Dave Unfiltered: How to Market Like You Give a Damn, Pick a Lane, plus Breakfast Ideas (and more)

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.

0:29And Marissa. 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.

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 exit5. That's convertive.com slash exit5. And you can also see the link in the show notes. You're listening to The Dave Gerrard Show.

2:52One, two, three, four, exit. One, two, three, four, exit. Hey, it's Dave. This episode, a little different episode, mailbag episode solo, just me. They just locked me here in a conference room. I got a bunch of questions from Exit 5 members in our community about marketing trends, conferences, strategy, what I eat for breakfast, what I do for fun outside of B2B marketing, I answered them all. I did. I answered them all. I have no voice left. I have no energy left. I answered all the questions in the community here in this mailbag episode. Plus, listen all the way to the end because I have an important call to action for you as a listener of this podcast.

3:35If you could just listen there and send us a note, that'd be awesome. All right, here it is. Mailbag AMA episode with questions from Exit 5. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to an episode of the Exit 5 podcast. My name is Dave Gerhart. I'm the founder of Exit 5, Exit5.com. Ask your favorite LLM about it. I'm here by myself in this little conference room here in the co-working space that I'm at. The team has asked me, we had an idea, or maybe I asked it, classic ego thing. We want to do a little mailbag episode, just something different, no guest, just Dave. I got a bunch of questions from the Exit 5 community, and I'm going to just sit here and answer them.

4:13I'll share my screen real quick, and I can actually pull this up. So I got a bunch of questions about all types of things here in the community. Let's get into it. Okay, here we go. This is going to be a rapid fire. I'm going to see if I can answer all of these questions. Hopefully the team can edit me down to make it feel tight and concise, but let's do this. I'm recording this first week of October, so here we are. Okay, this question's from Eddie. And I mentioned this here. I said, I'll talk about bullshitting about anything. And Eddie said, how does one bullshit about anything? Seriously, let's say you're on a podcast and the host asks a strange question you weren't prepared for or just don't care about.

4:49Is there a rule slash process you follow to answer without skipping a beat? Look, I'm going to say this for all these. These are like my opinions, right? I don't know what you feel in these moments. I have never had a problem with if someone asked me a question that I don't have an answer to or don't know, I've had no problem just saying like, I don't know that or I don't want to answer that. It's not awkward to me. I don't know. At this point, I'm approaching 40. I got a nice life. I got kids that love me. My wife loves me. I got a good relationship with my family. I like to read, work out. My mental space is good.

5:18There's nothing you could ask me really that's going to send me into a place. And so I'm happy to just, you know, if it was a strange question, I'm going to either take a beat and say, hey, I need a second to actually think about a response there, or I'm going to be okay with not answering it. So I don't know. I think it's some level, Eddie, of just like not really giving a shit. Like I do give a shit, but I don't. And I know you, and I think you could apply some of that same type of energy. I think also, the other thing is just realizing that, like, what are the stakes really? Like, what are we really doing, right?

5:45We're on a planet that we have no control over. I'm sitting on a podcast being interviewed about marketing. Like, in the grand scheme of life, what is the real big deal about answering or not answering this person's question? I just, I think about a lot of things in life through that lens. That's also why I have no problem answering because what are we really doing here is how I think about that. And I saw Chelsea second that. Okay, Diane, how many rounds of, so Diane, we worked out together at both drives. I knew she was going to throw in a workout question here. How many rounds of Cindy is your record?

6:16For anybody that doesn't know, Cindy is a classic CrossFit workout. I think the proper one is as many rounds as possible in 20 minutes. You do five pull-ups, 10 push-ups, and 15 squats. So I don't know, Diane, but I did, after drive, actually Saturday morning, I did Cindy and I hadn't done it in a while. And I got 14 rounds. I wasn't really moving. It was constant movement. I wasn't going super fast. I'm just good at pull-ups, push-ups, and squats. And then I do five strict pull-ups because I'm not good at kipping. So 14 is my recent record. Am I a fast walker or a slow walker? I'm a fast walker.

