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This podcast will help you grow your B2B company quarter after quarter—with confidence, clarity, and data-backed decisions.
In each episode, you’ll learn proven strategies, practical frameworks, and first-hand insights from GTM leaders, RevOps pros, and seasoned B2B executives. They’ll walk you through how they use data to set smart targets, forecast accurately, overcome growth plateaus, and build high-performing sales and marketing engines.
You’ll hear stories of real challenges, real results, and the data-driven moves that made all the difference.
The best B2B companies don’t just look at metrics—they use them to take action. Move The Needle will help you do the same.
Ali (00:01.629)
All right, welcome to Move the Needle. Today we're joined by Dave Gerhardt the founder of Exit 5, which is the top community for B2B marketing professionals. Prior to founding Exit 5, Dave was also the VP of marketing and then the chief brand officer at Drift, where his work helped the company achieve a billion dollar exit. Also previously CMO at Privy, which he led towards a hundred million dollar plus exit.
So a lot of great experience there. Dave is also the author of Founder Brand, a frequent podcast guest and speaker. Dave, you're someone I've been really excited to chat with for a while. So welcome to the show.
Dave (00:35.096)
Thank you. That's that's kind of you. It's always more fun to chat with somebody when they want to talk to you.
Ali (00:40.369)
you know what, as the podcast host, I only choose people that I actually want to talk to. Yes, I followed exit five for a while. You guys put out so much great useful content for B2B marketers. So this is a pleasure for me to get to chat with you. I wanted to start by talking about community. Obviously this is core to exit five's offerings and something you talk about a lot.
Dave (00:43.63)
Good. That's how it should be. Heck yeah. Good.
Dave (00:54.892)
Cool, thank you.
Ali (01:04.985)
And you've shared that Exit 5 grew nearly 80 % last year by treating your marketing community like a product. And I wondered if you could talk more about that.
Dave (01:14.796)
Yeah. geez. I always get in trouble when I write things online and then people come back with the statements. Yeah. I mean, so the short answer is, it is our product, right? And so I, what's cool about exit five is that this whole thing kind of started unintentionally. was a marketing, I was a marketing person and I just grew to love marketing. And I found there's this kind of whole sub world of like people sharing about
Ali (01:18.719)
Hahaha
Dave (01:43.21)
sharing what you're doing with your job online, whether you work in marketing or sales or accounting or gardening, whatever the domain is, if you share that stuff online, you can attract like-minded people. so I started writing about marketing years ago on LinkedIn and I had a podcast and then I happened to work at a company that made marketing software. And so I got even closer to the role of marketer. And along the way, I just, I started to, I launched my own little
private community of marketing people on the side. And it was just, it was called DGMG, Dave Gerhardt Marketing Group. My wife likes to tell me that I'm terrible at naming things and she's right. And I had no plans to like turn it into a real business or a real company. was just, I was a CMO and this was kind of like my sub stack, right? But it was on Patreon. Now sub stack is more popular. It's just a good analogy. And then a couple of years ago we had...
Ali (02:20.775)
That's easy to remember.
Dave (02:38.914)
Basically grown to couple thousand members. had a podcast, we had a newsletter, we had companies wanting to sponsor people asking about doing events. And I had this kind of weird in between year of wandering after those companies that you mentioned in the intro, had some exits. I was doing consulting for a little bit and then the consulting money was really good until 2021. And then the, the Zerp era went away and all these founders that had all this VC money and,
You know, kind of that all dried up and there wasn't a lot of money in consulting. And I realized I had the opportunity to basically burn the boats and try to turn this, this DGMG thing into a real business. And I wanted to basically rebrand it. So it wasn't the, I wasn't the center of it. I had seen other successful communities in the past. I super familiar with, Max ultra ultra Schuller from GTM fund. And he had this company called sales hacker. They sold to outreach back in the way, back in the day.
think Sam Jacobs and Pavilion, they've, they've built a really cool business. And I kind of started to realize that we have that already. We already had product market fit. already had thousands of paying members. We already had a popular podcast. I just had it on under this DGMG brand. And so I wanted to rebrand it to something memorable exit five, hire a team and build from there. so.
Ali (03:40.415)
Mm-hmm.
Dave (03:59.118)
really it was more of this decision of like everything I think in the trajectory of the business now goes back to like the fall of 2023 when I decided to take it from a side project of mine for since dating back to November of 2019. So was that four years and deciding to like hire real people brought on Dan Murphy to be COO brought on a couple other people on the team built a real company. And so the community piece is a part of
the business and so instead of it just treating it like, know, initially with my Patreon thing, was like, if I had an additional thought, I would just kind of go and da da da, you know, I wrote my two minutes on Patreon for the day. But instead we tried to treat it like a real product. We have a product owner, Matt, on our team as the community manager. We have a roadmap, we have features, we have feedback, we do NPS, we have things we want to build. And so just really taking the care to treat it like a real product the last two years as opposed to kind of Dave's side project has been everything.
