[Best of B2B] Devin Reed on Content Strategy (Founder, The Reeder)

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. And 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 exit five. That's zoom.com slash exit five. 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.

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2:38It's convertive.com slash exit5. That's convertive.com slash exit5. And you can also see the link in the show notes. All right, look, everywhere you look online right now, everyone's telling you the new way to do marketing because of AI. And I think because of that, there's so much perceived change and innovation and speed and technology and AI and agents in marketing right now. I think we've forgotten a little bit about the timeless lessons in marketing. Just like life, there's a bunch of timeless principles that kind of always work. Whether I'm reading a book from 1925 about advertising and copywriting that still applies today, or if I'm doing an interview with someone here on our podcast, I'm just reminded all the time about how it's easy to open up LinkedIn and feel like you're behind or feel like you need to chase the newest tool, tactic or channel.

3:25And so we want to profile some of the more timeless lessons here on our Exit 5 podcast, right? Everybody in B2B is chasing what's new, new channels, new tools, new playbooks with the fundamentals haven't changed. Some marketing lessons never go out of style. And that's why we handpicked this episode for you in your ears. We're blessing this as one of the greatest hits of the Exit 5 podcast. one of our all-time most played episodes. And here's this one for you. I hope this is a dose of timeless marketing that you need to ground yourself today. One, two, three, four. Exit. Fire.

4:03Exit.

4:08Exit. All right, so Devin is here. I wanted to talk before the podcast, but I said, I just want to hit record and actually chat with you on the record, the PR team at your company will be okay. This will be good for everybody. Don't worry. But before we dive in and I ask a million questions, as listeners know, and I take lots of notes and go in a bunch of different directions, like for people listening, can you introduce yourself, name, quick bio, who you are, what do you do, quick career summary? And I'm going to jump back and ask you a bunch of questions from there. Yeah, absolutely. So currently director of content and thought leadership over at Clary.

4:48The quick background is I spent the first six years of my career in sales. So I went from being a terrible sales rep to a decent one to a pretty good one, I would say. Right when I got pretty good at it and the money was coming in, I decided to move over into marketing. And so that was while I was at Gong. So I was the second sales rep at Gong in 2017 when there were about 40 employees. moved over to marketing, was supposed to actually join Chris Orlob's team, if anyone knows or has heard of Chris Orlob. And so he was leading content. Right as I joined his team, he was like, actually, I'm going to get back into sales.

5:26So you can just have my job, basically. And so I became the one man band there when we were, I don't know, 150, 250 employees, and then scaled the team to seven, left when we're about 1200 employees last year. And then, yeah, as I mentioned, just joined Clary about nine months ago. Awesome. Yeah. I feel like I, just from following the story in the sideline, that's right. There was a little bit of a flip-flop. I feel like that might be one of the secret ingredients into why the content at Gong was so good is that you were in the role of the customer that you were selling to, right? You weren't, and I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, but you weren't a 22 year old fresh grad or marketing associate trying to like get inside the head of a salesperson.

6:09You're like, oh, I am this. I can talk about that. Was that a conscious move? And what was exciting about content? Obviously, you're making good money selling software. Gong is going great. I'm sure you were hitting all your numbers in the early days when the company's growing crazy like that. There's lots of accelerators and lots of money to be made. Take me into that time. Yeah. And this is, I'm not saying it to flatter you by any means, but I've known you for a while of you and we've met a couple of times over the years and studying you and just other folks in the marketing space. I'm just trying to find the intangibles, right?

6:44Like, why is this person successful? What is it about them that draws people to them? And that's in B2B and that's in just like life, right? I'm like always curious about that. And by no means watering down your success to this day. But one thing I was like, he's a marketer marketing to marketers. Like he's a dude marketing to himself that has to be part of it. And so all of the imposter syndrome and kind of doubt I had of myself of like, hey, I'm going to go build a marketing team at a pretty, you know, at the time, blossoming, you know, tech company, at least I know the audience, like at the very least, I know who I'm talking to and about.

7:16And so I kind of leaned on that really heavy. The reason for the transfer was, like I mentioned, like, I got good at sales, it took a really long time, but it never like felt like my calling, it kind of felt forced. And I didn't know that marketing was, you know, going to work out. But I just thought, hey, maybe there's this way where I can kind of, you know, play into some of my more creative skill set, some of my communication skill set and kind of just, and there's no disrespect to my friends in sales by any means, but you can easily become a cog where you're replaceable, you're a number and like, you're only as good as your last month or quarter.

7:47I wanted to find a way that I can maybe be a little bit more indispensable and valuable and find other ways to bring value to the company. It just so happened to be content marketing. Do you feel like now you're good enough with content and marketing and understanding content. Could you only do marketing to marketers or marketing to sales? Or do you feel like I know the game now you could hire me to run content at a cybersecurity company and I think I could be successful? I humbly think I could be successful, but I openly don't want to do that. I think the learning curve. I'm with you. I use that line all the time.

8:21I'm like, I would be no good in that world. I think it'd be a different playbook in that I would be more of like the curator behind the scenes and try to like interview and tap into experts where like me being the face of doing a lot of content like AdDrift at that time worked really well in that market. The walking and talking LinkedIn videos is not going to work, you know, selling to like DevOps or something like that. But I think that to me is what's fun about it is like you get to create a different recipe and attack it in a different way. Yes, I've said the almost exact same examples, which was like, would it have worked out, you know, from sales to like, what is like GitLab or some like developers?

8:56is like, no, probably not. And now that I've kind of found my niche, I'm just more valuable to a few handful of companies, right? Who sell to the persona I'm super familiar with. So I'd rather stay there, market to them and keep a shorter learning curve than say, Hey, I've got something to prove. I can be the head of marketing at a company that sells to developers. Watch me work. Like that just doesn't interest me. Your niche is what? B2B SaaS? B2B SaaS. If we go even further, I'd say sales marketing, or if you want to go to market, I know it's like kind of broad, but yeah. Can we talk about Gong early content strategy stuff?

