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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 3,500+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
1234. Exit. Exit, exit. All right, Matt, first of all, what do you. 2 hours ago, we sent out the first email for events, for tickets. What's your reaction, my friend?
Matt Carnevale [00:00:24]:
It's. It's crazy, really.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:26]:
Does the legend of exit five continue to grow in our minds?
Matt Carnevale [00:00:30]:
Yeah, absolutely. It's like, what are we, like, close to, like 40% sold out in 2 hours? I mean, that's just nuts. Like, I'm staring at the Slack channel. It's like every sale is like a drug. It's like, give me more.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:42]:
I know. And the last week we recorded it was after the rebrand, and it was like, we just refresh that all day. This is nuts.
Matt Carnevale [00:00:50]:
It is nuts. It's a lot of stuff going on, but all good. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:54]:
So we send an email. So last. Last week, we posted a waiting list and there was like, 240 people on the waiting list. We have 150 tickets that we can sell. We sent out an email to the waiting list and to existing members because we, you know, it is about the community. And so we wanted them to be the first to get a crack at tickets. And then the existing members also got a discount. So we're a couple hours in tomorrow.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:19]:
We're supposed to announce it publicly. It'll be cool to see when we wake up tomorrow if the thing that I'm writing on LinkedIn is going to be the event is sold out. Holy cow. Or, like, there's a couple tickets remaining, but based on this pace, I think that will be sold out in the next two days at least.
Matt Carnevale [00:01:36]:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And by time people are listening to this, we would have been, well sold out, that's for sure.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:43]:
Yeah. All right, what should we talk about today?
Matt Carnevale [00:01:46]:
No, us. That they. They booked a ticket. They want to come from Sydney, Australia. I don't know if you saw that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:53]:
I did shout out, Axel. I saw that and I said, that's amazing that he wants to come from Sydney.
Matt Carnevale [00:02:00]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:01]:
But I also need him to either decide to decide to come or give up the ticket, because someone's going to want it. So if you bought a ticket, you got to come. That's the catch. But that would be amazing to be.
Matt Carnevale [00:02:15]:
Like Taylor Swift concert tickets. People are going to buy them and then they're just going to go resell them for like, $1,000.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:21]:
There'll be a black market for exit five event tickets.
Matt Carnevale [00:02:24]:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Cool. So, yeah, why don't we get into some inside exit five this week?
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:31]:
All right, I'm ready.
Matt Carnevale [00:02:32]:
All right, so the first one, Craig, in our community asked, where are the best places to put online reviews? And what are some strategies for asking for online reviews? And I could start this one if you'd like, because I actually used to work for a company that did reputation management for small businesses. So not the same as what Craig was talking about, but for me, like a couple, couple pointers on online reviews, the best place to get reviews. For me, it's like wherever your competitors are. So if all your competitors are on g two, to me, that seems like the most logical place to put some online reviews. But you also can have multiple places to put reviews on. So let's say g two is like the primary platform you want to get reviews on. But there's also competitors. On Capterra or Trustpilot, you can do like a three step sequence over a couple months.
Matt Carnevale [00:03:27]:
So in the first month when they're really happy with your product or service, you can ask for a review on g two, but then two months later you can ask for Capterra, and two months later you could ask for Trustpilot. So you could actually ask in multiple places. And if people are happy, they will do it, but always have that one that you're prioritizing. And then another thing that a lot of people were asking about is, like, if they can incentivize for reviews. And from what I understand, this is actually malpractice on all review platforms, like telling people you'll give them a $25 gift card if they leave you a positive review. So that's absolutely something you shouldn't do because if you get caught, all your reviews can get stripped away from you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:03]:
Oh, interesting. I know that now, but I had to be refreshed on that. Yes. So you can't incentivize reviews.
