← The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
What’s Working Right Now in B2B Marketing - Live from Drive 2025 with Sylvia LePoidevin, Trinity Nguyen, and Natalie Taylor
00:52:10
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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?
- [01:34]
B
Can I?
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A
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.
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B
So go check it out.
- [01:45]
A
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- [02:08]
B
You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt. Hey, it's Dave.
- [02:26]
A
Quick note before we get into this episode. This is a recording from Drive 2025, our annual event here at Exit 5. This was recorded live in Burlington, Vermont at Hula as part of our event and we'd love to have you at next year's event. We're bringing it back to Vermont Stowe, Vermont. You can go to exit5.comdrive to get more information, put your name on the wait list and maybe make it to next year's event. But we're bringing the audio recordings from these sessions to you live, well recorded on the podcast because we thought it'd be a fun way to show you the stuff we talk about at DRIVE and to give you a sense of what it was like if you didn't.
- [03:02]
B
Get to be there.
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A
And if you were there, then you get to now re listen and maybe take notes again. So this is one of the sessions from drive. Go and check it out, get tickets, put your name on the waitlist for next year. Exit5.com Drive we're going to end this.
- [03:16]
B
With a little panel. I have three awesome marketing leaders that are going to come up here in a second and, and I wanted to do a panel talking about we get lost in strategy a little bit. Strategy is important, as Sangram said, but we get lost in it. I want to talk to three marketing leaders and we love hearing about what are you doing right now? I don't want to hear about fluff. I want to talk about whatever quarter this is. We don't operate in quarter. What is this Q3 for all you. What are you doing right now and what's working? And I want to talk through that. And also we will take all your questions, we'll talk through all the, all your marketing stuff, talk about what's happening in your org right now. And so we have Trinity, Natalie and Sylvia. What does your company do, what industry you're in, roughly what stage are you at and the rough makeup of your marketing team. And we'll, we'll jump off from there. Sylvia, you go first.
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C
Amazing. So I'm Sylvia, CMO of Kanji. So we manage Apple Devices, any companies that have Apple devices for any corporate reason. So it's part cybersecurity, part IT. So we sell the IT and security. Our marketing team is about 13 people total at the moment. There's Some different groups included with that. The core, core marketing team is just five at the moment and me. So we're super lean. We're almost 300 people total as a company and definitely growth mode and lots of stories to tell.
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B
Okay, good. Trinity, good to see you.
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D
Hi, I'm Trinity Nguyen, CMO at UserGems. We're an AI solution for sales and marketing. Basically using AI agents to help you capture buying signals, prioritize account people, and then help your team writing messaging and converting them into pipeline. Our team is about three marketers right now. Hiring one. I'm fighting for one more strong bench of freshener and consultants wouldn't be able to do what we do without them for the last six years. And then also an SDR team. So we call ADR account development reps within marketing as well.
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E
All right. I'm Natalie.
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C
Hello.
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E
Happy to be here, Eileen. Thank you. Eileen 1 NEWS super fan. I lead marketing at a company called Capsule. It's a series A software company. We create video editing software for enterprise brands. Currently the team is me and we just raised a Series A a few months ago. So hired one person so far who leads all of our events. I was just talking to Devin Reed that it's not a common first hire is an events person. But that was our. We'll talk about that later. But that's the current makeup and continuing to grow the team.
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B
Okay, let's go back down this way. And what's the one thing that's happening inside of marketing at your company that I would. I would not be able to pry out of your cold dead hands? Like, you have to pick one thing.
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E
What is it like, one thing that you can't take away from my marketing team.
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B
A person could be a tool, could be a thing. Like it's the key to me. Right? Like it's the key to making things go right now in the company.
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E
Yeah, it's my first marketing hire. Best marketing. Best hire I've ever made. And she is running the function that has been our runaway successful channel. And our pipeline would just plummet. Our opportunities would just plummet if we weren't running that events machine.
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B
So this is your events person. Talk a little bit about why what did you do? A Events are obviously hot right now. We're talking about and we're doing it and we said we're doubling down. They've worked for you early on. What is an event for Capsule? Why does it work? How have you done it? And then talk about hiring this person and what their goal is.
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E
Yeah, we Talked a lot about this on the podcast, so I won't rehash everything there. But they've been so successful because we have a very focused icp. We're very thoughtful about how we get people there, what the topic is around, how we structure the event itself. And it's really centered on getting their peers to network with each other. That is such a valuable hook. And then of course, it's like at a really cool restaurant and around a really interesting topic. And then we have a very, an even tighter sales plan. It's a full go to market effort, these events. It's figuring out what customers to invite, it's figuring out what prospects to invite, target accounts. And then the whole follow up plan, which AE is going to be there and how to convert that into an opportunity.
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B
What goes into that follow up plan? Because I feel like you can't just invite 20 people to dinner and then magically, you know, pipeline grows. There has to be some, like, we got everybody here, we had an awesome time. But then what?
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E
Yeah, I mean, it's how you frame the whole event. So you're getting there, you're getting people there under the premise of like, we're going to talk about video and AI. It's broad enough that it's interesting enough to our icp, but we've structured the conversation so that we're basically having some initial discovery conversations at the dinner that gives us enough information to follow up during the dinner and then also after the dinner, like, hey, and usually by the end of the dinner, at least half of the people there are like, yeah, let's talk more. Let's have a demo. Like, they know that they want to keep talking to us. So it's all in the tf. It's all in how you get people there and how you're, you're framing it.
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B
Trinity, what's your thing?
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D
What's the name of your employee?
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C
Let me pull the moment.
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D
She said, I'm like, every manager.
