here's the recordings. With AI, it's more beautiful than easier than ever to record stuff, put it up there, summarize and say, here you go. And that's won me a lot of like, I wouldn't say arguments, but like there's no debate. If the customer is telling you, audience is telling you, this is what I care about.
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A
Right, Yep.
- [18:46]
C
So, and I don't think it has to every. Everything doesn't have to be this big. Bet you can start out small and build up incrementally. But I would say moving from the tactical, you know, writing your email with AI to actually using it as a strategic counterpart, someone that is challenging you. Because if you let it, AI continues to just be your cheerleader and that can be really annoying. So let's get it to a place where it's pressure testing the things that you're giving it. And then for something more future focused is doing AI impact assessments. So, okay, maybe that's what your customer is feeling now in their role. But we all know that AI has exponentially changed the way that we think about our role and the things that we're focused on. What does your customer's role look like in the next 12 to 18 months? What are they focused on? What does their role look like? Does your solution still serve them? If not, then it's not just about a messaging change, it's about an entire product roadmap change. So there's a right, what to do right now versus what to look for in the future.
- [19:59]
A
Yeah, Tom, what are you going to say? Build on that.
- [20:02]
D
There's a few things there are a lot of questions about. How do you do things that aren't measurable? If you all work at a company where marketing isn't strategic enough to make big bets, you're at the wrong company.
- [20:10]
A
Sorry.
- [20:11]
D
Not sorry in that one. And then second, if you're also at a company that doesn't have a really good AI product roadmap, it's going to be hard to compete. The reality. I live in a world where engineers are dealing with these outages. We have vibe coders churning out more code than ever. You need software like ours to be able to react. You need AI to fight. AI is sort of how we talk about it. But I think for me, the two non negotiables are the company needs to be AI at the core or they're going to be irrelevant in the next five years. And the CEO has to be willing to do the kinds of things that break through the noise. Like if we just think about all the AI slop that's getting churned out by every company right now, it's going to be a sort of regression to the mean. If we all just do the same tactics on the same channels. Like, I just spent a $22,000 as of this morning on a month on an influencer campaign. So we will be working with an agency who will help us find influencers who talk to developers and engineers. These engineers will churn out a bunch of content across a bunch of channels. That feels like a way to break through the AI generated slop. What are the places you can go that are going to let you stand out? Which has never been more difficult than it is right now because everyone has N8N and Zapier and Clay and we all do the same emails, we all send the same templates. It's all the same. None of that shit's going to break through anymore.
- [21:28]
A
Totally. It's like the same thing over. I think if you just cover up AI and you called it like Martech or whatever. It's just, we're all, you know, we're all using this. It's the same thing. Oh, I, I would find out. What Tom's using is like, oh, he's using optimizely for this thing. Okay. He's using, you know, whatever. I wrote that down because I want to, I want to recap these and I, I love this. This is a more strategic discussion which, what, what which we wanted to have. But my. Tom said, basically, this is my take. You can, you know, get this for social media, whatever. How to do good marketing in 2026. It's, number one, you have to be the company. You have to be AI to the core. Like, AI has to be. Your company has to be AI native and marketing team, whatever. And then number two is the CEO has to be willing to break. Do things that break through the noise. I love that as a, as a benchmark, because let's. Let's just go look at what everyone's doing in our industry and let's find different ways to do it as opposed to just running the same place every everybody else does. I like that. I have a question about the marketing funnel. Does that still come up? Like, does the. Do you. Do you all think in terms of funnel anymore as marketers? You know, it used to be when I learned it, I was at. I think I was at constant contact. And it was like the funnel was like awareness, interest, desire, action. And then like, there was teams across the company dedicated to each parts of the funnel. You know, there's an ad team, there's a conversion team, there's a custom. There's a life cycle team. Do you all think of that inside of your companies? Like, do you sit down with your team, you draw out, like, the customer journey or the funnel, or has all that gone away? Does any of that still. Still matter? I'm curious how you're thinking about, like, awareness that, you know, I got to.
- [22:57]
B
Jump into this because I just had this entire review with, with my team and everyone else. And I think this goes back to also what you're saying, David. I think there is a funnel, but there isn't. And I think, like, people have to start thinking about how would you buy products, how are you going through the funnel yourself and how does your audience go through it? And it's not a funnel, but just the journey in how you go about, like, discovering, engaging, learning. And so with my team, I'm much more like, forget the funnel. Just, like, think of where they're on their journey. Are they, like, already ready to make a purchase or just starting? Or they're like, learning. And, like, I've had to shift the thinking to make. What do we make? Assets where, like, if they're just starting that we show up versus if they're already, like, ready to make a decision. What does that look like? And back to what Tom was saying. Like, with influencers, like, is influencers like in the middle of the pack or is it at the top of the pack or is it even at the bottom of the pack? And we don't know. And so some of these, like, channels, I think, are, like, pretty saturated. So the funnel no longer applies. But the journeys through these channels, I think you have to start understanding how it's being utilized or not. And so that's how we shifted our thinking.