9:30Because, and I use this example a lot, and I have worked with a lot of B2B SaaS companies, marketing teams. I think one of the biggest challenges is that a lot of companies are doing content and we got a blog, we got a podcast, we got LinkedIn, we got TikTok, we got YouTube, we got this, we got that. And none of it is great. And that's not even saying it as a knock, but we just kind of try to do it everywhere, which like, I don't know if this was the actual strategy, but from the outside, what I felt like I saw Gong and you guys doing was in some ways, like less is more. Like it felt to me like you did kind of like one or two like pillar pieces of content instead of just like cranking out blog posts about sales.

10:13You were like, Hey, we're not going to publish anything for three weeks. We're going to use our own data. And we're going to come out with like, you know, here are the most common phrases that closers use or what I'm making this up, right? And we're not going to do it across every channel. We know that our buyers are on LinkedIn and LinkedIn is a really busy and effective channel right now. We're just going to kind of focus on LinkedIn where I've been in the situation where it's like, well, you know, this person on the team has like an email subscriber goal. And this person on the team has like a blog traffic goal.

10:41And then this person has like a demo request goal. And like, none of that's working. I thought from the outside, what you all did really well was like, nope, we're just going to kind of go all in on LinkedIn. That's where we believe our persona is. and we're going to use LinkedIn to drive a ton of eyeballs to our content. Am I roughly in the ballpark of that? You're in the ballpark and you're in the lower bleachers. You're in the right spot. All right. Well, pretend like I've never heard it before and tell me the intentional decisions. Because I always say now, if I were to go do something else or run marketing somewhere else, I just think that focus is the key.

11:11It's not about being on 20 channels. It's like being really good at one or two and just squeezing all the juice out of those channels. And it also helps so much with internal alignment and who's doing what versus like the team, so many marketing teams, everybody's doing lots of stuff and everybody's really busy, but we're not hitting our goals. So the way I thought about it was, again, having been a sales rep, right? We've all heard the adage, go where your customers are today, go where your audience is today. And so I thought, well, what does a salesperson do when they log in? When they open their laptop, they go to three places.

11:42There's three tabs they open, Gmail, Salesforce, and LinkedIn. All day long, those are the three things that are open. So I thought, okay, well, email, We can build an email list, right? And that's a great direct path to communicate with folks. Everyone's on LinkedIn. Let's build on LinkedIn. And I can't build on Salesforce. There's nothing there. So I'll just take two of those three tabs and I'm going to own those two or three tabs. So every time you see my name, Gong's name, it's going to be something what we can talk about what valuable means, but it has to be something valuable, highly engaging every single time.

12:14And we will condition people and inevitably they'll share our content. And so I'm like, if I can just dominate, not play, not win, we are trying to dominate these two channels, LinkedIn specifically, then we can figure out if and how we scale. But I was all in that we can win and dominate those two places. We wouldn't really have to go much wider than that. There's a great book on business strategy. I think it's called Playing to Win. And one of the basically core principles in the book is like, before you figure out like, how you're going to play, you have to figure out where you're going to play.

12:49And so like, I love that you already in that first exercise, you've kind of narrowed it down to like, okay, we're going to focus on these two channels, which is going to be email and LinkedIn. But anybody can do that. Anybody can focus on those channels. Take me into like how you figured out the how and not just pumping out kind of average content. It seemed like you had a very specific bar for what you created. I always give a shout to Udi. I'm sure you know Udi well. He was, I mean, big brand guy, but really all about being different. And he always said different is better than better. And so here I am, you know, I've got Slea.

13:24I don't know if you can see in the frame. I'm tattooed up. I speak very street level. And I'm on these, you know, videos on LinkedIn, in giving sales advice, but using, like you said, the data, right? And so I think one was the delivery of the content was something that I looked in the mirror. I'm like, I look different than most people in this space. And Udi hired me. So he knew what he was getting into, right? He didn't ask me to wear a great business suit on videos and in front of audiences. So if that's kind of a differentiator is how I communicate and our tone at Gong as a whole, let's lean into that, right?

13:55And so the brand tone was something that was very different. The content itself was, yeah, we had this just, you know, treasure chest of all these different data points from the platform. And everybody on LinkedIn at the time, which again, at the time, not nearly as many LinkedIn creators and influencers was not a thing. I think Chris Orlov was like the first to have 30 ,000 followers in that space. And that was wild. Like people didn't even know that was a thing. And so it was like, hey, let's not just do opinion based stuff. I was on this one sales call and this is what happened and therefore everyone and their mom should do it this way.

14:28It was, let's look at the data. There's always a difference as you know, Dave, from like behavioral psychology, the things we say we do and the things we actually do. And so if I could say, hey, let's take the opinions, the best practices, the things you learn in sales school, which all the sales training, you know, when you join a sales company, what if we take all of that, then we pair it with data and say, hey, here's what you've been told to do. Here's what you think is right. But here's what actually works according to data. And that alone gave us a lot of credibility because it's data based, but it just jumped, it just pierced through the noise.

15:00No one was doing anything like that. And so when you take this and the way we were bringing insights and then the way we were delivering it with the tone, that's what was just like, no one was doing anything like that. And that's why we stood out. So I don't want to say easily, but so, you know, so much in comparison to the landscape. For me, it also comes back to, for people that are looking for marketing jobs, or let's say you want to do content marketing, I'm a partial believer, and I think David Ogilvie had this line that says, there are no boring products, only dull writers. and I think that's partially true, but I also think that when you're looking for jobs or looking for how you can be successful, like this wasn't vaporware, you had a great product with interesting data that like, oh man, this is a gold mine for marketers.

15:48And I think we had a similar thing at the time at Drift, which is like marketing to marketers. The CEO, David, was like really smart to be like, hey, look, if we're selling marketing, a marketing software product, like, hey, marketing team, You guys have to use our product. He made us cancel all of the other SaaS tools that we're using. And even if the Drift product at the time couldn't do a certain thing, he's like, you got to do it because we're selling this product to the audience. You're going to get better ideas. You're going to get better content. You're going to push the product team. And so a big part of that was like, oh yeah, this is a perfect combination of smart people who want to create interesting content.