6:54I like to get my steps in, but Leah says that I walk like I have a side that you don't want to be on my right side because I I guess I walk kind of crooked this way. And so my daughter's noticing this now too. She's like, ah, dad, I'm on your bad side. So you gotta be on that side of me. How do you protect creative time? And what does that look like for you now? I have a lot of time. I'm very fortunate in that we've built a really cool business. I have a great business partner, Dan, who's the CEO of Exit 5. And he's running the company day to day. And so we've created a schedule that allows me to be, I don't really have a lot of things on my calendar.

7:27And I have no problem saying that. And that's on purpose. because the role that I play in Exit 5 is I'm very much like managing editor. You know, they want me to sit around with a cup of coffee and Slack open and reading our emails, listening to our podcasts, jamming on webinar ideas, working with sponsor, copy, being around as a resource. And so selfishly, it's my company have created the role that I want. I didn't want to be CEO managing the day-to-day operations of the company. Luckily, Dan is great at that and loves that stuff and is a good partner for me there. And so most of my day is creative time.

8:01I don't take a lot of meetings. And so that's kind of one of the ways that I protect that time. But then also for me, I just know a lot about myself and the way that I can be creative is I need to work out. I do that every day anyway. I work out in the morning. If I have meetings or calls, they're usually after say 11 o 'clock in the morning. And so I pretty much have at least every day from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. open for free creative writing time, working time doing things like recording this podcast. What's one mistake you made? This is four questions, but she's a homie, so we'll give it to her.

8:34What's one mistake you made while growing this community you wish you could redo? I mean, there's so many mistakes and I think that's totally okay. I don't have one like critical, crucial one. There hasn't been one. You just, I believe that you get a lot of at-bats and if you ship things regularly, you get lots of feedback and ideas. And I change my mind all the time, which I think is a gift and a curse. I think it's mostly a gift because it means I don't really, okay, cool. We did something. People didn't like it. Let's go again. We have another iPad the next day, the next week. Early on, the mistake was probably just having the community in Facebook and then migrating to Circle.

9:10And then now we have an executive tier on Slack. That part kind of sucks. But I see the questions all the time. It's like, we're never happy with the tools we have. It's like, if I'm on HubSpot, I'm looking for something else. If I'm using this tool, I'm looking for something else. And so that's one mistake. And then, I don't know, Diane, I really genuinely believe this is not me bullshitting, but I believe that every mistake like leads to the learning opportunity. And so we're much more focused on director, VP, CMO, to in-house, to the chagrin of a lot of people, solo marketers, contractors, freelancers, people, agency people, they take it as a personal slight that we're focused on that.

9:47But we've just learned, this is I'm a product builder building a company. and we've learned that the sweet spot where we can provide the most value, where people get the most value out of it is for an in-house marketer. And so we've, I think you can appreciate this given your business, Diane. Like we've really narrowed in on our ICP and I think that only happens over time. We're going on year five of now doing this as exit five and you just constantly get feedback and learn and tweak. And you know, why does every company of all time like go up market and find a different ICP from where you started?

10:15That's where we're going. I don't think that's a mistake, but it's something that we're doing and we're learning. Okay, Lindsey O 'Brien. What's up, Lindsey? If Dan fired you tomorrow, would you do another founder thing, go back to in-house marketing or something else? Now, I realize this is a joke. Dan can't fire me, surprise. I'm in charge. I'm Dan's boss. Dan, I love you if you're listening to this. Does he listen to the pod? I don't know. But I'm the boss, so he can't fire me. He could get mad at me, but he can't fire me. So the question would be, if I decided to fire myself or if I was involved in some big scandal or something, I don't even know.

10:50I'm a pretty boring person. When I do another founder thing, go back to in-house marketing or something else, I think I would do the founder thing. I have realized this about myself. It relates to a lot of things that I'm good at in marketing. I like creating. I think that I'm going to be doing some type of creating in business, whether that's online, in-person, buying and redoing a bookstore like Ryan Holiday, starting a podcast and being the next Tim Ferriss, whatever the 20, 20, six, seven version of that is. I think I like the creative stuff, but I also have realized through exit five, I really like working with the team.

