60-Minute B2B Blitz: 9 Marketers Share Their Best Plays from 2026 (So Far)

0:00Hey, it's Dave. So Zoom Webinars and Events has made our recent Exit 5 Live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against Exit 5. I love that. And look, in a world of AI slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on-air talent though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our Exit 5 Live production team, our content team here at Exit 5, since they're the ones actually making this all happen.

0:29Marissa? I've been doing B2B content a long time. I know. It's hard to hold attention for more than 30 seconds, let alone a whole webinar. But Zoom webinars helps. Recently, we've had nearly 2 ,000 registrants, over 500 live, and hundreds of hours of watch time on our sessions. Maria, what would you say is driving that? It all starts with prep. We do up to seven hours per session. Choosing a topic, prep calls, building the run of show, and so much more. With Zoom webinars and events, everything's in one place. Registration, emails, polls, analytics. So it's simple to run that cycle every two weeks.

1:02At Showtime, I hand it back to Marissa in Zoom's production studio. With Zoom's production studio, I can set the scenes in advance. So on the big day, I just send them live with speakers and content already in place. Clean transitions, crystal clear audio and video. I feel like I'm running the big game back there. So this is why our webinars have been crushing it lately. Look, they just said we're spending seven hours per session on this. And don't just take our word for it. Come and see firsthand. We run these every other Friday. It's called Exit 5 Live, now powered by Zoom webinars and events.

1:32So come and check us out. See this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com slash exit5. That's zoom.com slash exit5. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-market strategy. Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties.

2:07Trusted by companies like DocuSign, Databank, and Constructor, Convertive builds on the search and marketing work you're already doing and helps optimize your site so more of your buyers find you and turn it into pipeline. Right now, they're offering Exit 5 listeners a free AI search review. They'll run the questions your buyers are actually asking through your Google and AI tools, show you how you stack up against competitors, and tell you what's worth fixing. If you're looking for a refresh of your AEO strategy in 2027, this AI search review with Convertive is a great place to start. Check it out.

2:38It's convertive.com slash Exit 5. That's convertive.com slash Exit 5. And you can also see the link in the show notes. You're listening to The Dave Gerrard Show.

3:02Here we are. The Blitz. The Blitz is live. We're one minute early. And I feel like there's also sometimes some people rolling in. So give me a shout. If you're here and here right now, Give me a shout. Marissa's here. Producer Marissa, she has done an amazing job pulling this together. The Exit 5 crew is here. I love that. Making the teacher happy. Jessica, good to see you. Chris is in Charlotte. We love that. Emily Lord, what's up? Shout out to you. Dan Murphy's in the house. Organizer, hello. Chaz, hey, hey, hey, what's popping? It's bumping in here. Houston, Toronto. Shout out to the greatest album of all time, Iceman.

3:41We can talk about that later. All right, so look, we have a busy, this is gonna be a crazy hour. I didn't have a tux, but I'm in my suit, looking great. Blue really brings out my hairline. And I'm really excited to be here. We had this idea maybe 10, 15 days ago. We wanted to do something different. So we know that the number one thing you all care about if you work in marketing is like, especially now because of all the AI stuff, it's like, show me real examples from real humans who are actually doing this. And so that's what we have today. We have nine marketers with us. Each one is going to get exactly two minutes on the clock to share the best play they've run this year.

4:19This is all about real tactics, real results. We just did the prep all backstage. It's going to be awesome. I have this little buzzer, aka instantrapairhorn.com, my favorite shout out to them. Not a sponsor, just giving them a shout out. So everyone's going to come up. They got two minutes. When the timer hits zero, we're going to kick them off the stage. We'll do a quick intro, get the next person up. Then after the first round, we're going to vote. and we have four minutes for the next round of five. At the end, everyone's gonna vote for one winner. We want one winner here for favorite overall play.

4:50I'm gonna make a$500, it should be$5 ,000 donation with this suit on, but for right now, it's gonna be$500 donation to the charity of their choice on me, Dan, FYI, that's gonna go on the Amex, you'll see that later. But first, I know a bunch of you here know about this, but I just wanna plug this really quickly. So our big event drive is coming up September 8th through 10th, 2026 here in Vermont, where I am Stowe, Vermont. And today we want to, we want to load this thing up with incentives. We don't, you know, why are you going to hang out with us for an hour when you can talk to Claude alone in your apartment?

5:24So we're going to give away three tickets to drive right now. These are like$1 ,500 tickets. We're going to give them right now in this session. So if you don't have a ticket to drive yet and you want one, just put in the chat, Dan and Allison are going to be in our Slack and in this chat right now. Go and just say like, yes, I want to go to drive or yes, drive ticket and put that in the chat right now. I'll give you a second to do that. Do you want a ticket to drive today? Could be the day. Yes. Okay, there we go. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We love that. All right. So Dan and Allison, we're going to pick three people.

5:55They'll give me that list by the end of the webinar and we'll shout that out. But here's the catch. Engagement hook. I learned this from you, Mr. Beast. No, I'm just kidding. We just made this up. You have to be here. So if you are one of those people that wants a drive ticket, there's going to be three of them, but you have to be here for the duration of this webinar, not webinar, live session. We're going to end it in 50, you know, 58 minutes from now. So you got to be there. And then real quick, my business partner, my partner in crime, the swag man, Dan, you got something to show. Did you get a package out there in Arizona this morning?

6:25I wasn't given any lines, but I was told just a model. Hold on. I'm going to try. Okay. Well, our line in our doc right here, in our doc, it says, and Dan M dash did the package arrive and you're supposed to hold up the swag box and you're supposed to say it did these are the drive look it's hair these are the drive swag boxes and we're going to be sending a few it's real it's not made up right we're gonna we're gonna send this out so in addition to drive tickets one of the cool things about doing these is like it's all marketers talking to marketers into the chat I kind of feel like a twitch streamer sometimes when we do these The chat is awesome.

