15 AI tools B2B teams actually use (Dave's Newsletter)

Hello and welcome to Dave's Newsletter — read by 42,000 B2B marketing professionals around the world. I’m Dave Gerhardt, founder of Exit Five and former CMO. I really write this newsletter (not AI) and my goal here is to share lessons and learnings about B2B marketing, insights from the Exit Five community, and to be a resource to help you grow your career and advance your skills in marketing. If you enjoy getting this newsletter, I’d love it if you told a friend about it. I also enjoy getting replies here because it is really me, so reply back after you read and say hello.

PS. 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.

TOGETHER WITH PARAMARK

When iOS 14.5 hit, attribution broke overnight.

Many marketers spent months trying to figure out which ads still worked.

It can happen again with new platform changes, privacy updates, algorithms.

And when it does, your dashboards won't warn you.

Paramark exists to bring diversity and accuracy to your advertising spend.

Take this free calculator to see how much you can save by measuring real incrementality, not just platform-reported numbers.

Two minutes. No sales pitch. Just clarity on whether your marketing is working as well as you think.

⚙️ What Scrappy B2B Teams Actually Use Today (Recommended by the Exit Five Community)

Editor's Note: Hey. Dave here. I am having a blast writing this newsletter and getting so many replies in my inbox; email is still King. And Queen. Long live email. OK so a few weeks ago, Jess, Our Head of Marketing, posted in our community asking what AI tools people are using...the tools they open constantly to get work done. We wanted answers from actual marketers - not the guys who get paid to write about AI tools on LinkedIn…and the responses were amazing. Tools I'd never heard of (and I’m a thought leader). Use cases I hadn't considered. This is exactly what I love about our community. No BS, just real marketers sharing what's working in their world. So this newsletter is all about the tools they're using to give you some inspiration and separate the signal from the noise with AI. Here we go.

What I love most about this list is that these tools can be used by everyone – small teams with tight budgets and 0 patience for wasting time; or marketers at bigger companies, too. One size fits all here.

Whether you're deep in AI already or just starting to dabble, you'll walk away with new ideas, tools to try, and ways AI can help you level up in your role.

🏡 The Foundation (What Everyone's Using)

ChatGPT and Claude came up over and over. But not for the reasons you think.

People aren't just throwing prompts at these tools and hoping for magic. They're building custom GPTs for specific workflows. Campaign naming. Competitive research. Brainstorming when you're stuck.

1. ChatGPT / Custom GPTs : The Swiss Army knife. Campaign naming, competitive research, brainstorming, content outlines.

💡 Real use case: Build a custom GPT trained on your brand voice and product positioning. Every time you need campaign names, it generates 20 options that sound like your brand. It’ll take 2 minutes instead of a 30-minute brainstorming session.

2. Claude : Perfect for long-form writing and content repurposing. Claude handles bigger documents better than most tools.

💡 Real use case: Drop in 10 blog posts you've written over the past year. Ask it to analyze your writing patterns, pull out your best frameworks, and identify which topics got the most traction. Now you have a content playbook based on what really worked.

The pattern? The best use cases are specific and repeatable. Not "write me a blog post." More like "analyze these 50 customer reviews and pull out the top objections."

🎨 Design and Content Production

If you're on a small team, you can't wait three days for a designer to mock up social posts. These tools bridge the gap between speed and quality when you don't have a designer on call.

3. Canva Magic Studio : Design social posts and ad creatives without a designer.

💡 Real use case: You need 15 LinkedIn carousel posts for a product launch. Feed Canva your brand colors and key messages. The AI generates templates, you swap in your copy, and you're done in an hour.

4. Descript : Edit video and podcast clips like a document.

💡 Real use case: Your CEO did a 45-minute podcast interview. You need three 60-second clips for LinkedIn by end of day. Descript transcribes it. You search for the word "customer" and "ROI," find the best moments, delete the filler words, and export three clips in 20 minutes.

Nothing can replace a great designer, but when you need something shipped today, they're good enough to get you there.

🔎 Research and SEO

The old way: spend three hours Googling, reading, and synthesizing. The new way: let AI do the grunt work while you focus on strategy.

5. Perplexity : Sourced research, trend insights, competitor monitoring.

💡 Real use case: Your VP asks what competitors are saying about the new EU data regulations. Instead of digging through 47 websites, ask Perplexity. It pulls recent articles, summarizes the key points, and cites sources. You send the summary in 15 minutes and look like you've been tracking it all week.

6. SurferSEO : SEO briefs, keyword mapping, and optimization.

💡 Real use case: You need to write a blog post. SurferSEO analyzes the top-ranking pages, tells you which keywords to include, how long it should be, and what sections to cover.

7. Ahrefs & Frase : SEO research and content optimization.

💡 Real use case: Use Ahrefs to find which of your old blog posts are declining in traffic. Frase tells you what's missing compared to current top-ranking content. Update the posts with fresh info, and watch the traffic come back.

The research part used to be the bottleneck. Now it's the easy part.

✅ Set It and Forget It

This is where small teams punch above their weight. Instead of manually routing leads or updating spreadsheets, build systems that run themselves.

8. Make : Automate lead routing, reporting, and AI follow-ups.

💡 Real use case: Someone fills out a demo form. Make checks their company size in Clearbit, scores the lead, routes it to the right sales rep, logs it in your CRM, and sends a personalized follow-up email. All without a human touching it.