16:24But we also have the right fit from a product standpoint where we can really work together to deliver interesting content as opposed to just having to write another, you know, 15 podcasts, every sales rep should listen to type of article. Yeah, absolutely. As a leader, it's kind of like a triangle that I think about it when I come to developing the team. And on each point, one is category because that's kind of, you know, I've always done the category play. You call it point of view. The second one is audience and the third one is product. And so we had that at Gong for aforementioned reasons having, you know, I sold the product for a couple of years beforehand.

16:58But as I start to build and scale teams, I try to look for where are we strong and where are we weak on this kind of triangle with each hire. So I'm going to come in with product knowledge. Like right now at Clary, I have a sales engineer turned marketer, nailing product right there. So I kind of think of those three ways. And then as the leader on the team, it's my job to bring the category from the CEO, from Kyle, our CMO, down to the kind of more street level folks. So that's kind of the little way that I look at it. In the Gong example, what was the kind of cadence from a content perspective?

17:30Obviously, you said no to lots of other different channels. I'm sure you all had a bunch of different ideas for, we could do this on YouTube, we could do this, we do that, blah, blah, blah. But you focused on LinkedIn and kind of long form content. What was the cadence? Did the team say like, we're going to do one meaty thing a month and that's what everyone's working on? How did this come together behind the scenes? In the early days, it was because it was me and a guy, Jonathan, that I hired. So it was just both of us. And so when we joined, it was like, hey, we're really doing like one thing a month.

17:59Keep doing that. And then see if we can do it like two things a month. That was like, can we double? I doubled headcount, can you double output? The strategy really was the Gong Labs articles, which folks knew to that. There was the data backed articles, specifically 800 words or less, extremely, one big data point, a story with it, and then some actionable guidance and a lead magnet. So if it was like, hey, here's... What was the example I think you shared? Which was actually when we did. These 10 words are what bestsellers do, bestsellers say. We might cover five of them in the blog and then go, by the way, here's a cheat sheet with all 10.

18:35Download it. And then I get your email address as well. We saw so much success with those when they popped off on LinkedIn that it was worth rolling the dice. We had the equation. We had the formula. We had the team. Let's just do one of those a month. We tried to get to two a month, but they're just pretty big lifts from a campaign and data standpoint. So we got to like three-ish weeks at best. But we just knew that we were getting... When one of these popped off, we had over 1 ,000 new followers on our page. We would get 500 to 1 ,500 new email addresses. Those folks could MQL. And what was most interesting, though, in going to like, how did you get away with that?

19:13How did you get away with one big bet? And we did some other stuff too that I'll talk about. but it wasn't about adding to the conversation. We were trying to own the conversation. I wanted everybody talking about that data point for 24 hours on LinkedIn. And what we ended up finding out with like, you know, a blog would go live on Tuesday. I'd get on a call with someone Thursday, Friday, maybe even of the next week. And they would start the call day with like, hey, Deb, just want to say real quick, saw that article from last week. Someone on my sales team slacked it to me. Someone on my sales team was in our sales chat.

19:43Like I'm convinced, even though I'll never be able to prove it, that Slack was probably the third best channel for delivering that content because people were sharing it. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I was just going to say, I think this is the other really important piece of this. It's like, yes, it was using your data, but it was not self-serving. It was genuinely useful and interesting insights that the VP of sales at Drift might send this around and be like, oh, let's look at our gong call recordings and see how often these phrases are coming up or like, hey, like you were teaching or sharing something unique that it was genuinely helpful.

20:18And I think that's what it takes to me to be good at content in a way that's going to drive measurable business results. We sell to salespeople, forget that we're gong or whoever. How do we make this piece of something so valuable that it's going to be the thing that they share and tell each other about and like, oh, check this out. I'm going to try this thing from this article. To me, that's what it means to build a brand. I think more than like logo and name and all that stuff. It's like, oh, Gong became this resource for salespeople. And so if I'm a mid-level like AE at some company, Gong becomes my kind of secret weapon to help me grow in my career because I'm now following your stuff.

20:54I'm reading this article. Oh, cool. I'm going to try this out. I mean, for me as a marketer early in my career, like that was HubSpot when they created like inbound marketing. I was one of the few marketers at a company that I was at at the time who was like going to their conference, going to all their webinars, following them on social media. I felt like I had this like secret that nobody else had. And I think that's what makes it great. And so it's like about getting inside the head and then creating the level of content that's valuable. And you being from sales, you can kind of pass the sniff test yourself.

21:21Right, absolutely. It's funny you say about the being genuinely valuable. I had a no product rule, no pitch, no screenshots. This was no product allowed. And it worked really well. It was funny as there was other times where you get the pull, we won't say names or titles, but someone above like, hey, why don't we do this? there's this new product coming out. Why don't we really do this? And I was like, fine. I like, you know, after defending my position for months and years, I'm like, let's do it. A third of the results, a third of the engagement because it fails the sniff test of like, oh, we're being pitched to today.

21:53Got it. Let me click out of this because it's not the same. And especially when you've built up this expectation and this reputation for what this is, you know, what I'm going to get. And then you switch it up on people. It didn't work. And so I was like, okay, there's my, there's my line in the sand. Can we all go back to the playbook that works. So I think people have a pretty good idea for like the types of content that you're creating. Also, I just love this as a strategy. Like this is how you got to start. It's like, I think too many people obsess with like on Monday, we're going to this and Wednesday, we're going to do this.

22:19Like you said, let's try this like one long form piece of content. It worked. Let's go do it again. And maybe now try to get two in the rotation and see, but there's this very thin line where all of a sudden you, you kind of get diminishing returns because then I was like, Oh, well, what if we did one of these every week? Well, then the audience wouldn't be that big. Which came up, by the way. Why don't we do this every week? Of course it did. I have, look, my business is Exit 5 and we have sponsors. And I've thought a lot of times about, man, I could basically triple the revenue if I tripled the sponsors and we did a one webinar a week.

