Why Marketing Is Back In The Driver Seat (with Maura Rivera, CMO at Qualified)

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Why Marketing Is Back In The Driver Seat"

Podcast: The Dave Gerhardt Show
Episode: Why Marketing Is Back In The Driver Seat (with Maura Rivera, CMO at Qualified)
Air Date: November 6, 2025
Host: Dave Gerhardt
Guest: Maura Rivera (CMO, Qualified)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into why marketing is experiencing a resurgence at the strategic core of B2B organizations, particularly as AI transforms both the discipline and the expectations of marketers. Dave Gerhardt hosts Maura Rivera, CMO at Qualified, for a candid, pragmatic discussion about modern marketing leadership, staying at one company, building high-retention teams, product and marketing alignment, the new wave of agentic marketing, AI in go-to-market efforts, and the return of in-person events. The vibe is warm, candid, and honest, with both speakers sharing actionable insights and humility about what it takes to thrive as a modern marketer.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The CMO Journey: Marathon, Not a Sprint

• Longevity at Qualified: Maura has been CMO at Qualified for 6+ years—a rarity in B2B tech, where CMO tenure typically hovers around 1-2 years.

  "It's a long time. In this world, it's a long time... each year is different, right?" – Maura Rivera (28:05)

• Team Stability: Half of Qualified’s 25-person marketing team have also been at the company for 4+ years, attributed to product vision and leadership trust.
• Career Path Realism: Both Dave and Maura discussed nonlinear marketing career arcs and openly acknowledged imposter syndrome and learning on the job.

  "I don't know everything... if you can hire the A team, I think it's a good thing if they're smarter than you." – Maura Rivera (21:31, 23:39) "The number one thing at this level is building the team. It’s the one thing that makes everything else easier." – Dave Gerhardt (32:36)

2. Product & Marketing: The Power Duo

• Alignment Drives Momentum: Close collaboration between product and marketing is at the core of Qualified’s playbook.

  "Product launches, the product roadmap, are the best thing and the best partner for marketing." – Dave Gerhardt (02:25)

• Cadence & Playbooks:
  • Quarterly Big Launches: These center around keynotes, demos, and the company’s evolving narrative (35:12).
  • Monthly Mini Launches: Smaller drops keep the brand top-of-mind and the innovation story fresh.

  "We try and do a launch every single month ... Product marketing cadence is the heartbeat." – Maura Rivera (35:12, 37:59)

• Collaboration Tactics: Early and continuous involvement with product leaders (CPO, engineers, designers) ensures launches are integrated and impactful.

  "You have to build that relationship with your head of product, bring them in early." – Maura Rivera (39:55) "That was the secret sauce... we worked on that stuff together." – Dave Gerhardt (42:13)

3. Leadership: Humility & Building an “A-Team”

• Hiring Philosophy:
  • Smart, specialized leaders are essential; the CMO need not be an expert in everything, but must assemble and empower great talent.

  "If you're a CMO... and you try and hire people too junior so you can be the star... you're going to fail." – Maura Rivera (23:41)

• Letting Go:
  • Part of leveling up is trusting others, being vulnerable about not knowing everything, and cultivating curiosity.

  "I'm totally okay with my team seeing me not know the answer... it's your job to figure it out." – Dave Gerhardt (26:16)

4. AI & Agentic Marketing: Why Marketing Is (Really) in the Driver’s Seat Again

• Workflows Transformed:
  • Qualified uses its own AI agent “Piper” to run all inbound SDR functions (scheduling, qualifying, follow-up outreach), replacing what used to be a whole team.

    "I used to have 10 inbound SDRs. Now I have zero. I just have Piper, the agent who does all of our inbound." – Maura Rivera (50:19)

• Outbound, Reimagined:
  • Human SDRs have redeployed to outbound, aided by AI copilots (with a real human overseeing quality and constant improvement).

    "It's much harder to do than inbound. Outbound is harder." – Maura Rivera (54:06)

• AI Creates New Roles:
  • High performers have evolved into roles like “AI Marketing Operations” and “Go-to-Market Engineers,” managing agents to optimize the pipeline (50:19).
• AI & Empowerment:
  • Marketing, armed with AI, now controls and optimizes a larger part of the funnel, driving efficiency and growth.

    "Marketing is back in the driver's seat... we have all these agentic solutions at our fingertips that we can help control." – Maura Rivera (56:24)

• Outbound Not Dead—Just Hard:
  • High personalization still matters, whether human or AI, and an “always tinkering” mindset is key.

    "You need someone setting a high bar, constant tinkering and innovating." – Maura Rivera & Dave Gerhardt (55:50)

5. Category Leadership & Narrative

• Category-Building:
  • Qualified is betting on “agentic marketing” as the future and anchoring both product and thought leadership narratives here.

    "We wrote a book on agentic marketing... how can you take ownership of the category and be thought leaders?" – Maura Rivera (43:53)

• Narrative Agility:
  • The team treats narrative as a living asset, evolving with each launch and market shift (37:59).

6. Events: The Playbook Comes Full Circle

• Events Are Back:
  • Both big summits and smaller meetups re-energize community, drive relationships, and deepen category leadership.

    "Events feel like they're back. In-person events are back." – Maura Rivera (45:02) "The community... People just want to hang out and connect in person." – Dave Gerhardt (48:03)

• No Substitute for Human Connection:
  • Even as agentic, AI-powered marketing rises, the need for real-world connection (and supporting infrastructure) only grows.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Team Overlap and Industry Friendships:

  "The small CMO world is like, a lot of times friends become competitors and then become friends... There's always respect at the end of the day for how other teams are winning."
  – Maura Rivera (07:03-08:40)

• On Leadership & Curiosity:

  "Always be curious. That's what makes a great marketing leader... because the landscape is shifting so quickly. That curiosity is what's gonna propel marketing leaders forward."
  – Maura Rivera (25:24)

• On Product & Marketing Partnership:

  "It's not just about setting the corporate narrative at the start of the fiscal year and letting it sit in a Google Doc—it’s a living, breathing thing for us."
  – Maura Rivera (37:59)

• On AI’s True Role:

  "AI enables marketers to cover more of the funnel, move the business forward and actually look like heroes, not just the team that spends the money."
  – Maura Rivera (56:24)

• On Team Retention:

  "That's the thing I'm most proud of... Everybody, knock on wood, has been around for a really long time because I hope they feel the same way. It’s chaotic and they work their butts off, but there's camaraderie."
  – Maura Rivera (32:36)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Product & Marketing Alignment Insights — [02:25], [35:12], [39:55], [42:13]
• Team Retention and Culture — [28:05], [32:36], [33:07]
• Building a CMO Career — [21:31], [23:39]
• AI & Agentic Marketing Deep Dive — [50:19], [56:24]
• Events, Community, and Human Connection — [45:02], [48:03]
• Leadership and Vulnerability — [25:19], [26:16]

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Advice & Takeaways for Marketers

Building a Durable, Engaged Marketing Team

• Prioritize hiring and culture: hire smart, empower them, let them teach you.
• Longevity yields trust, execution quality, and better long-term strategic bets.

Product-Marketing Partnership

• Early & continuous alignment between product and marketing compounds impact.
• Use launches as the heartbeat for team alignment, customer excitement, and refreshed narrative.

Leading in the Age of AI

• AI is not just about efficiency; it’s about enabling marketers to reclaim and expand influence through automation and insight.
• Human oversight and creativity are still the differentiators—even the best AI needs proactive management.

Future-Ready Marketers

• Category creation and active narrative evolution set the leaders apart.
• Invest in events and authentic community—online and off. Relationships still drive results.

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Final Thoughts

This episode is an inspiring, no-fluff conversation for marketers and marketing leaders who want to build resilient teams, architect smart playbooks, and confidently claim a central role as AI reshapes B2B marketing. If you’re looking for practical leadership wisdom, new perspectives on AI’s impact, or motivation to stay the course, Maura Rivera’s journey—and her partnership with Dave Gerhardt—is for you.

