Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 5,000+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
E5_Holiday Party
===
[00:00:00] He loves you the same.
Oh,
we're live. Yeah, we're live. We're
live. Comes.
We're live.
Oh dang, that hat's still good.
Look at that hat. Hey, look it, everybody's rolling in. We decided to start it a little early cause we got some good vibes. So come on in. Welcome. Welcome to our holiday party. It
really is a party. I love it.
Are we supposed to have drinks? What's on the menu?
I have a soda. Hey,
can you all stop talking and let the vibes just roll right now, please?[00:01:00]
Just let the music
roll.
All right, so we got, we got, there's a couple folks in here
already today.
This is the, this is my dream. This is like my dream of being like a, a DJ, like talking over music, right? Dang. This is it, man. This is the dream. So yeah.
Oh, they got the trap, the trap Christmas. This is a very, a very trappy Christmas here. I like it. I
mean, you can drop the playlist.
Yeah, I got you. What is
the 95 song?[00:02:00]
Patrick from Germany, 9 p. m. Thanks for joining Patrick.
9 p. m. It's 9 p. m. in Germany. That's commitment. 9 p. m.
Yeah, that is commitment. Thanks for being here.
Yeah. Let's go. Let's look at the show.
We've got [00:03:00] a
global audience right now. Everybody's here. I
know, this is great.
We're gonna get going in one minute.
Don't wait to see exit five dot com is the place to be exit five dot com our marketers level up exit five dot com our members are never stuck connect you from a to b don't wait to see exit five dot com is the place to be exit five is where b2b marketing levels up you seeking knowledge well awesome we got the most extensive hub to boost your metrics and numbers together[00:04:00]
Hey, Sam's favorite guys here. Ding. He's like, it's ding everybody. All right, well, we're going to, we're going to kick this off. Sam's here. What? It's holiday. It's the holiday. It's the holiday season. And so we, we wanted to do something. Actually, I, I, you know, I don't like, um, I don't, I don't like when people talk about I, when they're on a team, you know, but for this one, I'm going to say I, because about, Two weeks ago, I sent a crazy message to the exit five team.
And I said, I would like to do a holiday party. I would like to do a virtual holiday party. And everyone was like, Oh, awesome. Great. We got more things that we need to do right now, but we're here. We're here. [00:05:00] This is going to be informal session. I got the kids here right now and they don't, they don't understand that this is how we pay the bills, but it's all, it's all, it's all good.
Go see mom for a sec. So we want to do it. We want to do a virtual holiday party because our community, look at Jay Schwedelson is in the chat. Shout out to you, Jay. So
we got like a real VIP here.
Yeah, we got the exit five crew here. We got ding and Eric here. We got Dan, we got Matt, we got Anna, we got Danielle, we got ding and Eric.
And, um, we wanted to just do a little informal, like end of the year vibe virtual event, because we wanted to, we want to give out a bunch of awards to awesome people among, you know, in our community, we want to highlight some of the awesome things that have happened this year. And then also we're going to give you a teaser about what's happening next year.
Because we're a real team. We're a real company. We got everything planned. For next year already. It's unbelievable. It's December 17th. We have real plans for the year. And so I'm super excited. And so, um, the team is going to be a part of this ding. I just want to also shout out to ding. Ding runs [00:06:00] an awesome event and video production company called event shark.
Uh, we've somehow become friends, uh, through our, our love of, of music. And then we found the overlap of B2B marketing. We did a workout together in Austin. He's been to a bunch of our events and we were like, dang, we need you to be a part of this in some way. And, um, He's much more charismatic and fun than I am.
And so ding's got a little game for us to mix this up. So it's not just us presenting and talking at you the whole time. So real quick, if you haven't already done it in the chat, just put, put your name in the chat. Let us know like who you are. Um, where are you writing in from? And then also like, why did you come?
I want to know, why did you come to this? Just a quick one liner. Oh, TAS. TAS has had a big day today. You know, TAS is one of our 25, uh, 25 people on LinkedIn to watch. Right, Danielle? Like TAS is riding high. So Chelsea, oh, Chelsea's here too. Chelsea's in Asheville. Olivia is in Cape town. Look at this man.
Global Vinnie's in Sydney. TAS is in the house.[00:07:00]
Jess is in Buffalo. Pete's in, it's going too fast. Nate's in Denver. Um is in San Jose, Vancouver, Canada, stand up Petra's in New York City, stand up Ross. My guy Ross is here, Ross, right? You know what? You know what I love about Ross? What did he do at drive? Not only was he one of the best speakers, but he sat in the front row for two days.
He wasn't on his phone. He was hanging out. He had a great sweater on and he just was a part of the crowd and I love that. So
my
aunt's here. Yeah. Well, you know, they, they had a little, uh, they had an inside track on, on why we're, why we're doing this. So they're here. So, all right. Um, I'm going to drive. I got some stuff that I'm going to talk to you about hang out.
Look at this. This just looks amazing. So welcome to the exit five, a webinar, not a webinar holiday. I muted myself. Don't touch the mic. This is not a webinar. It's a holiday party hosted by us. The exit five team with a ding usually goes by the sales rapper, but I have taken the liberty of rebranding him [00:08:00] to his.
He's the marketing rapper. Um, who wants to know when the Bay area event will be? Uma, relax. We got you. Just hang out, hang out for a little bit. Have some eggnog. All right. Um, and if you're on this webinar right now, actually, someone's going to be showing up to your door any minute. There should be a knock at every one of your doors with a customized glass of eggnog from exit five.
