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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 4,400+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Adam Goyette [00:00:00]:
1234.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:01]:
Exit. Exit. Exit. All right, Adam's here. He's got four kids and two dogs running around there somewhere. So we're gonna. Just a couple dads talking. B two B marketing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:23]:
This is what the people want, right?
Adam Goyette [00:00:25]:
Yeah. If you make it without interruptions, it'll be a miracle day.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:28]:
Yeah, that's okay. Anyway, let's fill people, bring people up to speed. For people who aren't familiar with you, just to hear your voice, put a name to it, maybe give me an introduction to yourself and bring me up to speed on your background as a b two b marketing leader.
Adam Goyette [00:00:44]:
Yeah. So I've been in b two B marketing for a long time now. I previously led growth at g two for about two and a half years, and then led the marketing team at help scouts in the last year and a half or so, then was consulting, advising, and then recently, at the start of this year, started an agency growth union. We work with early stage startups figuring out kind of all things growth. So, yeah, that's kind of my journey. Like you said, I have four kids, two dogs here, so, yeah, happy to be on.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:10]:
So you've done a bunch of interesting things. G two, help, scout. You've been, you've been all across the b two B marketing planet. Usually, though, when somebody goes to start an agency, they have a particular way of thinking about things or doing things. I'm curious as to, as somebody who has many times thought about starting an agency and I didn't end up doing it, I'm curious as to hear, like, what, what your thesis was. You know, like most people don't go start with a successful career in b two B marketing. As a marketing leader. You know, you're not going to go start an agency and just kind of take everyone's work.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:44]:
We'll do anything, right. Pay us 20 grand a month, 15 grand a month, whatever it is, we'll go do everything. You gotta have a specific thesis. Like, what was your kind of framework and thinking that led to starting the agency and what's kind of the playbook, if there is one that you're focused on?
Adam Goyette [00:01:58]:
Yeah, I would say, like most products, I think, usually come out of someone's frustration with the experience they've had. And so for me, working with agencies, any time in my career, I always try to lean on them. Some were good, some were bad, but it was always very point solution focused. Right. There's a paid agency, there's a content agency, there's a backlink agency, and then lots of times the agencies are filled with agency people, and I don't mean that as a knock, but they've never been in the seat before as a b two b marketer. And I think there's a big disconnect sometimes, right, with what you're actually trying to accomplish. And so I found when you would work with agencies, a lot of times I'm trying to bring them along the journey or have them connect the dots with the other agencies and all this sort of stuff. And it always felt kind of silly to me because growth in b two B is never a one channel sport.
Adam Goyette [00:02:44]:
And so it's never just paid marketing. It's how your paid marketing works with your content and your brand and all these kinds of things. And there wasn't really anyone kind of coming in kind of holistically looking at it, right. There's lots of advisors and people like that and strategists, but nobody to actually do the execution work. And so we kind of come in and we help build kind of a growth strategy. Like, if we were your vp of growth coming in, here's what we would do. And then we execute up to three initiatives at any given time, right. And so that's kind of the way our model works.
Adam Goyette [00:03:15]:
So we're kind of channel agnostic. And I think the other thing is, like, lots of paid agencies is they make money when you spend more money in paid channels, right. Because they're taking a percentage of your spend or content agency wants you to write more content articles because they make money off of it. And so it felt very misaligned with, like, what your outcome is as a business leader and what their outcomes are.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:36]:
Yeah, okay. I really like this because, you know, I think it's easy to write on LinkedIn and talk about, oh, this thing works, and this thing works. And I do it all the time. But what I love about the podcast is you get to go layers deeper and you're like, oh, this. This isn't really a definitive take. And I think it's kind of like communicating with somebody in slack sometimes. Like, it feels very direct, and then they could actually hear my voice in person. You're like, oh, that's not how he delivered that message at all.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:02]:
Yeah, I think on LinkedIn we hear things like, do this, not that. Here's how I did this, and this worked for me. Right. And I think the more through my own career and the more people that I've talked to now building exit five, I've spent how, Lord knows how many hours talking to people like you and marketing leaders over the last seven years, hundreds of hours. It's nuts. And I'm able to pattern, match and see a lot of these trends and themes. And one of the themes that I really strongly believe is that any channel can work.
Adam Goyette [00:04:33]:
Yep.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:34]:
Podcasting works, TikTok works, YouTube works, SEO. They all work. Yeah, but where most people fall down is the strategy. And I think it all comes back to, like, I'll answer questions from people in the exit five community and I'm like, man, I hope people don't think I'm, like, a moron because I always go back to giving, like, the simplest answers. But I do find that almost all the time you've peeled back all the layers, it comes back to like, well, what's the strategy? Why are we doing this? What outcomes are we going to try to drive then that dictates the success? You know what? I'm kind of like, ranting about like, you've seen this at a bunch of different companies. It's like, it's so easy to get obsessed over the tactics when it's like, actually, I can tell almost right away in talking to a founder and a marketing leader if they're going to be successful or not based on how they, how they can articulate that strategy before we even look at the performance of any particular channel.