Ali (04:54.673)
and still run by a pretty small team, right? Team of five or six?
Dave (04:58.958)
Yeah, a team of five or six, although in the age of AI, all of the LinkedIn content and the VCs and everybody will tell you that probably even five people is too many. So it really should just be fire. Everyone knew it should be me and like an, and like a chat to BT or something like that. So I'm very self-conscious about the teams that no, I'm just kidding. Um, it's five, five, five people. So it's a good size for, for where we're at. And, um, most importantly, I'm having a lot of fun and I feel like I've been growing again professionally, which is really cool.
Ali (05:11.977)
Yeah.
That's what they tell us.
Ali (05:27.763)
the best part. From your perspective, what are some of the keys to launching and growing a successful community?
Dave (05:35.372)
Okay, well, we can't answer that question without first peeling back, like, what is the definition of community? And I don't have a perfect definition. I feel like I wrote this down at some point, but I'm not going to try to recite it. Now I have it in like an Apple note because I wanted to try to write a definition for us. Actually, I'm gonna see if I can look it up while we're here because a lot of people ask, you know, obviously I'm a huge thought leader and I'm building community. And that was a joke. You didn't laugh.
Ali (06:02.741)
Yeah.
Dave (06:04.141)
You never know some people think that's funny my team gives me a hard time It's an internal joke and I say it externally like wow, he really is an asshole Yeah, it's okay so so there's like so the community question is interesting because there's like a There's a community which is like a slack group, but you know, have ours is on circle. It could be You know, what's that? could be whatever and then there is community
Ali (06:12.137)
Love it. Thanks for the clarification.
Ali (06:23.839)
Mm-hmm.
Dave (06:32.426)
Like I live in this town in Vermont and there's a local community because we all kind of live in the surrounding area and we want to take care of the land and we pay taxes and we go to the school. And so I think that first question is like, are we talking about, should you build a private, you know, walled community user group place? And I think you can make the case that maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't. Right. But I think the broader thing is like community to me is the most.
one of the most powerful ingredients in marketing, because basically you're tapping into this shared interest. So let's forget about like where it's hosted, what it is, private community, public, whatever actual place somebody goes to log in and more just like, yeah, like dads who run is a community. That doesn't mean that we have a circle product that we're to log in, I think this is what the unique opportunity is from a business standpoint, which is like you're selling, you're selling a product, right? Like you work at data box. How would you describe the product? Like
Ali (07:08.915)
Okay.
Dave (07:30.89)
One or two lines about like the space you play in, data analytics. Okay, business intelligence, perfect. And so there are plenty of people in the world who work in business intelligence. There is probably something that they can rally around that has nothing to do with Data Box, but you can be basically the stewards of that conversation, right? They all go to work every day, they all have problems. You are in the middle of those because you have customers, you know this world really well, know Pete's been working in this industry forever now, like you have all this.
Ali (07:34.909)
Yeah, business intelligence,
Ali (07:49.609)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Dave (08:00.128)
information and knowledge. And so you can basically be the one to host the party and people built that. That's one form of community, right? Another form of community is like, people just love certain products. Like, you know, Strava is a great example of like people who run or bike. They have this great app. You can track your runs that app by nature, by the nature of it has community built in because we're going to be friends. We're going to connect on the app. You're going to see all my details. And then there's the other example, which is like, okay, do we want to build a private?
walled space for people to hang out. And there isn't one really, I can't give you one snippet for social media to answer that question because I think it's kind of like anything in marketing. There's a lot of nuance and I would, I would kind of run down the plays there. And then you look at a company like HubSpot, they built this category of inbound marketing back in the day. They had raving fans and they weren't raving about HubSpot software. It was HubSpot said, Hey, there's this was 2010. Obviously this is all changing now, but
2010, they said, Hey, there's a there's a new way to do marketing. And it's about like creating content that people love and it attracts them to your brand. That was such a powerful message at the time because it was like, I'm one of those marketers. Like I love writing. love creating content. I'm not in it for all the outbound and ads and all that stuff. And so yeah, like I like I rock with HubSpot. That's cool.
Ali (09:04.905)
Mm-hmm.