So you're, you're welcome for that.
I wish I love eggnog.
Do you? It's kind of weird to me. It's kind of weird. Uh,
one glass is great.
I don't know. Maybe I didn't. Maybe it's because I didn't, I didn't, I didn't grow up in a, in a, in a Christmas household. Um, I'm more of a Menorah guy myself, but the eggnog thing never really, uh, never really did it for me.
Dimitri's here. Dimitri makes a mean matzo ball soup. I know that for a fact. All right. So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do a year in review. We're going to do community awards. We got game show with ding that we're going to tell you about what we're going to do in 25, 2025. Right. And by the way, if you are watching this, I don't want anything else other than like maybe take a [00:09:00] screenshot and post it on LinkedIn.
At some point today or tomorrow, just to show people that you're here. That would make my day. All right. So it was an amazing year for exit five. We went from Dave's solo business. Many of you here, I'm sure remember a year ago, following my obnoxious self online, talking about, you know, the joys of solopreneurship and how the only way to have a company is to have a one person company and a la la la.
You know, obviously I changed my mind. We've had an amazing year. We brought in Dan. We brought in Matt, we brought in Danielle, we brought in Anna. We're going to turn around, turn the corner in January and open up another role. And I've told this team so much, but I'm going to say it again. Like I've had so much fun the last year.
I was basically burnt out talking about marketing. I've been doing this for a long time. Uh, back when I had hair and the team has given me so much energy. It's so much fun to be working on this together. Like today we did this launch. We did 25 people to launch on LinkedIn just to be in slack and [00:10:00] working with other people.
I think humans, I think we were meant to work with other people and to share in victory and defeat and give feedback and work as a unit together. And so just, just in chat real quick, I just want to shout you all out one more time. I love this team. I'm, I'm, I'm happy to be here. I'm proud to have you all.
And, uh, I'm just, I'm having a blast. So we grew the team from one to five. That's, that's number one. And we spent a big, a big amount of focus on, on content, our newsletter. We almost doubled the newsletter this year. We, we put out our 200th episode of the B2B marketing podcast with me, Dave G. And that's a, that's a lesson in marketing consistency right there.
By the way, I almost gave up on that podcast twice. I stopped and started, stopped and started. And then when I committed to doing exit five, I said, you know what? No matter what, I'm going to put out an episode every single week. Obviously we have an amazing team and our brand has grown, but the consistency of just putting picking that every Tuesday, we're going to put out a new episode.
Now it's multiple episodes a week. That is such an underrated hack in [00:11:00] marketing is committing to a publishing schedule. And it's amazing. I mean, you all see it on the team, right? Like we have them, we see how we see new members that sign up for our community. Almost every member is like, I've been listening to the podcast for six months and I finally decided to take the plunge and join the community.
The podcast is the tip of the spear. By the way, in three meetings this week, I used the phrase tip of the spear. And my, I said tip of the sphere each time, like Dan, like Dan would tip of the sphere, but it's tip of the spear. Um, we had 12, 000 people register for our events this year. So we did drive anybody in the chat come to drive.
Shadow, I know a couple of you are in the B2B marketing, the B2B marketing Mecca that is, uh, Burlington, Vermont. Where is that coming from? We've got to have a DJ for it. From now on, we're not doing anything without a DJ ever again. So we had, we had, uh, over 200 people come to Vermont for our first in person event and drive.
We had 110 people in Austin and we [00:12:00] did a bunch of virtual events where we've had 12, 000 people for the, for the year. And then most importantly, the thing I care about the most is our community. Um, We have grown the community 79%. Great stat, not 80%, not 78%, 79%. If I was in a board meeting, I would say this is double.
We doubled the community this year. And the big reason why is we brought in Matt. Where's Matt? Matt, wave to your friends and family out there. So we brought in Matt. Matt has been, you know, the community was honestly an afterthought for me. I would, you know, post there right there and then kind of post and ghost.
We hired Matt to come in and Matt has truly treated the community like a product. He acts like a product manager. He's on calls every single week with members. He's taking notes. He's looking at what other people are doing. He's deep in feedback and data and analytics, and he's really brought an awesome level of focus to the community.
And there's been no growth hack that has grown in the community. It is just. Been about treating the community like a product and one thing that [00:13:00] we've learned a hypothesis that I had last year was like, we need more content in the community. We need videos. We need AMAs No, you know what people want in the community.
What do they want in the community? Matt connections. They want connections. You don't want connections. You want to meet other people who are doing the same things you're doing. You want to build your own network. And that is what we want. Exit five to be a lot of a lot of love rightfully so. In the, in the chat for Matt.
But I mean, what's cool about this team this year is you can see, you know, that Danielle's doing the content, you know, and Anna's put on our events and been behind the scenes in a bunch of stuff. You know, Dan is crunching the numbers somewhere in a spreadsheet and making this thing run on time. Um, everyone, everyone, it's, it's not, it's not just my face out there.
And, uh, that's made a huge difference. So some, some, some quick highlights. All right. So that's us.
Um, Matt, want to hit on some of these community stats real quick. I'll let you just riff on this. I know we didn't really prep for any of this, but let's have you, let's have [00:14:00] each one of you talk over these real quick, just to get, get me on. I need to take a drink of water.