7:00We're also going to pick out a couple of the most engaged people, and we're going to send you these swag boxes. So all around, goodies all around. Thank you to InstantRapAirhorn.com for this session. It's going to be awesome. Just kidding. A ton of drive, love. And yeah, look, hey, we got some time back. Marissa, it's only 12.04, and I'm cooking. So are we ready to do this today? Do you want to pull up the lineup here real quick? And let's just do this format again already. I've already decided this feels like a live show. This is like, is this TBPN? What is this? All right, so we got Jess Cook.

7:34She's going to kick us off. We got these nine. I'll give you a quick intro on each one. Let's do it. I got my water. I got my electrolytes. I got everything. Jess Cook. All right, quick name, quick title. What are you going to talk about? And then we're off to the races here, kid. What's up, Dave? I am Jess Cook. I'm VP of Marketing at Vector. And I'm going to show everyone how we 6X'd our engagement on podcast promotions, just with a simple format flip. So I will pull up my screen. All right, so I am a VP of Marketing Effector. We have a podcast there called This Meeting Could Have Been a Podcast.

8:12In that podcast, my CEO and I, it's basically like you're getting dropped into our one-on-ones. We talk about decisions we've made together and disagreements we've had and how we kind of came to a decision. and it's a ton of fun. And they come out every other week. And we were posting video clips to promote each episode every time it came out. And we just weren't seeing the reach that we were really hoping for, which is, you know, really disappointing. We put time and effort into choosing these clips and getting them just right. You know, we did the whole like mobile friendly thing. We thought we were like really going to crush it.

8:48And we just weren't seeing the reach that we wanted. And I was not going to like, let that be kind of the benchmark for us. I wanted to do better. And one day, like a good millennial, I was scrolling on Instagram and I took notice at how Amy Poehler promotes her podcast, Good Hang with Amy Poehler on Instagram. And she kind of creates these little comics where she finds a moment that has kind of a funny punchline. And she drops the, the kind of quick version of it in three frames, sometimes two times, sometimes four into a comic and it gets you very like intrigued to want to watch the clip and usually on instagram you can scroll and then immediately watch the clip so i took that same recipe and i started posting our uh our own version of these comics so i would find a moment that i would have normally taken a clip from and i found kind of the crux of it right like the three scene version of it and i started creating these sometimes four as you can see in the middle started creating these little comics.

9:48And so you can see now the incredible bump in impressions here. We're talking an average of 6X more engagement. She's gone. Am I right? I don't know what happened. Diane, that was it? Is she done? Was that two minutes? That was aggressive. You cut her. Love it. All right, Diane, on you. All right, let's go. So my play is all about the strategy work behind the scenes, right? How to take your core messaging further and actually adapt it across different segments so it actually lands. So this year, I've been working on messaging for a number of enterprise, multi-vertical B2B companies that have the same challenge, right?

10:29So they're selling complex products into multiple industries or segments. So after simplifying the core overarching messaging strategy, more on that in my Drive workshop, by the way, the next question always becomes, how do you roll that out consistently across segments that act and buy differently, right? Beyond the usual capabilities, pain points, benefits. The problem is, is that most vertical messaging is either too simple, right? So it doesn't help you write targeted copy or it's way too complex to ever get used. So instead of asking the kind of classic, hey, what pain does each segment have and how do we solve it?

11:05We asked what was going on in their world that led them to look for a solution in the first place. So we started to focus on the buying trigger. We use real voice of customer language from interviews, and then we mapped that trigger across along the buying lens, the mindset, must have outcome, messaging pillar, and entry point. So if I can get my Zoom to work, I'm going to show you what this framework actually looks like in action. So we've got that same product, same core messaging underneath, right? But there's a different way in per segment. In terms of what this drove, I'm not going to claim pipeline, NQLs, like messaging.

11:40You know, there's too many variables at play, but it did give us customer-informed messaging per segment aligned with the brand messaging strategy. We then use that to build copy across assets beyond the homepage. And that's the play. If we get five minutes, I'll share a example. All right, peace. Yeah, I love it. I forgot to hit, that was on me, Jess Cook. And I'm talking to my team in the chat. They're like, no, that's the point. You want people wanting more so we can vote and then see who's going to come back. All right, let's go, Drew. You're on the first tee in 26 minutes. That's right. I got to get ready.

12:11Hey, my name is Drew Giovanoli and I run Buried Wins. It's a win-loss agency. And what most people get wrong is that it's just academic. It doesn't do anything, doesn't tie to an ROI, but it should. Win rate improvements. And one of the fastest wins you can have is tying it to pipeline recovery because win-loss research can resurrect dead pipeline. Why can it do so? Well, a meaningful amount of your lost deals are lost to reasons that no longer hold. So you've got product fixes that you have, improvements you've made to the product. You've got perceptions that were flawed from the beginning. You can identify this through buyer interviews, competitor intel that you now have about their weaknesses or your competitive advantage over them, or timing and budget that's changed.

12:53They're still interested. So you can win those deals back. And here's the quick path to do so. The playbook from one of my clients, they were a private equity-backed B2B SaaS company in aviation maintenance,$75 million plus. They took 300 deals that they had lost in the past year and a half. They mapped it against the research they had and segmented it into cohorts of lost reasons. We then gathered evidence for their right to win. These are new proof points they had. These are product improvements they've had, integrations. They developed messaging per cohort and then re-engaged those accounts through calling, texting, and email and generated 24 MQLs out of lost deals that were just left for dead and nobody was doing anything with.

13:34That's 8 % conversion. So incredible success to actually get direct ROI from your win-loss work. If you want the four-minute version that comes next, I will show you how to get people to show up to the damn interviews, four steps to pipeline recovery and a sample eight-minute sequence. I think that I am out. Good to talk to you. Oh, that's, yeah, love that. Good segue. We're cooking, we're cooking. Yeah, a webinar that's not a webinar where you actually want more, a more in R, a live in R. Good job, Drew. All right, who's next? What's going on? What's up? Long time no see. I know, I missed you so.

14:11So yeah, I'm going to be speaking at Drive about go-to-market engineering, which is a combination of big data, AI, and automation. So I wanted to share a little play that we've been using that's been very successful at Hologram where I'm the vice president of marketing. So it's all about unlocking the voice of the customer, right? We talk about this a lot in marketing, like really understanding, like, how our customers think and talk about our products and services, right? So a lot of us use different call recording softwares. At Hologram, we use GOM, right? So it has API access, and you can do a lot with this now.