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Want to connect with Maura Rivera or the Qualified team?
Find Maura on LinkedIn (and let her know you heard the show!)
Explore Qualified at qualified.com

For more B2B marketing resources, visit exitfive.com.

Transcript

[Dave Gerhardt]

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You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.

[Mara Rivera]

2, 3, 4, exit.

[Dave Gerhardt]

My guest on this episode is Mara Rivera. She's a CMO at Qualified. They're leading a movement in agentic marketing. The future, they've been saying, people have been telling me, is all about AI, and Qualified's right at the forefront of this. But I had a great conversation about Mara. We didn't talk entirely about. About AI. We talked about her career at Qualified. In a world where most CMOs are trading jobs every one to two years. She's been at this company for six years, and of the team of 30 marketing people, 25 marketing people have. Half of them have been there as long. And so I want to understand why. What's going on over there? What do they have in the water over there at Qualified that has all these people staying for so long? And it turns out the connection is the product vision, the alignment between the product team and the marketing team. And so we talked about how important that is at your company. How product launches, the product roadmap are the best thing and the best partner for marketing. We talked about the team AI, how outbound is not dead. It's certainly working. And here's why. We talked about why events are back, and I love this. We talked about why Marketing is back in the driver's seat. That's because of AI. It's a positive thing, not a negative thing. We're going to brainwash you into thinking that. Enjoy my conversation with Mara Rivera. She's a CMO at Qualified. We were just talking about our, our workout habits and, and tendencies. And you mentioned that you're a big runner and trail running. I hated running my whole life always worked out. But then a couple years ago, I was like, you know what? You can't. I can't really call myself an athlete, like, if I can't run. And so I don't run long distances. But, like three to five miles is like, is the perfect sweet spot for me.

[Mara Rivera]

Hey, that's good. Calling myself a big runner is a stretch. I. I would say I'm a. I'm a light jogger.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I said that. I. You don't have to take credit for that. I said that for me, though, also. I don't know if it's like, because of kids or because of, like, working indoors. Like the two for one has like, any workout that happens outside is. Is high I will rank it higher than, like, inside when I just. I need to be outside. So you and I were talking about your peloton. It's like, I totally get it if I'm gonna work out, like, and I can be outside. It's gonna be outside.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah. And especially just like being on Zoom all day. And then you and I were talking. We both have young kids. I'm like, if I can Even just get 25 minutes of alone time when I listen to like a. A. A funny podcast and I just run. Even if it's just for two miles.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yes.

[Mara Rivera]

It's like the, the time that I get dedicated just to clear my head a little bit. I don't do it as much as I should, though. And it's starting to get a little cold, so I'm nervous my habits going to wane even more, but.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Oh, give me a break. You live in.

[Mara Rivera]

I'm in California.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Like, what are we talking about? I'll show you cold. Like, I'm on the other side of the complaint.

[Mara Rivera]

I'm a softy.

[Dave Gerhardt]

There's no. There's no bad weather. Actually, a friend of mine who is a. An actual big runner, he's like, dude, I would always rather run. He's like, when it's 90 degrees out, I'm not going to. Like, running is impossible. But if it's cold, once you get going, your body temperature gets up so much. And so even here in Vermont, like, if it's zero degrees out, I will still be sweaty. You just have to have, you know, the proper.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Proper layering.

[Mara Rivera]

Have you always been in Vermont?

[Dave Gerhardt]

No, we moved here in. So I was a CMO at privy at the time. It was like April 2020.

[Mara Rivera]

Okay.

[Dave Gerhardt]

We were living in Boston.

[Mara Rivera]

Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Three year old, one year old. That's where, like my whole life was. And then I know Covid happened and everything went remote and just blew up. And I think I was having this, like, wait a second. Like, I'm. I'm not. I'm a knowledge worker. Like, I work on the computer. Like, and I. But I had always thought, like, if I want to be a CMO and I want to work and I want to be in marketing, like, I got to be in the city. And so my wife's from Vermont. And I just was having, like, I think as a lot of us were at that time of life, just having a. Like, it wasn't. I was probably, I don't know, my low 30s. So it wasn't a midlife. Midlife crisis. But I was like, we. We got to do something different. I'm ready.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Let's move to Vermont. Are you serious? Are you serious?

[Mara Rivera]

Well, it's so cool because you might not have ever done that move, you know, and.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Oh, we talk about it all the time. We'll be at night. We'll be watching TV at night. We'll be like, you ever think about what we would like, where we would be living, what we would be doing.

[Mara Rivera]

What your life would look like? It's beautiful out there. My brother went to Dartmouth, so we went. We went up to Vermont once when we visited, and I was like, it's a whole different world. The. The changing leaves and the. The cheese curds.

[Dave Gerhardt]

It was the cheese curds. Yeah. It's great. Well, it's good to talk to you. It's always fun. I can always tell. It's like, right away when I talk to someone. You know, sometimes I get messages from, like, PR teams and they're like, you know, they'll have some super impressive CMO on there, and it's like, the chemistry with someone is not always good. You were like, oh, I know. I feel like I know you. And I already feel that already, so that's awesome.

[Mara Rivera]

Well, thank you for having me.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I don't have as much existential dread. And, like, what the heck am I going to talk to this woman about for a while?

[Mara Rivera]

Dave, we have a lot in common, so I know we've.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Do we. What do we have in common?

[Mara Rivera]

Well, I feel like we've worked for competitors before, which is funny. Which is the small. The small CMO world is like, a lot of times friends become competitors and then become friends. You know, it's also. There's so much overlap.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Totally.

[Mara Rivera]

But I've always watched you from afar, Love your. Love your content. So it's fun. It's fun to be in the inner circle with you.

[Dave Gerhardt]

That's cool. It's. You know what's so funny? It's like when you're in a company, it's like, competitors, they're evil. De. Qualified sucks, you know, like, but. And it's so funny. But then once I left Drift, like, the. My world opened up to me in so many different ways. Like, our biggest. Probably rival at the time, well, qualified was like, coming up and new. And so, yeah, we were small, super easy to position against, like a startup. Not just qualified, but, like, you know, and I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but, like, marketing tactics would be like, oh, okay. What ingredients do we have? Well, they're New, like, and. And that's exactly what we use. When we were coming up, we, like, went after Intercom, and it was like, where the upstarts at Intercom could be. Like, they. They have no credibility, right? And so it's like, that's the whole angle. But when I left Drift, like, shortly after that, this guy who ran finance at Intercom messaged me, this guy Bobby, and he was starting a new company. He's like, hey, can you be my advisor? I was like, wait, you know me. I thought you guys all hated me. And he's like, no, dude, we. We thought we were, like, admiring what you're doing. And so it's like, totally. You gotta get outside the bubble. I. I will say, though, there's always, like, one. Some guy from LinkedIn who's like, if I have, like, a form on our website, because we had this, like, no forms, you know, chatbot. Like, use Chatbot. Some guy will like, chirp me and be like, oh, look at this. Mr. No forms has a form on his website.

[Mara Rivera]

I'm like, dude, you're like, get over it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Like, that was eight years ago. And I was like, a com. I was working for a company that was literally. My job was to be their marketing person. So obviously I'm gonna say, like, yeah.

[Mara Rivera]

Well, it's fun too. I was just talking with. I won't, like, talk about the companies, but I was just at this CMO thing last week, and they were talking about how they had recruited product marketing from their competition. Cause they always looked up to what the competition was doing. So I feel like it. Competitive spirit's good because you're looking at what the other team's doing. You're getting inspiration from them, you're trying to figure out how you differentiate. And then I think there's always respect at the end of the day for, like, how other teams are winning in different ways. So you guys kind of wrote a great playbook just for content creation at Drift that we always looked up to a lot of.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah, well, but. But I mean, that. That's what's fun. Like, those are. That's actually, like, it's. It's so one of the coolest parts about building exit 5 that I didn't expect was people just, like, want to have friends that work in marketing.