22:53Well, here's the issue. Because we're only doing one webinar a month right now, these webinars are getting a thousand people registering for them. All of a sudden, if you do that every single week, then all of a sudden a thousand becomes like 220, 186, you know, and you only have so many, like I just, and that's why I love the approach that you all took to marketing, which is like, use your ammo like wisely. And so when you post on LinkedIn, it's going to have a bigger result than if you did that every single day or every single week, it's going to have a worse result. Absolutely. Yep. You're a hip hop guy.

23:26So I'll go deep reference. Do you remember, I don't know the year, man, I'm terrible. Like 2007, eight, nine, when Lil Wayne went on an absolute terror of like dropping a mixtape like every week or month for like two years. Do you remember that? Of course, no ceilings. It was - No ceilings. You remember like - Yeah, it was probably like 2006 to 2009, yeah. Yeah, it was in that ballpark. Yeah, right. And so remember like, at first it was like, oh my, no ceilings was crazy. There's some really good ones. And then eventually there are so many coming out that like you kind of just lost interest. At least I did.

23:56I remember being like, Wayne, I only got so much time in the day, man. Like, and they weren't getting better. Like they got a little worse. The drought nine. You're like, no, I don't have time. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm like, which drought are we on? I haven't even heard seven yet. And nine comes out tomorrow. And I always remember that. I always remember that of like, leave people wanting more. Let people anticipate because it's going to help with your results. Like to your point, if I can get Dave every week live in a webinar, it's not as interesting if I have to wait a month, right? Or just for an example.

24:23And so I was big on that. And so what we did instead was just diversify the content format, which would say, okay, great. The blog did really well. People liked it. Let's turn it into short form. What's now called zero click content. It was zero click content before Amanda coined it. And it was put that out on LinkedIn. Hey, let's get Devin on video for two, three minutes and walk through it and put that on LinkedIn and webinars as well. Can you explain zero click content for people that don't know? Yeah. Zero click content is effectively content that you're publishing. And I would say email too.

24:55I don't know if she only meant for social, but effectively it's link less. So there's no link. I'm not promoting a link. I'm just sharing the content in the feed or in the native channel. And the goal is just to get people to consume it there, build trust, grow your following, grow inbound. That's what we were doing. And so when I say we did one big thing a month, it was like one big new thing a month. And then we would repurpose, reformat, and host webinars and all that good stuff. But the point was that all that was easy because we knew we had gold. It was just repurposing it. I also think of zero click content as in your example, you mentioned that like you can consume it all.

25:30I also think there's a right way to do it where not only do you consume it all without clicking, but it's so good or so interesting that people are then going to go to your website or find it anyway. And so you and I are recording this on a Thursday. Yesterday, I announced the relaunch of exit five and we're on a new platform and all this. And we drove hundreds of new signups on the first day and I didn't actually link to Exit5 website and there was no UTM, there was nothing. I made a Loom video walking through the new community. I posted it on LinkedIn and I said like, you can go and join right now if you go to exit5.com and I spelled out.com because I know that, well, it's a short, easy URL, exit5.com, but also like LinkedIn doesn't like links because they don't want to send people off the platform.

26:14Now, if I was an advertiser, I'd be, well, how do we track this? Well, I track this because on that day, there was 300 signups yesterday because I told people in the video, go to exit5.com. But there's no Google Analytics or any tags or anything that's going to show that. But the content matched the audience and we built up enough demand. And it was interesting to people. And I think back to the Gong stuff, it's like do less stuff, build up more demand for it, do it better. And then when you have a hit, like it's almost like for Gong, like people are like, well, how did you promote the content?

26:44They're like, that's the easy part. Like, oh, we posted it on LinkedIn and we had built an audience there. And so like everybody wanted to go and like download this piece of content that we created. We didn't have to think of 16 different ways to promote this piece of content. 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.

27:16He showed us how he used Optimizely's AI agent platform to run an ABM campaign that gave 2 ,000 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.

27:52If 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 exit5. That's Optimizely.com slash exit5. 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.

28:28They'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.

29:06That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five. Yep, totally agree. congrats on the relaunch by the way thank you quick plug i do my own marketing here a lot of times even myself have to defend right like how do i know it worked and so we would just look at the inbound numbers by day in salesforce and you would always see a spike obviously on these big days like obvious spike but it's the halo effect which is look i don't have a utm i don't have anything but one thing happened that day we did an email campaign we did a webinar we did this gong labs and you see a very clear uptick and a lot of times again not always but sometimes sometimes someone in digital, oh, well, we did launch a new paid ad that week or that day.

29:44It wasn't the ad. And I said, okay, hey, if we don't agree that it was what we did, then we'll just stop doing it and we'll find something else to do. And then the loss aversion kicks in and people are like, whoa, whoa, hold on, hold on, hold on. Like, you know, probably had something to do with it. And it's like, maybe it's correlation. I don't know, but it's pretty clear causation to me. If you did one thing, one thing on Wednesday and Inbound went up Wednesday and Thursday, probably that thing. Well, it also comes back to like having and building an audience. One of my least favorite types of content is when people write like, how Mr.

30:13Beast launched X brand. I'm like, how did he launch it? Because he has a bazillion YouTube subscribers. He says, hey, I have a new thing. Go buy it. Yes, exactly. And so that's always going to learn or like anything a Kardashian does. It's like, did they need creative promo? No, they have a huge audience and they say like, hello, the store is now open. Go to it. And that's what you can do. Two things I want to come back to. So you mentioned you'd create this content and you'd post it on LinkedIn, but most certainly you didn't just post it on LinkedIn and grow followers. Like, did you have a dedicated LinkedIn company page strategy?

30:48Like, you know, you were posting, Chris was posting, Udi was posting, Amit, maybe that's been more recent. Like, my guess is you were also doing stuff to build the audiences on LinkedIn so that when you did have a piece of content, you had people there to go find it. Can you unpack some of that? Yeah. Yeah. So at the time, and if you've been on LinkedIn long enough, you know, every what Dave, like two-ish years, they go through these big waves of features and functionality they want you to adopt. So like articles were a thing. Remember articles, like those were hot, like six, seven years ago. Then it was video and I don't know what it is now.