Dave (09:19.468)
I was a fan of them for 15 years before ever buying their product, but I was a fan. They, you know, they, told me this mission, this, kind of vision that they had about inbound marketing. And I, I would consider myself a community member of HubSpot despite the fact that I never logged into a community. So that's, that's not an answer. That's me trying to explain all of the nuance there. And I'm happy to jump in into it from there. And then I'm assuming most of the audience of this is, is in B2B. I think what's cool about B2B is the opportunity is that like we're
Ali (09:34.291)
Right, yeah. Yeah, I love it.
Dave (09:49.644)
The opportunity from a company standpoint is to help people do their jobs better. And I believe that like knowledge and expertise and education is the best ingredients for successful B2B marketing. You have to have a great product. You have to have a product that works and people want to use and love and enjoy. But if you can create content and education around the bigger problem that you're trying to solve, help me as a salesperson, help me as a marketer. That is how you build
Ali (10:13.589)
Mm-hmm.
Dave (10:17.816)
That is how you build community and ideally when you build community, you build loyalty, trust, affinity, so that when somebody has the time and place, when they're ready to buy that product, gonna, they might not necessarily always buy you, but they're gonna put you first on the shopping list.
Ali (10:34.547)
Yeah. That makes sense. I like that you covered the whole spectrum there of different ways to think about community. And I would imagine if a company is not doing a good job building that broadest definition of community, stewarding good conversations, attracting people to the story and the point of view that you have, then there's really no point in jumping to trying to build a walled or a paid community because you haven't done groundwork first.
Dave (10:58.77)
Absolutely. I love that. I like the way you reframe that because that to me is where all of this starts, right? And I think I get a lot of questions about how to build a community because that's the business and the world that I've happened to be in, but I'm not an expert. I'm not an expert in this. didn't, I don't have an opinion like every company because I have a private community with exit five. I think everybody often thinks that like my point of view is like every company should have a private community. And it's like, no.
Ali (11:08.885)
Mm-hmm.
Dave (11:24.076)
You actually shouldn't because what happens is like most often like all communities, my biggest fear with exit five and I'm, you eventually every community goes to, goes to zero at some point because it just becomes spam. just becomes noise or the community starts off strong. You, you want to launch a community at data box and you know, you hire, and this is no disrespect to you all. This is just how this usually happens. And I'm just using, I like to speak with examples. You know, you hire Pete's 22 year old niece to like manage the community.
Ali (11:51.188)
Ha ha!
Dave (11:53.486)
and it's a slack group and like it starts off nice but then like after kind of four weeks it just ends up being like people promoting their own blog posts in there and so I don't think that every company should have a community at all. We got into this because I think it's a unique business opportunity that we got in where like I had 2000 subscribers on Patreon.
Ali (12:01.033)
Yeah.
Dave (12:13.998)
A member of mine, Henry Johnson, messaged me one day and he's like, hey man, it's cool to listen to you, but like, since there's 2000 of us in there, like, how about you let us all talk to each other? And I was like, oh, yeah, that's genius, dude. And so we added that, we added the community from that standpoint. So I don't feel strongly. In fact, I actually would probably recommend most people don't. And I think instead most people focus on what you talked about in the beginning of that question, which is like, let's focus on like,
Ali (12:14.271)
Good man.
Dave (12:43.246)
Let's just take a level up from where our product is. Like if we're DataBox and we are business intelligence, like we want the people who work in business intelligence to spend their time with us. How do we get them to do that? Well, it's not going to be about talking about the features and all the nonsense in DataBox. It's going to be like, well, what do BI folks care about? What do they do? You know, they have their own language. They have their own humor. What we're seeing with Exit 5 is like beyond all the marketing stuff that we're talking about, it's like people want work friends, virtually even, right?
because nobody else, like none of my dad friends care about that B2B marketing. They do not care. No, it's very surprising, right? I just tell people I work in the internet. But we have 6,500 people inside of Exit 5 who do care deeply about B2B marketing. So what's cool is like, it kind of flips the conversation. So now it's like, oh, you know, this is Charlie.
Ali (13:19.605)
Yeah. Really? Oh, that's such a shame.
Ali (13:26.815)
There you go.
Ali (13:32.693)
Yeah.
Dave (13:40.152)
Charlie is VP of marketing at this AI company. Charlie also likes to run. Charlie also has three kit. Now we're building a friend. So it's not just about like that we share like hot marketing tips in there. Like we're really seeing this. That's the power of community is connecting people. And so that that's like the approach from like the data box side is like, how do we connect people in the the BI world? And then the result of that downstream is hopefully they'll end up buying our product.
Ali (13:55.573)
Yeah.
Ali (14:06.069)
I love it. mean music to my content marketing ears.