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E
Whitney is fine.
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D
That's why.
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B
Wait. But no, we were talking about this last night at dinner and it is worth saying, I feel like in my experience, which is not everything, every hiring mistake I've made in a marketing, when I was in a marketing leadership role was because I didn't really, I hadn't done the job or we didn't, we didn't do the thing internally. And you were saying last night it's like the perfect example of like you hired an events person because like Natalie was the first events person. You did all the things you, you knew what good looks like, you know how to do it. And now you have a better sense of hiring. Like I've, you know, made a mistake in hiring an SEO person because I just was like, I think we need an SEO guy and let's go hire someone. Right? And then like, of course that flopped, but you know, all the things now. And I think that's an important part of that lesson.
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E
One other thing I'll add on to that, to close out the events piece is the full perspective I had was helpful in knowing exactly what I wanted because when I found Whitney, I was like, I could never even imagine this type of experience would be perfect for this role. She led private events at eleven Madison park, one of the best restaurants in the world. And then she pivoted into tech customer success and was like the top CS rep at Calendly. And so I knew that I needed someone who had incredible hospitality experience and got vibe, restaurant, all of that kind of stuff, but also understood how this fit into the broader sales picture and the importance of this to our pipeline and sales.
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B
Did she come inbound or did you find her?
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E
She came inbound from LinkedIn. She saw the LinkedIn post.
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B
People get caught up in the ego of posting on LinkedIn a lot and I see people all the time and I'm like, I think you're miss especially as a leader in your company. I think you misunderstand the value of you posting there as from an employment brand perspective. Okay, Trinity, what's your one thing?
- [09:53]
D
So I'll skip the people side because everyone does. Amazing. Amazing. And kind of a similar background to what Natalie said as well, in terms of kind of a unique background and generalist, but also specialist. So like kind of the tea marketer but to pride out my cold dead hand.
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B
But you're not dead.
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D
Yeah, and I'm not talking my book literally the product that we selling because I've been there as a first business hire. Our entire go to market team, our entire CRM is powered by this one product. So like how we sell teams lean, everyone's teams lean for the revenue target we have. Right. But how do we keep increasing the capacity, whatever we're doing, how do we get more precise and like knowing which account to go after? All of that is just data. So we run a lot of ABM that we target 600 accounts every single month, one on one. Our ADRs and our AES prospect a lot. So like how do you prioritize your effort? So our entire CRM is powered by usagems and then now it's picking up the messaging. It tells us it's like right now, who to target in September or October. So if you talk to anyone at usergems, they will tell you this is like, that's how our entire CRM powered. If I don't have that, I would.
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B
You have these 600 accounts, right? I think a lot of people will understand that, but I think where people will have questions is probably, what is the outreach saying? What are you saying? This came up in a session we had yesterday. Everybody's like, yeah, everything's harder than ever. Email's harder than ever. Outbound's harder than ever. Like, we can send it, but we don't know it's going to be open. And so, like, what's the. The message? Roughly? Is there a framework that is working? Right?
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D
Essentially, people online say, like, outbound is dead, access dead. Everything is dead. Right? And then you would. And then you would see something on LinkedIn that's saying like, this is an amazing reply rate, 1%. I would lose my job tomorrow if that's a good reply rate. So it works. Even if people saying that email doesn't work, I have numbers to show you it works. When people say cold calling, no one picks up the phone. I have numbers to show you that as well. It's just outside of a LinkedIn bubble. These things actually work if you kind of figure out optimizing for it and make sure they all go out at the same time in a very orchestrated way. So for us, so we have a TAM of like say 12,000 accounts. We can't go after all of them at any given point in time. So we use signals to prioritize. Why do we want to target these accounts? Like, these 600 accounts, they rank to like 100 points to above. Because they have all of these signals at the company level. And then we find people inside those companies and these are the reason why we should reach out to them as a signal. Like, do they use us? In the past, they knew hires, they know someone that is a customer, blah, blah, blah. Then the messaging that works is when you combine all of that into an email. When you say, like, hey, John, congrats on whatever, like, new job, et cetera, Hope we can work again. P.S. so and so in your marketing team talked to us last year about pipeline generation issue. Timing wasn't right, budget was strict. Maybe you want to sing with John about what he. So when you combine all of this into an AI messaging, it works. And then when people say that cold calling doesn't work, it doesn't work because reps hate being yelled at, get rejected and hung up on. But if you give them a reason why they calling. So if someone picks up their phone and right in front of them is like, this is the reason why I'm calling you because your company has these signals. And I'm calling you specifically because you know us or you know John, who knows us.
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B
We talked about this yesterday. It's like the outreach that I respond to. It's like the whole universe has my cell phone number. But the I told Lee I really want to change my number. She's like, we've been together for 13 years and I just learned your phone number. I'm not changing. But the outreach that works for me is like, it is real. It's like, hey, we went to the. I'll just use. We went to the Exit 5 website and it takes like three and a half seconds to load. Do you know that? X, Y and Z. I'm like, does it take two? You know, if it's a real problem that we have, then like, that's a real example. Or somebody the other day was like, hey, you guys post all these videos on YouTube and like the average video has 64 views. Like, you should be doing this instead. But instead of talking a big game, this person actually made a 3 1/2 minute loom video and wasn't fluff. And she showed me exactly what we should be doing. It's like, that is what it takes. Also why I love events like this is because talk to someone outside earlier. They're like, outbound sucks for us, doesn't work. And then five minutes later you talk to someone and you're like, oh, no, it does. And I like the offer.