Yeah, for sure. Um, so first one you already talked about, you know, community, uh, community membership doubled this year.
Um, and then also our monthly active members. Doubled as well. It actually doubled. Um, which is great to see. It means that as the community grew, uh, engagement scaled with it. So that was really cool to see. Um, so every new member that we're adding in is taking part in the community and being engaged. Um, we had obviously a lot of great posts and content in the community, but what I'm really happy to see is how many comments we've had.
Um, you can see there's an outsized number of comments to posts and I don't know about you guys, but any, a lot of communities that I've been part of Slack communities, whatever it is, a lot of people post, but not a lot of people comment and engage in the community. Um, so you can see for us, it's almost the opposite.
So that's been a really great to see. [00:15:00] Um, And then last but not least, two big things. We launched the CMO club privately about a month ago. We have almost 70 members today and we're going to go bigger with it in 2025. So we're going to make it, uh, we're going to invest more there, get more members. Um, but that's been going really great.
Um, you know, if you're in the CMO club, let us know in the chat. I think I've seen a couple of people in here that are part of the CMO club. Um, and then we also did the marketing leadership accelerator this year. So we did our first. Accelerator type course. I think Dave, you did one a couple of years back.
Um, but this was the first one as at exit five with the team, which was really great. I think we got a 50 NPS score on it, um, as of yesterday. So a lot of people really happy with the program and this is another area we're going to invest more in, in 2025. So all good stuff.
Beautiful. Taz, this is not a roast.
You can't roast us.
Yeah, you [00:16:00] took her off the list already, Dave. Why is
Tessa on stage? She's been on stage with us. No, no, no, relax, relax.
So, so events was a big focus for us this year. Uh, we're going to run, we're running it back with Drive. We got more to talk about on, on, on events. Um, Danielle, can you, can you just, uh, talk about, talk about the newsletter and the, and the podcast real quick? Sure.
You mean my baby, the newsletter?
I love the sound effects. I feel like I need you to just like follow me around. It's great. Um, yeah, the newsletter. It has been probably one of my favorite things I get to do every week. Um, we've grown subscribers 92%. There's still time left this year. So if you are not subscribed, and you should be, um, head on over to the page, subscribe.
Um, And we've sent about 65 this year. I've written a little less than half of them. Um, so I took it over in June and just kind of dove right in. And I'm very [00:17:00] grateful that, uh, Dave and the team have trusted me to do that. Um, and we've written some bangers this year. How to write a B2B newsletter worth reading.
I mean, that's kind of meta, but, um, I promise I didn't, you know, just, you know, Do my own tips. I looked at other ones. Um, a really good one. This was from Dave Kellogg. If you don't follow him, he's writes Cal blog. He had this awesome, uh, podcast episode on high performing traits of a CMO. So we turned that into a nice little issue, um, Guidelines for building a marketing org.
But the backbone of the newsletter is the podcast. And I would say that if you are looking to get into content, this is like a great way to do it. Um, because there The backbone of the newsletter, like I said, is the podcast. I take those transcripts, I mine them for the little insights, like a little gold miner in the California in the 1800s, and then I get them into the newsletter and bring them to you.
So it's, that's really the definition of, uh, content distribution and repurposing. Um, so yeah, that's, that's me. That's me. [00:18:00] Newsletter and podcast. I love, I love the
newsletter love, um, just cause I hadn't said it yet. Founder mode for anybody wondering, but I love the newsletter. Love Danielle's another, another example of like the newsletter, taking my stuff that I wrote on LinkedIn and turning it into a newsletter.
Cause I wanted email addresses. And then another example of perfect example, like Dave does a kind of shitty V1, then we hire someone to make it better. So brought in Danielle, treated it like a product and. Obviously the numbers have the numbers speak for themselves, but the meta marketing lesson is like the level of care that you put into this stuff.
That is the ultimate growth hack. It's like we always searching for the shortcut for the optimization. What was the tweak? What's the subject line? It's like how would just put more effort and care and dedication into the things that you're creating. And we've seen that across the board going from a solo business to, to a team of five.
Okay, now we got awards, virtual drum roll, please. Maybe some, maybe some. Alright, so we want to hand out awards. We got our [00:19:00] top community contributors for this year. We got Garrett, Head of Growth. Garrett has created the most posts in the community. I'm not sure that, um, volume award is the right award, but Garrett, we love you anyway.
Just most posts. Shout out to you, Garrett. Thank you for being in there. Love that. The spark award, Chelsea, our new friend from, from we met in Vermont. She landed an awesome new job at chili Piper. Um, she's super active in the comments. If you write a comment in there, you know, Chelsea's probably going to have your back and have something to add or something to say.
So shout out to you, Chelsea. And then post of the year, This is a new award. Well, they're all new awards, new award by the exit five committee this year. Post of the ward, Madhav Bhandari. He, this is what it takes. People want to know like, how do I participate in, um, how do I participate in exit five? We'll talk about the stuff you're doing and don't promote your company and add real value and share [00:20:00] results.
Madhav wrote about basically how they created this SEO playbook at story lane that grew traffic over the course of six months. And he was very wasn't like here. I wrote this blog post. I'm going to promote it. Go get traffic to my website. He wrote a legitimate article inside of exit five just to share his SEO lessons.