11:26And so I think that would be a key thing here. You know, I think if I were to go back in house, it would have to be a really cool and exciting and unique opportunity, but I like being in charge. I like, I like being the founder, right? This one's from Caitlin. Hey Dave, here's one. I believe that brand is an incredible asset that's worth investing in and that it's a true differentiator and trust builder in the age of AI. Amen. When companies and especially startups are being asked to deliver mind-bending growth numbers, what's the balance between incredible brand building, no immediate ROI campaigns, and the more conventional bottom of the funnel stuff?

12:00So she's curious how you'd think about it. I said, look, I'll answer more on the pod, but I actually don't think there's a secret here. One of the challenges, I get this question all the time, and I think we always think it has to be either or. And I think this is like the duality of man, right? The duality of woman. You can do both. I think when I read between the lines here, it's really how do you justify spending money on something that doesn't directly relate to sales, right? Because ultimately, you know this in your heart. If you could just do it, you'd go do it. I own Exit 5. We've made a bunch of decisions that don't directly connect to revenue today, but are now.

12:34And I don't have to answer to a board or a CEO or anyone else. And so it's like, yeah, of course, we're going to go spend, you know, 100 grand and do that thing. So I think if I could be helpful in answering this question, I would say, usually the way you solve this problem inside of a company is you have to show them how people buy from you, show the CEO and CFO how people buy from you, how they make decisions. And you have to give them a vision for how you're doing marketing as a company. And typically, when you have not shown them a vision, like here is our vision, here's our strategy, here's how we're doing marketing.

13:03Now they have a frame to think about, okay, so that means we're going to do things like some of these brand building things because we need to get people to know us, like us, and trust us. We're also going to do all these shorter term like direct response channels, but we're going to do these things. And here's, you know, three examples of brands you probably know, like did Nike only do direct response advertising? No, they did this and they did this. So I think it's some level of like the way I would try to answer that question is by having a strong opinion on how our company should do marketing, right?

13:29I work out of this great building in Vermont called Hula. If Hula only did, you know, short term direct response things to drive new members, they would not drive new members. You can only advertise on Facebook so much, but they're doing things like being active in the community. They're hosting events. They have interesting people here sharing their stories. They're just doing random things sometimes that don't have a direct map to ROI. You need to be able to do those things and you have to be able to talk about that as part of the strategy. And this question is from Matt. I've read some of these, but there's new ones that I haven't read.

13:58So I'm doing this truly all on the flight. Matthew says, curious what your thoughts are on AI outbound BDRs. Where have you seen it work well? I think we've all been the beneficiary of the not so good version. Yeah, I don't know, man. Outbound has always been tough because there's this whole like, you know, people love to go on LinkedIn and post like, this is the worst. Look at this awful email that I get. And I still get them. I get automated emails from, you know, some data services out there still think that I'm the CMO at Privy, which like doesn't exist anymore as part of Attentive, or I'm the marketing guy at Drift, which doesn't exist.

14:31I still get it. like leads for drift, I still get those emails. So I don't know. I think that the only real measure of outbound is like, is it working in your company? For me, it doesn't matter if it's AI or a human. It's like, is there a why you, I learned from this guy, John Barrows years ago. I love this thing. He, you know, why you, why now? And so if you're outbounding me, it's the why you, why now? And whether it's AI or a human, a lot of that is just typically either too long, too much information, not enough information, or it's just that same kind of spray and pray. And so I think just because it's AI doesn't matter to me.

15:04How do you match up? Like, why are you trying to sell to me? Why me? Why now? I don't know. Don't really have a great pithy answer to that. I think we've all been the beneficiary of the not. Yeah. Here's my thing. Let me put this out there in the world. Side rant. If you have a LinkedIn account, there are some people that do this. Why do we waste so much time calling out examples of shitty emails? People, who cares? Like I would never, maybe not never. I've probably done it. I'm a hypocrite, right? But why would I waste one of my valuable LinkedIn slots to complain about some shitty email someone sent me?