14:42So one of the things that I've loved that we built in the last six months is a full-blown MCP server using GOM, right? So what we did was we took all of our calls historically, pushed them to Supabase, which allowed us to build MCP into Claw, right? Right. Daily cron job. So this thing is updated every single day. What does that actually allow us to do? Right. We can test messaging. We can inform the product roadmap, not based off of anecdotal information, but hard data. Like how many times have received feature requests from prospects and our customers? Right. I think they give you deeper into channel performance.

15:15Right. So I can see every single conversation that we had to lead that came in from SEM, for example, and see a little bit deeper than, hey, did this go to an opportunity? Did it become pipeline? Right. And then the competitive intel part. Right. Is this something that we heard from one person saying that this competitor does this poorly? Or can we see this across multiple calls, across multiple years? Super, super helpful in that perspective. Now, also, there's a big win there with sales enablement, right? So when you have this large database that's querable and usable from all your call recordings, you can do some fun things, right?

15:48So we've been able to build out a voice-enabled customer simulator based on persona. So it chunks every single persona based up, right? And then you can actually have a conversation with us as a BDR or an AE to do a better job based off the actual conversations that we've had with people from that job function, right? Similarly, built out a real-time objection handler using the Gong data. So get a really deep in the weeds question. I'm going to slack my SE. Really, you're querying how we've actually gone over this objection positively in the past and getting an answer back in real time. And with that said, I'm out.

16:25Yeah. Yeah, good job. Cooking. That's why we had Jess Cook go first so we could just be cooking this whole time. All right, Hunter, you're back. I'm here. Okay, let me screen share this time because I forgot that last time. This is so nerve wracking. It didn't start yet, right? I'm Hunter, everyone. I'm the director of DemandGen at Techmetric and the most underrated DemandGen channel in your company is hiding in plain sight. Long pause. What is it? What is it? It's not paid search. It's not your chat bot. it's your internal team. And this is the channel that we used to make our inaugural industry event, Tectonic, a success.

17:02So what most marketers miss before we ran a single targeted external campaign, we marketed to our internal teams. Every month, our brand and demand team sent one update to the entire company, our wins, our setbacks, where we needed help. No fluff, no cheerleading, just what I called breadcrumbs. Constant little updates each month. Sales started mentioning Tectonic on our discovery calls. Our product team put it on our login screen. Our CEO was personally walking into shops to invite shop owners and their teams to come to Tectonic. And this happened because everybody felt like they co-owned it.

17:37The play, treat your internal org like a channel with a content calendar, a cadence, and a job to do. Your best distribution network is already on payrolls and teams usually never activate it. We launched our first ever industry conference this year, 852 attendees, 94.5 % show rate, 97 % earned media share of voice. And in September, my brand counterpart and I are unpacking the full brand in demand playbook, the templates, the scorecard, the whole system, and we like for you to come build it with us. That was so fast. I'm talking to producer Marissa in the chat. All right, good job. Air horn. We got some time.

18:16We got some time back. All right. So now here's where this gets interesting. We're off to a hot start, 16 minutes, engagement is popping. I hope you tell somebody on LinkedIn about this, by the way, at some point. Right now, though, that so that was five. Right now we are going to vote for one like Survivor or whatever show you watch these days. I'm a big summer house guy myself. Shout out to Bravo. So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna roll a poll. Producer Marissa is putting together the poll right now. We just need you to pick one person here. Who do you want to hear more from? Who piqued your interest?

18:46Was it Jess Cook? Because we, you know, apparently we kicked her off too early? Was it Diane? Was it Drew? Was it Jonathan? Mining calls with the API. Was it Hunter? A tidy minute 30 there on the AEO chatbot. Who was it? I'd need some music. Oh boy, Jess Cook and Diane. I wonder if the order, wouldn't the marketers say the order of this poll is biasing this somehow? But okay, ladies and gentlemen, the votes are in. Can I get confirmation in my Slack here from our team. Jess Cook. Jess Cook, congratulations. You've survived. You've made it on to the next round where we will let you finish their presentation.

19:26All right. We're going to keep rolling. That's part number one. We will have more. We have one, two, three, four. We have another group of four speakers. We're going to kick this off with Haley. She is VP of Revenue Marketing at Sprout Social. So are we ready to run this again? producer Marissa, the busiest lady in B2B marketing this morning behind the scenes. What is up? Exit 5. How's it going? Okay. Like Dave said, I'm Haley McDonald. I'm the VP of revenue marketing from Sprout Social. And I'm just going to get into it. So one of the biggest problems that I see marketers making is kind of just basing campaigns around whatever you're doing, not about who you're selling to.

20:05So we have a product launch coming. We have a big event that we're doing. And the campaign plan just starts with the wrong question. And so the audience becomes this kind of distribution decision, not really a strategic one tied to revenue. And then what happens is ROI becomes something that you're trying to explain after the fact and chasing rather than having it planned. There's a better way and it starts before you even touch a campaign brief. So today I'm going to share a little bit of a framework. It's a matrix in the center of gravity for how I plan. One access, you have your solutions or your products on the other access, you have your ICP segments.

20:40So every cell gets a priority rating. Typically, it's modeled after hopefully something that's tied to revenue. So like your LTV, a revenue signal, LTV, fit, velocity data. It's not built by marketing alone, but it's built with kind of revenue operations, generally partnering with product marketing. Every segment gets a percentage allocation that ties directly back to your revenue targets. And when you do this, you stop spreading your budget evenly across campaigns or just willy nilly. And you start putting the weight where the signal is. And so this isn't so much a priority exercise, prioritization exercise, it's a planning system.