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E
Like, you have to have an off. Like, 70% of our dinner guests come from outbound emails. And even if they can't come to the event, we're getting so many opportunities. They're like, oh, I can't come. But like, what is capsule? And then it starts a conversation and they have.
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D
Because you're being lazy, basically. Lazy prospecting, right? You're looking for like a quick fixes or a quick wins where you can say, like, this equals that and buy my product. Like, hey, our CEOs get this all the time. Hey, Oktoberfest subject line. Because he's German, Austrian Oktoberfest. And he opened it because he likes Oktoberfest. And I was like, hey, do you speak? I noticed that you went to this school and have you been to Oktoberfest by The way buy this, like, HR software. And he's like, what?
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B
Exactly.
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D
That is just lazy prospecting.
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B
Right.
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C
People also just love saying things are dead.
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B
Yeah.
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C
But they're usually just like the old way of doing it was dead. Or maybe it was never that great to begin with and there's a better way to do it.
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B
Okay, what's not dead at your company?
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C
Okay, so basically it's our media property. We have this media property called the sequence that we launched, which is essentially like, we didn't want to keep building the company blog because, like, nobody wants to read that. And so we're like, can we create something that people will actually follow? And we also were investing a lot in social media, lots of other types of content, video, et cetera. And so we needed a place to like, point everyone back to, can we just like have a place to house all this stuff? And we put it on its own domain called the sequence.com and we realized like a month after it launched that it's being cited so heavily in all LLM search. And so I wouldn't give that up. And then we actually did. We just recently launched like a very simple how did you hear about us? Form on the website. And it was about 17%. 17 said they found us through LLM, specifically a lot of them named LLMs. It was just an open text field, which I highly recommend for anyone who wants to do this because then you get the actual raw information and not just like, I was lazy and clicked the first item in the dropdown. So 17% coming to us from LLM search. And the sequence is helping to power how we show up there. And so it's an interesting answer because I wouldn't. It's a media property that lives on its own and in its own right is like we've 20x the number of like subscribers that we get from the company blog. So this is all brand new, launched like two months ago. And so I wouldn't give that up because clearly people are searching this way. We have that data. And the fact, I think that it's on its own domain. Domain for some reason became this sort of hack where the LLMs are like, this is an external source. And so we want to cite internal and external sources when we're talking about you. And so it's for some reason, like helping us there. But it's not like a hacky thing. It's not like we're like, let's just automate 50 articles and like throw them on some other domain. It genuinely started as like, can we make really good content.
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B
Who's creating that content? Who owns creating that content? How does it get on the site? What do you decide to write about? There's.
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C
Yeah, so it's actually multiple different people on the team. One of them is, we have a content person. She mostly writes the newsletter and then the like editorial articles. But we treat it as sort of like there's different content streams, almost like when you go on Netflix and there's different shows. So we have like our editorial stream. But then we also have, we do these like short form videos.
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E
We'll post those there.
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C
We do longer form demo days, which those have been insanely successful. We literally. It's just a webinar. Then we do a demo. People love it.
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E
I don't know why.
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C
It's like people are tired of all the bullshit and they're like, can we just see a demo? And we have like really knowledgeable people run them and stuff. Of course.
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B
Don't your salespeople get mad if you give them a demo without the salespeople being on the demo?
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C
No, I think they're just pumped that like they can see what questions people ask. There's people asking about competitors. We have like four or five hundred people showing up and we'll get like two, three hundred questions. And it's a demo. And we've done virtual ones before. They have not been successful. And this format for some reason really works. So anyway, the sequence is kind of a catch all for like many different content streams. So it's our content person and then we have someone that runs virtual events, so she does the demo days. And then we have someone who runs social, so she does the short form video. So long answer. But there's multiple people.
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B
I love the demo day concept that goes into like the trend of like, you know, interactive product demos. Showing the product. It's like, can somebody just show me how the hell this thing works, please, tonight? And then like what a sneaky little marketing playbook there is. Like you get, I think a lot of the times with content the ROI is the feedback, the questions, the objection, handling like, oh, this always comes up on our, on our webinar deck for the demo. Let's handle these objections and each week we can iterate on this deck and make this better. One of my early, early marketing plays when I was at Drift was I hosted a weekly webinar every Single Wednesday from 2 to 3 o'. Clock. And I literally, that's all I did for like a year was I worked on this deck. And every week I would come up with new objections and try to handle them, and it would influence the product roadmap. And I think stuff like that, in a world where we want to automate everything is super important.
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D
I think I attended one of those sessions.
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B
Did you?
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D
Yeah, yeah.
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B
We charge like $20 for the product at that time. I have a real good history of charging very low in the beginning. We'll pay for it later. Okay, I want to maybe ask the flip side of that question then. So you all have a bunch of experience in marketing, even beyond your companies now, or it could be relevant to your company today. What's something that you've done in the past that you're not currently doing? And examples of this could be like, yeah, we killed our company blog, or we don't care about SEO, or we stopped doing events. And what's the opposite of that question?
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C
Yeah, I think for me, definitely the company blog. The other thing that comes to mind is we don't do like thought leadership virtual events anymore because the demo days have been so successful. Like, we've tried thought leadership events. You get some leads, you get some signups. We just always struggle to really nurture those. Probably an us problem, but I found that for virtual events, people just want something super, super practical. And for our audience, for some reason, the demo day format works. And so we do plenty of thought leadership in other formats. But I would say, yeah, no longer do we do really, like, thought leadership type virtual events. And the other thing we're not doing is content that's just kind of generic, like from the team. So all of our content's become so much more human recently. And if there's something we're writing or if there's a video, there's a human that that's from. Even if it's an editorial article, it's from and it's written from their perspective. And sometimes it's ghostwritten by someone on our team. But I think we've just done away with like, generic content. And it's probably just a ripple effect of like, AI can write generic content. Nobody fucking wants that anymore. They want something with an opinion and they want it to come from a person. That's like, here's an experience I had and it's more autobiographical than it is, just like, generic.