15:36I'm not going to do that. Okay, Sahil, for the last 30 years, I've been dying to know who let the dogs out. Great question. I said I think it was DMX. Ateer says, what's the most underrated, unobvious marketing investment a team can make today that will pay disproportionate value profit at dividends a year or later from now? Okay, I'll give you my answer here. It is called giving a shit. Maybe it's too. Giving a shit and having empathy. Giving a shit is like, I think everyone's in a rush to automate things and do the thing with ChatGPT, but I think the truly way to do great marketing is to actually give a shit.

16:11Like to be MailChimp and realize their customers love their product and to find customers who have cats and someone hand-knit hat for the cat and they made it in this whole viral campaign. Or to truly treat your marketing with care, with craft, with respect to, you know, the copy and the outbound email matters. The ads matter. Just, I think there's a very still much a layer of like, oh great, we can set it and forget it. We can automate all this stuff. So therefore we don't really care about it versus, I don't know, the way I sit down when I have to write an email to my kid's school, there's a lot of, you know, thought and energy and effort that goes into that because I have to walk into that school and show my face to my kid's teacher or whatever.

16:48And so if I'm an asshole in that email or I write something sloppy, I feel like that's a reflection on me. I think because of Martech and AI and all this stuff, we've become so disassociated from the actual marketing that doesn't matter. And so we just don't really care. And then related to that, I always talk about empathy. Empathy here meaning like, do you ever just think about how many emails you get? Do you ever think about when was the last webinar you went to? Which webinar did you actually sign up for and go to? Not just get the recording, but actually take an hour out of your day to sit down, not multitask, listen and watch and go to.

17:21Okay, that's the lens that I want to use to then go create the webinar we're going to do. I think that's a really important skill. What's the biggest hype story being peddled in marketing today that will brutally be busted in six months from now? I think probably AI. I think AI is a bubble, obviously. Both things can be true. It's very useful, but it's a bit of a bubble. I'm not an investor. This is not investment advice. Anthropic lost$42 billion, they said, this week. I mean, I'm not a, I'm no genius. I haven't been on the Inc. 5000 list, but like, we're not losing that much money at exit five.

17:51And finally, are you a Doomsday or Dune 3 kind of person? Neither. I've tried. You can ask me about this, but I keep trying to become a science fiction guy and it's not doing it for me. And I know everyone says you just haven't found the right book yet, but I'm a pretty avid reader. I read lots of different genres. You know, I'm a pretty smart guy. I read and I just can't get, are those even books? What is this? Is it a video game, Doomsday or Dune 3? Okay. I realized that. I thought you meant the book Dune. I'm not a video game guy either. I could be, but I'm not. Caitlin said, also, what do you eat for breakfast?

18:25I'm a scrambled eggs gal, but we've been... Also, please send me a message on LinkedIn, Doomsday or Dune 3. Is it a book or a video game? I don't know. Caitlin says, what do you eat for breakfast? She eats scrambled eggs, but we've been doing a lot of cottage cheese, protein bagels too. Recently, for about a last year, I don't know if you can see me right now. I know I got it going on sarcastically. I'm 5 '8", or whatever. I've been looking for a breakfast that is healthy, filling, high in protein, and doesn't require a lot of cleanup or cooking. And for me, that has been overnight oats. This is a commercial for overnight oats.

18:56It's like a half scoop of oats, a scoop of protein powder, two big globs of like yogurt, Greek yogurt. I use Siggy's yogurt. That's just what we have in the house. A little dash of milk and a tablespoon of chia seeds. Takes me five minutes to make. I do it right at night before I'm loading the dishwasher and I I go up to bed, I make that. And then I have that every morning. So I have a breakfast that's like 40 grams of protein, a bunch of good carbs, keeps me full until lunch and doesn't require cooking anything. Overnight oats is really doing it for me. However, the reason I suck at meal prep is I just get so bored and I'm kind of bored of overnight oats right now.

19:30But it works for me and I eat a lot of things for fuel because life is busy. You can't always sit around and have the perfect meal. And then if I don't eat, then I'm like, next thing you know, it's two o 'clock and I'm at the gas station eating like Doritos and a weird protein shake. So we can have breakfast. 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.

20:01And McKeel, director of AI innovation at Optimizely, actually won the whole session. He 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 launch virtual teammates.

20:33These are digital members of the team that learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your website optimized. If 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.