[Mara Rivera]

Totally, totally.

[Dave Gerhardt]

That can't be the leading value prop. And so it's like, you know, we need to, like, lead with education and, like, we need to help educate marketers. But we're finding that, like, our, like, aha. Moment is like, There's a story of. I tell this all the time. Now, I've never told on the podcast, but there's two members of ours and two heads of marketing, two moms. They live in a town in Pennsylvania. Their kids are in the same school in the same grade and play soccer together.

[Mara Rivera]

Oh, no way.

[Dave Gerhardt]

They didn't know about it until they, like, met through exit five. And now they're friends. They go for walks together. They drove up to our New York event. And so it's like the same thing. The line that I say all the time, it's like most people in my personal life, like, I have no idea what I do for work. I can't 100%, you know, I can't talk to them about marketing. And so actually, if you think about it, your competitors, if you all could like, hang out and like, have a beer and have dinner together, that actually probably be like the best conversation.

[Mara Rivera]

Totally, totally. I feel that same way where I. I have three young kids, I'm at school, I'm like, I think people think I work in tech. And I kind of like it sometimes because I get to just be a mom and not talk about work. But then when you do get to connect with other CMOs, other marketing leaders, you just have so much in common. You can talk about your relationship with sales and your campaigns or something that didn't work, or how you're thinking about spend for next year, and you can kind of just like also bitch to each other about the stuff you're struggling with. It feels like this, like, safe space.

[Dave Gerhardt]

So, yeah, they're like, are you. Did you go to Saster this year? Yeah, we did.

[Mara Rivera]

Ah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Like, you know, it's.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah, totally, totally. And then once you find those people, you end up seeing them in all the same events and pockets and circles and you kind of can't avoid each other once you form those connections.

[Dave Gerhardt]

It's like, I don't know, I. Maybe, maybe Frank Slootman would disagree with this, but it's like, it's not life or death. Like, we're just, we're selling software together. It's okay. Competition is good, though. It also forces you to be creative. It's like, I think, totally. You know, there's a. There's like one up, one upmanship. And like, I think I remember being at Drift and I think I saw an early thing that you all did that was super interesting to me was like, my perception of it was, you did. We did product launches and then, like, I saw qualified. You all did these, like, high End like you'd film. What's your CEO's name?

[Mara Rivera]

Craig.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Craig, yeah. All right.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

It'd be like. And then Mara and Craig and like you'd be like, dressed nicely and it'd be like cut to you and like you'd walk through this stuff and I was like, oh, there's these. People know what they're doing. Like you're doing like these high end, like making these feel like moments. And then like we take a little ingredient for that. And then like Intercom did this kind of like world tour thing and we took something that.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah, they're good at events. Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

But I, but I think that is what marketing is. It's like I say all the time that like my experience has been in B2B marketing, but I think one of my strengths is like the ability to like see marketing and everything. I'll get an idea from the like local sandwich shop down the street and there's like an old man who has like this creative, like hilarious sign out front and I'll like be like, how can we take that and like use that in our company? I think that is what's fun about marketing.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah. And it's. It's good to kind of stay on your toes. Right. You can't get too comfortable in marketing. You have to stay relevant. You have to keep innovating. And so when there's competition, it kind of lights a fire under you in a good way that makes you think like, okay, what's the. As soon as one launches over, like, hey, what are we going to do next? How do we keep that momentum? Because if you don't maintain it, it dies.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah. Did you work with Craig at Salesforce?

[Mara Rivera]

Yes.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Like, that was my understanding is like this, this kind of company spun out of kind of like a mini. You know, there's a lots of Salesforce mafia. But it was like you all had some connections over there.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah. Yeah. So my. It's actually the story goes way back, but my first job out of college was at Salesforce and Craig at the time was the SVP of product marketing. And I landed in marketing and I worked for Craig and then he became the cmo and then most of our executive team was all at Salesforce at that time. It was kind of like 2010 to 2015. So Sean Whiteley, our co founder, Bing Yang, Gopal Patel, all of our co founders and Tawny, they were all kind of at Salesforce in that era. They then left and started the company Get Feedback, a survey platform which was acquired by SurveyMonkey oh, yeah. I led product marketing at Get Feedback, so I kind of left the mothership, went to Get Feedback, was excited to be at a smaller company. And then when they left Get Feedback, Craig pitched me on. They. They kind of went into the labs, I would say, in like, September of 2018. And we're starting to cook up some ideas. And then I joined in May 2019. So I've worked for Craig my whole career, probably the last 16 years. And it's really cool. Cause I think we just have a lot of trust amongst our team and, like, amongst our executive team. Cause we've all worked together for so long, and with that comes healthy challenges and debates and all of that great stuff. But there's a lot of trust at the end of the day. And Craig's a marketer, so he's always, like, pushing me. He doesn't let me just get stagnant or lazy. He's always pushing us to be relevant and have momentum. Which is cool, though.

[Dave Gerhardt]

That's how it was at Drift with. With David. Like, David, he was a founder. He. He was never, like, CMO at Salesforce or whatever, but he. He loved marketing. Marketing was his thing.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And so he got to, like, basically mold me. Mold me in his image, you know, And I was like, 20 years younger or whatever, a different point in my career. And. And that was really cool. And I think that we're, you know, not everybody that listens to this is lucky enough to work for a CEO who. Who gets marketing.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

But, man, don't you feel like if that's something that you can interview and find out on the way in, like, just makes your life so much easier.

[Mara Rivera]

A hundred percent. I think it. I mean, there's a lot of pressure when the CEO gets marketing because you can't just, like, throw jargon at them and. And go spend a ton of money and they'll be like, yeah, go for it. Like, they. They're gonna press you. But I would much prefer a CEO who gets it. And also, like, Craig's willing to take bets on brand because he knows that we can't quantify it, but it's gonna help with our. With how people are paying attention to us. He's really invested in product launches. He's always pushing us. So I think it's a good thing. I talked to so many marketers who are like, you know, my CEO just doesn't get it, or I have to. They think everything. They think all we need to do is, like, issue a press release for everything, and we'll get coverage in Forbes and like, that would be really. That would make your job really, really hard.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah.

[Mara Rivera]

So I'm, I'm grateful that in our. Our other co founder, Sean, he used to be a product marketing leader at Salesforce. He's a product marketer at heart. So sometimes there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but I'd prefer that because there's a lot of good ideas than not.

[Dave Gerhardt]

It's better.

Well, it's like, better to have knowledgeable cooks than like someone who's never cooked before.

[Mara Rivera]

Yes, exactly. It's not like those Food Network shows that's like the world's worst cooks, you know, trying to make something. It's like, it's more like Top Chef.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Mara Rivera]

So did you and Dave work together or David before drift, or was that your first time working with.

[Dave Gerhardt]

No, that was our first time. So the way that I got my job there was my first big break in marketing was like I was working at this startup and I was, I worked at a company called Constant Contact and they were Email.

[Mara Rivera]

Email software company because I worked for Campaign Monitor because Get Feedback was acquired by Campaign.

[Dave Gerhardt]

We. I'm going to fly out to the bay. We need to. Yes.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah, we got it. We got to hang. We actually have a lot in common.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah. Yeah. And so that's where I started my career. Like, I, I was at a, I started in pr. I was a PR at a PR agency. Then I wanted to go in house and I went to Constant Contact, which is like really cool tech company at the time. And I pr. That company was cool. But I, I really like startups. At the time, my job was I was the PR manager for like Constant Contact social media product.