Dave (14:10.306)
Wait, the hard part though is, everything I just described is like, that's how marketing works. But then like the CEO and the CFO offer like, awesome. So how are we gonna measure that? I didn't, but it's like, I don't know, we're gonna try, we're gonna cookie everybody and we'll make sure that anytime they talk about our company, they will use a UTM plank and we will be able to perfectly measure this, I promise you.
Ali (14:21.621)
did you know that was my next question? I mean, we are a business intelligence company, so yes.
Ali (14:35.541)
You mean you haven't figured out how to perfectly measure all of it? That is a question though. Yeah. How about imperfectly? How about imperfectly? How do you try to tie, we'll say community, social, the broad definition of community engagement back to business outcomes?
Dave (14:41.166)
No, absolutely not. Do you want to the question? Why don't you ask the question?
Dave (14:59.118)
Okay, so I feel like whenever we talk about this question, we by default assume that like the people in our community and in our audience are just complete morons and have no idea and no recall and they'll never tell you. And what I've found, I'm certainly not an analytics expert. I'm good at writing and storytelling. I haven't done this at a humongous company and so I'm sure the rules are different for how you'd measure, you know.
the ROI of a billboard by Cisco in the Austin airport. I don't know how to do those things. It's not what I'm good at. But I find that a lot of times, believe it or not, people will tell you.
Dave (15:45.4)
That's it. That's number one. can riff on that more, but That is the number one thing. And in fact, I worked at this company called Drift and we had this amazing podcast there that we did and the podcast ended up, the podcast was not about our product. It was about work and life and entrepreneurship and startup lessons and no joke, the first million dollars in pipeline and the first million dollars in revenue that we did as a company, we probably had five sales reps at the time.
I would bet you that 75 % of them would tell you like, hey, I was on a call with a prospect today. And she told me that she listens to Seeking Wisdom and she's a super fan.
Ali (16:24.072)
Hmm.
Dave (16:25.784)
So how do we measure that? How do we know? That is how we know it. She just told us, literally just told us. But it's like we want to try to like...
Ali (16:30.037)
Right.
Dave (16:36.728)
break down all of the ingredients and it's like, okay, well this part costs $20 and this part costs $10. We need to add them all up and then like make the math work by the part. But it's like, no, this is what, this is what good, this is good marketing, which is it doesn't feel like marketing because it's really not. It's community building, it's audience building, it's content, right? Content is your thing. every single article you wrote, you had to like try to tell someone in your team like what the ROI of that article was.
It's like, no, that's not how it works. The goal is like over time, we publish lots of great, relevant, useful, specific content on the Data Box site. We get more traffic, we get more links, people talk about us. Now people just start to show up without us doing anything and they hear about us. And so what's really cool now is, and we didn't have all this in that era, which is like, all this is gonna come up on sales calls and you can record them with whatever you're using and get that data. Like that's what I would be looking for. be like, how many?
Ali (17:09.589)
Thank
Ali (17:20.479)
Yeah.
Ali (17:29.909)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Let's go play.
Dave (17:34.73)
of the hundred customers that we close this month, if you have a motion where you have sales reps that are in that process or even customer success or whatever, just ask them, how did you end up hearing about us? And they're gonna tell you, I went to this event or I listened to this podcast. so I'm not as caught, I think you can find ways to measure anything, really. I read this question as more of like, how do we justify it? And I think the way that you need to start by justifying it is like, I...
Ali (17:40.085)
Mm-hmm.
Dave (18:02.39)
If your company does not inherently understand that this is how great marketing works and like you need to sit down and need to draw that out. And I think this is the job of a good marketing leader is to be like, Hey, let's first like talk about the customer journey. Let's talk about how people are going to buy our product and let's get in agreement with that. Right. Because it's not just this entirely coin operated machine. And so the very first thing I'm going to do, and I used to do this all the time at Drift, internal marketing was a big part of our, of our job there.
Ali (18:08.265)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (18:21.087)
Mm-hmm.
Dave (18:28.898)
was basically like explained to the company and the CFO and sales team, whatever, like our philosophy on like, hey, here's how we think people are gonna buy from us, right? They're doing research, they're gonna go to events, they might do some Google searches, so yes, we gotta show up in SEO, we gotta show up in ads, but there's kind of all this other stuff that we can influence them. buy from tech, their friends are influencing these purchase decisions. And so you have to teach people how good marketing works, Like, did you buy,
Ali (18:45.482)
Mm-hmm.