And that's the stuff that I want to see more of. And so I want to shout out people like Garrett and Chelsea and Mada for being such an awesome part of the The community. So shout out to you all. Um, then we have the momentum maker award in true Martin momentum maker and rising star award. So Marin is the member who has sparked a bunch of great discussions and brought people together with thought provoking posts this year.
And Lindsay, who is an up and coming member, a newer member who I see in there all the time. She's in the chat right now. She's in our CMO club. Shout out to Marin and Lindsay. And then we got Craig. Craig is the most engaged community member. If you hit the leaderboard inside of EXIT5 that we have, [00:21:00] uh, you'll see Craig's name there always.
He's always in the comments, always adding new posts, always writing back. I, I always, my inbox is full with like, you have a notification from Craig Heron.
Yeah.
Super active. And then, uh, and then Matt, Matt Serna, who's a CMO replicant. They're really cool. Um, AI customer service, uh, uh, company in the AI space doing customer service, uh, for the enterprise.
And he is a new member of our CMO club and he's already been, been in there, super active, adding a bunch of value, helping each other out. And so I just want to shout out those people. Great. Thank you for you give what you know, you, you get what you give. And those folks have added a lot to our community this year.
So virtual shout out to you all. Now our top event contributors of the year. So we got Kanika Sharma who put on the community event of the year. She did a LinkedIn profile and post teardown for us. And man, if this isn't a topic that you all want to know more about, like what, what does it take to be great on LinkedIn?
What [00:22:00] is great copy on, uh, what does great copy look like? How do I write good posts? Kanika is an awesome sass copywriter and as Taz says, Kanika, she's amazing. She is amazing. So that was a, that was the top community event we did of the year. Top speaker of the year. He, I don't know if he's still here or not, but if he was, he'd be sitting in the front row.
Ross Simmons. He brought the energy to drive. He sat in the front row. He handed out books. He had great jokes and stories and anecdotes and specifics. Ross. Killed it at Drive Speaker of the Year, and then top podcast guest of the year. Oh, OG Friend. Uh, we have, we go way back on the internet. I haven't talked to her in a little while, but I wonder if she's here.
Amanda, Amanda Navidad from Spark Toro. She was on the podcast to start last year. It was like in February. She had just come back from maternity leave. She was, we were talking about coming back from maternity leave, deciding, you know, do you wanna be C uh, CMO or not? The path to marketing leadership and what?
Things she was doing as the solo [00:23:00] marketer at SparkToro. And if you follow her on LinkedIn, you already know that she's awesome. And so that was no surprise to me to look back through the podcast analytics and see that that is the most downloaded episode of the year. All right. And then two newer. So, so new events two weeks ago, we did this, uh, you know, we make it, we make up the rules here.
So. We did this session with Kip. Kip's a friend of mine, CMO at HubSpot. Uh, he's, he's probably the second longest public SaaS company CMO. He's been, um, in, you know, we always talk about the short tenure of CMOs, uh, one to two years. Kip's been the CMO of HubSpot going on nine years running now. And we had him in our CMO club.
Um, something that we're doing is bringing in Amazing CMOs like Kip once a month to talk to our CMO club members. And the response was amazing. Like Natalie Taylor called in from the airport because she had to get her question asked to Kip, the feedback of that was amazing. And so I just want to shout out Kip for, for being a part of that.
And then [00:24:00] a virtual event speaker of the year, uh, Diane, who has become a, another LinkedIn, LinkedIn friend of mine, she gave an awesome presentation. Just was an awesome contributor to our, um, ultimate roast of B2B websites. And then, and she's another person that's worth following on LinkedIn, especially if you're in the messaging, copywriting, product marketing, position space, Diane rocks.
And, um, this is a great, a great list of folks to build your kind of virtual. Digital network around. So now, now that our QBR is over, thanks Tess. Uh, I want to call up my friend, Ding, who we got a little game. We got a little game show. This guy's great at this stuff. I love these little things. So Ding, I'm going to pass it over to you.
Let's let's have some fun.
Yeah. How's it going? Y'all first of all, huge shout out to exit five. Shout out to Dave. Uh, I remember back in the day I was in the Facebook group and then years later, here we are at the QBR and that was a bar.
Hey, look, look, when you're in founder mode, when you're in founder mode, [00:25:00] sometimes you get to pull the founder mode card and you get to do whatever you want.
And I'm doing an event today to talk about my company. Damn it.
That's right. So for today's episode of countdown quiz, I'm sure some of y'all have seen this on LinkedIn 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. It's the ultimate challenge for B2B marketers. And since we have the community of the best B2B marketers in the world, we're going to do this live and to get us warmed up right now, we're going to have Mr.
Dave Gerhart himself. In the first round. So everyone give a give a round. Let's go. Let's go,
Dave, by the way, and we're going to bring somebody up next. So like if you want to participate in this, you get to you get to prove it. So Tass, you talk a big game. Let's get you. We'll see who's next. All right, let's go.
Let's go. I'm ready.
All right, let's do this. So next slide, please. So the the game Right here is Dave. You're going to have 30 seconds and you're going to have to name as many B2B Martech companies as you can in those 30 [00:26:00] seconds. So are you ready for this? I'm going to start the countdown timer
for the fact, for the record.
I'm honest. I'm an honest man. I could easily go to chat. GBT I'm, I'm, I'm, this is off the top, so I'm, I'm, I'm here. I'm going to, and where
we can see him, Dave.
