#219: Strategy | ABM and AI for Outbound with Trinity Nguyen, CMO at UserGems

In this episode, Dave sits down with Trinity Nguyen, CMO at UserGems, to discuss her journey from first business hire to CMO, the role of product marketing in B2B, and how AI is transforming outbound sales. Trinity got started at UserGems’ by building their first website for free, then got hired as Head of Marketing and has shaped the company’s ABM strategy and demand generation playbook.

Dave and Trinity cover:

1. Why every startup should hire a product marketer
2. How to develop a strong vision and align with product teams
3. Scaling outbound with AI-driven ABM and sales engagement

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - Intro to Trinity
  
• (07:31) - - Why product marketing is the foundation of great B2B marketing
  
• (09:08) - - The importance of positioning and messaging in a competitive market
  
• (11:17) - - How Trinity rebuilt UserGems’ website for free before joining the company
  
• (12:34) - - Negotiating your role and setting the foundation for marketing
  
• (14:10) - - Why marketing should own SDRs and outbound prospecting
  
• (15:51) - - The early days of building demand gen at UserGems
  
• (17:29) - - Differentiation and positioning in a crowded market
  
• (19:34) - - Aligning marketing with product teams and company vision
  
• (23:15) - - Developing ICP and refining target accounts
  
• (26:00) - - Why outbound was the first major pipeline driver for UserGems
  
• (27:50) - - Transitioning from a startup to a growth-stage company
  
• (30:05) - - How UserGems runs ABM at scale
  
• (32:19) - - The AI shift in outbound marketing and its impact
  
• (35:31) - - AI for sales outreach and improving outbound efficiency
  
• (38:55) - - Why Trinity was initially skeptical about AI in outbound
  
• (41:38) - - Cutting spend while increasing pipeline with AI-driven outbound
  
• (44:22) - - The role of brand and inbound marketing in a demand gen playbook
  
• (46:34) - - Why traditional inbound marketing didn’t work for UserGems
  
• (48:20) - - Creating engaging demand gen campaigns
  
• (50:15) - - Final takeaways

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***

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***

Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.

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Former startup CMO Dave Gerhardt and guests share their marketing knowledge to help drive revenue at your company and grow your career in marketing. The podcast mostly covers B2B SaaS, but there's something applicable for anyone working in marketing today.Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:

You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt. Hey. My guest on this episode is Trinity Nguyen. She is the CMO at User Gems. She joined the company five years ago as the first business hire and now she's CMO. After joining as head of marketing five years ago, she came up through product marketing. That was her background. That's her area of expertise.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:34]:

Today she runs a marketing team of 11 at User Gems and her company helps demand gen teams and sales leaders boost revenue by providing signals to intelligently engage with the buyers that are most likely to convert. We talk about her background in product marketing, the role of product marketing in a startup running an ABM playbook. At User Gems, they target 500 accounts per quarter. We talk about what that actually looks like and how they execute on it. And we talk about why she's completely changed her mind on the power of AI for outbound. Here's my conversation with Trinity. You know, it's funny, you were talking about Vermont, one of our, one of the Exit Five members, this guy Dimitri, and he said when he was. He posted a picture from the airport flying from Chicago and he said, I'm heading to the B2B marketing mecca of the United States.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:21]:

This is Burlington, Vermont. So tell me about User Gems. So you. You're a CMO at Usergems. What is Usergems?

Trinity Nguyen [00:01:29]:

We software for sales and marketers. Basically we capture buying signals to help you prioritize who to target when and why and then help you execute it too.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:39]:

And give me a. People like to get an overview so they can kind of see this in their mind. But like the. How many employees, roughly what stage is the company? If you can share any type of like company milestones, that's helpful because we're going to get into talking about like marketing team, your views on marketing, how you do things. But if we can kind of set the stage for the company, it's helpful.

Trinity Nguyen [00:01:58]:

Yeah, we definitely start up. So we're at around 60 employees, 100% remote, spread out between Europe and US. The stage of a company. So we're past. We're around. I'm trying to think like what I could. So basically we're in the teens in terms of revenue, still growing. And yeah, we.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:22]:

$15, right?

Trinity Nguyen [00:02:24]:

$15, yes.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:25]:

Yeah. Cool. No, that's good. That's helpful. 60. 60 people. Teens, you know, that's good. Okay.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:30]:

Okay.

Trinity Nguyen [00:02:31]:

Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:31]:

And how many people are in the marketing team?