- [23:57]
C
Yeah. So like I said, I have a lean team. So. And we oversee everything from brand and demand to enablement and retention. And then I also have rev ops under my purview as well. So those stages are really helpful when you're communicating internally because most people know about them and understand them. As far as running campaigns, we don't really look at the stages that we just talked about, but more of the engagement. Like, well, we use AI to really figure out what the scoring model looks like so that we can have that better sales and marketing handoff and understand what a quality lead looks like and if it converts to a quality deal. So it's not so much focusing on those stages so much as it is making sure we've all got alignment internally on what engagement points. Look, check the box to hand that over to sales and let them do their thing.
- [24:55]
D
There's a.
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A
There's a bunch of really good stuff in the chat on this. Kirk. Kirk said the funnel is a planning tool. I think I really like it as that because I think you need it as a. You need it as a guardrail. Like, you still have to figure out which marketing place to run. And so it's like, oh, maybe, maybe not. Maybe literally just not enough people in our market know that we exist. Like, hey, we have Tom's case. Like, we have the product. The product rocks. It's just early. Not enough people know about us. Like, oh, yeah, we're going to go spend money on billboards because, like, we just. We straight up need to tell more people we exist. Okay, cool. Versus, like, hey, we have a ton of interest. We have a ton of inbound demand. Like, meetings are full. We're just, like, struggling to close deals right now. Okay, that's a conversion issue. Maybe the funnel is. I really like that. And then Alexander says in the chat, forces of progress still one of my favorite ways of evaluating where a prospect is in their journey. So still like the funnel. Okay, here's what. Here's what I want to go next. Tell me something that was a staple of your playbook. Tom, let's start with you. What was a staple of Tom Wentworth's, like, marketing playbook? Maybe you know 10 years ago that like is not a thing. Is not a thing.
- [25:57]
D
Yeah. I used to work in a company called Optimizely that pioneered the idea of website optimization. We're going to run n number of experiments and find the best shade of blue that's going to give our landing page the best conversion. Was the dumbest thing. Like the dumbest thing. I had some. I think even last week we talked about this at my off site.
- [26:15]
A
Did you say you worked at Optimizely?
- [26:17]
D
Yeah.
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B
You did?
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A
I was a cmo.
- [26:20]
D
Well, the company that bought Optimize. It's a long story. The company that bought the company that became Optimizedly, this company called Episerver, which is Ektron, which bought Optimizing, rebrand, took their name and rebranded.
- [26:33]
A
Oh, I didn't know.
- [26:34]
D
Hired Aquia.
- [26:35]
A
Okay.
- [26:35]
D
Yeah. So my LinkedIn says optimize. It's a little bit of a stretch, but it's, it's close enough.
- [26:40]
A
I didn't know. I didn't know. You're just your fanboy.
- [26:41]
D
Sorry.
- [26:42]
A
Okay.
- [26:43]
D
But, but a big user like of website testing, sure. There's, it's of zero consequence to me. I haven't thought about it in 10 years.
- [26:49]
A
So you don't do any website testing?
- [26:51]
D
No, do. Is that true for both testing? Not trying to figure out if the. If.
- [26:56]
B
If.
- [26:56]
D
Putting the word.
- [26:59]
A
Yeah, the button should.
- [27:01]
D
Be blue or orange. It doesn't matter.
- [27:03]
A
Is that because AI. AI can do it or it literally doesn't matter.
- [27:06]
D
The lift is never the percent gains that you get. First of all, most people don't understand the concept of statistical significance. So they run this test. It takes them six months to get any learning. So they run it. They, they put it live after two weeks and it was, it just had no statistical validation.
- [27:22]
A
Is this like, is this only in B2B? Like if, if you and I owned like a, you know, consumer beverage brand, I'm assuming we would, we would, we'd.
- [27:29]
D
Be probably more likely because in order to get learnings, you have to have conversions. And none of us B2B marketers have enough conversions to get any sort of real meaningful learning. At scale. I get like 20 demo requests a day. You're not going to learn anything by.
- [27:42]
A
By changing the button, the button color.
- [27:45]
B
Or even the language. We definitely don't. We don't ab test our home. Good.
- [27:49]
D
Hallelujah. Smart people on this webinar.
- [27:55]
A
Yeah, I, yeah, I don't, I don't have an opinion on that. We always were like, we always couldn't do Enough of it. For some reason it was like we need a hundred variations of the homepage to see which one is the winner. Meanwhile, someone like just DMS you and you're like, yo man, so your CEO is awesome. Like, can I get a demo?
- [28:10]
D
Yeah, exactly.
- [28:12]
A
Okay, that, that's a good one. Anything. What else? What else? Come on. Come on, you three.
- [28:16]
C
I agree with that one. I think gating everything is definitely, you know, there was a time when it was a collect information at all costs. And now we're in a very much give information as freely as possible so that we can be. We can educate the buyer as much as possible in our favor in most cases. But also I think now that it's very easy to compare and do that AI research. It's important to make it as accurate as possible and because it's going to be easy to compare across the board. So I'd say no trying not to gate as much content as possible unless you absolutely have to.
- [29:01]
A
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 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.