21:06I 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. They'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.

21:40That 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 exit5 to see how they can help you meet your 2027 revenue goals. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit5. Alex said, would you do early on to make exit5 feel like a community rather than an audience? And would you do it differently if you're starting today? I wrote him an answer here. I'll read this for the pod. I never thought of a community or audience as being different, really. And true, those are just marketing words.

22:13I think a lot of times we just make things up like, how did you make it an audience versus a community? I'm like, I don't know. What's the difference? I just did it. Like, I don't have some scientific, like there's not a real reason. So to me, I don't really know how those things are different. I think for me, the biggest thing has been being real and showing my face, being in here, writing 10 ,000 comments. I think if I could pull up the analytics of my stats here And it's, you know, I've been treated like this, the product since day one, obviously, I spend less time writing replies than I used to.

22:39But now we have a team of nine people. And it's like, I don't have to do all that all the time now. And so a big part of it was that. But, you know, 10 ,000 comments, showing my face, adding humor. I think people just want to know there's someone real on the other end. And so that was a huge part of it is early on responding to everything, showing you're listening. A boss told me once like, hey, you know, I used to manage this engineering team. And in the survey, they said they wanted better snacks in the break room. and like literally that afternoon I went out and I got better snacks. And it's just like, actually seeing that feedback loop in action really mattered.

23:09And so I think like, you know, people feeling like we have a pulse on things because they see topics come up and we do sessions about them or we, you know, respond to members or hear feedback and make changes. I think it's the one-to-one, the hand-to-hand thing. And then the other thing is like, you know, doing events in person, man. I've met so many people from online and then met them the first year doing drive in person. And now we have like a personal relationship and connection. I feel like there's a bunch of people here. I feel like I know, like Sahil or Lindsey, who wrote a comment here.

23:37I can read it differently because we've met a bunch of times in person, and I think that matters. There's a lot here. I also think a lot of it is revision. It's very easy to go back and be like, what are the things you did intentionally? And it's like, I don't know. It's like, what do they call it? Survivorship bias. This just worked for us. I can't say that all these things were like these genius strokes. And I think a lot of times in these business stories and case studies or whatever you read online about how XYZ company grew. It's like they make it seem like I was sitting around and had this like step by step, month by month, week by week roadmap of what we were going to do with Exit 5.

24:10And that's just not true. It's very much day to day, week to week. Get more at bats, get feedback, make changes, listen to people, have a sense of what people want in the market. That's the only way I know really. All right, Chelsea, also the homie. Chelsea, on professional growth, the CMO says I'm always ahead on marketing and areas of growth for me. areas of growth for me are more about how I lead in a role and the technical capabilities, how to build and grow the right team for my specific org. And how do I create strategic clarity and lead my peers? I've been managing people for over 10 years, but tailoring that leadership to different audiences at my company based on what the needs are has been challenging.

24:44Would love any thoughts on this, especially the strategic clarity part and how to train my tiny, very ADHD brain to become a more structured thinker. So Chelsea, to me, it seems like the difference between becoming a marketer and being a manager or an executive and then they're different roles, right? Being the individual marketer, you get paid and you're measured on your ability to do the thing well, to run the good event. But the CMO here sounds like they want you to be more of a, we throw around the word strategic thinker, but I just think that means being a business partner inside of the company, not Chelsea managing an individual channel as part of marketing, but seeing where this fits broader in the set of the company.

25:21And look, I know this is hard for people, but you have to realize if you have a job and you work for someone else and you work inside of a company, you have to match how you work to that style of the company or leave or go do a different job, right? Or quit. But you often have to like figure out how do they think, how do they work, what does leadership want? And you have to align what you're doing to the goals and priorities that the leadership team is setting. And if you don't agree with them, you can either quit or you just got to be like, all right, yeah, fuck this, but I'm going to do it anyway.

25:51And you have to kind of get in line. I think one thing I've learned from this business, from my experience in the past. I was talking to a friend of mine who owns a small business yesterday. I'm not a small business expert, but I've just been around teams enough. And it's like, the number one thing is incentives drive behavior, period. Show me the goals of the company. Show me the goals we've set. And I can show you what people are going to be doing and also why they're not doing things. The reason you can't get on the same page with sales or this person's not going to do that thing inside the company is because usually they're not incentivized to do so.