[Mara Rivera]

Oh, cool.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And so I was like going to south by southwest. I'm reading TechCrunch every day. When TechCrunch was big, I knew all the companies, all the apps, you know, and I was like, I think I want to get into startups. And so I found a startup in Boston. They didn't have a marketing job for me, so I joined as customer success manager.

[Mara Rivera]

Okay.

[Dave Gerhardt]

World's worst customer success manager. For sure.

[Mara Rivera]

It's a good role to have as a marketer, to have that point of view of the customer facing team. I'm sure.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. It was, it was brutal though. It was more just like my job was to demo the product. Things never worked. And.

[Mara Rivera]

Oh yeah, that's not, that's not good. It's not good to be a CSM for, for a bad product.

[Dave Gerhardt]

This was like, well, it's like we had like, you know, pre million dollars in revenue. It was just very, very early. Anyway, while I was there, I started to get into startups and I listened to this podcast called this Week in Startups by Jason Calacanis. And I'm listening to this podcast, I'm like, man, all these companies are like uber instacart, all these San Francisco based companies. I'm like, I'm in Boston. There's an amazing startup scene here. I was like, somebody should start a, a podcast about Boston startups. And Ben, who is the founder of the company, is at Privy. He was like, you should start it. And he gave me the free pass, like, go build this side project.

[Mara Rivera]

Cool.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And so I did that. And it was through that podcast that I actually met, met David because he was a guest on my podcast. I got him. It was like a big get, like a founder. And I did an interview with him and I'm writing up the show notes the next day and I was like, man, that conversation was amazing. Like, that dude, like taught like, I learned a bunch from that. Usually sometimes I'm talking like a boring VC or whatever. And no disrespect to vcs, just one in particular I can think of.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I looked at the website and they were hiring a marketing person. And so I was like, ooh, interesting. And I was not happy in my job. I was working at HubSpot at the time. I send him a note. Oh yeah. And I get an auto. So I applied for the job and I get an automated message like 12 hours later that's like, thank you so much. We've reviewed your application, unfortunately, like, we've already filled this role. Like, appreciate it. I was like, bummer. Back to work. Whatever. That morning I get an email from the recruiter. He's like, hey, actually, never mind. David saw your email and he wants you to come in and interview. And I was like, heck yeah. And I went in and interviewed him and interviewed with him. He was like, yeah, like, we want to open up a job for you. Like, we think you would be great.

[Mara Rivera]

That's awesome.

[Dave Gerhardt]

That was the turning point in my career was like to go to a place for where I got to do a lot of the doing for the first time, the website, pr, social strategy. Like, and I can't thank that experience enough for like, I think it's great to go to a big company and you know, you were at Salesforce as an example. But I think I learned the most. Like, there's something to like go to a big company where you can learn a bunch and then like get to go and do something, you know?

[Mara Rivera]

Yes. I'm so grateful for my trajectory and I'll just kind of, you know, you don't know it when you're in it, that, that, that it's working out the right way. But Salesforce, I gotta see how is the machine. How does it operate? How does like one of the world's best B2B companies operate? I was inspired by their events, their product launches, et cetera. And then to be able to take that playbook and then be like, okay, how do we apply this playbook at a startup where we can move much, much faster. I'm more of a product marketer and customer marketing, that's more of my background. So it also pushed me at the beginning. Like I had to learn so much about. Cause I was marketer one. I had to learn like demand gen how to. I remember Googling, like how to set up SEM campaigns, how to build dashboards in Salesforce. Cause I was used to having counterparts. I was at some smaller companies, like in between Salesforce, as I mentioned with Get Feedback and Campaign Monitor. But it taught me how to do everything. And now that my team's bigger and we're a more mature company, I'm grateful for that experience because I can see what everybody's doing throughout the day. It's like, I'm not blind. I know what it looks like to upload a press release or work with our PR agency. I know what it looks like too. And there's a lot of new stuff like AEO and all this stuff that I don't know because it wasn't around when I was, when we were starting the marketing function. But I feel like it gives me empathy for my team. I understand the lift that it takes. I'm not an expert in a lot of the things and I think I learned the importance of hiring people who are smarter than you, especially in like in those functions where you're not strong. Like I have a really strong VP of demand gen and marketing ops. But it's. If you could have that experience at a small company and it's a ton of hard work and like late nights doing God knows what, not. Not fancy work. But it. You learn so, so much. I'm really grateful for it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Everybody that's listening to this right now, can you just hear. Mara is a super accomplished CMO and a marketing leader in the space that you care about. And she is on our podcast right now. 20,000 people listen, this a month. And she's saying, I don't know everything.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah, yeah, I don't, I don't.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And I'm, I'm calling this out because I think one of the number one questions we see in exit 5, I see in my inbox is like people that want to get to the CMO level, but they're like, hey, I, I want to be a cmo, but like my experience is only in pr. And I'm like, great. I've been doing this, Mara, for like since probably since the drift days, for like seven years now, interviewing CMOs. And every one of you has come up from a different area. I would say the common thread though is like everyone has one core area that they're good at. And so for you, you're saying like it's product marketing. And then they've all. Maybe there's three things. They have one core area like product marketing, that that's their core skill set. Number two, they've probably worked somewhere else where they were able to observe. So like you're at Salesforce and so maybe you've never run demand gen, but you probably worked at some with some super legit people at Salesforce, right? And then you go and you have to build a team around that. Can you just build on that? Because I want people to hear it from you about like, how do you. It is an impossible task to know everything in marketing right now. It's changing faster than ever. How could you possibly be an expert in ads, SEO, pr, product marketing, analyst, relations, events, the direct mail, like so how do you, how do you take that, how have you taken that into your job as a, as a cmo?

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah, I would say as an early. When I first was CMO at Qualified, I kind of had imposter syndrome. And I thought I had to be the expert at everything I've learned over the years because I've been in this role for about seven years. Like what you need to do is hire really, really smart people around you who can teach you and guide you. My VP of marketing operations, his name's Chris Bockleman, we've worked together for 10 to 15 years. He runs laps around me with like martech and report building and analytics and insights. My VP of DemandGen, who's like his, you know, kind of partner in crime, Sarah McConnell, she knows way more about me about than I do about like thought leadership and content and buyer journey. But I've. It's. What's the phrase about rising tides? What, what is that in blanket lift?

[Dave Gerhardt]

All Boats. Rising tides. Lift all boats.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah, lift all boats. Like, I just feel like if you can hire the A team, I think it's a good thing if they're smarter than you or especially in certain areas. Like, then you guys are going to come across like this, like, totally stellar marketing organization. If you're a cmo, which it's easy to have imposter syndrome sometime and be like, I need to know everything. And you try and hire people to junior so that you can be the star and you can be all knowing and they can do all the grunt work, you're going to fail. So I think you need, you need both. Right. And especially at a small company, those really smart people, they have to have grit. They have to be willing to roll up their sleeves. You can't come in as a VP and think you're gonna boss people around. When you're a small company, you have to do the work too. But I just think looking for great talent who can teach you something is like, what you should really be looking for when you're building out the team and then being okay. Admitting, like, I just asked yesterday to Sarah and a woman on our team who's owning our AEO strategy, I was like, I don't feel like an expert here. I feel like I have a lot to learn. I was talking with the CRO of Webflow two days ago and he was like, dropping all this knowledge on me about website behavior and the LLMs and traffic benchmarks and what they should be. And it was really informative and enlightening. And I went to Sarah and Sarah after and I was like, can you give me a master class on aeo? I just, like, I need to just like, go into profound. Show me all of our data. I need to get, like, really close to it. And it would be easy for me to leave that call and be like, oh, I'm all knowing. I just talked to this guy. I have all these stats, but I'm. I think it. It's okay to be a little vulnerable and say where you need to learn more.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah.

[Mara Rivera]

So I'm. I don't know. I'm rambling a bit, but.

[Dave Gerhardt]

No, you're not.

[Mara Rivera]

Build the A team. Call out when you.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah.