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B
Where's Eddie? Eddie. Eddie's a great. Eddie's a great copywriter and he has a newsletter. He was telling me about it earlier and he. Sorry if I talked for you, but he writes a newsletter and he shares a copy lesson, but tells A story about his kids or his family. And that is what gets people in. Right. How would you exploit. Can you explain it better than I do? Can you say what your process is there? Yeah. So I mean, you know, I think every one of those, like the anecdote stories, there's lessons, takeaways, and then there's a word count. Sometimes I'll still Google or chat to come see and I'll be like, give me a number.
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E
215.
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B
That story and that, that lesson together. How important do you think the story is to the fact that people read your thing? The story is most important. And then you deliver the. It's like what you said to me about like the Exit 5 stuff. It's like you come for the marketing and you stay for the connection. It's like, you know what the hook is?
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D
The story stay for the interaction.
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C
And it's funny because I love cooking. And you know when you're like browsing recipes and they tell like a, a 200 page story and you're like, give.
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E
Me the cookie recipe.
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B
I always use this example. I'm like, what's the goddamn time and temperature for sand? I need to know. Like, I know my chat GPT has been crazy lately. It's like problem statement. You want to know what temperature? I'm like, no, no, don't you do this now.
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E
So yeah, I think there's a balance.
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C
To it, but at the same time, it's probably more valuable now than more than ever, if that makes sense.
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B
What about you, misuser Gem? Some of you flipped your opinion on or have. Or have killed. You know what I want one of you to say is like, we stopped doing branded search or something like that, you know, like, so the thing is.
- [22:15]
D
Like whenever I say something that we stop doing, I'm going to regret it because somehow in a year it works again. Because everybody says dead.
- [22:23]
B
So yeah, I got people from 13 years ago. What's up now, Mr. No forms? Like, all right, dude, how are your chat bots now? I'm like, dude, I worked at the company. Like, what did. Yeah, I hear you. We won't hold it against you.
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D
And I'm just thinking like, what? So we stopped doing so a year ago. I think it was on some podcast I said that conversational ads on LinkedIn worked because this is probably two years ago. Metadata built like, you know, quarter $7 million in pipeline, which is conversational ads. Because it was new. No one actually believed in it. It was super cheap. And then we got into that bandwagon and we Saw like the insane amount of pipeline, but we're not doing it anymore because the moment we shared publicly, the channel stopped, program stopped working. So we're not doing that.
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B
That's super real though. You share something and then it gets super crowded.
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D
That's why marketers don't share openly. Yeah, unlike sellers. Like sellers you can share because it's like one to one versus marketing.
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C
The whole thing gets saturated.
- [23:19]
D
I think like one thing we also stopped doing is like massive booths, like booth at massive conferences. Not like this, like, this is great.
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B
What about boost at smaller conferences?
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D
Yeah, we like booth at smaller conferences at the anti conference.
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B
But even, even there though, I feel like what matters is the offer. Right. If you're like, there's 100 booths and you're all just, you know, handing out.
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D
Frisbees and scanning bags, just how you execute it. I think it's just like the capacity that we have internally. Our strategy, how we approach things, combined like the, the Venn diagram. I think booth at large conference in Vegas, like underground, no sunlight. This work for our icp. So we stopped doing that. We do a lot of regional dinners similar to kind of like what you're doing.
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B
Yeah.
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D
Yeah.
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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 wait. We want to explore the product, see how it works and understand its value. Before booking a meeting with someone, I.
- [24:20]
B
Want you to show me the product.
- [24:22]
A
Come on. 70% of the B2B buying journey is already done before a sales rep is even contacted. So your buying experience needs to match. And that's where Walnut comes in. Walnut helps you put your product at the center of your marketing. They make it easy for marketers like you and me to embed interactive demos on the site, drop them in campaigns, or personalize them for sales in minutes. No engineers acquired love that. Is that. Is that called vibe coding? Once a buyer is interested, they don't just want a one off walkthrough of your product. They want a place to actually evaluate, compare notes, and make a decision that they feel confident in. So Walnut has deal rooms that make it easy for your internal champion to sell your product to their team. With interactive demos at the core. The result is fewer stall deals, fewer stall deals, consistent buyer experiences and intent data that shows exactly what Features are winning. That's why companies like Adobe, NetApp and more trust Walnut to shorten sales cycles, scale pre sales and drive millions in new pipeline. Want to see it for yourself? Go check it out. Walnut IO. That's Walnut IO and they have a cool offer for you. They will actually build your first demo for free so you can see how demos and deal rooms actually works. You get to see the product, test it out.
- [25:32]
B
They're going to do it for free.
- [25:34]
A
Because we're sending you there from exit 5. So go to Walnut I.O. today and tell them that you heard.
- [25:39]
B
About them from Exit 5, like capsules earlier. But maybe things you did in past roles that you didn't bring to Capsule or not.
- [25:48]
E
You know, I think it's more, I mean I've mostly worked at startups so like I haven't had a big enough team ever to be like, oh, we're gonna stop doing this. It's like, okay, where do we go next and what do we experiment with? So it's less like stopping doing things and more just running tests. But it's probably just more a reflection of how I've grown as a marketer and just matured as a person. Is just less about kind of doing things to do them because you feel like you have to do them. I think that's. We all experience that through our careers is like figuring out what is really working and prioritizing that versus like, well, everyone's doing stuff with AI, everyone's doing stuff with whatever, so I, I have to do that. Or my CEO saying like, why aren't we doing this? And I'm looking at Brendan Checkbox Marketing.