21:13So you start with your revenue target, you're allocating it by segment, and you're building pipeline target by segment. And then you build your campaign strategy and your budget, not the other way around. So this works regardless of what GTM motion you're doing, enterprise, ABX, mid market velocity, product led, same framework, different activation. So if you vote me up, I will share some examples and how this actually looks when you play it out for a year. Heck yeah. What a CTA. If you vote me up, I will do blank. It's so you can blank. Love that. Great call, right? Good call to action. Tiffany's with me in the chat.

21:46Haley, great job. Casey's up. You got it. Let's rock. Marissa's crushing it. Dave's crushing it. Let's all take a deep breath. Okay. I'll be speaking a drive about handcrafted marketing using ABM. We're making our prospects and customers feel special, but we don't just make our prospects and customers feel special. We partner closely with our internal product marketers to test their messaging and make them feel special by delivering them results so that they can go out and refine their messaging. I'm going super back to basics here, A-B testing. Anyone can do it and everyone's probably trying to sell AI.

22:19It's really important to test the messaging that is resonating with AI because we don't quite know what the end benefit is going to be to our customers. So we had some hypotheses we wanted to prove out. On the right, you'll see product-heavy messaging. It's abstract. It asks the buyer to do a lot of heavy lifting and figure out what the result is, like all your knowledge, one trusted enterprise agent. What's an enterprise agent? We have to kind of refine it down to what the benefit is. So we flipped the script. On the left, we pivoted to outcome-led messaging with a tangible value-first hook, stop waiting, start knowing.

22:52No one wants to wait for things. Everyone wants to know everything. That shift delivered a huge 8X lift, skyrocketing our CTR. And beyond the numbers, this is a massive win for our product marketers. By partnering with ABM to run these tests, PMM gets instant real-world data about which value props actually resonate with their target accounts. And then they can go optimize before they go out broadly to the market. So when you partner with your product marketing team, not only your sales team benefits, not only your ABM team benefits, but your overall brand benefits. And I'm excited to talk about where I drive or in the next couple of minutes.

23:25Well, yeah, let's go. Call your shot a little bit. I'm not a math guy, but the one on the left is definitely better. All right. There's the buzzer. Can someone get in my ear? Producer Marissa, do we want to go to our guy Spud right now? Or where are we at? We got time. We're going to go to Anthony. I could sing for you. I agree with this. This is my favorite comment the other day. The rawness is what makes it great. Love these hiccups. All right. Spud, how are we doing? Hey, I'm back. So most ABM is still glorified cold outreach. Hot take. You run ads. you send emails, you show up at events, but every touchpoint seems to feel disconnected.

24:02So the play that's working for us to change this is simple. We use our AEs to have sales conversations at scale before sales conversation ever happens. Instead of putting the brand in the ad, we put the AE in the ad, typically in long form, like video podcast style. The same person who will eventually run the deal is teaching, educating, and sharing opinions with target accounts on LinkedIn months before the first meeting even happens. And here's the key. The LinkedIn video isn't the campaign. It's the anchor. Everything else we build around it. Organic posts, outbound events, direct mail, gifting, sales calls.

24:37Every touch point reinforces the same person, the same message, and the same expertise. So instead of prospects experiencing five disconnected channels, they experience one continuous relationship. When it works, we see things like this show up. I see your videos everywhere. I feel like I already know you. This all we hear on sales call. That's not brand awareness. It's familiarity at scale. Here's some more results that we're seeing. 92 % of accounts that engage on outbound had ad touch likes like this before outreach. One 10-minute LinkedIn video we did generated five discovery calls in two weeks on 4K spend, and we've seen roughly 50 to one pipeline to ad spend efficiency.

25:16So we think the future of seller-led media serve to their target accounts and exact buyers. Your best sales reps already know the objections. They already know the pain points. They already know the language buyers use. Go turn those conversations into content and create familiarity before the first reply, before the first meeting, and before the first sales call. And do it with the exact person who's going to close the deal. Nailed it. People in chat like Spud the goat. They know you. They know you. This is great. I love real people, especially right now. It's the other reason on Jess Cook's thing, the podcast clips don't work is because they see you with the mic.

25:49All right, Anthony, the guy with the plan on the LinkedIn ads, you're up. All righty. I don't know how we've had a B2B marketing webinar. No one said the word Claude Code yet. So we're going to talk about Claude Code a little bit here. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. If you want to know what AI agents can actually do for a marketing team, Optimizely is where I'd point you to right now for a real example. Last month, we ran an Exit 5 live session where a bunch of our members showed off their best AI agent use cases. and McKeel, director of AI innovation at Optimizely, actually won the whole session.

26:21He showed us how he used Optimizely's AI agent platform to run an ABM campaign that gave 2000 accounts their own landing pages built from signals like job postings, press releases, and leadership changes. That's like the holy grail of ABM, by the way. Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for you, the B2B marketer. You can build your own agents like McKeel did or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. They also just launched virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your website optimized.

26:57If you're being asked to look into AI agents right now, Optimizely should be at the top of your list. Go and see how they can help you reclaim your time and build cool stuff just like McKeel did. Check them out at optimizely.com slash exit five. That's optimizely.com slash exit five. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Compound Growth Marketing. They're a full funnel demand gen agency that I've personally hired twice. Yep. Before I was just a thought leader. I was a real marketer and CGM was one of the best agencies that I worked with. They help high growth software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use.

27:33They've helped an enterprise cybersecurity company grow pipeline 168 % year over year with full funnel media and an HR tech company grow 48 % through paid search. and they can do the same for you. They offer a combination of full funnel paid advertising strategy and execution, AEO and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you and this works because they were started by an actual former VP of marketing who really gets this space that you work in in B2B. So visit compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five to see how they can help you meet your 2027 revenue goals.

28:11That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five. So we're talking about AI powered LinkedIn ads. Step one of that is we want to connect Claude Code to help manage and analyze our LinkedIn ads. Best way to do that is go through the LinkedIn ads API because then you have full access to everything. There's some MCPs out there, but if you go through the API, you can do anything you can possibly imagine. So yes, PIS, this is a preview into our drive webinar, our drive workshop that we'll have. This is the foundation, and we're going to go a lot deeper at Drive. So real quick, how to set this up.