Matt Carnevale [00:04:11]:
Yeah, you can incentivize. No. So that's why the best thing is you actually have to find a time when customers are at peak happiness and ask then. And that's difficult to do because you don't always know unless you manually sift through some customers. But some things you can do, for example, which I've seen work really well, are people will ask, we'll send it a mass NP's survey, and then they'll only choose the people that are like seven and above, and they'll send those people a review request. So that's a way that you can. It's called gating your reviews. So you're like preemptively asking if people are happy, and then if they are, you ask them for the review.
Matt Carnevale [00:04:45]:
So you almost guarantee positive reviews yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:48]:
It'S like sometimes I'll be using like an app on my phone and it will say like, are you happy with this app? And I'll be like, yes. And then it's like, great. Do you want to leave a review? And I'm like, no, I don't want to leave a review.
Matt Carnevale [00:04:58]:
Exactly. And if you say no, they're like, oh, what can we do better?
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:01]:
Right.
Matt Carnevale [00:05:01]:
They're not going to ask you for a review then.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:02]:
So, yeah, that's great. That's really helpful. The companies I've been at or talked to or whatever, I feel like it's almost, it's harder that there's multiple review sites because I feel like if you try to focus on like, basically like you, you say like, let's focus on g two. And we want all of our reviews to be on g two. But then organically you get like seven reviews on trust radius and then like two of them are not good. And then you're like, ah, we that shows up high in search. Like, what do we do? We want to be there. So do you have to play the game and like try to be in all those places? I feel like that's hard to do versus pick one site and be like, we're just going to push everyone to review on g two as an example.
Matt Carnevale [00:05:40]:
I don't think you have to play the game, but if you think of somebody searching best b two b marketing communities in 2024 and Trustradius has the highest SEO value and they're showing up the top of every chart and we're not even on that listing, then that's going to hurt us negatively. So I think you just have to play it by like, you know, what's the most popular, but I don't think it hurts to set up a profile in multiple places. If you're getting a lot of negative reviews on one of the platforms and maybe the strategy is to direct some of your reviews to those platforms to drown out all the negative ones.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:15]:
Yep. I also think one of the things there, so like what should you do with the reviews? Where should you put them? We talk about this often, like social proof is the best marketing that you have. And so I think you could have a dedicated page on your website for like examples, but I also think they should just be, it should just be good marketing. It should just be sprinkled in. Whether you're b two b services website, a software company or restaurant, you should have proof sprinkled into all of your marketing. And so like that means reviews. People want to hear from other people what their experience was using the product. And so, like, I kind of read that question as like, well, there's not just like one place.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:52]:
It has to just, it's just good marketing and it should just be integrated into everything that you're doing.
Matt Carnevale [00:06:58]:
Yeah, exactly. I'm not an SEO pro, but I know there's a lot of widgets online that you can use that'll funnel reviews from multiple sites onto a widget on your website. And it's something that Google really likes, apparently, from an SEO perspective. It shows them that, like, you know, you're a trusted, trusted person, especially if they're Google reviews, which they won't always be. But that's another one where it's like, you can use a widget to put reviews onto your site.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:23]:
Also, reviews are a tough one, really, because I feel like we, we want to say, like, as a mark marketing advice, we want to be like, how do we get more reviews and how do we incent, how do we use them more? And it's kind of like the real answer is, like, to have a good product.
Matt Carnevale [00:07:39]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:41]:
And it's just funny because I asked for, I actually don't do this that much because I don't really care. But, like, you know how, like, it's a common podcasting strategy to be like, ask, push for reviews. Like, I just, I just don't want to do that. Like, I know I listen to, there's podcasts that I listen to and they're like running these little contests and they're like, leave us a review. Like, you know, these reviews really matter. Like, I know that. I just, God, I've been podcasting for ten years. Like the whole, like, if people are going to leave a review, like, if people will want to leave a review, they will do it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:12]:
Have you ever left a review for anything?