- [26:36]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's hard because you hear something, you hear something that's working, you want to go do it. And like you don't have the context maybe. I think the context matters so much. I used to try to chase this a little bit, which is like, well, maybe that company raised $100 million of VC money and so they can run a different play. You're bootstrapped, you can't hire the same person. Maybe you don't have the. Sylvia's built a nice little like employment brand where people want to go work with you because of what you're writing on LinkedIn and stuff. Maybe not everybody has it, so. And what I think is fun about the job is we all have different ingredients to like try to make a recipe and that is, that becomes the fun piece. I wanted to ask you if anybody has a strong way to handle this. How do you play offense with marketing, as opposed to just reaction, I think it's something that we always, we all deal with here is like, hey, we need this landing page. We need this deck. We need this thing done. We need this, this. You can spend all your time just caught up in playing defense and reacting to all the things across the company. When like the best marketing teams are able to say, like, nope, these are the things we're doing. Any of you work through that or how do you do it at your company? How do you manage up and work with the CEO? Any insight onto that is super relevant for this.
- [27:39]
C
I have a really fun example from recently.
- [27:41]
B
We don't want that.
- [27:44]
C
We did a Shark Tank Day and it was the best thing ever. So we basically. I wanted to get all the best ideas to the top of the pile and I wanted to like accelerate AI And I felt like I had all these people on my team that had all these brilliant ideas and there wasn't like space for them to bring something that big to the table. Like something that would require some big change across functional involvement or something like that. And so I think this was a way of being proactive. Is that like I created the Shark Tank Day, basically marketing Shark tank. We had 16 ideas. We pitched some insane ideas, like just really cool stuff. And we pitched to this panel of sharks. They were all representative of our buyer Persona. So they were people internally. But there are people that had like been our buyer Persona, done that job, been in those shoes. And so I told them like, you are in character today of that Persona. But then we also had people from leadership that were there. I gave them money Shark labels. So they were money sharks just because I had to give them a name. But they were there for just like buy in and hearing the ideas. And obviously at some point we're going to have to allocate budget to stuff. And so I needed people to be in the room that would be supporting that as well. And so that was a cool way to just bring all the fresh ideas to the table. Do it in a way where each person could pitch something they were passionate about or some idea that they had. And we had music and people won cash prizes. And it was also just really fun. And I think especially in Age of AI right now, there's so much fear. If I could wave a magic wand and do one thing, it would be just remove all the fear around it. Because I think there is such this mindset of limitless possibilities. And I feel like this making it into a game just allowed us to step into that Energy a little bit.
- [29:22]
B
What's the best idea that came out of that?
- [29:24]
C
There are so many different categories. The one that comes to mind is.
- [29:26]
B
What'S the one that you're most likely to actually put in play as opposed to like. That was a fun team bonding exercise.
- [29:31]
C
Honestly, a bunch of. I think there's six or seven that we are generally going to do, but one that comes to mind is interactive experiences on the website. I think this is the most AI specific too as well, but there were others that were not. And so it's the idea that we could create a digital twin of our solutions engineering team which are super knowledgeable. They're the people that are running those demo days, right? We sell the it.
- [29:51]
D
They.
- [29:51]
C
They don't want to talk to sales, they don't want to talk to me. They want to talk to that person. And so can we create a digital twin of them that they can then chat with? You created a digital twin of yourself, didn't you?
- [29:59]
B
I did, yeah. Yeah.
- [30:01]
C
How's it going?
- [30:01]
B
Equally as annoying.
- [30:03]
C
So. And there was many other interactive ideas too. One of them was just like, just like fun interactive things. Like you could put in your current tech stack and we'll have a bot that will roast your tech stack but then also tell you why we do a better job at all those things. Right. So like there's some things that are just like fun too that could be a little bit like viral and shareable. There's probably five or six of those, but they were all in this category of just these like interactive experiences. And we created lovable prototypes and we were just demoing them at this Shark Tank thing and it was really cool. So that's definitely one that comes to mind that feels doable and something that incorporates AI so we can get more momentum around that as well, but is also super valuable. Our ICP loves to chat. They don't like to fill out forms or talk to sales. They like to chat. And so I think that would work really well for that person.
- [30:47]
D
I like that roast thing.
- [30:49]
C
I really want to do the rose.
- [30:50]
D
Yeah, it's time.
- [30:52]
B
It's dead.
- [30:53]
D
It's dead.
- [30:55]
B
Somebody already posted about it. Guess what's dead? Someone's like, shark Tank days are dead.
- [30:59]
E
I know, I know.
- [31:01]
B
No, but I, I do think it's important. It's like why I events like this, you learn a bunch of ideas. It's like when you can give your team or even just yourself space to not get caught so much in like the rigor of the day to day and Be like, what if we just had two days to just imagine the things that we should be doing. Right. You do get a lot of.
- [31:16]
C
And it was different from planning. Like it felt totally different than planning. But it was like kind of planning. But it wasn't. And it was different because it was almost like we were in this alternate universe where we could create anything.