Adam Goyette [00:05:24]:
Yeah, 100%. I think it's like, especially, like, events, and you see it all the time, like you said on LinkedIn, where it's like, events are dead, email marketing is dead, SEO is dead. And it's like, if all these things were dead, then how is it that at G two with events, we would go to trade shows and they were profitable for us? We were trying to go to as many trade shows as possible, right? And if emails were dead, how come, like, you know, there's other companies that are making tons of money off it, right? And so I think it's the, it all comes down to the strategy and aligning, like, what's your specific tactic within that channel? Because I think one of the things now, it's not dead, it's just harder. And so, like, when I was at help scout, it's helpdesk software. There's 300 companies, probably 400 companies today competing in that space, right? And so if you think about that for a moment, it's like, okay, doing paid advertising isn't a strategy. Doing email marketing isn't a strategy. All those companies are doing it, right? And so you really have, like, two options. Like, how can I be either in the top 1% of people doing paid out of those 400 companies or how do I do it differently or in a more unique way? And that's where I think brand and growth and all these things really tie together, because if you're just rolling out generic canva ads on LinkedIn, pushing everyone to a demo, and then you're like, LinkedIn doesn't work.
Adam Goyette [00:06:44]:
Well, I think the strategy is broken there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:46]:
I wrote that down. I love that you said, it's not dead, it's just harder.
Adam Goyette [00:06:51]:
Yep.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:51]:
And I was listening to Gary Vee talk with Kip and Kieran on marketing against the grain, and he was talking about how when he first started doing email marketing for like, his dad's wine shop or whatever, he was the only person doing email marketing. And so, like, his open rates were like 98%.
Adam Goyette [00:07:08]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:08]:
And he. What? Doesn't mean he was any good at it. He just was. Early in the channel we go to today, there's companies in every vertical, every industry, every channel is flooded. And so, like, the strategy is more important. Maybe we can use this podcast today to help people be more strategic and think about the strategy. Let's dive into some of the, you don't have to give us a name of the company, but maybe talk about a project you're working on now or recently doing. The people that listen to this, they want the real specific and tactical advice, and I want to try to dig into.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:44]:
All right, if we know that's true, if we know that growth is not a one channel sport, channels are not dead, it's just harder. How can we use this time to help people get more strategic and think about marketing strategy? Where does it start?
Adam Goyette [00:07:57]:
So for me, it starts with the leadership of setting up a structure for the team to actually be willing to try new things. And so if you think about it for a second, is when do most marketing teams do their brainstorming? It's like after we miss q three, it's like, oh, shit. Get everyone on a Zoom call. We got to figure out how we're going to hit this number. I can tell you firsthand, most people don't come up with the best ideas when it's under pressure like that. They're going to go with whatever they think is safer. They're not going to throw out the wild idea that might just be burning $5,000 in marketing spend. When you're in that situation, I think one of the big things is how you're structuring the team and how you're getting them to think creatively.
Adam Goyette [00:08:37]:
At g two and at help scout, we basically had an idea board in Asana, where everyone would just dump ideas, good ideas, bad ideas. Like, whenever you saw it, you saw inspiration for something. And once a month we would go through that idea board and everyone have to pitch their idea. It would be like a Friday afternoon, and everyone would just go in and pitch their ideas. Some of them were horrible, and I will always have the worst ones, kind of on purpose, right, to set the stage of, like, there are no bad ideas, but you really want people thinking bigger. And then we would run at least two of those every sprint. So we worked in two weeks sprints, and every sprint we would run at least two tests. Sometimes they were smaller tests, sometimes it was a bigger test in terms of what we were testing.
Adam Goyette [00:09:20]:
But really it's like, what are we trying to test? How does it tie up to the bigger goal that we're trying to achieve? Like, which of our KPI's or okrs or whatever you're measuring does this tie into? And then what's the MVP version of this launch? Because too many times marketers are. When we have a podcast, how are we going to promote it on all these channels? And how are we going to get it on LinkedIn and YouTube shorts and instagrams? How about you record one and put it on LinkedIn and see if anyone even likes it? I think you get so far down the road of planning that it takes you six months before you even record a podcast episode. You see that in growth channels all the time where it's like, we need a strategy for Reddit. It's like we'll just start running Reddit ads. That could be the simple strategy to start. Right? And so I think the key is minimizing the test and making sure you're not allocating too many resources towards test.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:13]:
Yeah, this is great. I want to hop in here. So this is really good. So just giving the team, I feel like a key thing is like, to have, it's like, because you've had a dedicated space for. This is why it works, right? It's like we want to encourage a culture of ideas, but they just go nowhere. They just go into slack ether or like, the marketing. And I'm the number one culprit of this. Like, I have more ideas than anybody.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:38]:
I would challenge anybody to have more marketing ideas. And my, I go, I send them to the team, I get all excited. I'm like, oh. Because I'm just, I have very recency bias. Like, I just did a webinar earlier today and somebody talked about something on the webinar. I was like, yes, we got to do this. And I sent it to the team. Like, we got to do this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:53]:
Now I'm talking to you. I'm going to get three ideas from you on this podcast and be like, yeah, we got to do that. And then I feel like I'm bothering them, right? I'm bothering the team because, like, now I'm the crazy guy with the ideas. They're like, well, the founder, the CEO, whoever, the marketing. The words have weight, right? Like, if your boss, like, suggests something, you're like, okay, should I do this or not? But then also, we might never follow up on it, ever. There's no system for tracking it. But then also, we might be stuck three months from now. And I'll be like, well, damn it, why don't we do one of those things that I suggested? I love.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:25]:
There's this book, high output management by Andy Grove, who ran intel. And he talks about how, like, this is old school book, but he's like, one of the things that I like to do for one on ones is to keep, like, a file away for, like, the one on one notes that I'm going to have with my team members. Because during the week and during the month, you know, Adam and I might need to talk about something, but I don't need to interrupt him with that right now. I just. Just file it away and let's talk about it later. And so I love the idea of, like, filing all these ideas away, but then actually having everybody like, let's go through, let's sort these. And you said you would pick, like, two. Like, did you come up with that number to force you to do it? Cause where I would get stuck is I, like, how do I get the team to go and do these things now? Like, you know, everyone's always busy doing other stuff.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:08]:
They already got enough on their plate. How do I get them to go and do these ideas?