[Mara Rivera]

When you need to learn more. When. And always be curious. Like, I think that's what makes a great marketing leader is somebody who's always. Because the landscape is shifting so quickly right now. So that curiosity, I think, is what's gonna propel certain marketing leaders forward.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah, no, rambling is good. I would. I Love this style of. I love when a guest actually talks to me. It makes me so much more fun. There's so much less pressure than, like, next question, Dave. And I'm like, well, I don't have a next question. I'm having a conversation. Like, I didn't think of what I was going to ask you. Yeah, a couple things that made me. That made me think of number one on the, like, not knowing everything. I don't know if this is because I think it's probably because I'm just older than I was and I. I'm at a different point in my life and family and maturity, and you just. You just change, like, a lot of things, you know, I'm 38. When I was at Drift, I started. I was 28. That's a. That's a long time.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah. You're a different person.

[Dave Gerhardt]

You're a different person.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And, you know, life humbles. You just learn stuff. Right. And I think one thing that I'm super okay with now is maybe. And maybe it's because my company or whatever, it's my company. I'm totally okay with my team seeing me, like, not know the answer. And I have tried to get better at being like, I don't know the answer, but, like, it's your job to figure it out. So you go tell me, I'm happy to help you, and you can pick my brain on this, but, like, you should go figure it out. That's.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Where I used to always be, like, I'll do it, I'll do it, I'll do it. I can do it, I can do it. And that's. That doesn't help. That doesn't help you in the long run. It's like you never learned to pass the ball. And then eventually, like, one day you're out sick or whatever, and you need to. You need to be able to do that.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah. That's been a big learning for me as well. Cause I think early on it was easy to be like, I'll do it. I'll do it. I'll scoop it up. I've done this before. It'll just be faster if I do it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah.

[Mara Rivera]

And when you can learn to, like, let go, and folks rise to the occasion when they're given a challenge, and if you're always just saving them, then they won't have to learn the hard way.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Damn.

[Mara Rivera]

So I think that's the sign of a great leader when you're just like, here's a challenge. Can you go dig? Like, dig into this Come back with a recommendation. Let's work on it together. We'll workshop it. But I'm not going to have all the answers. Like, go do some research and come back and we'll formulate our strategy. I also think that's. All of this is just. And I'm not perfect. I'm still learning. But a lot of it is just, like. It's confidence. It's confidence being okay, not knowing the answer. It's having confidence in your team that they're gonna figure it out. It's having confidence that, like, I don't know. In all of. In all of those things, I think. I think it's important.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I had something else that I wanted to ask you, built on that. And I. I usually am taking a thousand notes, but I'm actually having a conversation, so this is. This is enjoyable. One of my questions that I had in my head when I was thinking about what I wanted to talk to you about. You've been qualified for six years.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

That's a long time. In our.

[Mara Rivera]

It's a long. Oh, my God. I feel like it's like in this world, it's a long time. Yeah. Six. Six and a half.

[Dave Gerhardt]

But who's not in reality? It's not like my. My mom was a teacher. My wife's mom was a teacher. They both worked at the same school in the same role for 40 years. But there's. You know, in our world of tax, it's like two months and you go somewhere else.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah. It's a revolving. Well, it's funny. My husband's. He works for William Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and he's in finance, and he's been there for 19 years.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Oh, and you guys just love stability over there.

[Mara Rivera]

Rivera household stability. Yeah. But like. And so he's like. And I'm like. But in tech, usually it's like, you know, two years shelf life for a cmo, and it's fun because people are always bopping around. But I. For me, it goes back to the team that we have. Like, it's that trust that I talked about. It's that comfort that I've talked about. So that's what. That's what keeps me here. And then the product. We're innovating really, really quickly, and so that keeps it exciting. But, yeah, it's a long time. Most CMOs who I meet, I just met the CMO. Who was it? She was at Clue, and she's been there for seven years. And we were at a breakfast, and I was. We basically had a very similar story and we're like, we gotta catch up. We gotta go get wine next time and talk about this. Because it is. It is rare to have that much history with the company. But it's been fun. Each year is different, right?

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah.

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[Dave Gerhardt]

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[Dave Gerhardt]

I thought about what I wanted to say to you on the on the team thing. So I remember specifically you just were talking about like how, how it really is all about the people. And I think this is one of those lessons. It's, it's kind of like post kids. It's like once I have my own kids I realize a bunch of the things that like I didn't like that. My parents did. I'm doing the same thing to my kids. Oh, I get why you did this. And I worked for Mike Volpe, who's a CMO at HubSpot at the time. And they. When I joined HubSpot, they had 75 people on the marketing team. And the very last round of the interview was me. Was. Was with him in an hour in person. And I was like, how do you have the time to do this? Like, this is a public company. He's like, what? He's like, what do you mean, dude? This is the job. I was like, no, that can't be it. You gotta be like, you must be, like, coming up with taglines and billboards and this is. No, this is the job. He's like, you will learn the team. 90% of the job is building the team. And it is the one thing that makes everything else easier. If you get the team right and the people right, then you get to do it. And so your thing is, it's one of those, like, business platitudes. Like, it's all about the people. But until you really feel that, you're like, wow, my team is awesome. And look at all the time I have back and the freedom that I have and how much of a source of my stress was because, like, I was a bad. I was bad at hiring and bad at managing and, like, didn't know how to find the right people. That. That is the job at this level.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah. Team. And I think that's, like, it's easy sometimes to rush hires because you're like, I've got work. I need to take off of someone's plate, or I've got a headcount to fill, and if I don't fill it, it'll disappear. But who you. Putting as much time as you can into building that a team. It will pay off in spades. That's the thing I'm most proud of at Qualified is. Is the marketing team that we've built. And everybody, knock on wood, has been around for a really long time because I hope they feel the same way. It's chaotic and they work their butts off, but, like, there's a camaraderie.

[Dave Gerhardt]

How many. How many people are on the team right now?

[Mara Rivera]

Our team's like, 25 people.

[Dave Gerhardt]

25. And do you have a bunch of them who've been there for more than four years?

[Mara Rivera]

Oh, yeah. A bunch. Next to the team, I mean, we've probably hired. I bet, like, 12 to 15 have been here for over four years.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Wow.

[Mara Rivera]

Don't quote me on that.

[Dave Gerhardt]

No, I'm not. But just, just as something, something. I'm just trying to say, like, as a percent that. That feels like a lot of companies. It's constant, constant turnover, constant change. Like, it must have given you the ability to like, operate more long term because you have some history, because you can make longer bets. The people that are there to see these things through.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah, we have our playbooks. We know how to do it. There's a lot of trust. I mean, it's always hard. We're a remote team. So that's like, that's the thing I crave the most is just more in person, together time with us, because that always really fills our cup. But yeah, knock on wood, every. And I think there's a lot of pride. Like a lot of folks were here when we were smaller. We're about like 300 employees now and we feel like we're on the map and we're a real company and like we're, we're thriving, which is great. And people are like, you know, it's all led to. This is kind of the feeling that they have. Like all, all those late nights, all of those, like, early day launches we were doing, it's kind of led to this moment. So I think there's a lot of pride from the team, but that trust, I think is great. And now we're folding. We're hiring right now, so we're bringing new people into the team and it's like, okay, how do we bring new people who can help us do more and are going to just like be great additions to the team and kind of help us maintain that great camaraderie we have. Because that's what makes it all work. Right. And that's what makes it. You want to work hard is when you like the people that you're working with.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah, take me into the as much as you can. Like, yeah, obviously six years is a lot, but I want to take me into like, how qualified does marketing? Like, yeah, what are some of your rhythms and routines? Like, do you operate? You know, do you do these monthly. Monthly launches, quarterly product launches, campaigns. Like, yeah, people love hearing the actual. Like, here's how this company who's doing well, does marketing.