26:22And you could be a good person and have this altruistic view of the world, but they're just not going to do the thing because, I don't know, yeah, like growing the podcast is just not really how I'm paid or measured. And so it doesn't really matter. And I think that to me is the strategic piece. You know, how can you spend more time with the CMO and understand the things like, you know, she cares about and understand what's important in her job and really learn how to serve her better? That is going to be the thing that will help you maybe solve that problem or not. What do I know, right? I've worked for myself for a while now.

26:51Robert Hansen, Dave Gerhardt, if you were starting B2B marketing from scratch today as a new head of marketing and a blank slate, what would your plans, playbooks, and first 90 days? I know everyone's gonna hate this answer, but there is no playbook. My playbook is there is not one. And so I think this is what's really fun about business and any job really is the first 90 days, well, I would come in with a plan. I wouldn't be, let me get onboarded for 90 days. But really, it's like, I don't know. I need to understand the competition. I need to understand the market. I need to understand the product.

27:20I need to understand the customers. I need to figure out where the gaps are, what the opportunities are. Because again, I'll say this for the millionth time. I say this all the time. Everything works. Webinars work. Ads work. Direct mail works. TikTok works. Partnerships works. Resellers work. Co-marketing work. Everything works. You have to figure out what you can actually pull off. And that is so often predicated on like your team, your talent, the budget, the market. Everyone says hire A players. Well, what if you can't? What if you don't have the budget to? What if A players don't want to work at your company?

27:50Then you have to hire someone who's not an A player and pay them less because that's what you can afford. And how can you find that person and train them? There's just too much nuance here. And I think ultimately it comes down to having a deep understanding of the customer, the market, of the business, and then being able to pull some levers and make some plays. That said, I know you're looking for a specific answer here. For me in B2B, the number one thing still comes back to in B2B, I like to always think about how can you be the top resource for your customer? If you sell to cybersecurity, to finance, to developers, to IT, to sales, to marketing, to accounting, to finance, whatever it is, I think it's a great strategy because in B2B, it's a considered purchase.

28:31You're not just going to see an ad and buy. You need to try to build a relationship with that person. I think everyone in a job usually needs to know how to do their job better. For some people, the top 1 %-ish type people want to do that. And so the job in marketing and B2B marketing can be. How can we be an educational resource for them? How can we entertain them? How can we be fun, funny, entertaining, informative, useful, specific? Then you figure out how that plays out for them. Tammy said, why doesn't the Exit 5 community have a dedicated Slack community and not just the CMO Circle? Sorry, I just really want Slack for us.

29:03Good question. Not some secret cabal plotting against everyone here. We've kind of over the years, it was on Facebook and then I moved it to circle. And then everyone's always asked, what about Slack? And what about this? And what about that? I think there's a bunch of examples of successful communities on all different channels. We do have a membership for VPs and CMOs. These are executives. I think most of them are at companies over 25 or 50 million. It's not because we're discriminating against anyone that has a lower revenue tier. We've just found there was a group of higher level VPs and CMOs that came to us and said, hey, we'd love to have something a little bit more different.

29:39and just for us. Okay, cool. And we were like, you know what? Let's just try something new. Let's launch that on Slack. We have that. It's called our CMO council. We're soon rebranding that. It should just be called the executive membership. Matt, if you're listening to this and you haven't done it yet, take a lap. No, Matt's great. Hope he listens. Love you, buddy. My guy, Mr. Tumaza. So yeah, we have it on Slack for the execs. I think ideally we would find a way to have more people in there. It's just migrating tools, partners, platforms, all that stuff. But yeah, I think there's a world Matt actually said, we're thinking about it.

30:10There is something that we'd love to get more people involved in the slack, but TBD, I don't know. Grass is always greener. David Drechtler says, since you offered the topic of hair, have you considered this truly worth a watch? It's not what you think. All right, should I just do this? This feels risky, but I'll do this live and see if I, uh, they gave me so much in my life. I just wish the one thing they hadn't passed on was the baldness gene. It's been devastating as a woman to have a problem with baldness. People can be very cruel. Millions of you have come to us at Bosley Hair Restoration to help ease the heartbreak of baldness and to have your hair restored naturally to its original hairline and density.