Adam Goyette [00:12:12]:
Yeah, so there's two things to respond to what you said. Number one, if you have those CEO's cmos who are firing tons of ideas off you, you could ask them to like, hey, can you put this in a doc? Most probably aren't. And so I think one of the tricks I learned is when you get those requests, you don't have to have a big back and forth there. The simple thing is, like, I'm going to add it to our one on one doc, and we'll talk through it on Thursday. Or, I love this idea. I'll add it to our backlog of ideas. We're reviewing them next Friday. Join the meeting if you want.
Adam Goyette [00:12:42]:
Right. So it's like, I'm not ignoring your idea. I'm also not telling you we're doing your idea. And so I think part of it is like, it's great to have that kind of funnel of data. And I think marketers struggle with that, with salespeople, too, where it's like, sales keeps throwing ideas at me. It's like, yeah, but it comes from a good spot, and there are good ideas in there. And so I think, like, having that outlet or spot to put them is key. And I think the other thing is, when you think about the team load and team management, like you said, you don't want to give them a full time job of experimenting things.
Adam Goyette [00:13:15]:
And really. So we tried to limit it to two because we felt like, okay, that's a digestible amount of things we can test. And sometimes it was like, hey, we're crazy busy because we have these things going on. We're about to launch an event, or we have this trade show this week. And so it'd be like, okay, we're not going to launch anything with the event team, but this week we're going to try out these two things on paid. Right. And the beauty is, because you have 100 ideas and a backlog, you can pick and choose which ones you're going to try and experiment.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:43]:
And this stuff would be in addition to the core job, right?
Adam Goyette [00:13:46]:
Yeah. So Kyle Lacey has that good framework. I think I may have stolen this from him a while back, where he basically says he allocates, like 20 or 30%. I forget what the number is of his budget, marketing budget to experiments and brand initiatives and things. Basically, he doesn't have to report back on. And so part of it's like, you have to allocate some of your budget to say, like, hey, this is an experimentation budget. And I think where marketers struggle is, how do I convince my CEO that I need, like, this budget and we're not really going to expect results out of it? It's like a weird.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:20]:
Well, I think that's why that percentage is important, because I have found that they don't care. If you say, like, oh, yeah, we're going to do a bunch of, like, random stuff with podcasting, then it's like, okay, but like, I. Where are you spending that money from and how much time is that? But if you frame it, if we just take the Kyle Lacey number, if we say it's 30% or 20%, we're going to say, hey, 80% of our people and budget and time is going to be spent on, like, doing this stuff that is meant to hit our goals today. I need 20% to ensure that we're going to hit our goals tomorrow. That's how I would think about it. Because in my first time as a marketing leader, I was so focused on and was under so much pressure to hit the number, hit the goal, like right now, this quarter, this year, that all of a sudden when you get the plan for next year and the CEO wants to grow the company 50%, you can't just take your existing channels and you know this, you worked at g two during really high growth period, right? You can't just take the spreadsheet and like, drag your existing channels and like, just get more demos and handraisers from it. Like, you have to be placing these next bets. But then at the same time, those things need time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:30]:
And so you might need to be like, podcasting for six months or testing into Reddit or LinkedIn or whatever the strategy is, because it's going to need to ramp. And so a mistake that I made was I never, I didn't carve out that stuff until it was too late. And then I would go into the year and I'm like, shoot, we got to find two or three new channels when it's like, way better to have been testing them. Do you get what I'm trying to, like, articulate with that?
Adam Goyette [00:15:53]:
Yeah. I feel like a lot of people, too. That's why you see so many, like, sales, marketing plans that are completely backed loaded in the second half.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:59]:
We're just going to figure this all out later. Yeah.
Adam Goyette [00:16:02]:
Oh, we need six months to figure this out. And so, like, you look at it and you're like, what the hell's happening in July that we suddenly start doubling?
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:09]:
Which then, oh, man, I've have, I've gotten in this problem, too. Then. July is actually a historically slow time in b two b because everybody's out on vacation or doing stuff for their kids. And so, like, things are way down. And so not only did you miss the number in July, but it was actually a 50% miss because it was a 50% bigger number. You can't just draw a straight line for the year. Oh, yeah, been there.
Adam Goyette [00:16:29]:
Yeah, for sure. I feel like any marketing leader has made that mistake at least once in their career. So I think, yeah, your point of.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:36]:
The CEO that I work for was like, I'd never want to hear that it's July ever again. I don't care because I know there's 31 days in July. I don't care that people take ten days off for 4 July here in the US. I don't want to hear about it. And I'm like, all right, so now we have a month that has effectively 20 days, maybe 14 selling days in ithemenous. Got to hit the number. Okay, here we go.
Adam Goyette [00:16:57]:
Yeah. And I think that's your point about planning for the future, right? I think part of it is if you think about being able to ship two new experiments a week over the course of a year or every two weeks, let's say another two week sprint over the course of a year. I've just launched 52 new experiments. So if you say, like, okay, take another company that typically moves slow and they're trying two new things a quarter. They've launched eight. And so if you say, what's the success rate of any of these? And just say 25% of the experiments are actually going to be successful and turn into something meaningful that we can try to scale at the end of that year. I now have. What is that? Twelve things I can do.