Matt Carnevale [00:08:15]:
If I've been asked multiple times, like, I left one for my physiotherapist the other day and they asked me multiple times and he's like, really good. So I was like, okay, fine, I'll do it because I know it matters. But other than that, no, not really.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:29]:
Right? And so, like, I know that people do review. Like, okay, I'm reading a book right now and I do love going to Amazon and reading reviews of books, right? And I just personally don't leave reviews. And so it's like, I try to have empathy for, like, if I just push everyone, I've never left a review for a podcast, but I've asked people to leave a review and so I think it's good to push for reviews. It's good to ask them. You know, they do matter. I think what happens is like it becomes this game of like your competitors have lots of reviews and you don't have any. And then you're like, ah, shoot. Like we got to kind of play this game.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:01]:
But I like, I think your advice was really, really good, Matt, which is like your advice is basically the way I translate that is like integrate it into something else from your marketing versus like making it a one off, like reviews campaign. Like oh, what a. Would a quarterly NP's survey or some type of feedback survey be useful data for us? Yes. Okay. Are we going to find out which people are happy through this? Yes. Could we then ask those happy people like, hey, by the way, like it would mean a lot if you left a review that then do that, right?
Matt Carnevale [00:09:30]:
Yeah, exactly. I think that's the only way to do it. The one off is good for that one little quick hit. But then it's like, how about the next 20? 3100 customers, right? So yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:40]:
Good answer.
Matt Carnevale [00:09:42]:
Cool. Next topic is team composition. So I think you would responded in on this one, but someone was asking about what the makeup of their team should be. You know, they were saying they have a budget north of half a million dollars. You know, and we're essentially asking what are the best? You know, what kind of roles should they be hiring for? How should they build a team? I think you have more experience there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:06]:
Yeah. So. Hmm. This is a tricky one because I feel like this is one of the situations where we like to. It's easy to default to benchmarks and to be like, well, this other company has this much revenue and this many employees and they have their team structured like that. And I think that's a tough game to play because there's so much nuance and the variables are so different, like who you can attract from a talent standpoint, the budget that you have, the industry you're in. There's a lot of nuance who just happens to be available so often. It's like, oh, well, this person in our network worked for this CEO at her last company and she happened to be available and her thing was demand gen and so she joined first.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:49]:
And so that's why we have that. You know what I'm trying to articulate, like, it's not this perfect science. And one of the things that I really learned a lot from working at drift with David and Elias, those guys was like, they made it up based on what the business needed. And instead of worrying about like, well, we need a product marketing manager who does this, and we need a demand gen person who does this, they pushed me to really just think more about the functions of the business and the goals of the business and what are we trying to accomplish. And at one time, we were trying to really make a push in video, and so we went and hired a video person, and we figured out which team they were going to be on later. It was like, let's solve that function. Also, somebody's got to manage people, and people have to report to each other, and there has to be some structure. And so I think we often get caught up on who needs to report to who versus this might be Dave.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:42]:
Dave is the team leader. It's not really this perfect thing, but he's going to own this and this and this. As an example, at my last company privy, where I was CMO when I hired Dan, you know Dan now, he's kind of like a jack of all trades, right? He's just like a figure it out guy. And we had already had someone really strong on demand Gen. I would have hired Dan to do demand Gen, even though he didn't have deep experience there. I think he would have figured out. But the two other teams that we needed to have were product marketing and brand were product marketing, brand marketing and partner marketing. And so I hired Dan and was like, you, you're responsible for these three functions and that's how the team got assembled.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:24]:
Verse like if we had laid out, okay, we have product marketing, let's hire a person for that. We have partner, let's hire a person for that. I think you really gotta. This is, this is a fun part about team building. I think to me is like, it's the closest you're ever gonna get to like, building a sports team. And you have a budget and you gotta see who's available and who you can afford and who can actually work to you and work with you and which people are gonna mesh. And so I don't have like a perfect answer on like, here's how you should structure your team. I would just push you to, like, not focus on the benchmarks, not look@traditional.org charts.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:58]:
Really think about what are the goals of your team right now and what is the strategy? What do you need to solve and then let things evolve. Like, if we keep growing, exit five at this rate and we build a team, Matt, do you think you're going to be like solo community manager forever? No. You're going to keep growing and rising and different things are going to come pop up and you're going to have the opportunity to take on another channel, another team. I think you have to have a lot of flexibility. Now, this is different at like, if you're LinkedIn and you have a 500 person or 300 person marketing team or whatever, then, like, there's going to be more structure there. But I think especially in the earlier days, you gotta, gotta be more fluid with it and you gotta focus more on the strategy and, like, think about jobs to be done. What jobs do you need to be done and who's going to do them then? Like who? You know, this perfect, this perfect team structure anyway.