- [30:45]
C
Pricing too. That needs to go out the window.
- [30:47]
A
Like not having that event.
- [30:48]
D
We talk about gating content for a second. It's the fucking dumbest thing. I hate to swear this way. I like it is the dumbest thing. Like, it's a throwback to, like, I need to show the VP of sales I hit my lead commit target this month.
- [31:03]
A
So let me put a form in.
- [31:04]
D
Front of my nonsense content. If anyone on this call, I'm looking at you right now. If any of you are gating content, I'm blocking you on LinkedIn.
- [31:11]
A
Yeah, I get everything. We run a different business though.
- [31:14]
B
But hold on, does Getting content on LinkedIn calendar say comment to get asset?
- [31:21]
A
I have the opposite. Let me, let me put this on the record. I have the. What, What a privileged life you have, all of you. If the biggest problem in your life is that people want you to comment on their LinkedIn post to get a piece of content. Some of these posts I see out there, these people, these people should go to jail. I'm like, who cares? Don't comment on it. Like, ignore it. Move on. Gosh, let's get you some bigger problems. It's like you might see your, your.
- [31:48]
D
Ex, your ex colleague, Adam from Drift. Adam the Sift Rock guy? Yeah, he made a post about it and about how he hates it and someone from LinkedIn, like a VP at LinkedIn commented and said, we agree this is a bad experience. It was a whole thing yesterday.
- [32:03]
A
Well, let me, let's talk about LinkedIn. But while we have this audience, the other, the other place that LinkedIn has fumbled the bag. I'd like to give a shout out to Eric from Hatch, who, who coined this phrase for me, fumbled the bag. So we've been running tests and other people have some similar data, but with video on LinkedIn. Despite the fact that everyone looks at social media videos, what do they tell you about social media videos? Vertical video. Vertical video. Vertical video. That's what TikTok is. That's what Reels is. YouTube shorts, right? LinkedIn. No clue what they're doing. The best converting video that the best engaged videos on LinkedIn actually are actually horizontal videos. Because have you seen the experience, like if I post a. It just, it just is like my face like in your screen with no context of a caption or anything. And so this is like a reverse growth hack. It's like because they got the feature wrong. Like the videos that work better right now on LinkedIn are horizontal videos. It's amazing gating content. I think the issue, look, so obviously the side tangent about the LinkedIn stuff, the issue to me is not gating content. It is like thinking that gated content should then get a phone call from your sales team and some, some good outcome is going to happen for that. Right? And so like I do think it's, it's a totally fine mechanism for like content delivery and getting people to hand raise things and maybe get interest on a top. I like it at that. But yeah, I remember my first, my first real marketing job. The. I did marketing for a year before we had a. I had a sales counterpart and they brought in a VP of sales. It's got 20 years more experience than me. You know, I'm just a kid in my 20s, like running marketing for the first time. He's like, why don't you come in here and draw, draw me the funnel on the whiteboard. I draw him out the funnel and I'm bragging about all these metrics and here's we got 20,000, you know, this many visitors, this many contacts. He's like, how many, how many sales qualified leads are there, buddy? I'm like, I have no idea. I'm like, we have a really big email list. He's like, yeah, yeah. He's like, these.
- [33:50]
B
Would you.
- [33:50]
A
What you have, what you have here? These are not leads. These are called contacts. And that was the very first like slap in the face that I got from a sales sales leader.
- [33:58]
B
I think to echo that part, one of the things that we were doing in the past and I think that we've stopped altogether now is back to like, oh, someone fills out a form, hey, go contact them. Sales. Like we stopped that. Sales doesn't get any leads or anything except for like until they literally have hit filled out a demo form. Like that's the only point which we hand something to sales. But that's a practice. Like in the past you'd be like, hey, they filled out this. Go talk to them.
- [34:20]
A
Oh, they've done this many actions.
- [34:21]
B
These are lead score says it's ready to follow up with. And all the debates you go back and forth and countless hours, dear God. That you'd spend on stupid shit of that's a lead.
- [34:30]
A
Why don't you follow up with it?
- [34:31]
B
It's not a lead, it's a contact.
- [34:33]
C
Yeah. We just used AI last quarter to completely revisit our scoring model for both contacts and accounts. And we set up a similar thing is that until a contact reaches a certain engagement score, they're not even assigned.
- [34:51]
D
Yeah.
- [34:52]
A
What else? What should I be asking you right now? I have a bunch of questions, but let me take a. I'll take a drink drink of my water like I'm let you free form. What, what, what should we talk about?
- [35:00]
D
Is AI resulting in smaller marketing teams for sure?
- [35:05]
A
Yes.
- [35:06]
C
There was actually a Procter and Gamble study earlier this year. Did you see it? It's in April, I believe. And they compared human only teams to people using AI and what they found was that one person using AI performed as well as human only teams, but two people using AI outperformed everyone. It was a solid study. It's great. I think that's just proof that it's here to stay and that people are going to be more generalist and that they can be empowered to do more despite what their job title is.
- [35:46]
B
That's true.