Adam Goyette [00:17:39]:
If I launch 50 something tests, and if I launched eight, I have basically two things. And that compounds really quickly. I think we found, like, direct mail worked really well. And we were launching tons of direct mail campaigns in our ABM strategy at g two because it was working. So we've tried tons of different kinds of experiments that have had meaningful impact that we launched with, like, a very minimal test that we're able to scale into much bigger programs.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:05]:
So what I also am getting from this is like, it's great. So you got to have ideas. You got to have a framework to track and measure ideas. You actually have to implement them. I do think forcing. I just like the, like, okay, you made up two, right? Let's just go to. Because we're going to try. It's going to force us to try new things.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:22]:
It's like, you know, my wife and I want to go out on a date. We just have to go pick a new restaurant because we want to try it. We want to try and find some new place that we like. You set two. That gives you a rhythm to do it. But then I also think you mentioned the most important thing is also to, to be intentional about carving this out. This is going to be 20. We're going to spend 20 or 30% of our time and budget testing new channels.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:43]:
That's a huge unlock for me because without a framework to figure out why, that's like, well, then we should be doing this or we should be doing this. It gives you something to lean on. It's a guardrail for doing that.
Adam Goyette [00:18:53]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:53]:
All right. So that's one thing we're talking about, how to help you develop a better b two B marketing strategy. This is new ideas, but how do we. Let's talk about the core business for a little bit here. So for most of the people that listen to this, they are working at companies where I'd say there's either one or two motions and some companies have both. One of them is going to be what we could call product led growth. This could be product led, it could be free trial. I'm going to lump them all in.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:24]:
We're trying to drive people to go do something specifically right now. Sign up for our free video product or go use Apollo data tool for free, up to x limit. Then we have other people that work at companies that are more sales led motion, where like, go get a meeting from sales, right?
Adam Goyette [00:19:45]:
Yep.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:45]:
Do you have any experience in the sales meeting bucket? And can we talk about some things that you've seen be able to drive the needle and move the needle on driving demos. I think this is where a lot of people get stuck, myself included, is like, what's in the seat? How do we drive more demand in that part of the business? And what are some ways that we can think about a strategy to, like, investigate what might be wrong, what might be broken and go try to fix it?
Adam Goyette [00:20:10]:
Yeah, for sure. So I have experience in both. Right. G two. I supported a 120 person sales team help scout. We were product line at 90% of the revenue. So it's definitely different motions like you talked about, I would say for the demo piece of it, I think there's two things that typically go wrong. One is marketing needs to make sure they're following the full funnel and not stopping at like, we passed over mqls and really understanding what's actually driving the revenue for us.
Adam Goyette [00:20:38]:
Right. Because a lot of times people always think we need more. And then you go in and if you actually just look at the funnel all the way through, it's like, man, it's not optimized at all. It's broken in so many different spots. Right. It's taken bdrs five days to follow up with people, or our close rates are dropping because we hired five new sales reps and we're giving them the same leads that we're giving our best reps. And there's all kinds of things there. And so I would say, like, the first thing is, analyze your funnel and see where you have holes, because I guarantee you there's definitely holes.
Adam Goyette [00:21:10]:
And when I say funnel, it's not just the marketing funnel. It's like all the way through. I think the other things that I've seen work really well for driving demos is you have to understand people don't naturally want a demo of the product.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:25]:
This is where I'm kind of getting. This is what I was trying to get at. It's like this fundamental thing, like, I don't want to demo. You don't want to demo? I want one. If I really have a pain, I'll give you a perfect example. Trying to. We're giving out equity to everybody that works at exit five. I've been running the business as like, an LLC by myself for the last couple years, but now we're, like, restructuring the company to bring in employees.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:49]:
I have to go. You know, I had to do a bunch of legal work. We have to create a cap table. So I need cap table software, but I also need to get a 409 a valuation. And so Carta is a company that does that. And so I reach out to Carta, and I have a demo on Monday. I don't want to do that, but I have to do it right. I have a need for my business.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:10]:
And so I just literally, before talking to you, I got an email from the SDR asking me a bunch of qualifying questions. I didn't roll my eyes once because I need it. This is a. How many people are going to be on the cap table? What's your revenue? How many employees? That was not annoying to me because I have a pain. This is where it all breaks down, though. So of course I'm going to take that demo. But how do we drive that as marketers? And how do you have empathy for 95% of the people? I love that 95 five rule. 95% of people are not going to be in market.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:41]:
I'm in market for Carter right now, so I'm probably going to buy that. How do we do things that are going to drive hand raisers? And then you get into the whole other side of it is like all the incentives inside of the company are misaligned. Marketing is measured on mqls, which is just a content download, which is not going to drive pain. This is the root cause of a lot of the strategy stuff, right?
Adam Goyette [00:23:00]:
Yeah. I think there's two ways to go about doing it. One is from a demand kind of capture, or people want to call it these days is like the 5% how do we get the 5%? And that's where you have to understand, like that's where paid search comes in. And I think those types of campaigns.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:16]:
Content that would you think about your market? And like would you think about that? Is that 95 five something you would think about? And like realizing we're not marketing everybody and say, okay, we're gonna do this for this segment and this for this segment. Like, do you think about the stages of awareness someone's gonna have with your product?
Adam Goyette [00:23:31]:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I definitely think you do. I think you have to understand certain campaigns are focused in on driving conversion and it really should be dollar in, dollar out. If I'm bidding on a keyword like best 409 a software or whatever you're trying to do, that should be driving conversions for us if it's not brand building. And so I think bucketing and understanding some of your campaigns, what's helping us build brand and build awareness and then what is helping us actually drive conversions. And so I think the second thing about the 95% is, to quote the little mermaid, you want to be where the people are and the people aren't on your website. And so I think part of it is marketers just think about their website as the sole source of like, we have to optimize this. And it's like your immediate visit wasn't to Carta's website.