31:20But anyway, so I would just publish an article from my page because we knew one, people wanted to hear from a person, not a company. Two, I had the credibility as a previous salesperson. And three, it wasn't as mature at the time, but we were pretty damn sure profile pages were getting more views. So we said, Hey, let's just do the obvious thing. That's easiest. So I would publish it at eight in the morning via LinkedIn. And then we would do what we call the gonkster activation or employee activation, which was, Hey, internally Slack and email, this new article went live. Here's who it's for. Here's what it's about.

31:49Like two sentences, please go like and comment or share with your prospects. If interested, there was no monitoring of that. If you didn't want to do it, you didn't have to, but a lot of people did because again, sales team had bought into the content. And then, yeah, of course, Udi would reshare. A lot of the folks wanted to share because there was so much buying into the marketing and they also believed in the content. And it was clear, like, I would put in their PS, the more people that share, more shares means more views means more pipeline every single time. And so it was kind of like, okay, well, if you care about pipeline, you should probably share this.

32:19You also had an important ingredient, which is like, you had a company where people wanted to be there and they were engaged and like Gong was a thing and like people had equity in the company and the company was growing. And so like everybody's rowing in the same direction. It's much harder to be like, hey, go and share our stuff on LinkedIn when like people think the product stinks, morale is low. You know, it's like that also is a huge factor in being able to activate the employees like that. Huge, absolutely. At the time too, it's like, you know, the first hour you want to throttle the engagement as much as possible.

32:49So, you know, for those on, you know, again, how long you've been on LinkedIn, there was the golden hour. It's still in effect now, but not like it used to be. Like if you used to get a hundred likes in an hour, you were going to go like a super viral sensation. Not so much anymore. But we also did email. We emailed the database and we sent them to that LinkedIn article like minutes after it was live. Like we were trying to send everyone. Which is like the digital team's nightmare. Like we're not driving them to a property that we own. Like, what are you doing? And it still worked. To your point earlier, people saw it.

33:18They go to my profile, they go to Gong's profile, they go to our website and it worked. I think people are smarter than we give them credit in some examples, which is like to your point on like not even pitching the product it's like oh shit i shouldn't be using slides in my discovery calls i don't even know if we're doing that today i bet gong can help with that like that's the simple train of thought and then people go and get a demo and you know fairly a lot of times like look i don't actually know exactly what you guys do but i like you and i saw your content it's great and i just want to learn more and then we had a great sales team i'm sure they still do obviously i'm not there but and so it was like cool super warm lead i just had to do some education, which we had to do anyway, because no one was recording calls five years ago.

34:00Yeah. So kind of just naturally, a bunch of people in the company start posting and start growing the following, growing individual followings. And then you all are excited about what you're doing, interested in your field. And so like, then, you know, you're kind of like on your LinkedIn, you're writing an insight of your own that has nothing to do with Gong, but you're like, hey, I was in a meeting today and this interesting thing happened. and Udi's doing the same thing and Chris is doing the same thing. So each of your personal accounts starts to grow. Okay, makes sense. I also feel like you had an intentional strategy with the company page too.

34:35Yeah, and on the employee side, we held like LinkedIn trainings, optional like lunch and learn type things, like 15 minutes if you wanna build your personal brand, how to post on LinkedIn. Because what we learned was a lot of people wanted to post, but they're just nervous. And so we did like non-gong branded trainings real quick of just like 10, 30 minute trainings, completely optional. And that's what sparked a lot of people to start posting. So that's, you know, if you're listening, trying to get your folks more engaged, try that. We did. And it was going back to that thing for the company page, which was one insightful thing a day.

35:06If you see our post, it has to be so good that you want to go, you have to go follow. It's impossible not to follow us. That was what it was. And it was one post a day. Usually, you know, again, at the beginning, just me looking at blogs, looking at stuff we've already published, repurposing it, finding new stories, you know, and then throwing the data piece in there. And when I hired, I think it was my third person, maybe it was Jonathan, maybe it was my second person. Then it was like, okay, let's go to two. Can we double? All right, cool. We're keeping engagement up. Can we go to three? Okay, we did that.

35:34Can we go to four? Oh, we're seeing diminishing returns. Okay, great. Three was the magic number. Played around with the timings because by then, and I'm going quickly over time, you know, we're going international, right? So we want to hit on different time zones. But the goal was always the same, which was to produce the most engaging sales content on the fucking planet. That was our motto internally. Like we said it all the time. Anyone on the team would know that's what we're here to do. And we protected that feed tough. Like chief people officer wants like candidate shout outs or stuff. You get one post a week.

36:05We finally budge. We're like, okay, we have to start helping other teams. Like, okay, recruiters, you get one post a week. Okay, this team, you get one post a week. And we like scattered it in and we still try to make it as fun and engaging as possible. Congrats to Gong on being one of the San Jose Business Journal's 30 fastest growing companies. That's where we lost was the corporate awards and stuff, which of course we wanted to share. I'm not trying to make it seem like we were all for ourselves or anything, but we just knew what worked on the feed. And we're like, I don't want to post that stuff because it's not going to work.

36:36New CFO, for sure. That's important. That gives you some credibility in the market. But we don't need 14 shout outs for new job recs this week. No one's even clicking on them. So let's not fool ourselves. It also all adds up, right? And so I noticed with my own stuff, there was a time when I would kind of just like every day talk about Drift and promote Drift. And that didn't work as well as when I kind of stopped doing that. And I just kind of talked about what I'm doing in marketing in general. And I happened to work at Drift. And then let's say one out of every five posts, then I'd be like, hey, next week we're doing this webinar, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

37:12Here's the link. That's when I started to notice like, wow, I just drove like hundreds of signups to our company webinar through my personal page. But again, back to what we said earlier, if I posted that type of stuff every day of the week, twice a day, it's gonna be very small returns from that. People are gonna mentally unsubscribe. They know they're being sold to, they know they're being marketed to. Give them the zero click content, the valuable stuff four days a week, they'll happily take that fifth thing. The mental unsubscribe. I have some more LinkedIn stuff, but I wanna just kind of talk about this idea of a lead magnet that worked really well for you all at Gong.