- [35:47]
A
I've seen this just directionally as a thought leader, somebody who makes a living hosting a podcast, interviewing CMOs. Maybe you heard of it. It seems like a lot of people are. Team size is shrinking, or maybe it's not shrinking, but it's not growing at the rate that it used to. Everyone is under intense pressure. Like to ask for one headcount right now is like, you better go to the CEO and board and explain like why you can't do this with technology. And by the way, I'm not sure that that's entirely fair. I think there's a lot of. I believe in AI, but I also think there's a lot of like we can't really do all the things we think it can. It's not literally running the entire business for you, despite what some people might say. There's a lot of half baked stuff or like you could vibe code something and then actually it just gets to halfway and then you just spent a week doing it and now you. It's still not done and it doesn't work. And so I think you, I think you still do need. But I've never shared this perspective. I don't think on any of our webinars. So I think one of the things for me in my career in marketing, I hit a ceiling once I got to become like a team manager and I was the VP of marketing, and we had 30 people. I came up because I was like a. I was a good marketer. And then you get thrust into managing people, and then you become the head of marketing, and that's the progression. And they basically brought in, like, a professional CMO over me, because that was what you needed. You needed the CMO who has, you know, managed a team of a million people at Salesforce and has seen that. And I think what's very exciting about what's happening now is, like, I think the trend is not just smaller team sizes, but I think it matters that the CMO is actually good at marketing now more than ever. And the CMO is not just the people manager.
- [37:20]
B
Tom.
- [37:20]
A
Like, I know that's why you're still doing what you're doing. And, like, you want to be a cmo. It's because you actually enjoy the brand building, the storytelling, the company building, the marketing. I think that unless you're at maybe those top Fortune 100 companies or whatever, like, the CMO job is less about becoming, like, a professional, like, people manager now, which is super exciting, at least for me, with my confirmation bias of liking the marketing. And so I think the secret is, like, CMO team of, you know, five to 15 marketers or whatever, and then lots of AI and agency. Like, that's the direction. Then I know a bunch of founders who are starting new companies. Founders who, like, had companies in the last wave of SaaS and then are starting new companies now, and they're based basically, like, oh, I would never have a big marketing team ever again. And that's the founder saying that right. Right out of the gate.
- [38:07]
B
So I'd love to ask the folks on the call, anyone in there, like, how much AI are you guys actually using on your teams and what. What tools? Because, like, I. I very honestly, this is gonna, like, maybe piss people off. But, like, I have bought one AI product in the last 12 months.
- [38:23]
A
What is it? Name it.
- [38:25]
B
Zel Z AI product. And it was because they sold me so well on how it fits into my workflow. Yeah.
- [38:32]
A
And what I'm doing.
- [38:33]
B
I've, like, looked at many, but everything comes out to my favorite AI chat buddy, which is either Gemini or ChatGPT. Yeah. I have not bought AI tools. Like, nothing has, like, made me say I want to jump into this. Because oftentimes I'm like, wait, this is making my world even harder. Yes, it might give me more outputs.
- [38:52]
A
But I'd love to know how much.
- [38:54]
B
You guys are doing. Then.
- [38:55]
A
Put it in the chat. Put it in Everybody's doing right. Put it in the chat. How much AI would you say you're using?
- [38:59]
D
Yeah, for us it's a lot. At my company, one really tangible example, we do a ton of agentic stuff off of Gong call transcripts. So every time a Gong call transcript happen, every time a gong call happens, about 10 agents fire. For example, our sales reps have to use Medpic when they're filling out details on an opportunity. All the Medpic stuff, we have an agent that just reads that call transcript, pulls out all the eight pieces of Medpic and dumps it into Salesforce. So multiply that times 20 sellers, times 10 minutes of work. Every discovery call, we're saving them tens of hours a week by doing that. Every time there's a mention of a competitor, it summarizes the learnings of that competitor, dumps it to a database that we use to update a battle card every few weeks or so. There's a whole bunch of stuff. Call transcripts are the gold mine of stuff. And AI makes call transcripts actionable. We used to talk about listening to a couple of Gong calls a week. But like AI can listen to every single one and pull out insights on every single one. And then you can make them do things like update Salesforce, update the battle card, send the slack notification to the.
- [40:06]
B
Person, did you have to buy new tools or did you take what you had and just plug it in?
- [40:10]
D
Clay and Zapier, man. Clay and Zapier are the two. I love Clay and I love Zapier.
- [40:16]
A
Never heard of either.
- [40:17]
B
So those we have implemented also as well. I'm just wondering like, is there any other tools also I.
- [40:23]
C
We keep it very much to the the general use tools. One, they're more cost effective and two, they're just more versatile. So we have ChatGPT, Claude, NotebookLM, because to your point, Tom, those notebooks and those call transcripts, AI can store all of those. If we need to call out something that someone said to us recently about something that went really well with their campaign, we can just ask it a question. It gives us a verbatim quote of something that was said and a note to where the call transcript can be found. So that's been a huge help. It also helped with our mixed method surveys where we paired survey data with actual interviews with marketers and it surfaced again verbatim quotes which it was so important to us because we didn't want to misrepresent anyone. So those three. And then the only kind of niche tool we have is Riverside for videos So I like to keep it nice and simple, get as much out of those tools as humanly possible and then, you know, if, if there's a really great use case that you need to double down on and there's a great tool out there, go ahead and invest.