Adam Goyette [00:24:19]:
I'd be willing to bet you probably pinged a few other founders, like, hey, how did you do this? Maybe you asked your accountant, you asked probably other people that you knew. Maybe you're in a slack group that you asked. And so you have to be really active on all the other kind of areas people are exploring. And you have to understand, like where are our buyers exploring, reselling to marketers. And so they're in all these slack communities and that's where this is happening, you know, and try to get a better understanding of like where are your buyers today and where are they spending their time and you want to be there. So if they're listening to the podcast, if they're doing all these things, you have to figure that out for yourself.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:53]:
That's really well said. Yeah, and I have the little mermaid playing in my head now.
Adam Goyette [00:25:00]:
It won't go away.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:02]:
So I feel like there's multiple options. And I think where marketing is hard is like, we could do this, we could do this, we could do this, we could do this. But we have limited time, resources, budget, team members, maybe at a marketing team like Salesforce size and levels, there's going to be hundreds of verticals and you have somebody focus on each of these areas. But don't you feel like this is where you have to make some bets and make some decisions and like, I think this is where the strategy and the planning is actually really important.
Adam Goyette [00:25:33]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:33]:
I have liked to have a couple slides that says, here's basically our hypotheses. Here's how we're going to do marketing. Like, here's how we think people buy. Here's what we're going to do. And so therefore, this year, this half a year, we're going to focus on these five plays and we're going to try to do them.
Adam Goyette [00:25:54]:
Yeah. Yep. Agreed. I think that's, you can't say yes to everything, right? And I think, like, back to the idea of like early stage startups and even like first time kind of marketing leaders, like, you get those slack messages, you know, at 10:00 on a Sunday night and you're like, oh crap, I guess we better do this. And suddenly before you know it, you're doing 50 things and none of them well. And the reality is like, you have to be proactive and lay out the strategy for exactly what you said. Here's why we think these are the bets we want to make, right? And we're going to go all in on these channels or these things and here's our strategy. I always love to include a slide of other things we considered and why we're saying no right now.
Adam Goyette [00:26:35]:
Right? And so it's like, I'm not saying we're never going to do a newsletter. I'm saying, like this year we're not doing a newsletter or this quarter even, we're not doing a newsletter because our focus is these four things.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:45]:
Well, I think that just shows, like ultimately you're presenting this plan to the company. I think you need to socialize this plan. So you're going to show this plan to the CEO, to the rest of the company. The company should know your marketing strategy because you want to show them that you've done your diligence and that you're aware. It's not like, hey, we're not not doing events because we don't know that they exist. But it's hard, you know, it's the thing that I always struggled with was like, we have decided that we're not doing industry trade shows as a channel right now. Not never, but just for right now. And then all of a sudden someone sees a LinkedIn post and like gets the VP of sales and it's like, man, we should have been at Sasser this year.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:23]:
Yeah, we should have. But we're not. We've decided that we're not spending that money this year and we're doing these things instead. Okay, that's a different conversation than like, oh, shoot, we had no idea this was going on. This wasn't a relevant play for us. But I really am pushing people that listen to this to, like, the sign of a good marketing leader. I know right away is like, can you articulate the companies, how the company gets customers? And your marketing strategy, this is like the fun part of the job to me. This is like a little bit of art, a little bit of science, right? You're taking the data, you're making some opinions, and you're saying, all right, I think these are the puzzle pieces that we're going to use.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:59]:
These are the chips we're going to use. Let's go try to do this. And we're going to adjust and learn on the fly. But if you can't tell me what the buyer's journey looks like for your company and then what your marketing strategy is, like, it really. Your marketing strategy is really just a set of bets. Right. It's a hypothesis on how you think you're going to be able to go get customers.
Adam Goyette [00:28:15]:
Yeah, 100%. I think the other thing, like you touched on, which is like, you have to socialize these plans at the first time. Your head of sales is seeing the marketing strategy. Is that like the company kickoff to start the year? Like you've screwed up as the marketing leader. Right. You want them completely bought in. You want them as excited or more excited than you are about the plan. Right.
Adam Goyette [00:28:36]:
You want them poking holes in the plan in private. Like, that's the time to have those conversations. Not like you said two months after. And it's like, well, I could have told you if you asked me that we should have met these events or we should have been doing these channels. You need everyone bought into your plan before you roll it out. And let's be honest, my best ideas, I always stole from sales. I love stealing from sales. I would always ask the sales team, what did you think of that campaign? How are those conversations? We would include them in our brainstorming sessions.
Adam Goyette [00:29:04]:
We would ask a BDR to join to have them throw out ideas. We would steal the idea, execute it, and be like, marketing is great.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:11]:
Well, I think the only reason you don't is when you're fearful about what they're going to say.
Adam Goyette [00:29:16]:
Yeah. Yep.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:17]:
And you're fearful that they're going to tell you that marketing is having no impact and they don't need any help, and so we don't bring them in. But when you can create a culture where, like, those two teams are partners, the goal of the company is to close customers, and you're going to use sales and marketing to get there, and you're going to each work together. That is what makes for a healthy mix.
Adam Goyette [00:29:36]:
Yeah. And you can't be afraid. Like, I think part of it, too, is, like, there's tension back and forth between sales and marketing leaders. Right. Because then marketing will be like, well, sales isn't doing their job or sales isn't doing this. And I've always had a relationship where, like, I actually want all the feedback. I don't care if you tell me this campaign sucks. I want to know that.