I don't have pants on, but other than that, I'm, I'm happy to participate. All right, let's go.
Oh, we're starting already?
Here. I'll, I'll, all right, we'll go in three, two, one.
HubSpot, Salesforce, Loom, Knack, Vimeo, Paramark, Zuttle, Slack, Atlassian, Notion, [00:27:00] Qualified, Chili Piper, Demandbase. Clary, Copy AI, Jasper.
Oh my god.
Time is up! Alright y'all, everyone give a round of applause
for
Riv here. Oh man, I've counted 16. That's almost, that's more. Somebody
kick Taz out. I'm tired of her nonsense. Taz, you're gone.
I'm gonna bring her on stage. Taz, request to join.
Alright, let's go. Alright Taz, are you ready? We got more?
Yeah.
I don't see her requesting. Drop fire! Drop fire!
Where's the request at? I see John talking about no pants found right here. Let's go everyone.[00:28:00]
Let's go. Welcome. Welcome to the spot.
I'm, I'm more of like a keyboard. We know
why you're here.
I can't do it. I can't do this on the spot. Let's go
ding.
Yeah.
All right. So this format is called the five, four, three, two, one countdown quiz. So I'm going to be asking you to name five things from a category, four things from a category, so on and so forth.
So this is the ultimate test task. I know you talk a big game, but now is your time to shine. Now is your time to prove yourself. And I know that the chat's going crazy. How are we feeling chat? You think Taz is going to complete the task?
I'm just going to leave. If this gets too embarrassing, I can't lose all the clout I got from today.
All right, let's go. So if we get the next slide up as we're about to get into it, hopefully you don't get one of these. Hey,
Zach [00:29:00] said, Zach said, when the teacher calls you out from the back of the classroom, you remember like in class, two kids just like talking nonsense. Ding, ding. You got something to say?
And then you get called on and it's your turn. That's what this is.
Uh, no surprise. That was 100 percent me in school and every like parent teacher conference was, she talks a lot. My mom's like, raise her up. Like, I don't really care what she does.
All right, Taz. So we're going to get started in five seconds. Ready? All right. Five, four, three, two, one. All right, Taz, name five B2B marketing buzzwords that people overuse.
I love this. Okay. Streamline, revolutionize, AI boosted. Um, uh, shoot, uh, is increased growth or increased revenue buzzword y? I don't know if that's buzzword y.
Uh, but those are the three [00:30:00] that I see the most. Dang it! Give me some more! Who wants to help me? Quirk! Come on, chat! Come on, chat,
come on, chat,
come on, chat.
Synergy. Unleash. The
worst. Holy crap. Sahil, yes! Turnkey.
Optimized.
Yes!
Purpose built. Number one. Industry leading. In your head. Industry is my favorite.
Yeah, unified. So go pack. All in one. Yeah. By the way,
I've never, I've hosted these things for a long time. I've never seen the chat light up so fast. Everyone has a buzz word. You want engagement in the chat. You just ask the people to put in a buzzword. Seamless.
Seamless. All. Alright,
solutioning, we, or it's a verb now.
Founder mode. All pass task. I think you passed round one. Let's, let's ask the chat, 'cause that last one is a little bit iffy with the revenue. All right, chat. Are we accepting those answers? No, no,
[00:31:00] no. Ding. Remember, remember whose company this is. It was not, this is my company. We're doing this for me today.
I'm in charge here. Um, by my estimation, my homie Tass and I love her. If she got like three out of five,
that's the honest answer.
Who's in, who's got the math on three. Let me ask chat GPT. What's three divided by five. That's her grade. Not going to cut it.
It's like a B.
Yeah. Sissy. All right. That's round one.
That's round one. What's next?
All right. Task name for Martech tools. This should be easy. Cause
can I just take it from what Dave said or no? Um, okay. Maybe we should do some new ones. Okay. So, uh, Martech tools. Let's see. What do I use? Is. Um, okay. And GA does GA count. Jan, uh, GA four. I'm going to just name all like website related stuff.
Okay. Uh, dang [00:32:00] it. This is like, I'm so on the spot right now and I'm just like losing my mojo. I'm better. Oh, wait, this is
so, so what you're saying is it's easier to be pithy behind the keyboard than it is to be on camera.
Yes. Like the guy today who was on Danielle's post. Right? It's much easier to be a Mr.
Keyboard Warrior, ha ha, pointing fingers.
Tassie's my bouncer, actually. She's my LinkedIn bouncer.
Tass, you can, you can, you can phone a friend, too. We could, we could bring somebody else to name for, for Martech Tools to get another person up here. I'm okay with
that. Oh! Okay, wait. Um, Lachey can get up here, but I'm going to say, uh, SEMrush before she does and Ahrefs before she does.
And then we'll see what she, what she actually comes up with. Can I say HubSpot again? Like, I feel like you said HubSpot. Everyone says HubSpot. It
feels like you're failing right now, if I'm being honest.
My mouth's falling down the stairs. Okay, get Lachey in here. Look at her. She's No, she
doesn't want to do it.
It's all good. It's all good. All right. We did this one. Okay. Oh, [00:33:00] wait. We, all right. Taz, thank you. I'm kicking you out. We need another voice up here. Bye. All right. Who wants to be our next participant? We need a, we need a new fresh, we need a new fresh voice.
Hi Tass, I'm removing you. Love you. How do
we, how do we do it, Danielle?
Somebody raise their hand.