[Mara Rivera]

So product marketing is a huge focus for us. We do launches, probably. Probably do one big launch a quarter. But we try and do a launch every single month. When we do our big launch, our playbooks usually revolve around an event. So we can try and build momentum, build excitement before it do this virtual event. We host them on Goldcast. They're what you talked about earlier. It's a keynote, it's a product demo, it's a customer conversation. We try and make a, make it feel big. And then as soon as that quarterly big launch drops, it's like, how can we just promote the heck out of it, obviously. So that product marketing playbook. And to me it's important that everything's laddering up to our corporate narrative. We're talking a lot about agentic marketing. How is pipe gen changing with an agent at the center of it all? We have our agent, Piper. So those big quarterly launches, but then every month we're like, okay, how do we keep that drumbeat going? So tomorrow we're launching like agentic nurture and this idea that an agent can work the top of funnel and that's more of an on demand launch. So we'll drop a keynote, a demo, a customer story. We'll do all the things. But it's not a big virtual event. So I would say launches are a great way just to showcase innovation, both for new prospects in pipeline prospects, but also for our customers to feel like these guys are always innovating.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Let's pause on this for a second. Oh, yes, this is my favorite thing. And I don't talk, I don't think about this enough now be I think because of my job today. But I think that there are great companies. There's a strong alignment between the product roadmap and marketing. And there's a great article David Sachs wrote back in the day on this about like, I don't know what it's called, like the cadence. There's like a cadence or something. There's an operating cadence. And like we did this at Drift, not because of that article, but it was like at the time we wanted to move fast and suck all the oxygen out of the market. And so we, we did a product launch every single month. And why that was amazing is because of everything you just said. It's like you have to have product and marketing working together to drive the like company narrative. And so at the time it was like we're trying to like create and own this, convert this category of conversational marketing. Well, that can't just be the marketing team, like doing a bunch of webinars. We need like the drumbeat of product stuff and then it's an amazing way to rally the whole company.

[Mara Rivera]

Yes.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Around this. And then like so much of marketing is not about the always on, on demand stuff like ads and SEO. It's about like coming, creating these reasons to go and retell your story. And it's amazing for like giving sales reps. Sales reps are going to do their thing anyway, right?

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

But if you give them like a why now thing, like, hey, here's who we're qualified. We do X, Y and Z. But also we have this new thing and here's why this is super relevant to you. Plus you can go market to existing customers. Like I just love that as the like central, like the heartbeat of a, of a high performing team, right?

[Mara Rivera]

Yes, I was going to say it's the heartbeat. Like and so we have and like the whole marketing team's work, you know, creatives working on it. Like we're working on demand gens, working on everybody kind of works towards these launches and then we'll go on the road at events and we're bringing that new product in our sessions and at our booths, whatever it may be. But that product marketing cadence is the heartbeat. And to your point Dave, it's a forcing function for us to keep evolving our narrative. So like I sit in a room with Craig and with our product marketing team and we develop these mini keynotes and it's a chance for us to say like, here's our vision, here's how it's evolving, here's what's new and like we're so excited to bring you this value customer. So it's internally, it helps us move forward. Like we're not a company who sets our corporate narrative at the beginning of the fiscal year and lets it sit in a Google Doc. Like it is a living, breathing thing for us. We're always adjusting and evolving and these launches help us crystallize it, get it into the market and then we're working really closely with our product team. We're a product company so like if our product sucks, nothing else matters. So it's like how can we bring that innovation to everybody? And one thing that's cool is early days. We would like go out, we would outsource to video production, whatever. But we've built an in house studio. So our, our office in San Francisco, we have qualified studios. We'll go shoot our keynotes and our demos there and we can, we probably do like three or four shoots a week. Like we were in there yesterday with the team from Saster actually because they're a customer of ours and they're shooting some stuff. So like doing all of our creative in house has allowed us to move really fast. It's allowed us to do those Monthly launches, quarterly launches, whatever it may be.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Okay, so that's. That's a great, perfect answer. That. That's a good. That's a good pillar of that. Do you have any. You haven't had to live this. So maybe not any. Any advice for someone who's like, yeah, well, that's just not how my company works. Like, how can you lead that change as a, as a marketer and try to get these two things working together.

[Mara Rivera]

For marketing and product? I mean, I think it's like, you have to build that relationship with your head of product. That's. It has to come from the top, unfortunately. Like, and so I think building. And Bing is our. One of our co founders and chief product. He's our chief product officer. So we're lucky because he and I have also worked together for a really long time. But there's always the healthy tension, right, of like, marketers. Marketing's pushing us to launch something and the product. How do we keep getting it as perfect as possible? And so I think bringing the product lead leader into those conversations and mapping out, like, hey, here's my recommendation for what our launches look like over the next six months. What's your feedback? Do you think this is too soon? Are you comfortable with this and like, bringing them into that marketing machine? Like, Bing will come and we'll do jam sessions on our keynotes or whole, whole listen in. Or I'll invite him to meetings where we're talking about the press release for a launch. And I'll say, like, you don't have to come. I'll put you as optional. But I just want you to be in the loop. I want you to know what we're doing. I don't want there to be any surprises from marketing. And so that's, I think, helped a lot because it's just building that, like, that friendship and relationship and just like cmos. I know Udi from GONG is always like, know how your CRO takes your coffee. I think you should also, like, know how your CPO takes their coffee too. So you can do these fantastic launches as a team and as a unit and then kind of the teams, your teams underneath, you will follow. Then your product marketing team and your product operations team will start to create that rhythm and that cadence.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah, I like the coffee thing. I think ultimately I feel the same way about the coffee as I do as the team. Like, I think a lot of times though, there's like, surface level kind of be like, it's great to be friends with your. With your product leader. But, like, are you actually working together?

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And the best I've ever had this was when we were at Drift Craig. This guy Craig Daniel, who's the head of product at the time. I would just see him storming down the. Storming down the, like, the hallway to, like, my desk, and I'm like, oh.

[Mara Rivera]

You'Re like, oh, no, no.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I was pumped because I'm like, they just had an ide idea. And, like, they will. They would be like. He'd be like, digi, come here. You got a sec? You got a second?

[Mara Rivera]

Like, yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

They would bring me in the room with, like, you know, five designers and two engineers, and they'd be like, what do you think about this? And it's like, yes, knowing what I know now, like, that was the secret sauce.

[Mara Rivera]

Yes.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Whereas, like, I worked at. And I worked at other companies where it's like, nope, we're not showing you. We're not showing marketing yet. We can't show you yet. Can't show you yet. We'll tell you about it when we're ready. Nope.

[Podcast Sponsor/Host Voice]

Next.

[Dave Gerhardt]

You know, next quarter. Next quarter is like, we worked on that stuff together. And, like, the product team had amazing marketing ideas, and we had amazing insight into the roadmap, and it was truly a collab, collaborative thing. And I. Yeah. You know, that was the secret sauce.

[Mara Rivera]

Totally. And, I mean, we're so lucky that, like, we sell to marketers. We're. We talk about qualified, unqualified. Like, all of our inbound pipeline goes through our product, through Piper, our agent. And we, like, we were leading up to our latest launch, which was Piper X. It was the latest release of Piper. We had daily standups for probably six weeks with me with, like, our head of marketing ops, who oversees our qualified implementation with our head of design with our engineers. And we were shaping the product and giving feedback every morning, beginning of day, and every day, end of day for six weeks. And so when it was time for launch, we were all, like, so pumped. Cause we felt like we were able to influence the product. They were baking in our feedback. And then it was. It just felt like this team effort, which is very rare. So building that cadence. You have to do it early, though. I think sometimes if you don't do it when you're new in a marketing role, and then like, 18 months later, you're like, oh, I should get close to my product team. It's too late. You have to do it early.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Okay, that's. That's a big one. I want people to like, it's. It's so much of the success I've found, like, in talking to so many marketing leaders over the years. It's. It's very rarely like, oh, qualified is. You know, they have some like, SEO hack that they figured out. You know, it's like, it's almost always the bigger strategic thing. So that's a good one. Product launches, what would you give me, like, numbers two and three on that list?