Matt Carnevale [00:13:51]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:52]:
What's your reaction to that? To my rant on that?
Matt Carnevale [00:13:55]:
I agree. I agree. I like the line of, like, it's about doing what the business needs first and to think from a first principles perspective. Like, even for myself and exit five, I know we're different than some other companies, but originally you and Dan hired me to do social and community, and then that did we.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:15]:
What year was that? Was that this year?
Matt Carnevale [00:14:18]:
It's all the way back in 2023.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:20]:
When was that? I don't remember.
Matt Carnevale [00:14:23]:
Yeah, social community. And then it was like, okay, now you're a marketing manager doing, you know, a bunch of different marketing things, content, et cetera. Now it's like going back to focus more in community, but still doing some other stuff. So it's like, I've just been pretty fluid in what the business needs, and you guys have done a good job of just letting me go through that process. But what I really like, too, is like, our content engine does really well. We know that. And for us, we just looked at it and said, okay, like, you know, we don't have anyone strictly managing content right now, so maybe it makes sense to hire a content marketing manager. A big part of it, too, is like, we've done the thing already.
Matt Carnevale [00:14:59]:
We've done it well. Proves it could work to some extent. So now we're going to go and hire that person. So I think that's also a great way to approach it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:05]:
Yeah, this is where, like, who you hire and, like, you learn as you go. And so, like, like, we hired you, you're doing a bunch of these things. We've kind of found this pocket of, like, where you're going to focus, but at the same time, we're hiring a content person now. But you're totally, you've been an amazing teammate and, like, you're totally fine with, like, some, I've worked with some people in the past, and it's like the second that they find out that we're going to hire a content person, like, they start slipping on all the other stuff. Like, you're still managing the podcast, you're still managing the newsletter, you're still managing social. This just says a lot about, like, the type of person that you are. And these are the people that you want to surround yourself with from teammates where you're not like, oh, all right, then I'm just going to let this go because someone else like that shows me that you really care about this business. You feel like an owner in this business.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:52]:
You want to see the business win. And now, like, I wrote about this yesterday on LinkedIn, actually, which is like every, anytime I've made a bad hiring decision, whether a person or an agency, every mistake I've made, hiring agency people, full time people on the team or whatever it's been, because we didn't do parts of that job first, right? Like, look at how, look at how deep Dan has gone in on, like, events, right? Setting up drive. Now, if we do want to hire a full time events person, like, even if that person fails, I would feel better about making that investment because, like, we kind of know what to expect. We've done a little bit. We can ask better questions. And so in this example, you've been doing a lot of the content stuff. Now we're going to, like, take away those legos, give them to somebody else, and then, like, hopefully we can find someone who's like, what you've done for that space and we're going to continue to grow. But you haven't been like, no, that's not my job.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:43]:
Or taking it personally that, like, we're going to find a content person. There's just so much toxic nonsense. And so, like, again, this is nuance. That is another important ingredient to, like, figuring out how we're going to grow the team, right? You've basically done five parts of marketing to now double down on one or two, and then we're going to go, like, find somebody else so we can grow in that area. I think a lot of that, a lot of that matters. And then the design is just like, man, you don't know who's going to be. Who can you get? Like, who can you hire? Who can you get? Who can you afford? Which person is going to mesh with your team? I mean, I wrote about how we're going to be hiring a content person. I have so many DM's from people who amazing, like, top a level talent in this b two b marketing space that are messaging me.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:29]:
But then I also know that, like, ah, that person's amazing. But, like, I don't. I don't think they would mesh with us. I don't think that's the right person. And so there's a lot of. There's a lot of nuance there, too.