- [31:25]
B
Yeah. One of the first jobs I had I worked at this email marketing company called Constant Contact. Back in the day they did this amazing thing that was like this. But it was across the whole company and anyone could participate if you wanted to. And they. What they did is they basically they got like the top two or three business problems right now. Like a conversion is down or we need to increase adoption of X. Right. And then they would randomly pair you with teams of like six to eight people. They would have breakfast and lunch and you'd all go literally across the office and spend the whole day with your team. Your team would have a name and you'd be like someone in customer success, a salesperson, two engineers. And your job was to spend two days and like fully hack on this. And that was such an amazing thing because it got every role in the company working on the growth challenges of the company. And I think, you know, Sangram kind of alluded to some of this stuff this morning. Sometimes we. It is too siloed. It's like, yeah, the company growth is a company effort and man, if we got all these smart ass engineers in here, like don't we want to help them like work on growth? And the salespeople are really smart and CS and that was an amazing thing. So I like that inside of marketing. That's cool. But I want to do Q and A with this crew. But is there anything anyone. Is there a question I should have asked you that's worth saying in front of this forum about something that interesting you're doing at work? And then I'm going to pass the microphone.
- [32:46]
E
I would maybe just say one thing that's been that I've learned in the past year is the importance of aligning across the whole go to market team. I've worked before in places where departments are very siloed and marketing's doing marketing and sales is doing sales and sales will ask marketing for stuff. But from the beginning the head of sales and I joined at the same time and we have worked very closely together throughout the growth of the company. And the events, for example, were a full go to market team effort of. I've mentioned that before, like CS is advising on what customers to come Sales is we build like a seating arrangement for the dinner and talk about the game plan for every single person and the follow up plan for every single person. And that alignment has been crucial for our success as a company. And some of the things we do to maintain that are every week we have a full company weekly wins where everyone shares a win and gives a shout out. So it just gives visibility on what's going on. And then at the top of the week we do like a full team sprint meeting. So we're all aligned and we all know what everyone is working on. And it's kind of an open forum of oh well, I know what's going on with that person, that deal. How can I help? Oh, we're hosting an event there next month. Let's make sure that that person is there and it's a full team effort so that everyone's working. Like we all know that we're all working towards revenue. That's our North Star and I think that's super important to remember in any team.
- [34:13]
D
I'll add to that one a little bit too. Since we had a marketing conference, one thing that I've been noticing because we talk to like sales leaders and the marketing leaders and rev ops as well. One thing I've noticed with a lot of marketing leaders is just like depending on how our companies structure teams, I noticed that a lot of marketers actually don't know how sales operate that we align on top like ICP goals and all the incentives.
- [34:36]
B
They don't know the comp plan right. They should know how sales reps get.
- [34:38]
D
I truly believe that like if you show me incentives I will tell you the behaviors people will do. And when we talk about alignment like marketing, we always talk about alignment. Revenue alignment has been around forever. We talk about it. But whenever I talk to marketers I would say probably like 80% of people in the room don't really know how reps actually get the deal done. Because marketers, we operate as accounts, we programmatically, we have the tools to kind of class and target, do a lot of fun stuff. But for sales it's one to one. So until you can kind of like internalize how they would work in the account like if you were them, it's really hard to get them to believe anything you say because everything you say is going to be fluffy. And sales can tell when you just like make things up because that's kind of like their job. So I would encourage marketing, I mean marketers too.
- [35:24]
B
Questions want to do questions yeah, yeah. Orly, you want to shout it out?
- [35:28]
E
Yeah.
- [35:28]
D
So.
- [35:29]
C
So a question for Sylvia. So you're talking about the signal. They said you create this hub for all you want and it's pre. All of these signals to the AI agents. Yes. I'm asking you to kind of go into the land.
- [35:49]
B
What do you think is policy of.
- [35:54]
E
Obviously doing so much better as like.
- [35:58]
C
More authority.
- [36:02]
B
And you know, you just give it.
- [36:06]
C
I know I've ruined it already.
- [36:08]
E
That's done.
- [36:09]
C
Yeah. So the question she asked was essentially, why is it the fact that it's on its own domain? Why does that make a difference towards how the LLM is treated? My hypothesis in the research that I've seen is that there's. LLMs like to cite multiple sources when they're giving an answer to something and they don't want to cite just the company's own stuff because that's something they wrote about themselves. They could claim anything. And so I think it's that they like to check it against an external source. And I've seen like, I don't know if you've seen like the charts on LinkedIn about like where LLMs get their data and there's like internal external breakdown. And so I think it was just like if someone asks it a question that it can only get the answer on our website, then it's going to go look for other places to validate that answer. And if there's an external source that has some good information on it, then they will use that. And so when I go into ChatGPT and search things about Kanji, I'll see the sequence referenced in those little links on the right all the time. And I think that's because it's looking for an external source and the fact that it's on its own domain, the- sequence.com, then it's being treated as external. Can you quantify how much your inbound has grown? Absolutely not. I have no idea.
- [37:26]
D
You just started two months ago.
- [37:27]
C
Yeah, that's super new. So we just a week ago launched that, like, how did you hear about US Field? Which is how we got that number? 17% referenced LLMs. But this is a week of data, y'. All. So, like this might totally change.
- [37:39]
B
I think like one thing that's kind of like a mind trip is like, is that traffic that would have come from Google and now we're just getting it from a different source. Like, you know, it might not always be net. Net. New.
- [37:50]
C
Yeah, true.
- [37:51]
E
Sorry, just quick follow up on that.
- [37:53]
C
Please know that this external site is what's influencing the LLMs. Like I get the traffic is coming from ChatGPT, right? It's because it's, it's very hacky. We haven't measured this yet because we just discovered this like a week, a couple weeks ago. It's literally just from like when you go in there or I go in there and search and you see like the links on the right where it's like giving us reference sources, then you'll see the sequence all over there. And so that's the only thing. So we haven't put enough. We actually did just buy airops which is supposed to help with some of the measurement, but I don't think airops, yeah, it's like LM optimization measurement, but we haven't, I believe implemented it yet or have the data from it. So once we have that maybe we'll get some more information. But it was definitely something that just stood out to me that especially since the sequence is like 2 months old, like it makes no sense. And so the fact that I think.