30:48Yeah. Until you're back there. What's the punchline here? And I still have plenty left. All right. So I know I have not. It feels like a lot of pressure. It's like watching that live on the podcast. It's like, hey, listen to my joke. And I have to react to it. I think I look great. I have no plans to go to Turkey and get my hair did. Actually, the best thing I did was started shaving my head in my late 20s because now all my friends that are approaching their 40s and are starting to really show their baldness like they're holding on for dear life and they haven't had the courage to shave their head yet.

31:19So I was an early adopter there. No big deal. Next question is from Joe. I feel like you've mentioned it in different places at different times, but my Ask Dave anything question would be, what do you do outside of work that helps you bring your best self to work? Joe, great question. I talk about this often because it's funny. if you look at my content online, you're like, man, this dude just loves B2B marketing. I do. That's part of my job. But I'm a much more well-rounded person and a full person outside of work, Joe. Thank you for asking. So there's a couple of things. I'm deeply rooted in family.

31:50I just love, I got two kids, my wife. I love just being with them. So I'm a really simple guy. I feel like all I've wanted my whole life is to have a reason to stay in on a Friday night and not go out drinking. And I have that now. It's amazing. And so I go to bed early. I love being a dad. It's just so fun to see my kids be curious and learn about life. So fully invested there. I think I'm a better... People who don't like me online, they would never want to know this, but I think I'm actually better at being a dad and a parent than I am at my job in Exit 5 and being a B2B marketer. So that's a big thing for me.

32:24I have to exercise a lot. I've learned about myself. I'm like a dog. I kind of just exercise myself every day into a state of like happiness. I actually do think there's a big thing there with mental health and, you know, drugs and stuff where, man, if we could just get more people exercising, it's clearly to me, we were wired that way biologically, like to run away from predators or something that your body makes you feel good. And so I always caveat this by when I tell people my schedule, I don't want to be seen as one of those people who does all the things and gets up at the crack of dawn.

32:56But I'm just going to tell you what I do and there's no projection or judgment around it. But my alarm goes off at 5.30. I wake up. I brush my teeth. I go downstairs. I chug water. Everybody's still sleeping. I make a cup of coffee. It has a scoop of creatine in it, a little half and half and some maple syrup. I mix that up. I have that coffee. I have a little workout space in my house. If I'm bored at home, I go to the gym. But I typically do strength training in the morning because I want to be outside later in the day. I like to do strength training and cardio every day. I'm not on some type of program.

33:28It just makes me feel good and it's a huge part of my thing. And so I do, I lift weights for 45 minutes-ish in the morning, go wake my kids up, breakfast, drop off, school. And then usually from eight to nine, after I drop the kids off at school, I try to do some type of cardio outside that could be as easy as a walk for an hour. And I like to do a two-for-one, which is bring the dog. I think the best thing in the world is to have a tired animal that you exercise together and the dog loves me because of that. So I either run, rock, hike, or just walk, try to be outside no matter the weather because I spend my days inside doing B2B marketing stuff.

34:03And so I want to get that cardio in outside. And then that's pretty much it, man. I like to work out. I like to work. Work gives me a lot of purpose, not in some crazy workaholic way, but I feel like we were meant to work and to be on a team and to have a community of some kind and to work on stuff together. So I like to work, do something productive to feel like I moved my work life and business forward that day. And then I'm typically back home around three o 'clock, pick up my kids at school if I can do it that day, if I don't have any big things going on. We hang out at home, pitch to my son, draw or run or chase my daughter around.

34:38That's it, man. I'm in that phase of my life right now. It's very simple. And I cry every time I see the Instagram content that says one day when you're 80, you will give anything to have one of these days back right now. And so that's the phase of life that I'm in. And that's all I need. I also like to play golf. I'm playing less golf lately, but I like to just hit balls, chip around, practice, coach my kids' teams when I can. I coach baseball. We got lots of soccer and activities. So that's what I'm doing right now, Joe Ray. Send me a message on LinkedIn and let me know, okay? Emily says, Dave, you've been to more marketing conferences than many of us aside from Drive.

