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Hello and welcome to the Exit Five Weekly Newsletter - read by 25,000 B2B marketing professionals around the world. Exit Five is a membership site designed to help you build a successful career in B2B marketing. Join 5,000 other members at exitfive.com.

By the way - this email was designed in Knak which helps you create email and landing pages in minutes without having to write code. Learn more about Knak here.

🚪 Should you be gating your demos?

Maybe not.

In the 2025 State of the Interactive Product Demo that Navattic just put out, they found that ungated demos have a 5 - 10% higher engagement rate.

And if you *do* gate your demo, forms placed later in the demo had a 10 - 15% increase in engagement rate.

The full report is full of other stats and gems on how marketers are using interactive demos based on data from 28,000 demos.

It’s not public yet, but we’ve got a sneak peek for you 👀

Check out a preview of the full report here.

🧠 Marketing when you’re not the subject matter expert

One of the hardest things I’ve had to do in my marketing career so far was market to CFOs.

I am clearly not a CFO (see: my math grades) – but to do good marketing, I had to get as close as possible and figure out what their day to day looked like, and how our product fit in.

So I learned how to read a P&L and how to analyze cashflow. It was hard, but I learned a lot. And sometimes, that’s exactly how you do great marketing.

It’s pretty unlikely that you’re going to be an expert at every company you join throughout your career – so you’ll probably have to do this too, at some point.

So what exactly should you do if you’re not your ideal customer?

Take this playbook from Kevin White, Head of Marketing at Common Room, that helped him crack the code for marketing to data analysts, developers, and more.

1. Your customers are a cheat code

It’s always important to be close to your customers, but even more so when you don’t have experience in their positions.

Without talking to them, you won’t know:

• What they care about
• What keeps them up at night
• How they think

And deeply understanding that, your messaging and positioning won’t be as effective as it could be. Once you have it, you can dig deeper into key questions about product-market fit, like:

1. What was happening before you started using your product?
2. What value has it unlocked?
3. What concerns did you have before you started using the product?

Steal their exact words for headlines, landing pages, campaigns – you name it. The language they use to describe their pain points will *always* resonate.

2. Lean on your internal experts

Chances are there’s at least one person in your company who *is* an SME. They’re your new best friend.

They will have a ton of knowledge about your target audience, industry trends, and product value that you can tap into as a marketing leader.

Start by:

1. Creating a simple list of potential SMEs at your company
2. Set up recurring time with them to talk about the problem you’re solving
3. Come prepared with questions about your customers and record the calls for insights

From there, the options are endless.

Turn their insights into blogs, videos, and social posts. Position them as conference speakers, panelists, or podcast guests. Help them post on their own channels.

3. Build an army your audience trusts

Hiring external SMEs should be on your radar – they don’t need to be full time, but they’ll help you fill in gaps and build trust with the audience.

These can be contractors, influencers, creators. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box here.

Here’s where to start:

• Find where your audience is spending time and who they’re listening to
• Start building relationships by reaching out with an ask, like writing a guest blog post or doing an interview with you

Kevin did exactly this to hire writers for a company he was advising.

He found writers whose content he really loved and who were doing work for similar products and reached out to them about writing some posts for the team.

Another favorite Exit Five story of mine is from our member Chelsea Lassen.

She ran marketing at HiViz LED lighting – a company that made equipment for firetrucks. To learn about them, she actually went to fire school.

P.S. Want the full interview with Kevin? Just reply to this email and I’ll send it over :)

And if you've read this far, then you'll love the next big thing we're doing at Exit Five this year: a report on B2B Marketing Salaries.

It’s not just data – it’s a tool to help you negotiate better pay, ensure fair compensation for your team, and get a clear picture of the market.

Learn more and take the survey here.

📺 UPCOMING EVENTS

✉️ The B2B Event Playbook: Building Revenue-Driving Events in 2025

Events are back, baby.

From small gatherings like dinners to large scale customer conferences and webinars, events are back in B2B marketing in a big way.

But throwing events without a strategy is like burning money.

Whether it’s hosting your first user conference, investing in a sponsorship booth at a tradeshow, or looking into hosting micro-events like dinners – you need a solid strategy to back up your investment.

Our first Exit Five Live session of 2025 is all about B2B events. We’ll be joined by event experts Stephanie Christensen (Director of Marketing at Zuddl) and Kristina DeBrito (Director of Strategic Events at Iterable); hosted by Exit Five founder Dave Gerhardt who will share how we’re running events at Exit Five.

You’ll learn:

• The key metrics to track to show ROI on your event plan in 2025
• How to get buy in from key stakeholders
• What’s working for B2B marketing leaders right now (and what’s not working)
• How to do follow up post event
• We’ll also cover some lessons from virtual events too

Plus, there will be plenty of time for live Q&A so you can get your burning questions answered by our panel of event pros.

Join us live

📰 LATEST CONTENT

Here's the latest from the Exit Five content library:

• [ARTICLE] Inside a 100 Person Marketing Org
• [ARTICLE] What B2B Marketers Need to Know About Account Based Marketing
• [PODCAST] How To Build A B2B Community with Dan Cmejla, B2B Community Expert
• [PODCAST] Why Cookie Cutter Marketing Doesn’t Work with Gurdeep Dhillon, CMO at ContentStack

🏢 OPEN ROLES

Who's Hiring Right Now?

HOT JOB OF THE WEEK: New North is hiring a Growth Marketing Strategist. You'll build marketing strategies based on business outcomes, connecting the dots across content, paid, ABM, and marketing ops initiatives. $100k annual salary.

Interested? Apply here.

Other open roles on the Exit Five job board this week:

• Neuron7 is hiring a Content Marketing Director. Fully remote, US Only.
• Databox is hiring a Lifecycle Marketing Manager
• Mutiny is hiring a Content Lead
• Drivepoint is hiring a Content Marketing Manager
• Global Payments is hiring a Principal Content Strategist, SMB Professional Services
• Global Payments is hiring a Principal Content Strategist, Higher Education
• Opus Training is hiring a B2B Growth Marketing Manager
• Paramark is hiring a Head of Marketing, Founding Marketer

See All Open Roles >>

Have an open role and want to make sure the best B2B marketing talent sees it?

Just reply to this email and we'll send over more info on how you can post it on our job board + get it in front of 25k+ marketers.

Join us in Exit Five

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Get feedback, campaign ideas, browse templates, videos, guides, get recommendations on agencies and vendors, find contractors and freelancers, vent about your boss, find new jobs and more.

We have a 7 day free trial so you can join 100% risk free.

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