37:47There's a lot of chatter in the world today about, you know, people poo-pooing this content generation strategy and lead capture and gated content. And, you know, that's not really MQLs. Do you have an opinion on that? Has your opinion changed? Did it work for Gong then? It might not work now. Just I want to hear your perspective on that. Yeah, I learned after about two years in marketing. So again, going into it, I didn't know any of these phrases. I just called it like a gated piece of content. Like I was like, it's gated. I'm trying to collect email addresses because again, obviously it's like, I'm trying to get direct line of communication to these people.

38:21I want them to expect my name. I remember you had written one time, Dave, it's not your subject line that they read first. It's your sender name. Still true. That's what matters. Oh, leave it completely. And so I'm like, we got to come correct. They see Devin at Gong, Devin Reed at Gong Labs. We need to like, they need to be like, oh, hell yeah. And like rush to that email. That's what I was trying to build. I got to get email addresses, right? And so I don't give a shit what people think about gated content or not. Like if you hate it, it probably because you didn't do it right, or you got burned as a consumer of it.

38:50But the truth is, if you put good content out there, they're going to find your blog and subscribe or they'll happily give your email address for that piece of content, right? And so there's really a trust trade that's happening. That's what you're doing. You're trading trust because your email address doesn't have a monetary value, right? It's not worth one or a thousand dollars. It's just worth trust. And so every time we wrote a landing page, we wanted to make it as compelling as possible, but we wanted to over deliver when you got that piece of content. Again, it had to wow you had to be so great that you wanted to share it with somebody.

39:21And so we were just delivering on that over and over and over again and collecting a huge email list. And so now we had a rent again, what we call now a rented audience and an owned audience. And that kind of built our moat a little bit. And so for me personally, I think it's crazy not to build an email list. I'm sure you have one. I'm sure it's one of the most valuable things at Exit 5 is that email list. If your podcast burned down, you'd have your email list to go start a new one. If LinkedIn kicks you off the platform, you have an email list to start to keep communicating with them. So I'm doing it a little bit differently now at Clary.

39:52But my reader, my business, my email list is the most valuable thing aside from IP. Yeah. I mean, the email list is the print money button. And yesterday when I relaunched Exit 5, the creative marketing strategy was tell the email list about the new thing and give them a link to do it. And they did it. I think the disconnect on the gated content, like lead capture is you can't run that playbook and then be like, yeah, all these people who downloaded this Gong article about sales tips are not ready to buy Gong. You can't say that those are MQLs or whatever they are or SQLs or whatever. However, if you just had a thousand people get your content about how to do a better discovery call and you sell a product that is a really good fit for those people, then you can say, hey, remember me, Devin, the guy that you got that great content from?

40:44Well, actually, we have something that you might be interested in. Do you want to try it? It's our free tool that can do X, Y, Z. And so I think it works. You have to have the whole vision and picture mapped out of what the whole content strategy is going to be. Not just like, yeah, these a thousand people downloaded this ebook. Let's call them. This is a great point because it's not intent to buy, it's intent to solve. There's a problem that you have. You wouldn't have downloaded the content if you didn't, and you're trying to solve that problem. What we ended up doing probably like the last year I was there, we went from one a month to two a month to one a week.

41:14It wasn't always a new thing, but it was some evergreen content every single week. And so what we started to do was create what we call a content pack, which was a one-page Google Doc, which was the 411 on what this piece of content was and what it means to your prospects. So if you're a BDR and you get a Salesforce link that you got 10 MQLs today, right? This VP of sales just downloaded this discovery cheat sheet. The goal wasn't to pick up the phone and say, hey, I heard you want to buy Gong. It was, hey, you might have a discovery problem. So you downloaded this thing. That's actually kind of exactly what we do is help with discovery calls.

41:47Like, would you be interested in learning more? If you call them within the first 24, 48 hours, they're still excited and hopefully remember that piece of content. you're going to get a warmer call that's going to lead to a legitimate intro call and hopefully what would be an SQL or a true opportunity. So that's the way that we viewed it. We coached the teams appropriately. Yeah, we got a ton of MQLs, but going back to the halo effect, you would see a spike every single time we sent an email. Not one day a week, we sent one sometimes two, but we always saw people came inbound as well. And so that's why I think it's worth it.

42:19But rather, you know, however you want to calculate it from MQLs, direct inbound, direct traffic, whatever. I'm just in the camp of less, but high quality content is going to serve the business. All right. I got a bunch of random follow ups. We're going to save them for maybe like the last five, 10 minutes of this. We're eating up time, which I could talk to you for three hours about this and you could tell me everything. But I do want to spend a couple of minutes on take me into as much as you're comfortable sharing without giving away secrets. But like, what is the content strategy at Clary now?

42:49How is it different than Gong? Like, for me, it was fun to change companies and get to like, do something again, but with different people, different ingredients, different market. And I bet you're having some of that, even though there's some overlap in the market. So what's the content strategy today? How are you thinking about content? What's fun about your job right now? Yeah, that's a good question. So a lot of it is the same in that we are selling to sales pros or, you know, Gong was sales very specifically, like the VP of sales at Clary. it's revenue pros. So it's a little bit more at the executive level.

43:19Sales is like a part of that umbrella, but it's CS, it's CROs, it's finance, to a degree, sales operations. So it is the same, but different. Also same is there's a category play, right? So Gong, revenue intelligence, Clary's a little bit longer, it's revenue collaboration and governance or RevCG. And so the first six to nine months was all about that thought leadership. So the nine months leading up to me joining our year or so, they had launched their category. If anyone knows Chris Lockhead from Play Bigger, he's an advisor there. That was a big reason I wanted to join was to learn from him.

43:52And so it's, hey, they've just launched this new category. They purchased a conversation intelligence tool in Wingman. And now we need to go to market and really use content to go from 30 ,000 foot, what is this category to like, how do you actually think through it and act on it? And so that was kind of the first few parts. And so we, you know, a few different formats or channels, which is blog, social, podcast. And that's been really fun because we're doing it in a different way, where at Gong, we were kind of just living the POV, which was revenue intelligence is all about using and Gong's point of view there was, you know, don't use your opinions and gut feel, use data.