Matt Carnevale [00:17:38]:
Yeah. Yeah, I like that one. Yeah. Another thing that. That made me think of is, like, even as a team leader, I think sometimes people will hire a specialist and then be like, great. That person owns it now. It's off my plate. Like, you're the owner, so all the results are on you, and it's like you're just leaving that person out to drive from the jump.
Matt Carnevale [00:17:57]:
One thing that I liked about you and Dan was, like, even as I started to take things off your plate, like, you still remained somewhat involved, which made it a lot easier for me. From the perspective of someone who's not managing someone right now, it's really great when my manager does not just totally step away the second I start owning something and make it a bit more gradual and help them along the way. No matter how senior you are or they are, it doesn't matter.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:21]:
Yeah, it was interesting. And Jason Lemkin talked about this. I can't remember if it was in our conversation or something else that I listened to him talk about, but he said that he really wanted to be the fully hands off. Don't be a micromanager. And that's the only way you survive and scale. And there's some truth to that. But he said one of those mistakes he made in the early days of saster was actually being too hands off and fully just being like, yep, I hired Matt. I don't know, figure it out.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:49]:
And I think initially, when you and Dan started, I think I kind of, like, was going down that path, and now I realize that, like, I'm better if I can, like, go deep in something. And so, like, you'll see this from me. Now, I'm not always in the weeds, but I might hop in for a minute. Like, you know, over the weekend, I went, I'll go, like, I'll go on a spur, and you'll see this from me in slack. Like, I'll go on a spur, and I'll be, like, in the community, and I'll be like, Matt, does this work? Is this thing wrong? Check this out.
Matt Carnevale [00:19:16]:
And.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:16]:
And I'm not, like, checking your work. It is just me just going in and just, like, seeing things through my eyes. And then, like, none of it is a quiz, but me saying those things to you and then, like, how you respond, it's never a test, but I do learn a lot from how you respond. You're like, oh, interesting. Yeah, I gotta look into that. Or like, yes, I've thought about that, but don't worry about it because, like, this is more important. Like, that's how I check a lot of boxes. And so I think that that's like, the role for me in running this business is to, like, be, I forget what the saying is, but, like, you're, you're like a little bit deep in all of the different areas.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:52]:
You know, it can't run like that. Like, I can't be rely. And we've gotten to a better place. We've gotten a really good place where now we're like, for example, if you share something, right, you're not waiting on me to ship it, you're gonna give me some time to respond. And if I don't, you're gonna ship it. And then we can, I can give feedback later. That's like the perfect position to be in, but I can also hop in and go really deep and give feedback. And I think that's the right working relationship right now.
Matt Carnevale [00:20:18]:
Yeah, I agree. And if you want a team to move fast, inevitably there's going to be some things that the individual might miss or could have done better or should think about next time. So you going in is great because it just helps me get better for next time. But it should never be from the manager's perspective. Like, you should have done this, you should have done that. Especially if you're giving them like 1020 things in their plate. Like, there's going to be some areas where they're, you know, they maybe didn't do everything that they could have, but if you give them the right feedback the next time, they will.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:46]:
Yeah. And look, I'm sharing all of this right now from the perspective of, like, running our three person company. The biggest team I've ever had is 30 people. I'm sure the answer is different if you are the CMO of a hundred person marketing. But even still, I find that in those orgs, like the people that I talked to, like Tom Wentworth, for example, I don't know how many marketers they have on that team. Maybe 30, 40. They're like a $250 million revenue company. He's like, no, I'm still in HubSpot every day.