Dave (18:59.308)
did you buy that like Claire V bag because you saw this direct response ad and immediately clicked on it. But it's like, no, you will, you got a friend who had that bag and you liked that style. And then you end up like hearing this thing and you heard this, like the founder actually like is a big believer in like women's rights and she donated all this money to this call. that cool, that brand is really cool. Then you happen to be sitting on the couch one night and you see an ad and you're kind of like, you know, watching Bravo and it's kind of boring. And then you buy the bag, right?
the ad is gonna get the credit for that. It's the same thing in B2B. It's being able to tell that whole story. so I think people are gonna tell you by doing it. I also think the way you measure this is one of the simplest ways to think about brand in this sense. And I think about brand meaning like your reputation, not your logo or colors, is how many people showed up to your website directly.
Ali (19:32.126)
Are okay?
Ali (19:55.817)
Mm-hmm.
Dave (19:58.444)
Right? Like what I've heard the term data box. I know they do business intelligence. Like how many people went directly to data box.com? Cause who who's doing that if they don't haven't heard now the challenge is you don't know if the thing that got them there was like your Instagram post or you know, Pete's like LinkedIn rant or whatever. But I think we're just looking at broad strokes like
Ali (20:04.607)
Yeah, large percentage.
Dave (20:22.796)
And then the other part is like with social media today, can just feel, you can feel it. This is what's amazing about social media marketing and it's not a secondary part of a brand strategy anymore. It's the core part is like, and I'm sure I've seen Pete's content as an example, but I'm sure you can write about things and the response to a topic now becomes a signal for like, man, when we write about blank, right? Give me an example. I'm sure that's happened inside the company lately.
Ali (20:34.239)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (20:50.569)
Well, I take a little bit of pride in this one. So I will give you an example. I will say Pete's post that blew up the most within the last three months was one that he wrote up about our content playbook actually, and talked about specifically how we do podcasts, repurpose that into newsletters, you know, in support of our multi-channel, omni-channel strategy. but got very specific about how exactly we do it, laid out the playbook and that one, that one did really well.
Dave (21:19.488)
Okay, so that did really well. Doing really well doesn't necessarily mean that like you got seven new customers from that post, right? But it means that probably more likes and comments and then the actual qualitative of the comments matters. Like, again, back to the we're not morons thing. Like, wow, I'm getting a lot of VPs or heads of marketing or like people at legit companies commenting on this post or like asking me to send them the recipe or whatever. Those signs all matter. Those are all signals.
Ali (21:26.133)
Yep.
Dave (21:49.112)
probably getting more DMs, probably over time it's getting shared. Those are signs that that's how we know that this is working. We need to stop trying to compare what's working with direct response marketing, right? What's working with a PPC ad is gonna be like, are we spending money on this traffic and is the traffic converting? What's working with content, brand, community?
Is this stuff that's going to build and take time. And then the last thing I'll shut up on this is, I also think like just the brand and awareness is just so underrated and we don't think about it enough. Or we think that awareness has to mean like we engage some like research firm and all these companies. we did this big study. I would put it as like, look, if you have a sales team, like, do you want to work for the brand where more people know that your company exists or not? Right. And so when we're doing outbound, have people heard of us before roughly?
then like marketing basically opens the doors for all of those, all of those conversations. Like we used to say at Drift, it's like, this is like, you know, you kind of get that rusty squeaky door that's hard to open. And then like you come in and spray some WD-40 on it it's much easier to open. That's what great marketing and great content can do for the brand. You just got to be able to like package all of this up and explain how you're doing marketing internally to the company. If you're just out there and you're talking about how you're
Ali (23:01.555)
Yeah, I like that.
Dave (23:16.354)
writing three articles a week, and that's all you ever talk about, then of course, everyone's gonna be like, well, what do we pay this person? And like, what does it cost to produce these articles? And how long do they take? And what's the result? But if you can paint this bigger picture, I think that is where you'll be more successful in having these conversations about what works.
Ali (23:33.663)
Love it. Do you have a hard stop or do you have a few more minutes? Okay, awesome. Thank you. Since you are a community-based product, I'll ask what are the measures of success, the metrics and, you know, KPIs that you look at and that are important to you in your business?
Dave (23:36.534)
No, I can keep going. I figured this was like one to two anyway, so.
Dave (23:53.612)
Yeah. So the number one is number one is NPS net promoter score. Just how, how, how likely are people to recommend this product? How happy are they that that goes back to that? Because what does it matter? All the, all the stats and everything doesn't matter if people don't, don't want to be there. And so we look at that number one, number two is probably, monthly active users and just engagement. Like, and then obviously
It's a paid community. We're not trying to sell you a software license after. for us, it's not really a lead gen tool. It is the product. And I think having it be a paid community helps create a bunch of value and keep a lot of the riff-raff out. I think Peply has called it that. And I've taken that. It keeps the riff-raff out. So new members, revenue, churn.
what else? Then like the leading indicators would be traffic. our email list is a big part of our business. so looking at the health of that list opens engagement, unsubscribes, and then just like where traffic is coming from, like for, for example, it's, today we're recording this. It's the third week of July, the first two weeks, a big part portion of our traffic, probably 50%. And it comes from.
advertising and it was slow. And so we weren't generating a lot of contacts. Traffic was down, contacts were down, everything was down. That's kind of what we would go look at. And then the longer term view on it is like, twice a year we'll measure MPS of the community and use that to determine like, are people happy with their product?