Trinity Nguyen [00:02:33]:

So marketing, we have both the SDR team we call ADRs and the marketing marketing. So in total we have around. I say like 11. Nice.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:43]:

Okay. That's marketing owns the SDRs. I just had Chris Walker on my podcast last week and he's, he's all his worldview is like, marketing should own SDRs.

Trinity Nguyen [00:02:54]:

100,000%. Yes, Chris, keep repeating it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:57]:

Well, let's jump into that. Let's jump off to the deep end now and. Okay, so I do want to get into like the company. And you joined as the founding head of marketing, but what is it? So actually, yeah, let's save this. I'm going to. I'll take my notes. We'll come back to that. So you got 11 folks in the marketing team.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:13]:

What was the state of the company when you. When you joined five years ago?

Trinity Nguyen [00:03:16]:

Oh, I was the first business hire. So there were two co founders and two engineers. So I was number five.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:25]:

So did they raise?

Trinity Nguyen [00:03:27]:

No.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:28]:

Raise money?

Trinity Nguyen [00:03:28]:

No, it was 100% bootstrap.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:30]:

Wow.

Trinity Nguyen [00:03:31]:

Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:32]:

And did they pay you in money? Did they pay. Did you get paid?

Trinity Nguyen [00:03:37]:

I did get paid.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:38]:

Okay. Okay.

Trinity Nguyen [00:03:39]:

Limited. Definitely. Like, it was fun time. It's definitely like pirates and romantics kind of thing, right?

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:45]:

Sure. Where were you at, like, stage of your career to do that, to decide to go and do that?

Trinity Nguyen [00:03:52]:

Yeah, this one is interesting experience. So I was a principal product marketing at a series B C startup before. So I would say, like not early career, a little bit in. And then I decided to do a break sabbatical because I want to take a break and I reevaluated things.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:14]:

Sure.

Trinity Nguyen [00:04:14]:

And the thing is that after you kind of like traveling around the world and your brain kind of rewired and rebalanced somehow enable you to take a lot more risk than you normally would. Because there was no way The Trinity of 2014 would have said that she would join that early of a company.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:32]:

Why?

Trinity Nguyen [00:04:32]:

That's how I started.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:33]:

And why, why, why not?

Trinity Nguyen [00:04:34]:

Well, I think a little bit of the situation. So I was on visa, so. So first generation immigrants here. Just got my citizenship a couple years ago.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:45]:

Nice.

Trinity Nguyen [00:04:45]:

So that put a lot of natural restrictions there. And then also it kind of inhibits you from taking a lot of risk because, like, you don't have the natural family safety nets in the U.S. yeah, yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:54]:

Wait, forgive my ignorance, but what type of restriction does that put on your ability to join or not join a company?

Trinity Nguyen [00:05:02]:

Yeah. In order to. So you go to school and then you have some kind of like visa that can let you work for like an internship for a little bit. But actually to work as an employee, the company has to Sponsor you. And to sponsor us, you do a lot of paperwork. You have to hire lawyers to, like, do the whole, like, red tape situation.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:24]:

I got it. Got it.

Trinity Nguyen [00:05:25]:

Hopefully you will get the job. So a lot of companies don't want to sponsor international students because of that. So that's just kind of like put a lot of restrictions like who you. Where you can apply for a job and then who you can hire. So.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:37]:

Okay. And so did that, did that impact your decision to choose a company and you got your mba, right?

Trinity Nguyen [00:05:47]:

Yeah, I did my MBA in Kellogg Northwestern. Yeah, it definitely does. So that's why you don't see a lot of international students start a startup or join a very early stage startup. You always need to be sponsored by a company.

Dave Gerhardt [00:06:01]:

Okay, got it.

Trinity Nguyen [00:06:02]:

Yeah. When I joined, I already got my permanent residence, so that's why I could do it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:06:07]:

Okay.

Trinity Nguyen [00:06:07]:

The bootstrap startup did not sponsor me.

Dave Gerhardt [00:06:10]:

I was gonna say, yeah, there's a lot of. There's a lot of legal and overhead. As someone who is building a company for the first time, we have six. We have six employees. And even just having one person who's in Canada, like, all the nuances that I didn't think of, like, oh, you know, I'll talk to my accountant or my, you know, finance person. I'm like, hey, we got this guy and connect. Nope, can't do this. Nope, can't do that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:06:32]:

Nope, can't do that. Got to pay him this way. Got to do it this way. It's. It's crazy. And it makes you think about all of the. From a company side to start a company, how much, all the things that you need to have in place if you truly want to build a. A global company, you know, you truly can't just hire somebody from anywhere and put them on payroll and that's it, right?