Matt Carnevale [00:21:19]:
Love that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:19]:
And I think he's like, I need that. I need to be involved at that level. So I think that's pretty unique. But it's weird. It's the hardest I've struggled with that scaling as a manager. The level of. The level of being hands off, because also you can't. Your brain does not function if you try to be involved in everything.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:37]:
And you need to give your team autonomy, but you also need to know what's going on. It's weird. It's like you own a store. You need to pace up and down and understand which products are on the aisles and how everything works. But you can't possibly know, like, what's the skew and how many. It's a challenging thing, so.
Matt Carnevale [00:21:53]:
Yeah, totally.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:55]:
We haven't sold a ticket in 18 minutes. I'm starting to get worried. I just looked at slack.
Matt Carnevale [00:22:00]:
Holy shit.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:00]:
We haven't said the last ticket was purchased at 344. It's now 04:02. Should I call Dan?
Matt Carnevale [00:22:05]:
Do we need to send the alert LinkedIn post? I think we should start running an ad to everyone in b two B marketing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:12]:
I was so mad at him before because he told me to go to Hula. He's like, we need you to go down there and film a video. And I did. And then he wasn't even going to use the damn email. The damn video. And I'm like, no, you better. You need to use. He's like, no, we don't want to use it now.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:24]:
I'm like, yes, the email to the waiting list is exactly when we should use the video because those are the people that we want to buy the tickets. And it's like this nice personalized video.
Matt Carnevale [00:22:33]:
Exactly.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:34]:
I edited it myself. Shout out to Capcut. Tim Davidson will be a fan. I sat on a bench outside and I edited that video. And that's what it is.
Matt Carnevale [00:22:43]:
I know. That's funny. When he was like, no, we'll use it for the next email.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:46]:
No, no, no. What do you mean? You made me go down there. I took an hour out of my day to go down there today.
Matt Carnevale [00:22:52]:
That was funny. I know. And the tickets may not even be available in the next email, so I'm glad we used it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:57]:
No. And the. The event is. The vent space is called Hula.
Matt Carnevale [00:23:00]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:01]:
And thank goodness. Talking about being in and out. He sends the faq copy. He's calling it the hula. What is that? The hula, Dan, give me a break.
Matt Carnevale [00:23:12]:
Oh, man.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:13]:
What else? Anything else on the docket?
Matt Carnevale [00:23:15]:
Yeah, last one. This one should be. Should be right up your alley. Past days, Ali. It's live chat. On your website, is it a good way to get more leads, increase conversions? How would you help someone think through live chat?
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:28]:
I have no idea. No idea. This is like, this is like asking me about like, my 8th grade girlfriend. Like, I don't like, that was a lifetime ago. I have no opinions about live chat. Honestly. I'm trying to give you the like, I think people like that. People want to ask me to ask because I worked at drift and we, we pioneered that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:49]:
I don't, I don't have a strong opinion on this anymore. I think there's so many tools that you can evaluate that can do so many things. And should you use live chat? I don't know. What is the strategy? To me, that's like, should you be on TikTok? I don't know. I've actually thought about this and like, we should have some type of chat on our site. We get a thousand questions via support, but that's a, that's a different thing. Do you have an opinion on this?