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah, I would say, like owning the bigger narrative I mentioned just like agentic marketing is really what we're pumped about right now. And how are agents coming into your marketing team and helping you generate pipeline for us? That thought leadership content and playbook is huge. Events also play a big part of it. Like, we're having our agentic marketing summit in a few weeks. We wrote a book on agentic marketing. I mean, you. You know this playbook better than anybody. So I feel like I, I don't have to tell you, but for our listeners, like, how can you own not just the product positioning, but try and take ownership of the category and be thought leaders there? That's a huge part. And then I would say, like a big area of focus for us. And this is kind of. It's because of our own product also. But it's just like our website and how do we make sure our website is beautiful and it's simple and it communicates a message and then it's optimized for conversion. And then I'm adding a fourth, which is we're big on events, and events feel like they're back. Like, in person. Events are back. I mean, we're just on the heels of Events Fall Madness where we all used like, a lot of hand sanitizer and shook a million hands. But, like, it does. That's a big part of how we get.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah.

[Mara Rivera]

Face in the place with marketers who we sell to Owned events, sponsored events, my hand.

[Dave Gerhardt]

We do our own. We at our events. Like, I feel like, like I'm, I'm the host, I'm the founder. People that come to our events know me. I feel like I'm the bride and I'll be like, yeah, I'd be like stealing a second to myself. And I'm like having a sandwich in a corner and like some guy, it's always a guy, it's never a woman. Guy comes up to me and he's like, dave Garrett, nice to meet you. And I'm like, do I have to touch your hand right now? Like, I'm eating.

[Mara Rivera]

Like, I'm all. I've eating a Sandwich.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Putting my hands to my mouth. I don't. You know, I already had. I already had norovirus last week from the animals that live in my house. Like, I don't.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah, yeah. Tell me about the event that you do. I've heard how many, how many people came to it this year. So it's pretty impressive that you can get such a huge group, like hundreds of people right up to where you are.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Well, have you seen. I mean, I have 190,000 followers on LinkedIn. I'm a thought leader. This is like, you know, we just say the events, the vet. We have tickets available and these people show up. Like, it's easy.

[Mara Rivera]

The event runs itself, I'm sure.

[Dave Gerhardt]

So we had 250 people in Vermont, and we did it in Vermont initially because I was being lazy. And we, the business is built, built on this, like, amazing online community we have. And after years of doing it, members were like, when we should do an in person event? And I was like, no, I hate events. Super stressful. I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. But then when I hired a real team and now we have a real company and seven people, it's like, yeah, we should do events. We decided to do a home game in Vermont because I was like, fine, we can do an event, but I'm not traveling for it. And it turned out that actually, that actually ended up being an amazing play. And that was not why we did it, because there's like, people want to go to these, like, off market. You know, we all grew up like, you know, you and me, we've spent how many of our hours of our life in like, you know, the Hilton in downtown San Francisco, like in a Marriott. And I think to your point about people wanting to go to events and want to travel, I think they want to go do different stuff in different places. And then they're, you know, connecting the Exit 5 brand, which is about Vermont, to Vermont, and having the event there ended up being like an amazing unintentional marketing play. But the event was amazing. And it was amazing because we have this baseline of like, probably 50 of the people who are there already felt like they know each other because of online.

[Mara Rivera]

Yes.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And so I our. We got a 88 NPS in the first year and then a 77 in the second year. And it was like, I didn't expect it to be, you know, to beat that. But I don't think we have some secret events playbook. I just think it's because the People that are. It's the people that are there and they want to hang out, the community and they want to be around each other. So. So we're doing it next year. We're keeping it in Vermont, but we're getting a bigger. We have a bigger venue. So we'll have 400 people in Stowe, Vermont in September.

[Mara Rivera]

Nice.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And then we're also doing an event in March in Arizona that is focused on a hundred B2B marketing leaders. So you have to be a VP or CMO to go to that one.

[Mara Rivera]

Okay, very cool.

[Dave Gerhardt]

We'll get you there. And we're doing that. But you know what, we've had a ton of success with smaller events also. Like, we, through our community, we have 10 people last weekend in Phoenix, went and played pickleball.

[Mara Rivera]

Love it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And like, that's amazing. Right? There was a bar, people did barbecue. There's a. Have you seen these break rooms? No, it's kind of like you just like you get 10 people in a room and you just like smash things.

[Mara Rivera]

Oh, yes, yes, yes. I didn't know it was called a break room. Yeah, yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

So like people are doing that and I think people just want to hang out and connect in person. And we felt that way that events are back and I think so it's interesting because I think like both things are true right now, which is like, I fully believe in where you all are going. Like, I do believe in agentic marketing and all that stuff and AI and that being the future, but there's another end of the spectrum. Whereas I also think that like the people and humans are going to matter more than ever. And I think we're all craving for like, we all spend so much of our time on zoom calls, on video. I spend so much of my time walking around my house talking to, you know, my little British AI accented chat GPT. Like, but there's a difference between, like, if I actually see you in person and I look you in the eye and you get a sense of my sense of humor and we have that banter and nuance. And so I think the challenge for like marketers is to solve both. Like, how do you do marketing using AI to like help your business grow. But like, I think from a brand building standpoint, connecting in person is just going to be more important than ever. And so we're feeling that and it's kind of changed the trajectory of our business.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah, I think especially so many marketers going back to like the. That marketers are shifting jobs. So so much like that Networking so key because you can have. It's where you'll end up. Like the fact that you worked for David because you did a podcast interview with him, and that kind of set the trajectory of your, of your career. Like, it's, it's good just to keep that network alive and well, and people are craving that, that fun right now. I, I spent a lot of time with Matt Hines, who's done a great job curating community and putting on breakfast and that type of stuff. And people show up. People show up when it's raining, people show up when it's cold because they kind of. They just want to be together.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah, exactly. Because there's no, there's no room for nuance online. But in person there is. And I think there's a huge value in hanging out with people who, who do the job. Tell me about what, what's working for you all on the like, AI side of things. I'm sure you're using your product to run a lot of your marketing, but, like, what are the specific plays that you're empowering AI to, to build pipeline for you?

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah. Yeah. So we're using our inbound agent, our AISDR agent, Piper for all inbound. She works a bunch of channels, she works our website. So, you know, we used to have this world where humans would have conversations with folks on the website. Piper does all of that for us. We kind of crawl, walked, run towards that. So I used to have a team of like 10 inbound SDRs. Now I have zero. I just have Piper, the agent who does all of our inbound. And what's been a big unlock for us from a pipe gen perspective is not just engaging with folks on the website, but also following up with all of our leads. So the fact that she can pre and post event email folks, get them to book meetings, at events, do event follow up. She can go through old leads that like at one point we're interested or old opportunities that one point were interested, but we might not have one and try and work those folks. So her kind of working across email and website has been key for us from an outbound perspective. We're using a platform called Relevance. We've built an outbound agent that serves as both a copilot for our outbound SDRs, because we kind of redeployed all of our inbound SDRs to outbound when we brought Piper on. We're using Relevance for that. And it's been helpful to kind of just do a lot of the research on the buying groups and Help tee up emails. But then a lot of times we'll go through the human to hit send. That's more of a build story of a building an agent versus kind of an out of the box agent, which is what we have. And it's been cool too, because when you talk about the importance of people, we've created these new roles on our team. Like, I now have an. I know some people are calling them go to market engineers. I have a guy on my team who does like, AI marketing operations. His job is to manage Piper and make sure she's coached and she's onboarded and we're giving her feedback and he's sending her after the right leads. And then we have another guy who used to be a BDR and outbound sdr and he's made. He's like standing up this whole relevance platform and all the agents that we're building on top of relevance. So that's been cool too, in that, like, our pipeline's going up, we're more efficient with how we're creating it, but it's also created these new roles for Ryan and Rich. They used to be some of our best SDRs, and now they're like getting super in the weeds with agents and like, they're developing this new career trajectory with the advent of them. So that's been cool too. And then, I mean, we have a ton of. Ton of little things we're using from a. You know, we're using Clary for AI forecasting. We're using like all of Gong's bells and whistles for kind of like, you know, to get a pulse on what's going on from a deal perspective. But Piper and Relevance have been our inbound and outbound tools that have helped. From a pipegen perspective, Outbound is one.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Of those things that, like, everybody tells me is not working right now, but then it. It's working really well for some people. And I always want to like, unpack that. What have you learned? What are the secrets? Because on one end of the coin, you have like, way easier to just like, do outbound and send people a bunch of irrelevant junk. And so, like, the bar of like, what's actually good outreach is. Is higher, but you can do it through AI. I'm just tell me outbound is working for you all. So. Yeah, I'm curious to hear, like, how would you handle that? Objection. And what, what must they be doing that's not. That's contributing to it not working? What could they be doing?