Yeah, you got to just request to join and then we'll pick someone. We got three people right now. We got Vinnie, we got Sahil, we got James.
Put, put Sahil up there.
All right. So he'll get ready.
All right. And then Sahil, good to see you brother. Next event. We're going to, I love the DJ play, but, um, Sahil plays in a rush cover band.
And I think, I think there's a play with us, uh, in that for a next event. Just saying. All right, go ahead,
ding. Let's go. Welcome to the stage. So now we have our next question. Let's see. If we got a little sneak preview of it, but, uh, Anna, we can get that on the. Stage. So are you ready? Boom! I'm ready. [00:34:00] Three!
Dave Gerhart has worked out. Drift. Exit five. Are we counting the Facebook group?
That's not a company, bro! I'm gonna need two out of
three.
Exit five in Drift. That's for sure.
The correct
answer
would have been Privy. There was also HubSpot, nine months, nine of the most glorious months of my life spent at HubSpot. Um, there was also a constant contact would have been an acceptable answer. They were an email marketing software company that got their lunch eaten by MailChimp and, uh, then I started my career at a PR agency called Lois, Paul and Partners, uh, but Sahil, good to see you.
Always great hair, great job, um, thank you for everything you do. But I've really, I'm, no, I'm serious. This is, I, I enjoy seeing your face everywhere in Exit 5 and, uh, [00:35:00] thank you for, thank you for being a part of this thing. All right. Okay. How many more we got? We got another one? Oh yeah. Let's, let's, round
two.
Let's, uh, let's, let's get a new set of questions up. All right.
Round two.
I made this a little harder than, uh We're going to round two. All right.
I'm bringing Ross on stage. Yes. He wants to come.
Perfect. Bring him up.
There he
is.
If you get these wrong, I'm going to violate you with the sound effects. I'm ready for it.
I'm
ready for it. I'm nervous. All right. Let's go. All right, Ross. Let's do it. All right. So It's round two Rodman. And guess what? If you mess up here, we're gonna distribute this clip forever. . Oh no, this is recorded. He hit you with, he hit you with the distribution. This wasn't recorded. The
hit you with the distribution.
We're gonna distribute this clip everywhere, love it. I love it. Let's do this.
Alright Ross, so let's you ready? Five. [00:36:00] We're ready. I'm ready. 4, 3, 2, 1. Let's hit it.
Five logo. Whew. Uh, that's, that's tough, dude. I'm gonna
give you one to get you started your favorite company. Reddit. Red logo. There's one Reddit.
That's fair. That's fair. Reddit. Let's go with, uh, Toyota. President's Choice. Um, Adidas, Santa . . What about Tim Horton? You're a Canadian guys And Tim Horton. Tim Horton.
Did I throw Tim Hortons in the mix? Yeah, I don't know. Oh yeah. That's a tough one. Um, red and logos. The psychology of red, nobody uses it. Rackspace? Rackspace? Is Rackspace red? Sure, we'll give it to ya. WWE? NWO [00:37:00] Wolfpack? Anybody? No? Nothing? No, that's it.
Alright, he did it. Thank you. That's a hard question, man.
That was hard. That's tough.
All right, let's keep it up. I'm keeping him up. I'm keeping him up. Dang. All right, Ross, you've gone around too. Oh, I got this. This is my vibe.
We've got Rudolph. We've got Blitzen. We've got Comet. We've got Cupid. We've got Donner. Prancer, all of them. And some people would even say Olive.
Olive, get it? Olive, the other reindeer. We also have Olive. Olive, Olive.
Yeah, that's the dad joke. Yeah, good job. Alright, can you name three holiday, classic holiday ad campaigns?
Coca Cola Santa. That's the best. Um, then we've got, that's probably all [00:38:00] I've got. Let me think. Coca Cola. What are you guys doing?
You wrote
these questions. What? So give us, give us the other two. What, what I'm put you on
that. Wow, you're putting me on the spot. So here, here's the, here's the part where I get exposed. I actually only knew that one. Hey, we got that in here. Uh, Rachel says the car with the big red bow, any car brand that is, that's factually correct.
I see Budweiser, Hershey. These aren't very specific chat. We got to do a little better.
What do you
tell them what you
want?
John Lewis adds every year. They were so emotional. Volcano
volcano. And that's a great one. The volcano. What he wants for Christmas. That's
what he wants for Christmas.
All
right. We got one more.
All right. Ross named two things that make a perfect B2B marketing.
Ooh, I got one. It's sent from me.
That's sent from Danielle. [00:39:00] One that seems personalized, uh, really comes off as if it's human. One that doesn't say in the ever evolving world of AKA not written by ChattyPT. Um, and one that has a PS. You got to throw the PS in.
People are sleeping on the PSs these days.
I love that. Big fan of the PS. Tell your, tell the, put the content in the email, then do a PS. PS is where you can reference the link again. You can tell another story. What
does PS stand for?
Um, parlez vous s'il vous plait? No. Damn. Postal script. Postal script.
Yeah.
I don't know. I don't even use my brain anymore. Just chat. You can see that's everything for me. That's hilarious. I love it. All right, Ross. Good to see you. Good job.
Thank you all. Thank you. Next
year. Being an awesome member of our community.
all.
All right. [00:40:00] Love it. Crowds, crowds, crowds going nuts. Okay. Um, Let's, let's, let's, let's keep it, uh, let's keep it moving.