28:45First, you need to create your LinkedIn developer app. You just create an app. It's free. It's easy. It takes one to two days to get approved. Get that created. To be able to push changes, not just read data, but push changes to your LinkedIn ad account, you need to go in and enable your specific ad account. Get that enabled. I like to download the API doc so that I don't need to go make a bunch of requests every time I ask it to do something. tell Claude to build an API tool so that it sets up all those functions for you. You're going to log in. It's going to pull in your ad accounts that you have access to, and then you can get started.

29:15So now what are some plays you can do once you have that connected? One of my favorites is automatic bid management and budget pacing. So if you're managing LinkedIn ads or you're running LinkedIn ads, bids fluctuate over the course of a month and a quarter and a year, your budget pacing might get off on weekends and during busy and less busy times. So having this prompt, setting this up so that Claude can help you analyze your bids, keep your budgets on pace is a very effective strategy that you can do. So have it run a couple of times a week, analyze your LinkedIn ad account, pull a bid and budget recommendations.

29:51So for bidding, if your campaigns are fully spending, recommend lowering your bid. If they're underspending, recommend raising your bid, pacing, keep on track for your monthly budget and taking the account weekends. Also, what you want to do is log these changes so that Claude can continue to learn every time you adjust your budgets and then send yourself a Slack message. Bam. Instant rap horn. Instant rap air horn. Noise. Nice. Anthony's great. Anthony's been running all of our LinkedIn ads, by the way, for the last two years. He knows what he's doing. Okay. Poll two. Here we go. Let's roll them.

30:24Go, Dave. Producer Marissa says, go, Dave. Plug the poll. So that was, now we're going to rate the next four, please. and we're going to vote for them. I think our producers are telling me that moving on to the next round so far is Jess Cook, Diane Weirdu. And now we got three of these folks are going to move on. Doom, doom, doom, doom, doom. If it was my music, it would be bumping, but it's not. All right. I wish I could vote. Okay, Spud, technical difficulties aside, he came in with the heat. So where are we at? spud hayley anthony casey i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry casey here's the thing though let me tell you this casey we gotta let you go you have like the most the second most popular podcast episode maybe ever the it's on youtube the abm when i had you on like a month ago is like still buzzing you should go check that out so you're getting a lot of love so i don't feel bad about letting you go here uh lindsey in the chat says i love that podcast see people listen to our podcast dan you see that casey was great all right so here we go jess diane anthony spud haley we got more time for you now jess cook welcome back to the show now you got four minutes that was so aggressive and i was so nervous and i'm so so glad to be back all right and still you still did it oh man amazing well thank you all for voting for me okay let me bring this back up here.

31:50Let me hit slideshow again. Let me get to where we were. Oh no. Okay. Okay. What I was going to say is not only did we get 6x impressions and reach, but people genuinely love these clips. I have all kinds of screenshots like this to lift me up when I'm having a rough day. But this one is just actually from this week from good friend, Jen Allen Newth, good friend of Exit 5 and all of our friends, Jen Allen Newth, who says that these promo images are one of her favorite things she sees in her feet. So just really positive like energy in response to these, including just the increase in reach. So just want to keep going here.

32:28This was just a little visual I put together of like genuinely the increase in reach that these comic strips have given us. Okay, here's how to do this yourself. Five steps. First is choose a moment with like a punchline or an epiphany. A good hint is to start your first scene with a question because usually what happens is the response is usually some sort of great insight or something funny. So if you can find kind of a moment in your podcast that would have been a good like clip that started with a question, that's usually a great place to start. No fewer than two scenes. Obviously, you need sort of a back and forth.

33:04No more than four because it starts to get real crammed in that small vertical space. Three scenes is perfect because you can really split it out nicely and you get that good back and forth. Next, you go in and you grab your screenshots. Your facial expressions are key here. They don't have to be the exact moment someone said the thing that is on the screen. It should be kind of around that area. But you want to grab the moment where they're making the facial expression that is really like crucial to what they were saying there. Okay, you started to take up three of your seconds. But you yesterday, I saw you and you were like this in your chair.

33:37Yeah, that was when I took me six months to find a demand gen mark in her and I was like dead. So yeah, just the crazier, the better, honestly. Another tip is to truncate your text for clarity if needed, but really keep it as close as you can to the original transcript as possible. I'm going to show you an example of that in just a second. And 2316 by 3088 pixels looks really good on both mobile and desktop. And I'm going to give you a template in a moment so you don't have to memorize that number. So this is just an example of on the left, you actually see the transcript from the podcast episode.

34:12And I highlighted the actual pieces that I pulled and turned into the caption for the comic. So very much pulled exact words, but did not get the entire exchange just for clarity and to make it really concise and to really like hit home the point. You want that last scene to be like a punctuation mark. And I will drop the link to this in the chat, but this is my Canva template that I use for this. Exact same text, font, weight, color, and all. The yellow text for whatever reason really goes a long way and kind of pops off the screen. So I will drop this into the chat right now so you all can start making your own comics that's it dan said dave let her go on for a few seconds after this i don't let people revolt so good job look they can take your canva template but they cannot take your sense of humor and chemistry with josh which is why this works so well so that is a big point of it yeah and that's a lot of what my drive talk is going to be about is just like building around that relationship and and building the brand around the people in the company and what does that look like okay so come see me in air horn all right diane she's back yeah i didn't expect to be voted back so i don't know drop questions in the chat in case i like run out of time and stuff but i'll walk you through this template now that i've got a little bit more time i want to give a bit more context because i think that's key for play so this kind of play and framework that i'm talking through was used with kind of 10 mil to 3 to 50 Gmail era, B2B companies.

35:41So we had complex product, product suite, sending to multiple segments, right? So it's kind of niche, but this can also kind of apply across more horizontal B2B companies as well. The challenge with messaging at that stage is it's not really like a copy problem, right? It's kind of like a decisions problem. Like, what are we actually trying to say? In what order? And then when you add in the layer of like, okay, we have a bunch of different industries and verticals we're trying to speak to, the inputs get messy, right? So a lot of too much internal misalignment on what matters. And we need to kind of bring in customer language into that.