Adam Goyette [00:29:54]:
I don't want to keep running a campaign that sales hates and isn't driving any revenue. If you are getting early signs of that, tell me. I'm. Now, the way you deliver, it might suck. And we could talk about that. But, like, I also will tell you, because you're telling me, like, hey, sales is dropping the ball here. Like, right? Like, you wanted to host this dinner in Boston, and the sales team hasn't invited a single person to it. Right.
Adam Goyette [00:30:17]:
And, like, we have this booked and paid for. And so I think you open yourself up to have those conversations and push it back. And that's a healthy relationship when you can have those.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:25]:
I love that. So for people listening, like, you got to take on that attitude. That. And you can hear it in his voice. I'm just taking notes. You got to take on that attitude as a marketer. You got to take on the, like, I want the feedback. I want the feedback from sales.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:40]:
Do you want the feedback from sales? Do you really? Because I think of it as, like, we're making a dish, they're selling that dish, someone's eating that food, and they're like, I'm not eating this, or I'm not even going to present it to somebody. Wouldn't you want to know? Because everything is a waste. The stuff that you shop for was a waste. The grocery list was a waste of you taking the time out of your day to go shopping. You cooking, the prep, all that stuff was a waste. Right? Let's. There's so many things that you guys want us to do. There's a hundred channels.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:10]:
You want us to. I want to know what's not working so we can stop doing that.
Adam Goyette [00:31:13]:
Yep.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:13]:
Same way I want to know, you know, a huge question that comes up in our community, Adam, is like, I feel like I'm create. We create so much damn collateral and content for sales, and they don't use any of it. Right. I've been answering this question all morning. I just did a webinar on this. But I want to hear, since we're riffing on this topic, how would you get at the root cause of that question right there?
Adam Goyette [00:31:34]:
Yes. So my first question would be, did you ask them the content they actually wanted?
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:38]:
Bingo.
Adam Goyette [00:31:39]:
Or are you just creating content? And then the second follow up question would be, how do you plan on using this content? And then I think, part of discussion, if you are doing that work, after the first quarter where they didn't use your first three things, you asked them to create a. You can have a conversation with the sales leader and be like, hey, last quarter, your team demanded we get these. It's been used five times, so we're not going to be creating the next three. Right. Until we actually start seeing usage from these kinds of things. It's a waste of our time. But I think you have to really ask sales, what do they need? And I think a lot of times, I don't know if it's ego or fear. I feel like sales kind of has this vibe where marketers have this fear of sales.
Adam Goyette [00:32:20]:
They're too afraid to talk to them. They're like, I don't know, gonna get beat up or something. It's like, you don't have to be afraid of sales. They might be harsher, and they're more blunt and willing to say things, but, like, you can't be such a flower that you're too afraid to hear that feedback.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:33]:
Well, it's hard. It's human nature. It's like, you know, my daughter makes me a drawing. She's like, do you like this, dad? And obviously, I'm not gonna say no, right? But at work, you're like, this is shit. These leads suck.
Adam Goyette [00:32:46]:
You call this coloring in the line?
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:48]:
Get out of here. Nobody's gonna read this. But at work, it's the same thing. Like, yeah, it's hard, man. We just spent, a videographer on our team just spent 60 hours making five videos, and we put them all up on YouTube, and each one of them has eleven views. Like, that sucks. That sucks to feel that. To feel that waste, right? And it's like, we spent three weeks making a deck for sales that no one has even ever looked at.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:17]:
But you hit on the answers. Like, you got to peel back all the layers and say, like, let's make this together. I was talking this morning and I used the example of my daughter would come home from school and I would take her lunch out of her bag and all of her food would still be in her lunch. I'm like, you didn't eat any of your lunch. And she's like, dad, you packed me all the things that I don't like. I was like, all right, damn it. We're going to go make your lunch together. Let's you pick out, like, let's work on this together.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:41]:
You helped me make your lunch.
Adam Goyette [00:33:43]:
Yep.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:43]:
I'm not going to let you eat, you know, fruit roll ups and everything for lunch. There's some guardrails here, but, like, let's pack a good lunch that you want. Come home the next day, she eats the lunch. Why? Because we made it together. It's the same exact thing. Like, you have to, as a marketer, be like, I'm here to help you close deals.
Adam Goyette [00:33:59]:
Yeah, exactly.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:59]:
Do you have that mindset? I'm here to help you to close deals. What do you need? Okay, cool. Oh, interesting. Yeah, actually, we could give you that. Okay. We need this one pager. And then I've also found that, like, they're going to use way less than they actually need anyway. They don't need 100 unique pieces of content.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:13]:
It's going to be like three or four things that they use all the time.
Adam Goyette [00:34:16]:
Yeah. Marketers have to understand sales is also very reactive. Right? Like the same thing, like you said, it sucks is like, if I just got off two back to back phone calls and they're like, yeah, we're not going to move forward. Like, we weren't that impressed with, like, the customers you already have or the case studies or whatever feedback they get, they probably immediately ping. Marketing is like, we just lost two deals because of this. This is a huge problem. It needs to get addressed ASAP. And it's like, yeah, but those were two deals out of 1000 opportunities we had this quarter, right? It's not that big of a deal.
Adam Goyette [00:34:48]:
And so I think you have to understand. I would always push back and ask for data and say, okay, can you show me the deals that we have in closed because of this or put some of the questions back onto them? What I found is sometimes they just will be like, yeah, you know what? I looked at it. It's not that big of a deal. Or I thought about it more. It's not that big of a deal deal. You can't just react to them either. And so I think that's a big thing. And I think two other things that you touched on is, like, building it with them goes so far.