Ali (25:21.141)
Okay.
Ali (25:39.253)
And if they're not, based on that feedback, what do you do with that data?
Dave (25:43.362)
Well, we don't, we just gaslight them until they are happy with the product. Yeah, it's great, it's great, totally recommend it. No, mean, so obviously like we measure NPS once or twice a year, but we don't wait to make changes. What's amazing about a community-based business is that the feedback loop is kind of always going. I I'm in the community every day, I'm getting messages from members all the time, our team is getting messages, we're seeing posts, we're seeing comments, like the feedback loop is always there.
Ali (25:45.909)
How's that working? Great.
Ali (26:03.081)
Mm-hmm.
Dave (26:12.192)
Every week we get, if somebody churns, hopefully they leave a note about why they churned and those get fed into your Slack. And so we can see the churn reason about why. And so there's all those like indicators along the way. And then we have a regular like community discussion and community meeting where we look at the community metrics, we have goals. so we're kind of, you know, it is a product, right? So we're always talking about it. And so if it's like, Hey, like churn has been brutal the last two weeks, like let's do something about it or.
hey, we did this thing inside the community and it flopped, like, let's have a conversation about it. Let's do it. We're treating like a There's sprints, there's goals, there's a roadmap.
Ali (26:47.476)
you.
Nice. Yep. That's nice being at, I don't know if you feel the same way. I know for me, being at a smaller company again, where like those changes can happen quickly is really refreshing. in a few larger orgs where those wheels turn very slowly.
Dave (27:05.749)
Yeah. I don't know if I could, I've kind of only worked at smaller, fast moving companies. Big for me was like 300 people. Well, I guess I worked at HubSpot. That was a lot of people, but I was on a small team. yeah, that would drive me nuts, especially just with the speed of like how things move today. Like I'm just, we just believe in like daily shipping, weekly shipping, constant, like small iterations to make things better. That's the way.
Ali (27:16.693)
Pretty big. Okay.
Ali (27:32.415)
It's a much better experience for the customers. So I love that you are in the community every single day. People are reaching out to you. said you're, I'm sure, watching the discussions that are happening there. So I would love to know, like, what's the chatter right now? What are the top things? I know AI has to be one of them, but what else are the top B2B leaders talking about in your community?
Dave (27:55.478)
I I wish there was an else, but that is, it's AI. There is no, there's no else. I think the else is like, I would say I kind of bucketed things in my head right now into like.
Ali (27:59.472)
Okay. Yeah.
Dave (28:10.542)
There's the kind of time, don't even, maybe timeless is the wrong frame for it, but there's the strategy, the stuff that marketing leaders and marketers are always talking about, at least until all of our jobs are replaced by AI, is like strategy stuff, hiring, firing, goal setting, hey, like I just, you know.
I just got asked to take over this new geography and we've never had a sales rep over there before. How would you think about structuring comp? And there's kind of those strategy level type of stuff and then all of the other stuff is very much AI related and it's not just AI tool related. I think that the challenge is what's happening with the AI stuff is that it's not about like.
the recipes of how you're using these tools. That is a hugely popular, we do a ton of content around that and that is gonna continue. But what the AI discussions have caused is kind of this like existential like where's marketing going? What is happening? I talked to a CMO, you know, two weeks ago and she was like, my company, like I got 70 people on my team and like.
Ali (29:11.551)
Yeah.
Dave (29:21.998)
our board and our founders and everyone is pushing me to be like, what are we doing with AI? What does the future of the team look like? And so it's not just like, here's how you can use AI to send an SDR outreach email and we're gonna show you how to do that. Those things are interesting and we show a lot of those, but I think it's really, are rethinking about the role and the goals of marketing in this world and I think it's, I was in like seventh or eighth.
Ali (29:29.546)
Yeah.
Ali (29:34.889)
Right. It's bigger than that.
Dave (29:51.872)
eighth grade when the internet really happened, maybe sixth, seventh, eighth grade when the internet happened. I can't, I wasn't thinking about this. I was trolling Smarter Child on AIM. But it feels like that. It feels like, okay, we all work at these businesses where we just got access to the internet. Like, what's gonna happen? That is the macro thing that I think everybody's talking about and thinking about.