35:10Obviously, we'd love a rundown of your top picks and why, which ones are worth the expense of convincing your boss, using your stipend, or even paying your own way? Look, I tried to answer this. I really don't. The only events I've gone to in the last couple of years have been ours for Exit 5, for Drive. I did go down to check out HubSpot's Unbound this year because I hadn't been there in 10 years and I had some meetings that I wanted to go see people at, but I really don't. Emily, I don't have an opinion for you. This would actually be a better question for the broader community to see which trade shows are worth going to.

35:38Oh my gosh, did we make it? I'm going to pass out. This is great. Last question here is from Matthew. Dave, what's something younger you really wanted that you don't care much about anymore and what's gone the opposite direction. Yeah, I think younger me probably wanted to be like a professional athlete or something like in sports and sports were just a huge part of my identity and my self-worth and all that stuff. And now I'm like, I don't care about any of that stuff. I don't even watch. I used to watch NFL for 10 hours on a Sunday, red zone, you know, just sit there all day. I haven't watched a football game and tenure directly correlates with my kids, but it just doesn't do that for me.

36:14And so I don't really care about sports and that type of stuff. I also really used to be into like sneakers and Jordans and Nikes and Air Maxes and all this stuff. And I don't really care about that anymore either. So I've gone completely in the opposite direction there. I think probably just being in a good place. I'm very fortunate, you know, to have a healthy family, a nice business and a good life. I'm a simple man. Give me that. Let me wake up, work out, eat good food, hang out with my family, see my friends. I do think that one thing that's gone in the opposite direction is I used to feel like everything can be online.

36:49Who cares? I'm going to hole out in my bunker in Vermont. And I've realized the last probably three years that I'm extroverted and I like to be around people. I like my own time alone too. But I think being around people really gives me a lot of energy. And I've kind of changed my opinion that, man, I think I need to be working on a team. I think I need to be in an office with people. We don't have that now at exit five, who knows maybe one day or a future company. I will have that. I don't know. I need to be around other people. Can't just hold out and like, you know, collect your coins. And then also I think it's very important that as much as I've talked about kids and family, I think it's important to have, you know, your friends and be able to take a guy's trip or a girl's trip or to do whatever you do.

37:28Something my wife and I do is like, we don't really keep score with each other at all, which I know some of you all do that. Toxic couples where husband goes away, wife's got to go away. Wife's got to go away. Husband's pissed because he's at home. No, we don't do that. We support each other. Leah wants to go and have a weekend with her friends. Heck yeah, go do that. I'm not some idiot dad that can't watch the kids at home. So I'm taking a lot of shots. I got to hang up this podcast. All right. Thank you all for the question. This has been a mailbag. We didn't really talk about that much marketing and I I think that's great.

37:55A little mix of personal stuff, marketing stuff, mailbag episode, one for the hopper for Marissa and Maria. Look, give us some feedback. We want to know, I want to know specifically, what do you want to hear more of? We're in this stage right now. We're investing in all of our content, specifically our podcast. Email us. I want you to do the take this action. Email us hi at exit5.com with the subject line podcast ideas. Tell us topics, companies, people. What do you want to hear? Do you want to hear interviews with big name CMOs? Do you want to hear interviews with people doing marketing at companies you've heard of?

38:26Do you want to hear people you don't know who they are, but they can talk really smartly about SEO and tactical stuff? Do you want more outside of work stuff like this? Tell us. We're all plugged in in the content machine here right now, and we're thinking about what types of stuff we should be making for 2027. So send us your ideas and feedback. We'll read them all and get back to you. Thanks for listening to this episode, Exit 5 Podcast. I'm Dave. I'm out.

38:52Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you liked 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.

39:23People 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.

40:02Hey, 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 work together at our Exit 5 event in Austin, they handed out cowboy boots in our newsletter. They shared an AI prompt cookbook.

40:33And 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.

41:11go to customer.io slash exit5. That's customer.io slash exit5.