We got, we, we're gonna bring up, we're gonna do another guest. I want to put, uh, I want to make, I want to make Dan our next guest actually right now. Yeah. All right. Round three.
Just have him pronounce a bunch of names.
All right, Dan. Yeah, just give me names for us. What are the secret gifts that people give during Secret Santa?
Uh, candles.
Candle holders, uh, video iPods, uh, ties, and um, uh, shot glasses. Shot glasses has been the only legitimate answer there, honestly.
Someone gave him a video iPad one year and he hasn't been the same since.
No, the office! No one gets that reference? Come on. No, no. Wait, tell
me the
office reference. I
love, I love
a show.
The secret [00:41:00] Santa episode where we're, I don't want to ruin it. I mean, it is like 15 years old. So everyone hopefully you've seen at this point, but that's okay. Dwight and Michael argue over the video iPad or iPod. Come on. No, I need to relax now. You got to watch that one this time. Perfect.
All right. Two, two, five answers.
Two of his five answers were about candles, which, you know, someone, uh, said in the chat, why that's a real life
experience, but
why?
All right, go ahead, Dan.
All right, Dan, name four content formats on LinkedIn.
Uh, okay. My guy, Matt has taught me a lot about this, this year. First one, uh, text posts, video posts, uh, Matt, don't get mad. I'm gonna screw it up. Is it a, it's a document, but it's a sliding document. It has a name. It's like a slide show.
Runs with
Schmaracel.
Yeah. Yeah. That one. And, uh, is that three or four?
Three.
Carousel. Yeah. [00:42:00] And then a bro tree. Yeah. That's the, that's the fourth row.
Good job. All right. I'm tagging in Anna next. I'm tagging in Anna next. Anna, you're next on the hot seat. Uh, with, you know, this is a holiday party with Dave and Dave and Ding and, and, and team.
All right, here we go. Go ahead. Ding.
All right, Anna, name three b2B influencers.
And
you can't say Dave, you can't say Dave Gerhart, you can't say Anna, you can't say Matt, you can't say Danielle.
Okay, this is easy. I'll say Tass, Lachey, and Ross. There we go.
Love it. Perfect timing. We
released a list today.
I know.
Obviously we all know that I'm the only thought leader worth following, but um, we're separate. Love it.
hair.
Thank you. Appreciate that. Actually, I had to get a, I had to go sign up for volunteering for my kid's school today. I had to go to the police station. I had to get fingerprinted for like a non supervised [00:43:00] volunteer.
And the policeman asked me my height, my eye color and my hair color for hair color. I said none and he just giggled. That is an option. All right, Anna, good job. Most effective, most efficient answer. All right, here we go. What's this one, Ding?
All right. Name two holiday movies that feature work or corporate life.
You can't say diehard.
Ooh, the holiday? Holiday party? That's one. Office party or something? Can't say die what about diehard 2?
That, that,
yeah. We'll count it. That's
like Dan saying candle and candle holder.
Elf, that's a good one. Okay, that's my answer. That's
you. I just watched the holiday two nights ago. Chocolate. It was great. I love that movie. Yeah, that's one of my favorites. Good one. Much. I'm sorry. [00:44:00] Much better than love. Actually. Okay.
All right, Danielle, I know you want to answer one right now. So I'm putting you where you're you're up next.
Name one way to celebrate a team win this year.
Ooh, I'm shopping out on LinkedIn.
Very on brand. Very good. Okay. All right. Give it up. That was fun. A fun little, a fun little segment. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna wrap this up. Uh, I said we were gonna. Spread this around, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna see if I can do this real quick and hold on.
I'm having technical difficulty. So, uh, okay, Anna, you tell us, uh, tell us dates and events. So we got it. We're gonna just quickly share what we got coming up in 2025. And then we're gonna, we're gonna get, we'll let you get out of here. But for events, what do we,
so we have a couple more meetups next year.
So we're coming to Boston at the beginning of March. We'll be in the barrier
and
we'll be back in Austin in November for our three meetups [00:45:00] next year. Stay tuned for the dates. We're still locking that in, but we're excited for that. And then we'll be back at drive in September, back in Burlington, Vermont.
So stay tuned for whenever that releases as well, but there will be a wait list and early bird tickets. So. Stay tuned, keep your eyes peeled, and we're excited about that for next year.
We went, we went back and forth. We, after telling everyone we weren't going to make Drive any bigger, we were like, we're going to make it bigger.
We need to go bigger. We're going to go somewhere else. We came back full circle. We're running it back in Burlington. We'll have room for like 20 or 30 more people, max. We're probably going to have to raise the ticket price a little bit to keep it exclusive, to be, to keep it feeling good. If you came last year, we're going to, you'll, you'll know early.
Um, and then, you know, we hear you that there's, there's lots of places we could go. We could go to, we could go to London, we could go to Chicago, but we're just, we're starting small. It already feels like a lot of travel. After being like, I don't want to travel for work again. [00:46:00] Here we are, but we're going to go to Boston, San Francisco, Vermont, and Austin.
That's going to be great. All right, Danielle, my friend, Danielle, you got to glow today. Tell me about some of the things that you're excited about from a content standpoint in 2025.
Yeah, so the big one is we are finally investing and putting a lot of great content on our website. We have launched soft launch.