- [38:46]
D
A lot of people said the same thing like everything she said in terms of like the hypothesis how AI crawls multiple sources so press releases actually is now hot, not dead.
- [38:55]
B
We were saying this PR is back, man.
- [38:58]
D
I know, I can't believe it. But because they're looking for third party sources. So now a lot of companies reviving.
- [39:04]
B
PR team Yahoo Finance, like those distributed.
- [39:07]
D
Like because you want a third party page to list your stuff.
- [39:10]
B
Charlie got you next. Yeah, one more follow up on that. Like how much are you or how are you factoring in like the content that you're creating there and how much of it is kanji focus versus like category focus?
- [39:23]
C
Yeah, it's a good question. So we actually when we do these demo days we write up recaps and that's the most product specific content we have on the sequence. Because the sequence is supposed to be an editorial site, right. It's not supposed to be this dump of product information. But I think because we put the demo day recaps on there, I think that's where it's getting some of the product specific info. And so I would say the vast majority of what's on the sequence is more thought leadership. It's from a human perspective. They're almost like op ed type pieces or they're videos with descriptions, things like that. But the, I would say maybe, I don't know, a fifth of it or a sixth of it will be these demo day recaps and we'll obviously tell A story around it. It's not just like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 product features, but it is pretty product, very straightforward. And so that's probably the sort of segment or stream of content that's the most product specific.
- [40:13]
B
Don't you all feel like there's a lot of conflicting information out there about AI and SEO and nobody really knows.
- [40:19]
C
Nobody even knows what the acronym is.
- [40:21]
B
No, but that's the thing about the posts and stuff you see on LinkedIn. Isn't the best thing to do. Like, I think it's easy to sit wherever and be like, well, she doesn't know. All you got to do, like, try something, learn for yourself. Be like, okay, there might be something here. What type of experiment can I run to do this right? I think you can argue all day in the LinkedIn comments with people about how to measure AI for SEO. Like, let's all just do it for our own business and figure out what we can learn. There's a question right there. You, my friend.
- [40:46]
D
Yeah, this is for Sylvia.
- [40:48]
C
So it's one idea of a digital twin engineer, but how do you handle.
- [40:55]
E
Potential threat or competitors using that?
- [40:59]
C
Oh, that is a good question. We have not gotten that far yet, honestly, so I'm going to note that down. I mean our thought on it was I think there are certain AI platforms you can purchase that can give some level of governance against any sort of like misuse of a bot and things like that. So we're in the process of just like researching how to actually make this happen. And so I'm sure we'll learn a lot more through that. In terms of the competitive side, my personal like philosophy on that is like, who cares? They're going to find that shit out anyway.
- [41:28]
B
Everybody's got like the zoom info pricing doc somewhere or whatever. Yeah, I've been at every company and like you get a. Someone forwards you a message from one of your competitors. It was like I was at Drift and Intercom, had our whole freaking sales deck and it's like, exactly. We are in a new age though, where like there is a lot of, you know, what level of information would you, would you want to give is definitely a very real concern and question.
- [41:51]
C
Yeah, we could potentially have two versions. Maybe there's one that's more just for open deals, that's a resource for them, that's embedded in the product and maybe there's one that's external or something like that.
- [42:00]
B
Imagine if you knew as a competitor and you just troll and like you just flip into like troll mode or something. Like that that'd be so good. Any. Yeah. If someone hasn't really deployed that yet into their outreach, where do they start? They figure out how to deploy which signals to look for. Very good question.
- [42:18]
D
So I would say so it depends on the business. I guess in your case it has how old is the business? Like do you have like CRM data, historical data, things like that.
- [42:29]
C
Okay.
- [42:30]
B
Into plays of the world.
- [42:32]
D
Right.
- [42:32]
B
And stuff. And so they always have different ideas about setting up. A lot of these guys are reaching it through play and starting to build it out. And so I'm not trying to guide them too much and see where they're going. So real talk, I'm asking to go into historical data, see what the clients, who they are, when did they find and try to go from that standpoint. Yeah but I didn't know if there was a better approach bring in sales CEO think tank or So I think.
- [43:01]
D
It'S good to have like the feedback from especially the sales team, TBD and the CEO depending on how they involved deals. But I think the number one start out with quantitative first. So like look back into your historical like how much data you have and then theoretically the solution you have should be able to tell you the ICP criteria, the fit that's pretty standard. And then typically what kind of signals those companies typically had around the time that they talk to you. Same thing with the buyers. So this is the hardest part. It sounds simple but basically almost like a product marketer AI that kind of look back and analyze and then tell you typically these are the indicators of companies that likely to buy you. I'm not saying in market because that's assume a lot. Right. And that becomes your stack rank of these are the signals that we should care about and then assign weight to those. Then now what is your target account list if you have them? Or let's go find accounts that match these and then these new accounts find all the signals that's happening right now there and then stack bring them based on the first sheet of paper. So in between before you start applying it to your target account, this is when I would bring in the sales leaders and then maybe a CEO. It's like does it look right? The data says that but maybe something's changed because data could also like things could change. Like we monitor a mix of ICP Persona in the last six years and things do change. So maybe they have some newer information in the last three months that could shift the ways. And this is where the human in the loop comes in. And then you get that set of like weighted signals, important score thing. Apply that account scoring and contact scoring to your next.