36:14So for me, the way that I approach that is the best way to dial in your messaging is better inputs, right? So specifically customer language, and then also those actual like triggers and behaviors. So this trigger question is one you should be asking constantly because it kind of changes as the market changes. So then we need to adapt to vertical messaging with that as well. So in one of these engagements, the market context was obviously shifting pretty fast, particularly with AI. And so those triggers were shifting too. All right, hopefully you guys can see this. So here's an example of how you can actually build out this framework.

36:52I worked with, this is an example across two different companies. One where one of the verticals was a farmer. And so we saw a buying trigger, which was, you know, they just failed a regulatory inspection or they just had a recall happen. So that dramatically changes how we want to approach messaging to that particular vertical. And so we mapped out, hey, what does that mean in terms of the buying lens? How are they actually evaluating or making decisions? So risk averse, buying committee heavy as well. The outcomes that we knew that they needed were, you know, full audit trails, a lot of accuracy.

37:28And so all of this kind of impacted that entry point message there. So in terms of how you guys can go and do this right now, hone in and pick one segment, go and find the most common three, five moments in voice of customer language. I do have to say that we ran specific customer interviews, right? So not just tell us about the product, but actual messaging interviews that were, what was the struggle? What was your decision-making process? What were you trying to solve? So we actually had a lot of very sticky and helpful voice of customer language that we could put into this framework so that we're not kind of just filling this with assumptions and we're actually mapping out what buyers have actually told you so that you can then create vertical messaging that's super niche and super helpful for buyers.

38:16I think, I don't know, is there like a question that I can answer in like the last 30 seconds? I don't know, Dave, that's a bit rogue. Maybe that's a bit tight. I think you did it. I think you did it. You always want to leave on top. All right. Yeah. Cool. Jay-Z said that Mace left on top, and that's how he screwed up. Don't leave while you're hot. That's how Mace screwed up. But this is good. You did a great job. I love the... Drew said this in the chat, and I love you saying it too. Actually going and talking to customers is different than asking Claude to pretend to be your ICP and riffing on questions with Claude.

38:51Anthony's back. Anthony's back. No surprise. The B2B marketers love Claude Code. So we're going to talk. They rejoiced when you said that word. So let's talk about some more AI powered optimizations. We can go a little more in depth here. First, I'll share a couple of tips and tricks for working with AI ads. Always best practice to have a human in the loop. You don't want this just to be running rogue and changing your budgets and changing all that other stuff. So I love to push notifications to Slack, have it ask for approvals, especially for budget changes. Just the best practice out there. You do want to tell to respect API limits and avoid blasting too many calls at once.

39:29I have heard of lots of people's Google ads and meta ad accounts getting banned for using AI. They're probably blasting with too many. For what it's worth, I have not heard about that happening to LinkedIn ads yet. So you might be safe for now, but just be careful of the limits. And then have it log changes for future references. LinkedIn ads does not have like a nice change log history for you to go reference. So have it log your own changes and then have it learn from that too. So that feedback loop is key. So let's go talk about some more key plays you can do. Very important is to scan your demographics.

40:02So I like to do this regularly. Depends how much budget you're spending is how often you want to do this. The more you spend, the more often you want to do it. But at least once per month, go scan all of our demographics for our ad account. Let's scan it for the last 30 days and identify demographics that mismatch our company's ICP that are receiving a significant amount of ad spend. I'll caveat with a lot of people on LinkedIn have second jobs, which can start to look like they skew your demographics. So you just want to catch stuff that is the big spend that you want to cut out is the most important.

40:34So skip reporting on any facets that are receiving a small amount of spend or likely second roles or jobs. Send me a Slack message of any identified that we should consider excluding. So you can see on the right here, it's starting to pick out some trends where we have like, for this example here, we have a lot of education, professors, very common to see a lot of that pop up in your campaigns, salespeople, IT. So it can give you some good ideas of demographics you might want to exclude. This is just one screenshot. You can do this across company sizes, industries, locations, and all that good stuff.

41:04So lots of data to crunch, great usage for CloudCo to do that for you. Number two is bulk exclusions. So if anyone's managed LinkedIn ads, you know, it is a pain in the butt to go add exclusions across a lot of different campaigns. If you're running more than 10 campaigns, it is a pain. You have to open each one of them individually, apply this. So when you're doing all these scans, it's great to have Claude go add those exclusions for you. It saves you a ton of time from doing that across all your different campaigns. So whatever you identified in your demographic scan, that's a good thing to have it go exclude across those campaigns.

41:35Otherwise, exclude your company, exclude your competitors from your campaigns. Common job titles are like retired, intern, student, job seekers, all that good stuff. So you can have Cloud Code handle that for you. One more I'll go over is competitor ad scans. So another great thing to be doing, this one doesn't use the API, but this one would use a third-party tool called Appify or others out there. Have it go scrape the ad creative that your competitors are running and have it do a SWOT analysis for you. where are they using a lot of messaging that you're not using and call out those things that maybe you should consider using.

42:09So if you're seeing all your competitors are using one angle, that would be good to know. Maybe you want to add that in, or maybe you have a differentiator against that, then that's why you're not using it. So great thing to do is go scan your competitors' ads, have it do a SWOT analysis, and then do that maybe quarterly or so, depending on how often they're updating their ads. So we went through a lot in that first part. If you guys want the step-by-step on how you can build that API connection. It is a little technical, but Claude handles most of it. There is a full tutorial here for you to follow on how you can build that and then even a YouTube video to walk through it so that you don't get stuck in any of the parts.

42:41I did see somebody ask a question, you do need to create that developer app and LinkedIn needs to prove it. I've never heard of anybody not getting approved and it just takes one to two days to get that approved. All right. That's what we got. Yeah, man. Good job. And And, you know, hey, shout out top to bottom. Courtney Nugent shouts you out for your audio being very crisp. It's the podcaster, buddy. No, it was the podcaster. A ton of, this is like why we do these things. Like Amy's bugging out about bulk exclusions, Sam, bulk exclusions. This is really interesting doing this ASAP. Yep, doing this today.