Ali (29:56.681)
you
Ali (30:00.949)
You
Ali (30:11.317)
Yeah.
Ali (30:15.903)
Would you say in general the sentiment is optimistic, pessimistic, somewhere in the middle?
Dave (30:24.942)
I think the pessimists are pessimistic about it. The optimists are optimistic about it. I think if you put them all in a bucket and you blended them together, I think it would be right down the middle. You know, I see all sides of it. I see you open up LinkedIn and there is the person who's always mad at someone and always angry at someone. That post is going to be about how this is the worst thing ever and you know, AI and you know,
Privacy and you just I'm not saying those are those are not true claim. I don't know I'm just saying then on the other side. It's like no, this is amazing. Here's what's gonna happen with marketers and so I don't know. I'm an optimist I I I am I believe that like you can create your own future and as someone's gonna be well Of course you can like, know, what what privilege to say that but that's it's not what I I'm just saying like I believe that I have a very entrepreneurial mindset, which is like
Ali (31:06.485)
Somebody's gotta be.
Dave (31:20.814)
Okay, I don't know, go ahead, take my job away, we'll figure it out. I don't know, that's how I've always been, I'm like, like the challenge, I like the competition, go ahead, replace exit five, exit five goes to zero because of AI, I promise you I'm not gonna be out on the street, I'm gonna freakin' find a way to create something of value, I don't know, maybe I'll go buy a car wash, I don't know, but this is just my mindset, and I'm, you know.
Ali (31:44.659)
Anyway,
Not the first time things have been totally shaken up and not the last time it'll happen either, right?
Dave (31:54.88)
Yeah, look, I also feel like there's like, and I kind of go back and forth in this every day, which is like, the rate of change of AI is insane right now, but at the same time, it's still not perfect. And you need, you need the, you need a human in there to take things to the, to the last line. Right. And so everybody's obsessed, like right now there's Google has this like VO three, you know, I'm sure you've seen it where you can basically write a prompt in Google and
they make this like eight second video for you, right? If you don't know what you're doing and you go do that, it's terrible. I've tried, I cannot make a good video. you are funny, witty, creative, know how to prompt it in the right way, have read, done a bunch of research on it, then like, yes, you're going to get a better output. And so the, the, the variable there is still like, you know, I can't just sneeze into Google Gemini and get this like amazing ad for my company that
Ali (32:31.669)
You're good? You good?
Ali (32:47.709)
human.
Dave (32:53.826)
That's what you see on LinkedIn. You're like, check it out. everybody, some, someone made this like fake liquid death ad that went viral. And it's not like some, it's not like Dave Gerhardt just sat down in his computer and like, you know, wrote three sentences into some AI tool and got that. Like there is real work and real creativity. And so I'm choosing to take the optimistic view of like, I think of this as like, I love marketing. love creating.
Ali (32:55.221)
Yeah.
Ali (33:01.96)
Okay.
Ali (33:16.329)
Mm-hmm.
Dave (33:22.602)
I'm treating this stuff as like a video game or some super intelligent software that's going to allow me to like do my job to the max or like you as a content person doesn't mean that you're all of a sudden all the data box content is going to be AI slop because you have access to all these tools. It's like, now as a team of one, look at how many things I can do by myself and how much, you know, how many, how much, how much faster can I go and how much better can I get things in like, my gosh, I can actually
Ali (33:30.293)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (33:43.668)
Right.
Ali (33:49.321)
Mm-hmm.
Dave (33:51.224)
build this website by myself without having to be like, you know, get halfway. And then also, know, Jason Lemkin from Sassler has been writing about this recently, but like, everybody's talking about vibe coding. Almost everybody that's ever tried to actually vibe code that's not an actual engineer, like you get somewhere along the way and you're just stuck and you stop and you never finish anything because it is, there is still some technical knowledge you need. There is still some complexity. And so I think there's probably going to be a year, you know, I don't know if it's
Ali (34:13.267)
Yeah.
Dave (34:21.378)
two years or five years, a buffer of like, not all of this stuff is gonna change overnight. But it's definitely coming and if you can use these tools to your advantage to make your job better and more effective and more efficient, then also on the optimist piece of this, like, okay, let's just say that like, this AI stuff is gonna take all of our jobs. Well then like, do you just want to ignore it? Or do you want to?
Ali (34:46.773)
Get ahead of it.