- [41:42]
D
I also will give a shout out to exit 5 sponsor, at least at some point. Qualified. I think I was super skeptical of the AI BDR idea, but we've been using this qualified thing to do inbound follow up. Like we go to a big event, we met 800 people, only 40 of them really want to talk to us. I think 10 years ago we would have sent an email nurture stream on a HubSpot and said thank you for coming to the booth and we'd sent them a bunch of resources. We're now doing all of that sort of follow up and disqualified. And the emails it writes are shockingly good. Like, good enough. Where I'm proud of them. We give it some context. So it's not just writing emails, it's off of random stuff.
- [42:21]
A
You're proud of them. Like you're proud of. You're proud of the aisdr.
- [42:25]
D
You're like, I'm so I look at, I'm not embarrassed by it. I'm not. I don't look at it and say, this is AI slime.
- [42:31]
A
I know, I know.
- [42:32]
D
Shockingly good.
- [42:33]
A
Look, one of the hardest things in, in for me in marketing has been like, I've always been the email guy. Like, I'll give it to Dave, he'll write the email, Dave writes the email. Like, I'm not good at many things in life, but like WR emails is, is one of them. And it's been an impossible task to like try to scale that and train someone on it. And it always ends up just being like, I'll write it anyway. But stuff like this makes a ton of sense and I'm glad to hear it's working because everybody else is telling me nothing's working. Outbound is not working, it's dead, it's whatever. And so what do you think makes the AI outbound work though, Tom? Is it like they do better research? Like, how does it.
- [43:07]
D
Yeah. So good questions. It's the context, it's the research. Right? So I feed this Piper qualified thing a summary of the person's LinkedIn profile, a summary of the summary of the company. I give it all the contextual stuff about Incident IO so it's able to take and I give it all the context of what they were doing on our site. It takes all those things, it can munge them all together and come up with something really good. So I have a clay process that does all the research. The clay process feeds it to qualified, and qualified does all the writing of the email.
- [43:39]
C
I definitely agree with the context aspect. The context is what makes AI really powerful, and then the prompt is what gets it really precise. So whether you're using those agentic flows or you're using just a GPT that you've created, we have a really solid knowledge base that we created that covers everything from brand voice to positioning and messaging, competitors, Personas, existing content. And anytime we need to give AI context, we just download that as a PDF and upload it. So it's absolutely tool agnostic and it gives so much rich context.
- [44:22]
B
I got booted off for my answer clearly earlier, but no, now I'm back and I think for us, exactly for my answers, we've done that. And this goes back to what Tom was saying, I think, and maybe Dave too, with the same isms. We've done that. When we've given a brand and given this, and then instantly we can tell the SDRs are the ones who are creative versus the ones who are mid, as all the kids say. And you can just tell the quality. And so teaching that actually is where AI is coming to me. Like, hey, these emails aren't working. This is how an email looks when you use AI, use context and actually think outside the box. And that's actually where the learnings have gotten really faster. And be like, this is what good looks like and this is what goes into good. And like, explain to someone who's not there what are the parts that went in so they can almost like visually see. Like, this is where you missed. This is where it happened. This is how the anatomy, anatomy of a good email looks like. That's outbounding. What context is there? How is it relevant to the user? And it helped them build taste. It takes time, but it has helped people build taste. That wasn't there before, but it definitely takes time.
- [45:23]
D
I look at it like AI can, for email specifically, AI can generate emails as good as maybe 60% or 80% of humans. But the benefits of it's reliable, it's fast, it's always working. I can get an email out minutes after a conference ends versus the BDR was on vacation that day. There are so many benefits to it that I'm all in on it.
- [45:48]
A
All right, I like it. I like it. My least favorite, everybody's like, soon, and soon we're gonna have to have our. The A.I. you know, we'll have an org chart for A.I. agents inside the company. And I'm like, no, what does that mean? We're gonna. They don't. They're gonna give them benefits. You can do perfect. Like, we've just. It's just soft. We're like, we. We'll do performance reviews for our AI and it's like, no, it's just called, like, reviewing if the product works and you like it.
- [46:11]
B
Like, what?
- [46:12]
A
Anyway, there's always going to be something. Dan is in my ear saying, like, we need to just do this as like a regular radio show because I want to. I want to go into 15 different directions. There's so many, like, I want to ask you personal questions. Lindsay and I were talking about yoga in. In my impending hip surgery in New York. Tom's got work. I want to ask him about what. Whatever he's on right now or whatever he's been taking. Because it looks. He look, you know, he's doing it. I'm happy for you, man. It's good.
- [46:38]
D
I'm jacked.