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah, I mean, for us, like, outbound has always worked pretty well for us since day one. It's, I mean, this is. Sounds like such a lame answer, but it's hyper personalization. It's going deep on the research. It's making sure, Dave, we know that you're in Vermont, that you were in Boston, that you, where you went to college. There's a hook. Maybe your college has like had a game that happened that night. And we, we used to do these things called friendly wagers where we would say if, where did you go to school, by the way? Did you go to. Were you in Boston?

[Dave Gerhardt]

I went to Harvard. Have you heard of it? No. I'm just kidding. I didn't go to Harvard. I didn't go to Harvard. I didn't go. I was just always. Oh, I totally believed you. I totally believed you. I went to Wagner, Wagner College in Staten Island, New York.

[Mara Rivera]

Okay. So, you know, maybe there's something about Wagner College, whatever it may be, that was really funny though. I totally believed you. And so like when we just had humans doing outbound, they would go deep on personalization. They would do these friendly wagers. They would reference all of it. That would go far. Now that we have an agent assisting us with outbound, so we basically have an agent who can take like a patch that our BDRs don't own and try and get something from it. What's critical is this guy Rich because he's in there every day making sure that the agent emails are better than the ones that he would send. They're not a bunch of crap that's going to land in your inbox. They're really personalized and so we have a really high bar. So I think it's like, how can we emulate what the humans were doing? Because that was always working for us. Rich is, he's like the hardest working guy I know. He's the first one in the office, the last one to leave because he's trying to figure, he's trying to crack the outbound agent code. It's much harder to do than inbound. Inbound is like, it's like they're hand raisers. They know your brand. They want to get to know you. Have an agent pull the friction out of that buying experience. Like that's a no brainer. Outbound is harder. And I think there are a lot of people who've bought outbound agents and they think it's, it's set it and forget it and their pipeline will grow. And that's simply not true. You need to have somebody who's managing it. Somebody who's setting a high bar. And then you have to kind of like, we have a. We have a test going on right now with our leaderboard of, like, can the agent generate more pipeline than our humans would? So we're kind of trying to create some, I would say, like, healthy competition to make sure that we have a high bar for what they're doing. So I don't think anybody's totally cracked using an agent for outbound.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Well, it's like. It's like anything. There isn't. There isn't going to be some magic recipe. And even if there was, you would share it on this, everybody would copy it, and then it would just stop working. So it's seems to be more about, like, constant tinkering and innovating.

[Mara Rivera]

Yes. Yes.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Okay. What has you excited about? Like, I guess we. Let's take an optimistic view about where. Where marketing is going. You know, there's a lot of like, AI is going to replace all of our jobs. D d d d what has you excited about the future and the role of. Of being a marketer. Like, how do we. How do we find our. Our place in a world of AI?

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah, I. This sounds cheesy. I've never been more pumped to be in a marketing role. I feel the reason I'm excited is I feel like marketing is back in the driver's seat with how we're moving the business forward because we have all of these agentic solutions at our fingertips that we can help control. I think for so long, marketers were seen from other parts of the organization as like, like, those are the guys who spend money. Those are the guys who want to run billboards. But then we didn't feel like we had control of our funnel. And a lot of times SDRs who are like, responsible for converting pipeline report up into sales or CRO. So this idea as CMOs who now have more control of our funnel because we can have agents who are. Who we're deploying throughout, it is incredibly exciting. I think it's an exciting time to lead because we can encourage our teams, like, try new solutions, break the playbook, see what new tech is out there and get your team excited so they're not feeling like they're doing the same old playbook. And then if you can bring those ideas and be the mover and shaker in your organization and inspire other parts of the company. Look how our team's embracing agents. Look how my team structure is evolving. Look at this new tech. We're just trying. Look at our pipeline numbers that are going up because I have 24. 7 coverage. Like. Like, that's. I feel like marketing has the opportunity to look like heroes in their organization right now and kind of lead this movement, and we love being at the forefront of stuff. Like, I think it said 54%, maybe higher. Of marketers have embraced agents and are. Are like, using agents in production. A lot of other teams are not. Are not that far ahead. So it's like, how can we carve this path and really be seen as folks who can help us hit our numbers and do it more efficiently and paint the vision? We'll. I think we'll be in a more strategic role than we were three years ago.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Style. Nice.

[Podcast Sponsor/Host Voice]

I like that.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I. I agree with you. I'm. I'm excited. It's. It's. I don't know if it's because my business is growing. We're having fun, but I think there's a lot of interest in marketing right now, and it's. It's really, really fun when it kind of felt stale.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

A couple years ago. Okay. Mara, thank you so much for hanging out with me. You gotta go. I gotta go. We gotta wrap up. This was an awesome conversation. I would love to. I would love to do it again. My goal. I want to do. My goal in 2026 is to do more in person, like. Like interviews and stuff. And I think I would shortlist you on the candidates because the vibes. The vibes would be high. I'll come for. I'll come for a trail. A trail run with you and. Or something like that.

[Mara Rivera]

Yeah, come for a trail run in the East Bay. I'll. I'll work on my running before you get here. Because I'm a fraud.

[Dave Gerhardt]

No, let's just do two miles. Two miles is perfect. By the way, if you listen to this and you. Which I'm sure you did, and you're like, mara sounds great. She sounds confident, humble, good leader. Been there for six years, qualified. Sounds like a cool company. The best thing that happens to me is when someone tells me, like, all the messages they got after this podcast. So go find Mara on LinkedIn. Send her a DM. Try to work for her. Try to do, you know, don't. Don't pitch her on anything. Just like, if you're a marketer list, listen, you want to go work for a great cmo, Go send Mara a note. There's a reason six years at the same company, more than half of the team has also been there for. For four to six years. Like I would take that as a strong signal that this is a company that you, you might want to be a part of. So, so thanks for doing it, Mara. I will see you hopefully in real life soon. Thanks for hanging out with me on my podcast.

[Mara Rivera]

Well, thank you for having me, Dave. Super fun.

[Podcast Sponsor/Host Voice]

Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast.

[Dave Gerhardt]

If you like this episode. You know what? I'm not even going to ask you.

[Podcast Sponsor/Host Voice]

To subscribe and leave a review because.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I don't really care about that. I have something better for you.

[Podcast Sponsor/Host Voice]

So we've built the number one private.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can can go and check that out.

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Instead of leaving a rating or review.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Go check it out right now on.

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[Dave Gerhardt]

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.

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People are in there posting every day.

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So you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss.

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[Dave Gerhardt]

Hey.

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This episode is brought to you by our friends@customerio.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Do you remember?

[Podcast Sponsor/Host Voice]

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 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, figure 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. And 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.