44:32So what does the content do? Attack opinions and show you data. So we're just living it. At Clary, they're living it as well, but they're using languaging. They're introducing new phrases and new terminology to the market and getting folks to understand and to adopt that, right? Like no one knew what RevCG really was. What is a revenue critical employee? What is a revenue moment, right? And starting to educate folks in that way. So it's been fun because it's like two people creating a category and two different groups of really intelligent people doing it, but going about it in different ways.

45:02What's the makeup of the content team at Clary? It's a little bit different. It's shifted up a little bit. I have a customer marketing manager, actually, which is why I started with different because customer evidence is content. So I adopted that after being there a couple months. Customer evidence. I like that term. Yeah, customer evidence. Well, it's not just case studies. I think people think case studies all the time, but there's more to it than that. I've had screenshots from Twitter and LinkedIn and board decks and email replies and like that type of stuff. And somebody replied to your content email and I'll reply back like, hey, this was a great comment.

45:32Would you be okay if I use this on our website? And they're like, yeah, sure, go for it. Yeah, I love, we do the same. I think the first piece of customer evidence I got was VP of sales shared that a CRO emailed him was like, we just ripped out Gong, bought Clary. It was the best thing ever. I was like, screenshot that, put it on this landing page. And I told the creative team, don't touch it. Don't put any graphics on it. Don't add our brand to it. Just make it look raw and organic and it'll work. Yeah, exactly, because it's real. Cool. Let's pause on that for a second. The reason why is because it's, especially in B2B, it's like, we want to like give that to the creative team.

46:06They turned it like, let's say your colors are like a blue and white, right? They want to turn it into some like blue background, white text, like big font. And like, this goes all the way back to Gary Halbert, Boron letters, A pile, B pile, which is like when you go home and you take the mail out of the mailbox, you get a whole stack of mail, all the things that look like advertisements and catalogs and direct mail, those go over here. But the handwritten note that looks like it's from your aunt, because she always sends you 10 bucks on your birthday, you're going to open that one first. And so that's why that screenshot of the email works better.

46:37Yes, and hear me out, even in the enterprise, because you're still selling to people that is always going to work. I'd love, love that play. I wrote about that a couple weeks ago, because I got got by some window salesman who sent something in the mail is not in an envelope, it was just a one pager, like just all crumpled up. And it was like a blue pen handwriting with yellow highlighter. And of all the crap mail, I jumped to him like, oh, it looks like my wife, Sholly, looks like she had some sort of like quote, I guess a window broke. And then after like four seconds on this thing, I'm like, oh, I was like, look up to light.

47:07I'm like, damn, he got me. This is like printed, but that works. It really does work. So, and yeah, to your point on the enterprise, I don't care if you're CEO, you know, I don't know, new in your career, specialist level, same biological triggers work on everybody. So. So anything else on the team front? I can't remember if we covered everything there. So I have a sales engineer turned production manager. So he also with the podcast and video. I have customer, excuse me, content marketing lead, a manager, content manager who has two specialists. And then I have another editor who's on, who's on mat leave right now.

47:40So we've got a pretty deep bench. And overall, how are you measuring content or how, what, where do you, what metrics are you responsible for? Ooh, yeah, there's the heavy side for the list. Like how deep do we want to go? So there's a few different things. So I'll just say like their social, which is like follower count, engagement, mentions is a big one. We're also doing, speaking of the category play, starting to measure how often is the market and the market not including Clary, talking about Clary, talking about our category and so on. It's kind of like share a voice a little bit. We're looking at MQLs, but we're actually not gating a lot of our content because we have a thought leadership site that we put up, which is basically just a content hub without any gate.

48:22You can sign up for a newsletter. So that's our way. Hey, if we've earned the right, you can subscribe. So we look at traffic to that page. Are people subscribing? We look at direct web traffic. We look at inbound. Honestly, inbound to me is kind of the thing that I think if I'm doing my job right, we should just see more inbound. And then as we start to work on some of the attribution models, things like pipeline influence, pipeline sourced, I put like seven asterisks next to that when I report to it because there's like three attribution models and this could be this, this could be that. But overall, those are some of the big ones.

48:53I like the idea of using inbound. And I also like that there wasn't just one perfect answer there, because I think especially when you're selling more upmarket like you all are, it's not going to be direct response. It's not going to be we publish piece of content and X thing happens. It's like the combination of all those pieces over time are going to lead to improvements in more people knowing who we are. If more people know who we are, they're going to come to our website. Gets easier to measure as you go on. Okay, I got a bunch of things and we only have a couple of minutes left. So I'm going to give you like a little rapid fire around maybe like a short answer one or two sentences on each one of these just your kind of perspective couple notes that I wrote down.

49:27What's your feeling on generative AI and chat GPT as it relates to life of a content creator? Don't let it replace your thinking, but it can help you write faster. I think it's good for answering. I don't think it's going to help you for thought leadership because thought leadership is all about new ideas and chat gpt is literally a bucket of old ideas What about But what happens if you leave devon? And what I mean by that is that's the common pushback that i've gotten over the years and I believe in this people first approach to content Also, but there's always you know one out of every five people's like yeah, but I don't know that's really risky What happens if devon reed leaves gong or dave leaves drift?

50:09What's your answer to that? Do you mean it in kind of like being the face of a company or like being like the author of content and stuff like that? Yeah. Or like whether it's one person or two or three people as opposed to like the brand being the author. Oh, I mean, one, people want to hear from people. But two, it's like, wouldn't you rather have bigger results while they're here and do your best to keep an A player than to not have them at all? Amen. And oftentimes the people asking that are much more conservative in the sense of like, well, you're never going to get X result if you take that approach anyway.