Trinity Nguyen [00:06:49]:

Yeah, Yeah, I learned that too, through User Gems. Initially, it's like, oh, yeah, we, we have tools, we have deals, we have like this tool, that tool. We can hire anyone and then finance. Like, wait a minute.

Dave Gerhardt [00:07:00]:

Exactly.

Trinity Nguyen [00:07:01]:

You need to be legally compliant in all these companies.

Dave Gerhardt [00:07:04]:

All right, so you're a principal in product marketing. Product marketing is your thing. While you're doing product marketing, did you have a eye towards, like, I want to be head of marketing, I want to run marketing, or did you join User Gems with like a kind of product marketing lens to help the company grow?

Trinity Nguyen [00:07:22]:

The latter. I knew that I wanted to run marketing team at some point, but I didn't really spend that much time dwelling about it. I really like product marketing. I really like the strategic aspects of it. Shaping the product direction, shaping the narrative, competitive intelligence, all that stuff. I really like product marketing. So I just thought that like, well, usage. I just started my previous company was one of their first customers.

Trinity Nguyen [00:07:44]:

So I was familiar with the product. And when I was like backpacking in Europe and got bored after three months of just looking at churches, went to the website and I'm like, this website is horrendous. There's no way you're going to be able to find any customer if your website stayed this way. So it wasn't Lisbon. I'm like, well, let me, you know, rebuild your website for you as a side project because I was so bored.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:05]:

Wait, wait, wait. So, so they, they hired you as a contractor to build a website?

Trinity Nguyen [00:08:10]:

I volunteered. I was that bored out of my mind. I'm like, let me just figure out webflow and rebuild the website for you.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:17]:

Okay, but how did you pick this company? How did you pick User Gems?

Trinity Nguyen [00:08:21]:

Well, I know, I know the company already.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:23]:

Okay.

Trinity Nguyen [00:08:23]:

I knew back then the company I was at was a customer of User Gems. So I, I knew the team, I knew the product. I did not see the website until that summer.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:34]:

Got it. But you had been using the product. But they had no, they had no business people, they had no marketing, they had no sales.

Trinity Nguyen [00:08:39]:

Yeah, founder led sales. So the CEO was the seller.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:42]:

That's crazy. Okay, I hope this improved the, the number of shares you have when you built their website in the early days. So you, so you rebuild the website on webflow. Do you have design skills? How did you design it?

Trinity Nguyen [00:08:59]:

Heck no. I'm like the worst designer ever. Yeah, but like, I think that's the nice thing about when you take a break from your regular kind of like, hop off the hamster wheel, then you feel more free to try different things. And I'm like, that's how I feel.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:15]:

About AI right now. Like, I, I think because I'm not a head of marketing, I'm just an entrepreneur. Like, you know, we got five, six people on the team. I have some freedom to do what I want. Like, I find myself playing more again and building a landing page and trying to do this thing with the video and I'm having fun. Like, I think those things are so important. I think you gotta, like, you gotta stay in the game that way. And like, you know, as you grow in your career as a marketing leader, so much of the job becomes like management of people and not what brought you into the job at the first place.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:47]:

Which is like, no, I like telling the story. I want to make something. And so it's cool to hear you, hear you say that.

Trinity Nguyen [00:09:53]:

I love that. I'd love to see like what you're doing with the website using AI in the video. Yeah, it's just so hard to, just so hard to keep up with all the changes and updates and AI.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:03]:

It's too much. It gives me anxiety. Like I go to, I follow this one person, there's this one resource that I follow on LinkedIn and this person is amazing at like sharing what's happening in AI. But every freaking week, man, it's like, boom. Google Gemini released this new update and you need to study it now because it's gonna blow your mind. I'm like, okay, all right. And then I, you know, spend a whole day reading that and then like the next day it's like, no, no, no, Claude. You need to use Claude.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:31]:

And I'm like, okay, all right, all right. And then it's like chat GPT 7.0 came out and have you and like, oh, it's insane.