Matt Carnevale [00:24:12]:
Well, so I started my career in sales, and at the moment when I was transitioning from sales to marketing in the same company, they had put me on managing the chat bot because we would get some inbound from there. And I think it can do. If you're getting a lot of demo requests or emails from people asking about your pricing or services, then I think it's a natural thing to add. But if you just have a super low conversion rate and you're not getting a lot of interest on your site, adding a chatbot I don't think is going to do much for you. It's probably just going to add another task for someone on your team to manage, because someone on your team is then going to have to go and manage that thing. So in a lot of cases, I don't think it's the answer. I think it can be, but I don't think it is.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:59]:
I will say, though, I do feel like there's going to be, and I'm not familiar with a lot of companies in the space, but I think the opportunity is ripe right now given how good AI has gotten. Like, the idea of a virtual, of an assistant on the website, helping navigate the website is real and very powerful. And so, like, you know, if that's an faq, whether it's faqs or getting answers or help or whatever, I think the idea makes a ton of sense verse if you go back to the just the traditional way, which is fill out a form and wait for a response, if you can chat right now on the website and get help from someone. And it doesn't have to be, you know, maybe it's staffed by a human. If the math works out there for you, I know it's very helpful. Like, for the. Some of the tools that we use. Even if it's just like transistor for hosting our podcast.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:48]:
If I have to write in and ask them a question, if they're there, that's more support inside of the app. But I do think it makes sense. Just like, it comes back to the, like, who's going to do it? Is it going to be someone going to do it? Okay. No, we can't have somebody do. Okay, then is the AI, and then is the content you feed it going to be good enough to give people answers then? I think that can make a ton of sense. But again, I really do feel like you can use any marketing tool. Like, you could make the case that we should have billboards for exit five. We could.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:17]:
We could spend 40 minutes talking about the pros and cons of doing that. Right?
Matt Carnevale [00:26:21]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:22]:
What's the strategy?
Matt Carnevale [00:26:23]:
Agreed.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:24]:
Where does it fit?
Matt Carnevale [00:26:25]:
Amazing. That's all? That's all for today.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:28]:
All right, so by the time this podcast goes out, drive is going to be sold out. I guarantee it. If it's not, I will film myself doing a cold plunge in Lake Champlain, and I will pay my own money to fly 50 podcast listeners to the event. All right? How's that?
Matt Carnevale [00:26:49]:
Might need to edit this one out.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:52]:
That would be a bummer if we just stall out at 46 tickets. Like, it was just like, such a hot start. But now we're just. We're just stuck here. Here we are.
Matt Carnevale [00:27:02]:
We hyped it up too much. Who knows what the gods are planning?
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:05]:
We don't know. We don't know. So the event. So we got the exit. We got the exit five event. It's called drive. September 11 and 12th in Burlington, Vermont. If for whatever reason, it's not sold out, you can go exit five.com drive.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:20]:
Check it out. Use my promo code. Now. There's no. There's no discount. There's no discount. You get a discount if you're a member. If you're an existing exit five member, you get a discount.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:27]:
Exit five.com drive. You can continue to listen to this podcast, Matt, we talked about reviews today. You could, you know, let's give a push. Send a review. Matt, we're going to give Matt $1 for every. Every review that gets left for this podcast.
Matt Carnevale [00:27:42]:
My God.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:44]:
What else? We're going to open two new roles soon. We're hiring two new roles, content marketer, marketing coordinator. And we're going to hire, and we're going to continue to grow. We got something really special, and that's purely because of the people that are listening to this podcast. We have an unbelievable community, the people in the community. And I think we have two parts of community. We have the actual community, like in behind the login, that's community. But we also have the podcast listeners, the newsletter subscribers, people on social media, the comments, the feedback, the response we get is amazing from b two b marketers.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:15]:
And so, thank you so much. Keep that coming. I'm having a ton of fun. And, Matt, just to embarrass you in front of everybody else, you have done an amazing job coming in here. And exit five, you work your butt off. You're humble. You are continuing to learn. You just won me over this week because now these, you're all in on community.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:31]:
You're like, reading books about community, listening to podcasts about community. This is what it takes. You gotta find the book called Mastery by Robert Green, and you'll see what it is. But you've done an awesome job, and I've had a blast working with you, so let's keep it going. Thank you for listening to the exit five podcast. We're out of here.
Matt Carnevale [00:28:46]:
All right, thanks.