- [46:39]
A
Let's go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the cool ways we've used. I didn't get the chance to talk about some of. Some of the ways we're using AI, but, like, a little example is like, we have these ads that we're running and to. For our newsletter. And in the ads, it's like a picture from our event of me at the whiteboard. And. And it's for the ad. The ad copy is about AI and SEO. And Jess just took that image and she put it in like, nano banana or whatever and updated. And now in the back of the image, there's a tv. And the TV screen was blank. And now there's like a chart on it. Grow going up. And then on the whiteboard, it has, like, five things about AI and SEO. And it looks super legit. It's like, think about in the past, we would have had to, like, run that to have that idea, give it to a designer. They got to go put it, make it together in Photoshop. But, like, they already have 15 other things to do, like, in seriously, four minutes. She made an amazing piece of ad creative. And I, I love. I love things like that. You know, it doesn't have to be for people listening. Like, you're. You don't have to do the, like, super in depth. Like, we're going to revamp the whole marketing. Org. I just like this mindset of, like, what small ways could we be using AI? Could we be chipping away at some of our workflows? Whether it's ad creative, whether it's, you know, something you're doing for this mailer campaign, how much time we got left?
- [47:49]
B
Double checking on that. Right? That's the part, I think if you look at, like, AI and the buying journey and internal and both external, one of the biggest things, like, starting small actually helps, as Lindsay was saying. Right. Like, one of the things. There are people who are, like, smart, but they're afraid of AI because they don't want to give up the control. And they were raised in the past of, like, controls, everything. Everyone's have checks and balances. Let's get stuff out. But we need, as Dave, you're saying five, six checks before it goes out, and then marketing goes to hell because Frankenstein shows up. But that's like, who.
- [48:13]
A
Who wants control?
- [48:14]
B
Oh, everyone that's not in marketing.
- [48:16]
A
Okay. They want to see everything before it goes out.
- [48:19]
B
Yeah, Right. And so, like, part of the job now is like, we start small and we just ship things. And they're like, oh, wow, this volume of things. That's great. Is good. And then we're noticing people back off. They don't want control. They're like, cool. You guys are good. Okay. You're using A.I. you're good. But is that a good thing?
- [48:35]
A
It's like, oh, cool, you're using a machine gun.
- [48:37]
B
We all good? All right.
- [48:38]
A
Yeah, you're good. You'll get the job.
- [48:39]
B
Yeah. That's the sad part is people think volume equals good equals A.I.
- [48:43]
D
When?
- [48:43]
A
Oh, that's so insane. Oh, you used A.I. to do it. Oh, yeah, you're good. You're good. Don't worry. Yeah. Oh, Tom, AI wrote the billboard copy.
- [48:52]
B
Oh, great.
- [48:52]
D
Must be. It's great.
- [48:54]
B
No, but that's exactly what's happening. And if you're like, wait, we want to do fewer things better, like, no, no, no. That's not what AI is good for. Like, it's like, we're seeing this dichotomy. We're like, okay, all right. How do we just appease the gods internally to get them off so we can actually do good work? We definitely fall into that of, like, I appease you now. I'm going to go do good work. Which isn't 50 billboards or 50 copies. It's like five or 10 that hit the mark and review and get to the good spot.
- [49:14]
A
But, like, look, I'm trying to, like, I'm joking about the AI Stuff, but I. I love to. It helps me whittle down ideas much faster. And so I'm like the other night at working on this, like, I want to write this tagline. Here's how I wanted to say, like, help me come up with 15 versions of it and I can get to like, I can get through the shitty ones faster and then I can like spend more time on the, on the one or two. One or two ideas. Do you have any opinions on like AI video? First of all, have, have you played with Sora too on your own?
- [49:42]
C
Not to the level of Davidson.
- [49:45]
A
My wife Leah. Leah's having an intervention with me. She's like. And my kids have become obsessed with it and like, it's also kind of scary and I'm trying to teach them like it's fake. But I just, you know, I made a video of myself. I just been making the most ridiculous like AI videos and it's very, is very addictive. But in a, in a work context, do you see them working? Like, would you have AI generated like avatars for your company, for your sales reps, for your CEO? Have you thought about that?
- [50:11]
C
We're playing around with us right now for cold outreach so that, working on those really solid subject lines that'll get it open and then once it is open, playing around with how we can create video that cuts through all of that noise that we were talking about earlier. So we.
- [50:30]
A
Would you, would you use AI avatar? Would you use AI avatar people in your marketing?
- [50:36]
C
Personally? No.
- [50:37]
A
Lindsay? No. Aditya?
- [50:39]
B
I have tried it and for some of our customer win announcements last two weeks, I was tempted. I got it out and I was like, no, this is, I'm putting it back down. It was just a little too cringe.
- [50:48]
A
It was like, sorry, yes or no? Would you AI, AI?
- [50:52]
D
No, no, no, no, no. Like, this is where designers like, if you're coming out of college right now, I think the most AI proof job is a great designer who's creative. We're so far away from Sora and Nano Banana and all the image generation models being able to do work that stands out. So we have a design. We have an unusually sized design team at my current company, like five or six designers for a company of roughly 100 people. And it's honestly one of the reasons we've been able to build a great brand while everyone else is out there doing templatized nonsense. We put care into everything we do. Our billboard, we obsessed over it. Every pixel, every word, every effect we put on the treatment of the billboard. Yeah, if I were doing it over again, I Wanted to be marketing, I would go into design, except I'm not creative.