50:40So like, would you trade? Would Gong have traded? Should you have never gone to Gong and never published things under your own? No, they would take that trade all day, every day. And I know the same thing is true for Drift. I think it's a growth mindset versus or growth scarcity or abundancy, whatever that is. Okay. I kind of led you in there because I want to just put that on the record because I feel like we have the same opinion on that. For sure. You've mentioned this term of build your personal brand. A lot of people like to eye roll and poo-poo that. Look, personal brand, I get the phrase.

51:10It makes me my eye roll too, but I don't have a better one. For me, the way I think about it is it's your reputation. It's your digital reputation. And if you build a personal brand online, it's going to open up doors of opportunity before you even reach for the handle. That's it straight up. I'm not on this podcast if I don't have a personal brand. You know what I mean? If I'm not out here publishing ideas, helping people, all that stuff. But you also didn't get out of bed five years ago and say, you know what I'm going to start to do? know, I'm gonna start to build my personal brand. You're like, no, I, I like sales.

51:39I'm interested in this field. I'm going to start talking about this publicly and see what happens. Exactly. You know it when you see it. The cringesy stuff is like, and no offense, if people are doing selfies, like I'm not trying to knock, but it's like a selfie. And it's like this like really crappy, you know, not so veiled thing about themselves, even though it's like, wow, marketing is about this, but really it's about that. But also like my life is perfect and I only work four hours a week. And why aren't you too? It's like, dude, that's for nobody but you. So I think that's the problem. It's about you.

52:06It shouldn't be about you. It should be about your audience. Talk about LinkedIn today. You're still very active there. You post a lot of content there, but a platform has changed. What works on LinkedIn today? What's changed? How do you be successful on LinkedIn? Man, it's hard because we both have pretty large following. So when you start to complain that the algorithms change and this, that, and the other, I feel like the old hip hop guards like, man, that's not rap. This is rap. And like, so I have to kind of check myself a little bit, but look, the early stage of, you know, the early adopter phase is over.

52:35Like people get it. You can make money on LinkedIn. You can build brands on LinkedIn. It's a cash cow if you know how to use it. So you're starting to see a lot of the content reflect that a little bit shallower, I'll say personally, but don't focus on engagement so much. Focus on the quality, focus on the relationships, focus on who you're helping. And the other thing too, is you get a lot of results that aren't shown on screen, which I was just talking to this gal on my newsletter and she responded and she said, hey, because I actually posted about this, Dave, I said, hey, I posted this thing about 10 lessons and the engagement was fine.

53:06But DG reached out and offered me to be on his podcast. That's the win. And so when you're posting, don't just think about likes and comments, you're opening doors for other opportunities. And she responded and she said she had like five gals at like some like a retreat. And she said two of them saw her content, but never liked it, never clicked anything, but went and gave her a bunch of money and signed up for her retreat. So like All to say, it's worth doing and investing in, even if the algorithm seems a little messed up, even if you're not getting the engagement you want. If you just invest over time, it compounds for real.

53:37I love that. And it also changes that that's a perfect reason why you need to think about how you measure the effectiveness of that channel. Yes, followers and engagement are good metrics to just look at every now and then, but there's huge intangible and harder to measure benefits. Same reason for doing this podcast. As an example, this is not the biggest podcast in the world, but it has a pretty good following and a pretty good niche. And I get lots of inbound opportunities that come from doing this where if I just showed you the download numbers, you'd be like, oh, this isn't that impressive.

54:08But if I could show you what has come as a result of that, and I think that's why you have to be able to talk about content in a holistic way and be able to screenshot those replies and be able to show like, yeah, we booked a meeting with a million dollar client off of this LinkedIn post that had six comments on it. Yep. Dude, 100%. There's a correlation on my site. The better and the more I post on LinkedIn, the more inbound requests I get or the more newsletter subscribers you get. And the more newsletter subscribers you get, the better sponsors you get. Like it's all connected. But yeah, it's your point.

54:38People get tunnel vision on the vanity stuff, the engagement. Last question. Why go to Clary and take an in-house job when you clearly could have built your own company and done your own thing? Kids. No, I'm kidding. I had to throw that out there. I got two under two. No, the real answer, man, and I thought about it a lot. Kids. I mean, I won't lie. That's always a factor. Kids are always a factor. But yes. Look, I was a head of content at a really successful company. And I wanted to kind of prove two things. One, I wanted to prove to myself I could do it again and be successful. And it was also a different challenge, right?

55:14Like Gong was, you're the guy, like you're the guys and the only person on the team scale it with the company. Clary is 10 years old, you know, 800 employees, established marketing team. Can you kind of turn it around? I wanted that dual experience. So when I do go solo and I do more consulting, I can say, hey, I've done the fast paced startup from Zilch and I've done the, you know, a little bit more mid market, larger company enterprise play, turn that around as well. I think that's going to make me more valuable. So I was like, hey, let me invest a couple more years here, get a bunch of experience, learn from some great people, Julian, Kyle, Andy, Chris, and have fun doing it.

55:50And then I'll say, all right, cool. I'll hang my hat up and I'll go solo. Awesome. This was a great, great, great, great episode. I can't wait to post it. I'm not just saying that if you don't know by now, this is how I do these. I take a thousand notes while I write them and figure out what I'm going to ask you. Devin Reed, thank you for doing this. We will plug all of your stuff in the notes and everything, but the ultimate measure of this podcast for me is not CTA exit five. It's go to Devin Reed on LinkedIn, connect with him, send him a message and say, I loved your interview on exit five podcasts.

56:21And maybe we'll do this again next quarter. Okay, my friend. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, man. All right. Thank you, man. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over at exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus, we have a community, a community of over 4 ,000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company.

56:57Go and check it out. It's exit5.com. You can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4 ,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out, exit5.com. And I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's hatch.fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do. And they work with B2B companies just like yours.

57:29They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's hatch.fm. Hey, 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.

58:04They just get marketing and understand our audience. Molly, Rosie, and the team bring something creative. Every time that we work together at our Exit 5 event in Austin, they handed out cowboy boots. In our newsletter, they shared an AI prompt cookbook. And 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 web hooks using their own first-party data.

58:41And 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. Go to customer.io slash exit5. That's customer.io slash exit5.