- [44:35]
B
We'll do one more. And then these three were in Vermont. They got nowhere to go. So I would go find them. Find them after.
- [44:42]
C
Yeah, captive audience. So I know you mentioned pr. I didn't think it was that, but actually we did a client survey and.
- [44:50]
E
Just to figure out, like, how our.
- [44:52]
C
Buyers, our clients are getting their information. And still traditional media, it's the largest one for us. We go work with manufacturing, healthcare and all that. Just wondering, like, how are you maybe using PR to leverage more roles and more modern, I guess, modern marketing strategies? It's just, you know, we're trying to use it for bot leadership more and all that. But I just, I'm curious to see if we have ideas. Yeah, I have some thoughts on this for priority. Our thought is basically like, PR is only as good as its spokespeople. And so what we're working on is really more of building sort of influencers internally. So we have people who are building up their LinkedIn accounts, for example, getting them, posting, doing video with them, and then also having those as spokespeople for pr. The best way to do PR is have something really interesting to say or have someone really interesting to talk to. And so if you can build up this bench of spokespeople that's out there saying really interesting things, it's just going to naturally extend to that journalist conversation as well. So I think, yes, if you're trying to do PR for an LLM optimization hack and you're just going to ship out a bunch of press releases, I don't know, maybe that's a strategy. We're not doing that for us. It's more just like, yeah, who are the people? That's where it really starts with, who are the people that have something interesting to say? Then we set up a sourcing call with them. We figure out what do they want to talk about, what's interesting to them. We match that up with our storytelling and then that's what we pitch out to the journalists. And so I think, yeah, his has to start with like the people internally at the company.
- [46:23]
E
So I hear you said, like, have.
- [46:25]
B
Something interesting, have something to say. Right. The PR thing I've seen work over the last couple years with CMOs and others is the myth is to think that you're going to just like pitch the New York Times on the fact that you raised $100 million and, you know, the CEO thinks that's going to happen. But it's not the play that I've seen work really well is if the company has truly interesting and original data and you're often. And like that's got to become part of the product. And let's say, you know, this happens a lot in like cyber security, right? If you have a lot of data on interesting hacks and leaks and things that happen and you start by becoming a source for reporters, it's not, hey, talk to our spokesperson, but it's like, hey, this thing happened, we have some data. This is interesting, this is going to help your article. And then it becomes this bridge to actually build a real relationship. I think that the, the value in having like a PR firm on retainer right now is probably going to be like relationships to journalists in particular industries. But the marketing play that I would want to run is like, what interesting data and not, not the bullshit company data. Like we know we analyzed 200. You know, I loved our like salary report we did with XFi. But like we're not going to pitch that to the New York Times, right? It so can you create original data and be a source and you happen, it happens to be created by the company that makes this product and that gives you more something pitchable. But is that is exactly the example of like having something to say.
- [47:41]
C
There's two ways to do the research. Part two, you can pay an agency to do the research, which is generally best because then they put their like little stamp of approval on it and they're a research agency. And journalists love stats. Like we, when we do a, we used to do this annual report and we would get coverage for it the entire year. Like it just, they love stats and so research is definitely great workspace.
- [48:00]
B
Like a perfect example. It's like Apple Device from what you know, Apple device management. Right. So something happens with Apple. You have some stat about how many people take their Apple devices home now because we're all working from home. Like those are relevant to like reporters on the tech beat, right?
- [48:14]
C
Exactly. And then we've been experimenting with doing our own research and seeing if they'll pick that up. And we do this really simple. We use Typeform. We send out surveys to our sequence readership. And our latest survey got a thousand responses. We offered some swag incentives. And so we don't know if journalists are going to be like, well, you did this research yourselves. We don't know if they're going to like honor that or not. But because there's so many responses, we think they might. But yeah, you could Always try that like simple Typeform survey. It's just amazing for just connecting with the customer too. Like, I loved what Sanger was saying about NRR and bring coming back to that. Like, I think in all this AI hype, the biggest thing people are missing are just like, what are we doing for the customer? Like, we're all here looking at ourselves and looking at our teams, looking at our processes and just like, is any of this helping them? Is any of this impacting them? And so like the ability to like come back to the customer, even if it's like a simple survey or just sitting on a sales call. Like, I think we're really missing that right now.
- [49:09]
B
Cool. Okay, we're going to wrap. Shout out to this panel, please. Thank you.
- [49:17]
A
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com. Our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers, building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become.
- [50:14]
B
A member for the year.
- [50:15]
A
Go check it out. Learn more exactly@5.com and I will see you over there in the community. Hey. This episode is brought to you by our friends@customerio.
- [50:33]
B
Do you remember?
- [50:34]
A
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 Gerhart. Yeah, well, those days are long gone in marketing. AI has raised the bar for lifecycle marketing because now you can deliver smart, context aware communication that actually feels personal. And you can do it at scale without hiring five more content people personally. Personalization today doesn't just mean using my name, it actually means having context about any previous interactions. But the problem here happens because even though this sounds great in theory, most teams aren't actually doing it. They're stuck with broken reporting, siloed data and outdated stacks. It's often easier just to keep doing things the way you've always done them right? Isn't that kind of the the norm? Default to the status quo? So customer IO they did a sur they surveyed 600 marketers just like you and me to figure out what's actually working and what's broken in. This is what we call life cycle 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 strateg you can put to work right now. If you want to get smarter about lifecycle marketing, this is a great free resource. So go check it out. You can get it@customerio exit 5 and you'll learn how to build lifecycle marketing that keeps up with today's expectations. That's customer I.O. exit 5.