Dave (34:49.058)
get ahead of it and fully understand it and have an opportunity to be, you know how valuable like an, if you were like a digital marketer, internet marketer was to a company to figure that out, you know? And so, and then there's also like all these legacy companies that I don't think are just, they're not gonna go out of business overnight. You know?
Hopefully not. I don't know. do I I really don't know I hate giving like predictions because like I don't know and I change my mind all the time But I'm just answering your questions on your podcast. So don't get mad at me
Ali (35:16.349)
Hahaha
Yeah, no, I love it. It's really helpful. mean, you see a lot of the conversation, so it's helpful to get your thoughts. And it's nice to get an optimistic point of view. I sent this to my boss yesterday. It's a Forbes article, five chat GPT prompts to completely replace your marketing team in 30 days.
Dave (35:37.012)
Nice. I would say, who reads Forbes? So what do they know? Yeah. Of course, Forbes, yeah, Forbes is garbage. So sorry, Forbes, if you're listening.
Ali (35:40.179)
It was probably written by a bot anyway.
Ali (35:47.061)
All good. All right, I have gotten through most of my questions, so I will just ask if there are any anything I didn't ask that you wish I had. Final thoughts?
Dave (36:00.524)
No, I like, I've been enjoying more long form conversations because I think it's, people see, you know, social media content and three, you know, a post for LinkedIn and like obviously there's nuance to that discussion and so I think like having real conversations is important and yeah, I don't know. I don't have all the answers. I'm figuring everything out every day, every day. Well yes, I do, I do.
Ali (36:02.707)
All of your thoughts are out.
Ali (36:23.637)
But you're a thought leader. Thought leaders are supposed to have all the answers.
Dave (36:29.174)
I still have two years to make 40 under 40, the 40 under 40 thought leader list. So that's kind of the only reason I went on this podcast. Yeah.
Ali (36:33.107)
Okay. Nice. I am sure we can do something about that. Awesome.
Dave (36:40.428)
Yeah. What's your, what's your, what's your, like what's going on inside of data box? Like what's the conversations around AI and where marketing is going?
Ali (36:47.153)
man. All the things I would say on the go-to-market team side, it's very much like, you know, we're a small team. How can we do more with less? Everybody's using it. I'm playing around a lot with custom GPTs and we're working with a freelancer to build out some like, agentic workflows and things like that to just try to speed stuff up. I'm shocked every week at...
like the amount I can get done in a week or even a day that I'm like a year ago, two years ago, that took me a month. That was a month of work and I just did it in two days. Like that's pretty crazy.
Dave (37:27.596)
Yeah. Yeah. I like, I think my favorite optimist with AI stuff right now is Darmesh from HubSpot. And I was listening to him talk on a podcast the other day and he basically said like, you need to at least start every project with, I'm going to use like chat GBT to at least help me get this project going. And I've been trying to adopt that and I think that's, that's helpful, but it is.
Ali (37:34.997)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (37:48.841)
Yeah, for sure.
Ali (37:53.085)
It's a great brainstorm partner. And I think the best piece of advice I got was from a good friend of mine. She's been very active with custom GPTs and testing stuff. And you know how chat GPT especially has that habit of just telling you what you want to hear. And it tells it to you in such a nice, like affirming, encouraging way. And so she programmed hers to like be a sparring partner. Don't tell me what I want to hear, but like challenge me. And I did that to my
personal favorite GPT, which I call my, it's Ali's clone. And it transformed it. It's so good. It's really helpful. And it's like just having like another version of yourself, but one that doesn't agree with you, one that challenges you and it knows how you think, but it pokes the holes and it finds those gaps. And that's been really helpful.
Dave (38:37.432)
Yeah.
Dave (38:40.79)
that's a great point. I do that all the time, is like, tell me all the reasons why I shouldn't do this.
Ali (38:49.029)
Yeah. I say, me all the things. If I present this to my CEO, tell me all the questions he's going to ask and all the problems he's going to have with it. That's a great one too. And it literally, they are like the exact questions that he will then ask when I present stuff to him. And I'm like, I was ready for it. was ready. Yup. It's helpful.
Dave (39:01.944)
Yeah.
That's good. That's good. Yeah, the ability to see the problem from the other side is really useful.
Ali (39:10.133)
And then on the product side, know, everybody wants AI and build into their products too. So we already had some AI insights and features built in, but that's a big priority too, is taking that to the next level. So it's on everybody's minds. Yup.
Dave (39:24.622)
Nice. Cool. All right. Well, six months from now, it'll change again and we'll see. Yeah, that's right. No problem. Thanks for having me. See you.
Ali (39:31.701)
Just hang on for the ride. That's what marketers do. Alrighty. Well, thank you so much. This was a pleasure. You bet. Bye bye.