- [51:47]
A
Do you think we all just have this reaction to that because we know it's not real?
- [51:54]
D
Of all the things that AI can't do a good convincing job of, I think text is way further along than images. I don't think great brands are not going to be built off of Nano Banana.
- [52:09]
C
There are also options where you can create a whole podcast with avatars. Yeah, I don't want to listen to that. I don't. Why do I care that they're regurgitating?
- [52:19]
A
That would just be like this.
- [52:20]
C
They're not even looking up new things.
- [52:23]
A
Like the Forbes. The Forbes Council version of writing for your CEO.
- [52:27]
D
100.
- [52:28]
A
Hey, check out my guy.
- [52:35]
D
Yeah, it's the end.
- [52:38]
B
It's the end.
- [52:38]
A
He goes. He goes, you see me? I said, I sent it to my mom. I sent it to my mom. I said, is this me or AI? And she goes, I know that's not you. I know that's not you. That's not your smile. It's one of those weird AI smiles.
- [52:49]
D
We just did a. We don't. We launched a product recently and we went out and filmed a TV commercial with real actors. Like, what people are doing these days, they're doing B roll with Sora and they're. They're stick. They're having script writing. But, like, we wouldn't hire real actors. We paid them. We had to have catering for them. We filmed it for a full day. We had set design, we had all this stuff and it was expensive. But our launch video was 10x better than what we would have done had it been Sora and, you know, a bunch of. A bunch of text.
- [53:22]
A
Yeah.
- [53:23]
B
So I think one of the things we're all hitting on here is the lack of trust is gone. If you go too hard into AI and what Tommy was saying, like, better equivalent is trusting somebody and trusting them. If it's AI, clearly, like, there's a level of mistrust with that. If that's all you're using and leveraging. Right. That's why you hired actors, put a set together and went that route. And like, that's something we also like. I care deeply. I'm like, to have trust, it's got to look authentic. It's got to look like I can relate to you. And so Sora is fun to post on LinkedIn and stuff, but I'm like, would they really take me seriously if I put a sore of myself promoting this brand? Like, you can tell that is not Me?
- [53:56]
A
Yeah. Cameo. Do you remember, like, when. I remember when Cameo was more of a newer thing. It was like a super niche and creative play to, like, if I'm out trying to outbound a Lindsay and I find, you know, like, Kevin from the Office, and I know she likes the Office, and I sent her a funny video. Like, that worked. But now it's like any. It's been democratized. Any. Anybody can do that. I think the novelty. I also think there's some really good stuff on. On Sora. If you.
- [54:21]
B
If you.
- [54:21]
A
If you can, you know, like anything. If you can. If you can prompt it. Right. All right. Producers are in my ear saying, we got lots of questions. I don't want to. I don't want to stop. I want to turn this into a radio show. I want to talk. I want to ask you about the World Series. I want to ask you about Claude versus Chat GPT. I get so many things, but I can't do that. Tom, this one is from Don. Don V. In the chat. Thank you for using the Q and A. Don V. Tom, I get the reference, but can you please provide an example of taste for your shop? So this is the million dollar question, which is how do you define taste, Mr. Mr. T. I think taste is.
- [54:54]
D
When you build something, whether it's a piece of marketing creative or a dish at a restaurant or a bottle of wine you can get in Napa, that people who know who are passionate about the thing, look at the thing that you built and said, yeah, this thing is special. So for me, who my market to engineers, it's really hard to stand out. If my marketing to engineers is respected by engineers, stands out to them represents their challenges. That, to me, equates to taste. The same way, if I'm a winemaker and I build a bottle of wine and I get a 96 rating on wine Spectator, probably means I have good taste in winemaking. I think it's. It's. The audience has to define taste. And I think you kind of know it when you see it, when you get feedback. Yeah. And as Eric Williamson said. Shout out to Williamson. Yeah. Not trying to appeal to everyone. Like, I don't care who sees it. Like, I want people that I want to like my creative. Like it.
- [55:54]
A
I didn't know that was a guy in the chat. I'm like, who the hell is Eric William? Like, shout out.
- [55:57]
D
Former former colleague.