Adam Goyette [00:35:14]:
Like, you should have them in, like, what would be in this presentation? What would be in this white paper that you want? Like, let's build the outline together. Like, what are the key points we want to touch on to make sure that it's actually, like, what they're looking for? Because I think a lot of times it's like, we need a white paper on this or we need a case study on this, and then you find out the reason sales isn't using it. It's like, well, it sucks. It doesn't actually talk about the things we wanted to talk about. Right. And so they're still, like, not getting it all the way. And then I think the other thing I'll just touch on is, I think you should be beta testing campaigns and things with the sales team still. Right? Like, I would always pick, like, danny reed, who was, like, our best salesperson at g two or someone else, and be like, hey, we want to run this campaign.
Adam Goyette [00:35:55]:
We're going to do, like, a super small batch of leads through it. Can we send them to you to test and figure out, like, is there anything here before we roll it out to the other team? And now you have a champion where it's like, oh, why is he getting this program? Or, why is he getting these leads? I want those leads. They hear one good conversation and it creates this effect where there's actually demand now internally for the things marketing is doing, which is where you want to be.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:18]:
What if I not asked you so far that you want to hit on what's in your wheelhouse right now that we should hit on before we go soon?
Adam Goyette [00:36:24]:
Yeah. I think the big thing I spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about is, I think speed is one of the things, and we talked about it a little bit when we talked about the planning and all that sort of stuff. But I think one of the big things I see consistently is marketers getting hung up in terms of launching things and waiting till it's perfect. And I think it's faulty on so many levels because I think fundamentally, you'll never know it's perfect, and it never will be perfect because v one, whether it takes you six months to build and launch or one week to build and launch, you have to get those learnings. There's no guarantee that my one week version isn't going to outbeat your six month version. We would see this with creative teams where everything has to go through our creative team. And I always say, well, it's a test, and then just hide everything. It's a test.
Adam Goyette [00:37:20]:
It's a test because I don't want to wait to three weeks to get an ad creative that I don't even know if it's going to work. I don't even know it's the right audience. We just want to launch something fast. And so I think hiding things under the idea of a test, which it is, helps you move a lot faster. And I think back to our point of like, the name of the game to me is like iterations and speed and how quickly you can get better. Because the same thing we talked about earlier where it's like company a does eight new tests in a month or a year and company b does 52. Not only have they gotten more channels to understand, they're so much further along in understanding what works, they have such a better handle. If you think back to your event, Dave, that you ran, right, or you're running in Vermont when you do it again next year, you have a bunch of things that you know work already.
Adam Goyette [00:38:13]:
You have these plays and these things of how to build interest and speakers and all these things that you know are going to work well for you because you've done it once already. And so I think getting those learnings helps you so much understand what moves your actual buyers and what gets them to take action. And I think that's a huge unlock for a lot of companies they're not tapping into.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:33]:
Yeah, I love that. And just going back to like, customer driven insights, you know, that is kind of like the whole game. And, you know, I've made a living basically from listening to gong calls and being active on social media and understanding that content flywheel. And so at the companies I've been at, I'm not an SEO expert, I'm not an ABM expert, but I'm very good at content and audience building and understanding the audience of that company and that content. And so it's like, oh, how can a conversation on a podcast give me two ideas for next week's webinar? And then I'm on a webinar and like, oh, I see chat light up. This is the stuff that you don't get in a spreadsheet with data, right? I see chat light up. When we talked about a certain thing, oh, man, we should really go and do something like that. Oh, that's how we bridge the gap to find buyers, by the way.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:21]:
It's like marketing is this game of, like, giving people what they want and building a relationship, getting them to know, like, and trust you so they will buy from you. What we have available to us with digital marketing today because of content, because of social media, because of the open web, because of being able to record calls on tools like gong and listen them, is like, customers are basically telling us what they want. Yup, not always directly. Sometimes there's the literal version of, like, on a gong call, this customer says, I wish your product did x. But there could also be the other example, which is like you find some subreddit about some niche topic that you're interested and you're like, huh, all these people are kind of interested in this. I bet we could go and create something for them. Like, all of the signals are out there today. Marketers of, like, you know, 60, 70 years ago would kill to have the data and information that we have today.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:14]:
How can you use that? The challenge is exactly what you said, though. Can you move fast with those insights? Can you be okay with shipping something that's not perfect? Can you send out an email to get a signal? You know, when I first started talking about our event, we actually hadn't even committed to doing it yet. But I'm fortunate to have an audience on LinkedIn. We have a large email list. We started talking about the event, and more than enough people that we already would have had seats for any were like, if you do an event, I'm in. So that de risked the whole thing. So it's like, okay, let's go do an event. And that's huge.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:46]:
And, yeah, obviously not every company is going to have that type of audience, but you can find small little pockets and I think that's what's really fun about marketing to me.
Adam Goyette [00:40:53]:
Yeah, I think, like pre launch, I love the idea of pre launching stuff. We do that a lot for companies and stuff where it's like, hey, before we spend three months developing this free tool or whatever, why don't we just create a waitlist for it and announce that we're doing this? If we have four people who sign up and that's it, then let's just tell those four people, oh, for reasons, whatever, we decided not to move forward or just don't do it, and now you just save so much time and all this effort on something that's like, nobody was going to engage with this, right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:21]:
And so, yeah, totally. Like, or do, you know, maybe you want to do a dinner, right? Dinner is a great play for, like, one of these enterprise companies. Right, great. There's no cost to trying to do the dinner. Yeah, try to set it up. Can you get 15 interesting people together in New York? Okay, we tried. We got three responses. Well, they don't do the dinner.