I'll say soft launch, uh, our new product called articles. It's our spin on a blog, but basically we're taking all those awesome insights and putting them into guides, playbooks, um, things that you can reference on there. So very excited about that. Um, yes, Ross, and maybe we'll even end up on Reddit. Who knows?
Um, and then super fun sneak peek because you guys are here. We're doing our first ever exit five report coming late February. It's going to be the state of B2B marketing salaries. So very excited for that. I'm using my, uh, political science degree chops. qualitative methods, [00:47:00] um, putting those back to use for the first time in my career.
Aka
ChatGBT.
ChatGBT and Bothering Dan. It's half
of my day. Those are two things.
And then we're doing some more virtual events. So if you were an attendee of the Ultimate Roasted B2B websites, we're doing something very similar come March around email. It's going to be fun. We're going to bring the heat. It's going to be a great time.
So that's what we got coming up for content.
Just to echo, like, just to, to go deeper on that for a second. Like we've seen so much traction with our private paid community. I want us to think about, like, I want us to think about having a free lever of all this stuff. And we've seen a tremendous amount of attention and awareness and success with the podcast.
And so the, the, the hypothesis is like. Whether you pay us a dollar or not to join the community or to go to an event. That's [00:48:00] okay. How do we make exit five. com the number one resource for B2B marketers. And so you're going to tell your friends, Oh yeah, Hey, you want to know how to like structure your marketing team, go to exit five.
They got an article about that. Right. And so that's the big thing. It's like, how can we get more really thoughtful resources created for free on the exit five website. And I think that that's something that's going to really play out. Play out well over the next year. Uh, okay, Matt, what are you excited about, Mr. Community? What are you excited about in the community?
Yes, sir. So, uh, of course my Siri came up and I said, yes, sir. Um, we're doing more accelerator. So we did the marketing leadership accelerator this fall. Um, in February, I'm really excited about the accelerator we're doing. We're, we're doing an AI accelerator.
I don't have all the, uh, agenda for it yet, but essentially if you're a B2B marketer. We're going to try and pack the most important things that you need to know about AI and the things you need to get better at when it comes to AI. So that's going to be [00:49:00] really exciting. That's going to be probably launching sometime late January, early Feb.
So keep your eyes peeled for that. Um, second thing is CMO club. So we're, we're going to go bigger with CMO club. We've launched it in private this year and we've gotten really positive feedback. So we're going to open it up to more people, but we're going to still focus on small. Tight knit connections and groups here.
So, um, we're going to focus in all the right areas with CMO club. And then the last part community pass community pass is essentially, uh, what we're going to call just our regular exit five community. So not CMO club, it's just a community as you know it today. And, you know, we're going to continue to invest there.
Going to try and mix in, uh, you know, more playbooks from members and try and get them sharing the great work that we're doing so everybody can see. Going to focus, keep focusing more on matchmaking. We're planning to upgrade our matchmaking programs. That's going to get even better. And then last but not least, we're also going to try and bake in more, uh, [00:50:00] AI into the community.
So we're working with the Circle team on a, uh, a bot in the community that's essentially going to help tag the experts in the right post when they come up, just like I'm doing manually today. So. We're going to have more ways to get the right people involved in the right conversations and then hopefully find ways to reward them through gamification.
So that's what's,
awesome. And keep it, keep them, keep an eye out for us. Follow everything we do, exit five. com. You can follow us on LinkedIn early in the new year. We're going to open a new role for our six teammate on the team. And so maybe that's you, maybe that's somebody, you know, we're going to continue to grow and keep the feedback coming.
And we have an amazing. An amazing part of running a business like this is the feedback loop, right? We get comments on events like this, where we're in slack right now, sharing screenshots about what people are saying. We get podcast reviews, we get emails, we get comments in the community. It is all driven on your feedback.
And so continue to share your ideas with us, continue to push us. The other thing I would [00:51:00] say is we're also, we're very. Bullish on being like a curation business, not a creation business. Obviously we do create content, but we're, we're not going to have the hot takes. Like I don't, I don't want to be in the hot takes business, but we're sitting on this incredible community of 5, 000 marketers, thousands of people in our community.
Many of you don't get the opportunity at your companies to write about marketing because you're not a marketing company. You, you know, you do marketing for cybersecurity and so you're not going to be able to write up. blog posts about the three cool things you did in marketing and publish it on your website.
But exit five can be that platform for you. And so maybe there's an opportunity to be on our podcast. Maybe there's an opportunity to do an AMA in our community. Maybe there's an opportunity to speak in our event. Maybe there's an opportunity to write a guest post for our site. Stay close to us. Send us an email.
Hi at exit five. com like we are always looking to feature you with thoughtful, relevant content that you're doing in your day job. And that's a big part of our vision for this brand and for content for the future. So, all right, that's it. Thanks for hanging with us. That was an awesome 48 minutes. Go check out Ding.[00:52:00]
Check out what they're doing at EventShark. If you haven't already hired EventShark to do videos for your next event, you are falling behind the curve. So, shout out to them. Just don't hire them up so much because they're a key part of the next year and I don't want to be out there
filming on
my own. So, thanks you all.
Appreciate it. Here in the comments. Uh, thanks for hanging out with us on this little virtual holiday party. I hope you have a great, safe, happy, healthy rest of the year. I love this team. I love what we're doing. I'm having a lot of fun.
I got to testify. The greatest marketing community is exit five, 3, 500 strong. You better recognize
real engagement, real experience.