Trinity Nguyen [00:10:38]:

It's so much. I seriously don't know how people keep up with it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:42]:

I don't know. And then I'll. And then I like. And then I' out on a walk or whatever and I'm like, yeah, screw all that. Just trust your gut. You, you don't, you know, make a to do list of like here's the 15 things, like I need to build my AI avatar. I need to do all this stuff. All right, anyway, so, so we'll talk about AI.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:59]:

We got a lot to talk about AI. So you, you rebuild the site. They're like, this site is awesome. Oh my gosh, we have better product marketing now. Do you want to come work here full time?

Trinity Nguyen [00:11:10]:

That's kind of like what happens. And I said yes. But there were some conditions before I signed that offer letter. The first one is that I want the SDR team to be under marketing. The founder back then didn't know like all these complexity of a revenue alignment, account based marketing. He's probably like, whatever, sure, whatever you want.

Dave Gerhardt [00:11:35]:

Was there even a sales team at that point?

Trinity Nguyen [00:11:37]:

No.

Dave Gerhardt [00:11:37]:

No. So you're like, when we have a sales team, I want them to.

Trinity Nguyen [00:11:41]:

Exactly. I was the first SDR and the marketer. But I put that in the offer letter because, just because we went through a bunch of like account base before how to align sales team and SDR and marketing. It was, it was a nightmare. The team was great. It just really hard to align And I went through that process. I'm like, you know what? This is not how I want to run the business. So I put that in there.

Trinity Nguyen [00:12:04]:

And yeah, it was easy because there was no sellers.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:06]:

Okay, and what was the. So you, you, you know, you decided to join the company. You're head of marketing, first business person at the company. What do you do? Where do you. Where do you start or what did you do at the time?

Trinity Nguyen [00:12:19]:

Well, I tapped into my major, so product marketing. So trying to kind of figure out, like, the positioning and messaging winter didn't exist back in the day. So I just kind of used my own gut feeling, being one of their customers and talk to other customers. So that's one thing. And then the next thing was trying inbound a little bit. And I'm going to be 100% honest. I think I told Mark Hubert too. Inbound is not my strength at all.

Trinity Nguyen [00:12:47]:

I'm like an outbound marketer. I don't know what that means, but that's kind of like how I was. So we tried to build Inbound, trying to replicate HubSpot playbook. Didn't seem to work, or at least didn't work as quickly as I wanted to, and I didn't have patience.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:00]:

And when you say replicate the HubSpot, I'm assuming you mean content creating a blog, SEO creating Content creating.

Trinity Nguyen [00:13:05]:

Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:05]:

Yeah. Interesting. Okay, hold on. We gotta unpack some of this stuff. So your skillset is like that. This is the first, you know, people I get messages from founders or whatever, and they're like, you know, who should my first marketing hire be? I almost always feel like. And look, this is marketing advice, right? There's so much nuance, it's tough to say. Right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:25]:

However, for most companies, product marketing is kind of where you gotta start, right? Because the. And like, the more that my career is going on 15 years and doing B2B marketing, right. I'm like, oh, it kind of all the features, the tactics, the AI, this comes and goes, the core fundamental skills, the way to like, you know, the thing that every company is always going to need is strong point of view, positioning, messaging, product marketing. Right?

Trinity Nguyen [00:13:51]:

Yeah. And it's always one of the last marketing roles that get hired in most startups because it's not measurable. It's not like a pipeline, not like great instantly. It's very fundamental and people are just impatient. So.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:05]:

Well, the. So it. I think it is, it is, it is measurable and you know that, obviously, but it's. It's not measurable initially, but I Do think that it just depends on your. It depends on your relationship with the founder, the CEO, whoever. Because if like the first measure of it is going to be like, oh, we had no story before, we have a story now. I feel good about our story. I feel good about our deck.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:27]:

I feel good about our website. Okay. We're starting to like attract more customers, we're starting to convert more people. Like, people don't like it because it's not some, you know, it's not. We spent $10,000 on AdWords and we got this number back. But like, I do think it's like you move into this house and it's very messy and everything is everywhere and like, oh, you have this amazing interior designer come in and like everything is set up. It's like, oh, we can live here now. Okay, this is, we can work with this.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:50]:

On the product marketing side, do you have a, do you have a school of thought that you like? Do you have a positioning framework you like? What was the process you, you went through to kind of like wrangle product marketing for User Gems?