9. Zapier : Connects your tools and automates workflows. The new Zapier Agents take it further.

💡 Real use case: Every Monday morning, Zapier pulls your weekly metrics from Google Analytics, HubSpot, and LinkedIn Ads, formats them into a dashboard, and Slacks it to your team. No more manual reporting.

10. Clay : Lead enrichment and data connection.

💡 Real use case: You have a list of 500 target accounts. Clay enriches each one with employee count, tech stack, recent funding, and finds the VP of Marketing's email.

Small teams can't afford to do everything manually. These tools handle the repetitive work so you don't have to.

🛠️ Tools That Sound Fake (But Aren't)

These tools are doing things that weren't possible a year ago. They're weird, they're specific, and they're useful.

11. ElevenLabs : Voice cloning for audio content.

💡 Real use case: You write a weekly newsletter but want to offer an audio version. Clone your voice with ElevenLabs, paste in your newsletter text, and it generates an audio file that sounds like you reading it.

12. Vercel V0 : Design landing pages with built-in A/B testing and smart chatbots.

💡 Real use case: You need a landing page for a new product launch. V0 generates the page structure, you add your copy, and it automatically sets up A/B tests for different headlines. Live in two days instead of two weeks.

13. Flourish : Survey data visualization and interactive heat maps.

💡 Real use case: Your sales team needs to see where your customer concentration is for territory planning. Upload your customer list, Flourish generates an interactive heat map showing where you're strong and where you have white space so sales leadership now knows where to focus.

Not everyone needs voice cloning or interactive heat maps. But the teams that do will never go back.

🧰 The Tools You Haven't Heard Of…

You won't see these on every "Top 10 AI Tools" list. But they're solving the problems small teams face every day: turning work that used to require a hire into a 20-minute task.

14. GenSpark : Your marketing analyst intern. Upload data and get back insights, decks, and reports.

💡 Real use case: Upload your campaign performance spreadsheet and by lunch, you have a slide deck showing which campaigns drove the most pipeline, where your cost per lead spiked, and three budget reallocation recommendations for next quarter.

15. NotebookLM : Turns internal docs, transcripts, and case studies into fresh content ideas. Works great with proprietary data you can't just throw into ChatGPT.

💡 Real use case: Drop in your last 10 sales call transcripts. It pulls out the three objections that keep coming up, the exact language prospects use, and content angles your competitors aren't covering. Now you have your content calendar for the month, based on what customers say, not what you think they care about.

The best AI tools aren't trying to replace you. They're handling the tedious stuff so you can focus on strategy.

🫵 What This Means for You

The tools people are using have a few things in common…

They solve a specific problem. They save time on repetitive work. They don't require a PhD to use. They integrate with tools you're already using (because who’s going to rebuild their entire tech stack?).

And remember: different roles have different needs. The CMO isn't editing video clips. The content person isn't building lead enrichment workflows.

So figure out what's eating your time, then find the tool that solves it. Not the other way around.

The marketers winning with AI aren't using 47 tools. They're using 5-7 really well.

– Dave

P.S. What did I miss? What's the one AI tool you can't work without? Or the one you tried that was a total waste of time? Hit reply and let me know. I'm building a running list for the team and I want to hear what's working for you right now.

As for me: contrary to everything I just wrote above, 99% of my work with AI is with ChatGPT. I just can’t quit it because it’s been three years of me writing in there, and that’s three years of memory. Anyone have ideas on how to move it over? Jess is on me about NotebookLM and how Gemini is catching up. But I am stuck in my ways!

Once again, me for real. No AI was harmed during the creation of this newsletter.

📺 UPCOMING EVENTS

Open to all

• December 17: LinkedIn for B2B: What’s Working Right Now (And How To Sell Social Media to The C-Suite) (exitfive.com/live)

Exit Five Pro Members Only

• December 5th: Generating New Business from Customers & Repeat Buyers
• December 9th: Local Meetup: Raleigh, NC
• December 9th: Local Meetup: Atlanta, GA
• December 12th: Holiday Meetup: Chicago, IL Holiday Happy Hour
• December 17th: 2025 in Review: Wins, Losses, and Lessons Learned
• December 18th: Holiday Meetup: Boston, MA
• November 22nd: Local Meetup: Phoenix, AX

Marketing Leaders Club Only

• December 16th: End of Year Marketing Leaders Club Mixer

If you are an Exit Five member, click here to RSVP to these events.

Not a member? Join Exit Five Today

📚 LATEST CONTENT

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

• 🎧 How To Create Urgency, Build Pipeline, and Make Outbound Work
• 🎧 Should You Invest in Community?
• 🎧 What’s Working Right Now in B2B Marketing
• 🎧 The Case for Influencer Marketing
• 📰 Can influencer marketing work in B2B?
• 📰 10 Lessons from 10 Years of B2B Marketing
• 📰 Let’s make Product + Marketing best friends

✍️ NEW FROM EXIT FIVE

Do you need to learn more about AI in Marketing?

Need more AI? Our Head of Marketing Jess writes a weekly newsletter called The Prompt devoted entirely to AI in B2B marketing. Readers love this email because it's packed with practical and specific examples you can implement in your work and go beyond the fluff and hype with AI you hear on LinkedIn.

Click here to subscribe to The Prompt and we can help you get an A in AI. 🍎

This newsletter was designed in Knak. Check them out here.

Want to sponsor a future newsletter or learn more about other sponsorship opportunities with Exit Five? Email hi@exitfive.com (or just reply to this email).

If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here to get the newsletter every week.

‍