43:12This is insanely valuable. So nice job. I think. Spud is next. My production team has told me that I need to like pump you up and make you feel better because of the tech issue. but I said, you did that. You presented it. It was awesome. You won and your slides were great. So I don't need to do that. Who's that guy? This is one of our AEs. Well, and I appreciate it. Thank you. This is one of our AEs. I was going to show just a couple of the ads. People always love to see behind the scenes. So this is one of our AEs. Dave, I'm probably not brave enough to try to get our audio to work on this, but just wanted to at least show some samples here.

43:45You got four minutes. You did a good job. Hit it. Press that button. What could go wrong? Let's try it. Can you guys hear that? No. No. We tried. So yeah, I just wanted to show a few of these ads. We've got Gonzo, Eric, Brandon. We got a lot of different styles, but this is the primary one that we typically run is we just have, honestly, two AEs sit down together. They love to talk to each other. Imagine that, right? Sales guys love to talk. So it's a sneaky, cool kind of alignment tool for us too. So I wanted to touch on that. Like one of our favorite parts of this play is that it really creates some good chemistry and kind of forces a lot of alignment between our marketing and sales teams.

44:26Like we have kind of a quarterly cadence where we sit down and it's amazing. Like talk about proof that your marketing team is watching your sales calls. Like we use Fathom. Like they love that we are going through these sales calls, dissecting them for topics, bringing them to them. And it's just, it forces this really cool alignment. And they're like, wow, they're actually paying attention. plus they feel like they get to be a part of the marketing motion and they love that. So it's just a really cool, sneaky kind of like win there. And I wanted to highlight that. What else could we talk about?

45:00I think people like... I got one for you. A bunch of people in the chat that I've noticed are like, Connor said it best, but there's a bunch of questions earlier. My sales guys love to chat, but not on camera. Any talk about like how you got over this hump and got them all? Because everyone's like, yeah, I'd love to get them to do this, but they don't want to do it. Honestly, yeah, we've run this play actually at a couple different orgs, and you do run into that. There are some AEs that feel way more comfortable on camera and others that don't. What I will say is practice always helps. So just start, and the first couple could be horrible, like absolute train wrecks.

45:33And you just don't use them. But the more you sit down, and especially when they sit down with each other and start to forget about the camera, it typically, you can work through that. So it is tough sometimes to get them to commit to that. But yeah, that's what I'd suggest. Just start. Start with one and then they become the champion and then it works and it helps get more deals and dah, dah, dah. And then it's like, I'll do that. I can do that. I like the, it's not on camera. Like I had to do a podcast with a CEO and they tried to ghost, you know, be in the room solo. And it was like, we would having a conversation and pretending it's not filmed actually is like the obstacle, you know, that you can remove there.

46:07Oh, heck yeah. Yeah, no, for sure. And a lot of people typically have this question. They're like, how do you scale something like this? So it's just an illustration of how we look at it. We have, you know, bi-vertical AEs, so we typically plan it in that regard. But a lot of times too, we have a lot of like founder-featured content too with our CBO, Brock, and we'll run that over the top of all of it, like across all of the different verticals. So we run that as kind of like the typical cold layer. And then we also will shoot some more broad level type of topics with an AE, we'll run that across the top.

46:41And then all their very vertical specific stuff, like those ads I was showing here, for example, was like, we're very targeted with home pros, home services, construction type of a vertical. And you'll just basically start to build that out slowly. And you'll start to get more and more of an archive as you shoot with more and more AEs. But yeah, just kind of start in one. Um, we also, I touched on this a little bit, but we do leverage Claude. People seem to like Claude here today. So imagine that, but we use Claude actually to mine those fathom calls and bucket into problem solution or product topics.

47:14And that's been really useful for this too. So definitely recommend trying to, to mine your sales calls effectively. But nice. Yeah. All right. And on a high note, good job, Spud. That was great. A bunch of questions for you in the, in the chat, if you want to pop back there. Okay. Haley, you're up. Wow. What a, what a change of pace. My adrenaline was like sky high. The two minutes versus four minutes is insane. I was listening to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck talk about how they even have to write movies now for the 10 second hook into a movie because people don't know how to sit through it. So, all right, Haley, you're our last performer.

47:46Hello. Hello. I'm back. Welcome. Okay. So I put something in the chat, just like the link to the slides, because I know that some of this is type, the smallest type of the type is small. And also I'm going to try to save some time for some questions at the end. And so please feel free to put stuff in the Q &A. And also, if you just want to jam on this, please feel free to reach out in general. So I'm going to go back a little to this and just kind of talk through a little bit more since there's so much detail. But I wanted to kind of start out by talking about the axes here. So the segments where you're going to start out and like you're planning, and this is all about basically tying every single one of your most of your marketing tactics back to revenue.

48:24You're going to start with these segments and these segments are going to look different for you based on, you know, it's going to look different based on your company. So for a lot of organizations, segments could be by vertical. Generally, they could be kind of like by cohorts of use cases, business types. I've seen it when you get into kind of like enterprise, a lot of the time it is by vertical. And then your solutions are like, they could be different products. They could just be different parts of your products. It might just be one product for you, you know, if you're a one product business, the segments that are selected.

48:54So the way that you actually get to those, there's a few different ways. Like sometimes you're going to have a revenue organization like sales that will just tell you like, these are who we sell to. If you want to get a more data-driven approach to that, and you have business analysts in-house, that's great. There's also some technology companies out there, some consultants that will help you kind of look at your current customer base and model it off of like what customers have stayed with us the longest and spent the most with us over time and kind of develop patterns to tell you what your segments are.

49:25But the nice thing is, is that when you can work with your revenue operations organization and put percentages into each of these buckets, then you're ultimately going to get a percentage of your total revenue that you're meant to achieve by a segment. So let's talk about these like as if it were real life. And one of my past organizations, these were verticals. So one of our priority segments was retail, one was medium publishing, and one was, let's say, restaurants, like quick service restaurants. And we would have a percentage. So say it was like it ended up totaling up across all of these products, 48%.