- [55:59]
A
I'm just kidding. I want to. I had the Q and A tab up. He's like, yeah, shout out to Eric Williams. I'm like, Should I know that guy? The CEO of Google? I guess I should shout out, shout out to Eric Williamson. Dave. This one said, I don't know if this is serious, Dave. We try to avoid calling our LinkedIn Live Sessions webinars, but it's a hard habit to break. How would you position the difference, the name difference, to help understand the team, to the team, why it matters? It's really just a bit, it's just a joke for me because I actually love webinars and I'll tell you why I love webinars. I was thinking about this. I'm trying to get a hat that says I love webinars because I think this format is amazing. I got a message from my team like, you know, Tom was like someone like, they're like, wow, Tom's taking this real seriously. He's blowing up the chat. I'm like, that's what makes this super fun. Like, it's different than a podcast. And I think the issue, just like any other channel in marketing with a webinar, is if it's not interesting and if it's not relevant, then it's not going to be useful. This format, call it a webinar, call with everyone. This format has existed for a long time. I, as a kid, I grew up listening to sports radio and I love that I would listen to it all day. That that's what this is. But we're just talking about marketing and so what can that be for your world? So I think the, the problem is people hear the name webinar and they associate it with like some super boring pseudo sales pitch. Some company walking you through their software like webinar is. So why are podcasts super popular? YouTube super popular, radio, you know, talk shows super popular. Those are all basically webinars. It's just the name. And so you have to think about what, what's actually going to be interesting there for, for your, for your business. And why would somebody put the Aditya thing on your. In your head is like, why would someone take an hour out of the day to, to come and hang out with us? That's something that we try to think about. This one's from Maria. Any of you have any insights on measuring content attribution today? Not a fan, but that's how I prove my content's worth to my leaders. So you're doing a lot of, you know, brand stuff, taste stuff, creating content, doing content marketing. Anybody have an answer to measuring content?
- [57:48]
B
We've had to answer this question because our content budgets were great. And then AI showed up and they're like, cut it. You don't need all this. You can do this.
- [57:55]
A
Just. Just do AI. Just use AI for it.
- [57:58]
B
I can tell you our budget. We had an agency, everything. We're like 25 grand a month. I'll call it out. It's an agency I've had for 10 years. They're amazing. I've used them at Amplitude, et cetera. Love them. And so they're like, you gotta cut this. Like, we can use AI for most of this. And I was like, okay, cool. How about this? Let's run a test. I'll cut it for a few months and then let's see what happens. And the way we started looking at the measurement actually was the number of times our brand would show up in certain search results, how our search traffic rankings were progressing to the content AI generated versus what the agency generated. And that's where it started showing what the agency generated was still ranking, whereas the AI was not ranking. And after three months, I was like, here you go. You told me to cut it, I did it. That's what happened. It's one of those things that has been put to bed and never brought up again. And justified it by not just saying, oh, here, I'd help the funnel, et cetera. I'm like, in this new day and age, rankings matter more than traffic because 60% of searches don't end up in a click. So I'm like, the rankings matter more because that's what the reference ability for the AI comes from also, as well as the ChatGPTX that are showing up in results too. But that's how we've done it.
- [59:05]
A
And that has been put to bed.
- [59:06]
B
Completely now as a result. And we don't have to validate content as much as we've had to in the past as a result.
- [59:11]
C
When you mentioned it before, too, about distribution, what does it look like in many different forms and what is the engagement with it across all of those forms? What's working best and what's driving what kind of engagement? I think that's really important as well, so that you can get a full look at what that content actually did for the company. And then something that we've been leaning in on is taking those interviews from real people, repurposing them, and giving them share kits to make that content go even farther.
- [59:46]
A
While we wrap, give us. We measure everything. I'm a soup. If you know me, Tom, I'm a creative, analytical ninja. I measure everything. So we, we. We always want to give feedback on These scale of 1 to 5, rate this to 5. You ever been in a meeting where you have to do that? You have to say how the meeting was in front of other people. Alert Big Miller.
- [60:08]
B
You're getting NPS score right now.
- [60:10]
D
Dave.
- [60:10]
B
Is that what's happening?
- [60:11]
A
You're getting live. You're getting live nps. Like, and then we have the per speaker breakdown later. No, I'm just kidding. It was. This was great. Super fun. Dan's messaging me the whole time. He's like, we need to do you need. He's like, I need you to do this live three days a week. Like, I'm like, fine, I'll do that, but I'm not doing it. I'm not doing anything else. And I'm gonna wear a tux anyway. This was great. Just a virtual round of applause for you 3. Super fun. This was everything that I hoped it would be. Hang out, have a chat, talk about what we're all doing. Look, we'll. We'll send out all the follow up. We have the recording for everybody. The chat was amazing. Shout out to you. Chat like, way to go. Way to. Not just be here. Like, you were in the chat. Like, hanging out, having a good time. And, and I really appreciate that. We will be back here next month. We got more good stuff to do. Check us out exit5.com. If you're not a member, check us out. Send us a message and then send each one of our. If our speakers spoke to you today, go find them on LinkedIn.
- [61:02]
B
Hit.
- [61:02]
A
Hit the follow button there. Connect with them. A bunch of them are hiring. A bunch of them are good people to know in the world of marketing. And I wish you nothing but a great rest of the afternoon wherever you are. I'm a big, positive affirmation guy. I think if you believe it, it can happen. So have a great rest of the afternoon, you three. I appreciate it. Virtual fist bumps. We'll see you next time. Thank you. Go to exit5.com and thank you to Walnut for. For sponsoring this session.
- [61:27]
B
We love you.
- [61:27]
A
We'll see y' all later. Adios. 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 room 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.
- [62:45]
D
Hey.
- [62:45]
A
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 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 out what's actually working and what's broken. And 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 journeys 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 at customer IO 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.