Adam Goyette [00:41:42]:
Exactly.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:43]:
You're just finding these little pockets. So what new things are interesting to you? So you're, you seem to be a guy, you know, you're in the growth space. You're pushing your team and people you work with to try new ideas. Obviously, I know we're, you know, time that some of this stuff is timeless. The strategy stuff is going to keep coming back around, even in a world of AI. But what new stuff is interesting to you?
Adam Goyette [00:42:03]:
Yeah, I'm super interested in how people are trying to build out outbound engines, automated outbound, all the signals we are getting now, there's tons of data signals coming in now. I feel like with people tracking buyers on their website and then running all these automated campaigns and messaging through AI. And I think it's a super interesting concept to me because it's basically you're trying to build out an engine using all this data and insights. And I don't think anyone's nailed it perfectly yet, but I think it's one of those things where at some point it will probably get there. And so I think, like, I play around a lot with like, new tech all the time just to see like, what's interesting to me. And so there's a few tools.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:49]:
Are there any tools specifically that you plan that you're playing around with right now that are interesting?
Adam Goyette [00:42:53]:
So one tool that's really cool is Sybil. It's like a call recorder, similar to like gong and stuff, but it uses AI and it does like a transcript for you in terms of like, here's Dave's pain points, here's the things Dave cared about. It'll create a to do list for you. It integrates with Slack, so it'll just push your to do list right into Slack. And so I'm really interested in that in terms of like, give you sentiment and all these kinds of things. And also creates, uses AI to create follow up emails off the conversation. So super cool because it doesn't get you 100% of the way there, but if I click generate email, it creates a draft for me that's 80% of the way there and then I can just clean it up and send it out. And so that's been a super interesting tool to play around with.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:35]:
I love that everybody's like, there's two camps. There's either people who want to automate who are like, this AI is the greatest thing ever. It's going to help marketers so much. And there's like, no, I hate this. So never replace humans. And I think what you said is a really important nuance to you there. You're like, it's getting me to 80%. I'm still going to hop in and, like, add the real touch to it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:52]:
But, like, this week, I needed to set up a new landing page for a webinar that we're doing. And I was sitting there and I was like, man, I got to write this. I got nothing today. I was like, oh, oh, no, no. I got chat GPT. So I went into chat GPT. I gave the webinar the details. I said, hey.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:10]:
And I have chat GPT set up with, like, custom instructions so it knows what I do for work, the business, whatever. I said, hey, we're doing a webinar on June 25 with this company called Nac. They do their email design tool. The speakers on the webinar are me, this guy Jay, this guy Pierce. Here are their bios. We want to do email teardowns. We want to get people to submit their emails, blah, blah, blah. I just bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:32]:
And then I said, can you write me up a webinar copy? 2 seconds back, writer's block solved. Now, did I just take that copy and paste it and use it? No, I like, nah, this kind of sucks. This is really corny the way this was written. I'm going to rewrite it, but, like, in five minutes, I'm able to create landing page copy that. In the past, I would have, like, blocked half a day. Like, I got a bang out half a day of landing page copy. I think those use cases are really, really interesting to me.
Adam Goyette [00:44:58]:
Yeah, there's some other interesting ones in the growth space, too. Like, optio is a company. They can sit on top. You can connect your Google Adwords accounts into it, and, like, we're Bing ad accounts, and they can basically read your data. And then they make recommendations on your ad account. So they might say, like, hey, you spent $50 on this keyword and you've driven zero conversions off of it. You want to add to your negative keyword list, or they'll say, like, hey, you're under bidding on this keyword. Do you want to make some adjustments? So it's basically like digesting what you would manually do in Adwords.
Adam Goyette [00:45:30]:
And so it's not going to help you get adwords up and running and define maybe your keywords, but, like, once you're there, it's a really cool tool that I think help you try to figure out how do I optimize this just on a regular basis? And same thing, they have a generator in there. So it's like, generate me ten headlines. Every person who's ever run an Adwords campaign knows the pain when you go in and it's like, okay, add your ten headlines and you're like, okay, in your 30 versions of the copy. And now with the responsive ads, just pulling it all in makes it really easy to just give you. Like you said, okay, it generates me ten headline ideas. I'll go in and tweak them and change some of the words around to make it sound more like I would want, but it quickly generates those for me versus me being like, what's another way I could say, like, grow your revenue?
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:18]:
Yeah, I think that's huge. And especially, like, in marketing, we're so often repeating the same where, like, half of the job in marketing is, like, to say the same thing in a different way.
Adam Goyette [00:46:26]:
Yeah, exactly.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:28]:
And that's exactly where, like, AI can be really great. All right, Adam, good to see you, man. Good to hang out with you. I got a bunch of notes. Go to LinkedIn. Connect with Adam. Follow him. There he is, founder of Growth union.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:39]:
They help b two b SaaS companies scale fast and efficiently. I like the way he thinks about marketing. I hope we could give you some ways to help you break through the little funk you might be in right now. Get smarter about strategy. Think like a marketing leader. My number one quote from today is that it's not dead, it's just harder. And I think if you know that challenge, you can be set up for success. So, Adam, good to see you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:02]:
Go enjoy the rest of your evening over there in the UK, and I'll talk to you soon.
Adam Goyette [00:47:05]:
All right, thanks, Dave.