49:59And so then if I had a$100 million pipeline goal that year, times 48%, then$48 million of that pipeline should be coming from this segment. The nice thing is that because they're also by solutions, all of your product teams then also can get that same level of like, and this is the revenue we're achieving across that product line. So you're really attaching revenue to every part of your marketing plan. And then your campaigns typically line up across your segments. Product launches will line up across your solutions. So that's kind of how you get your campaign plan. And how this ended up working out for me in my last gig and kind of rinsing and repeating now is we had, like I said, retail, media, and QSR were kind of some of our priority segments.

50:48and what ended up happening because retail was the highest, it was showing highest generated pipeline because we were spending the most there. But when we looked at probability adjusted pipeline, it was lagging. So it wasn't going further in the cycle and we could determine that really quickly because of the segment plan and the segment monitoring. And so we pivoted over into our other segments so that we could ultimately achieve 120 % of our goal and we improved spend efficiency by 40%. Great. Okay, I gotta hit the horn. All right. So that was crew number two. That was, who do we have? We had Jess, Cook.

51:25Where did my list go? We had Jess, Diane, Anthony, Spud, and Haley. And now we need to pick one. We have the final winner. So wherever you are at home right now. All right. So pick one. You can only pick one. Which play, which campaign, which thing did you get the most info value? What did you relate to? Who did the best for you from today's? I didn't have the one in my list. I'm not going to lie. No disrespect. I love seeing what the people want. Comics, we had Jess Cook with the comic strip clips. Diane with the messaging triggers. Anthony with Claude Code and LinkedIn ads API. Spud, AE starring video ads.

52:02And Haley talking about revenue-driven campaign planning. Have we tallied all the votes? Okay. It's only right that the man who had the most difficulty with our tech issues right now. Our winner, the great Spencer Spud Rule. You rule, man. Way to go. I'm going to make a personal donate. I'm going to show up your house with a big check to a charity of your choice. The charity of your choice cannot be Titleist.com. I don't know what you're into, but we'll figure that out later. This is an awesome job. Real quick, why do you think this landed? You're a marketer. You know this crew well. Why did your thing lands so well with people what do you think honestly i think uh a big part of it my guess is that it was the same challenge we were dealing with is like constantly trying to come up with new video creative is like it's painful and it's like a really cool ongoing solution for that that solves a lot of other problems so yeah that's my guess i don't know i'd love to hear in the chat though.

53:03All right. But yeah, thanks, Steve. All your salespeople. Yeah, we won an award. We won an award. Yeah, I know. Watch out, sales teams everywhere. We need a name. We need a name for these things. Okay. So last thing that we got, I think, I'm just checking on my... This has been an insane ride. So we mentioned earlier, we're going to give the tickets away for Drive right now. And here we go. Stephanie says, I can't wait to win my free ticket to Drive. It meets Bud in person. Well, Well, Stephanie, you didn't win, but you can pay with money to come to drive and see Spud also, which is awesome. The winners from our team right here, we have Mia, Mia D, Dalton H, and people say my name, Gerhard Gerhard, so I'm sorry to mess up your name, but Alkistis C from Stripe.

53:49So the three of you, we're gonna reach out. Allison at exit five, she will hit you up and she will hand deliver your free ticket to drive. We'll see you. So the number one thing for me with this session, this was awesome, And I want to give a shout out to Marissa, who's the newest member of the Exit 5 team. And just like absolutely just at home, round of applause, put this thing together. I think we unlocked an awesome format. My biggest takeaway here is like people want real examples, real people, real examples. They want that. I thought we were going to give swag away too. I'm getting so many messages right now.

54:18This is what we want our brand to be. I understand. You could go to Claude and ask Claude all your AI questions. The thing we're building with Exit 5 is I want to show you real examples from real people. And this was an awesome example of that. So, Dan, do you have some swag? Why am I on stage? I just looked up and I realized I was on stage. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. We will tally up. We'll go through the chat. I got shipments ready to go. So we're sending stuff out. Everyone, thank you for being so engaging with this webinar. We'll do it again. It's awesome. I think that's it. So we did it.

54:47We got swag. Thank you. We're like our chat. So we are marketers too, right? I'm a marketer. That's how I started my career. we are going to take this format and think about like, I think one of the most fun parts of this job in marketing is when you do something and you get feedback and reactions, our brains are all spinning right now. But like, how do we do more of this? How do we tap into this? So stay tuned, exit5.com, get on our newsletter, exit5.com slash newsletter. And then all these people, you're going to see, this is a taste of what Drive will be like. But in person, in Stowe, in Vermont, it's beautiful.

55:16Third year in a row, we've done this event. There's a reason that the NPS is in the 80s, which Apple's NPS is like in the 50s. I don't know. And hopefully we'll see you in September. Otherwise, we'll see you on our next session. Thank you all in the chat. This was awesome. Way to go, everybody. I'm going to go give a big thank you to our speakers backstage and we're out of here. Great job. Appreciate y 'all.

55:40Hey, 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.

56:12People 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 wanna become a member for the year. Go check it out, learn more, exit5.com, and I will see you over there in the community.

56:50Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Customer.io. They're one of our longest running sponsors. Customer.io helps marketing teams get more impact from every message they send so you can reach the right people with the right message at the right moment. What we love about Customer.io is that they have a great team of marketers who really care about the craft. They just get marketing and understand our audience. Molly, Rosie, and the team bring something creative. Every time that we worked together at our Exit 5 event in Austin, they handed out cowboy boots. In our newsletter, they shared an AI prompt cookbook.

57:21And at Drive last month, they were giving out Airbnb gift cards and AirPods. They believe marketing is a craft that takes creativity, thought, and taste. And no, AI can't do this part for you. The best teams treat AI as infrastructure and built the right way. It actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. Customer.io helps product teams build personalized campaigns across email, SMS, push, in-app, and webhooks using their own first-party data. And today, more than 9 ,000 brands trust Customer.io to send their messages, including Notion, Les Mills, and Angie. So if you need a new vendor to power your customer messaging or you just want a great marketing team to follow, it's time to go and check out Customer.io.

57:59Go to customer.io slash exit5. That's customer.io slash exit5.