Trinity Nguyen [00:15:03]:

I think back then it was pretty straightforward because the product was pretty simple. But essentially like who it is for and why they trying to buy your product. I think that one is usually pretty easy for most startup because they usually like build a product for a specific Persona. I think the hard part is, especially now in this age is like, where do you play and why it's going to be you who win? I think that's the part that's really hard to get the right and objective answer because internally everyone thinks that we're the greatest, of course, but how do you make sure that what you communicate resonates with people who don't know about you?

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:43]:

Yeah. I want to read you this question because I got this question the other day from. I did a Q and A with a marketing team and they asked me this question. I want to hear your answer to it. How do you best differentiate positioning and messaging in a crowded and competitive market, especially with a lot of similar feature offerings?

Trinity Nguyen [00:16:00]:

So I would say like positioning for me is just simply like, who are you for and what do you do? So kind of like your frame of reference you are asked for. I think the messaging is like why someone should care. And typically people usually talk about messaging like the benefits benefit. 1, 2, 3. I'm thinking of my Google sheet. That's a template we use. But in this day and age, especially with AI can replicate almost every tool, the differentiators are a lot more important. So how do you marry your differentiators in a way that people care? Because everyone, like every product who have a ton of different differentiators.

Trinity Nguyen [00:16:36]:

Right. But not all of them matter. So how do you pick the one that matter and that becomes your messaging?

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:41]:

Yeah. I feel like I've been in discussions with product team or sales team and they're like, here are the seven ways we're different than this other company. And it's like, yeah, but that doesn't stick with somebody. It needs to be like one clear thing.

Trinity Nguyen [00:16:56]:

Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:57]:

And then also as a marketer, I feel like you don't necessarily own that completely. Doesn't it have to be a product? Like, isn't it like in the DNA of the company, like at a strategy level?

Trinity Nguyen [00:17:06]:

Yeah, it's a leadership level.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:07]:

It's a leadership level thing. Right. So how do you come up with that?

Trinity Nguyen [00:17:10]:

Oh, my gosh. Every marketer, like PMMs will tell you, like, this is the hardest thing because not even before you even get to the messaging piece, the first one is like, who do we sell to? Like, who is our core Persona? And almost every company I've been at, it's always a debate. Sometimes it's like a top 10 Persona. I'm like, oh my God, if you sell to all 10, like, who do you sell to? Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:30]:

And it gets, it gets worse as the company grows. Right? You search.

Trinity Nguyen [00:17:33]:

Exactly. Yeah. Different product lines. Right. So you got to wrangle that first before you get to the messaging. So data helps, but yeah, the reality is a lot of time you just hope that the leadership believes in the data more so than the gut feel or aspirations.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:51]:

And do you feel like the like, leadership team is like collab, like this is a collaborative thing or is like the founder lead this the head of product? Because it's. You think about the, the inputs into creating a differentiator. It's like, who do we sell to? What are our competitors doing? What are the features? You know, what features do they have? What opportunity? Like, it takes, it takes vision. You know, it's not like you just put it in chat GPT and ask what the differentiator is and get it. It takes vision and belief. Like, hey, this is where we're going. This is where we see the market. And those are the types of founders that you want to work with as a marketer.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:22]:

Right?

Trinity Nguyen [00:18:23]:

Yeah. It definitely has to come from the founders or at least get the strong support and buy in from the founders and then everything will cascade down. Every now and then you see that there's a strong Head of products. That is very visionary. But the founder needs to believe in that as well. Otherwise it's just, it's going to go everywhere.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:40]:

How do marketers, how do you push on that? This comes up a lot in our community. Like yeah, we don't have a strong differentiator. I can come up with all the angles in the world, but it needs to be a leadership thing. How would you like manage up and push the leadership team on? Like, hey, you all, we don't have a different, we don't have a clear differentiator here. How do, how do we solve that problem?

Trinity Nguyen [00:18:59]:

I think the first thing I would ask is if you're already in business, assuming with a certain size of revenue, that means you do have some product market fit, that means those buyers see something in you as differentiators. So I would truly try to talk to people to really appeal the onion to see what are the differentiators that made those buyers pick you over someone else. Could be price, could be anything. It might not be the same list that the internal folks want to believe, but I think that's the first part. And then after that trying to validate it with other prospects, close loss, close ones, that kind of feedback and then bring that data and insights to the leadership. Because if you start from internally, there are a lot of hopes and dreams internally, especially in startups. So. And also we, also internally we are the most cynical ones.

Trinity Nguyen [00:19:47]:

We're like, yeah, we're the same, it's just same, same. But unless you're just tinkering like you know, at very, very early stage of business, if someone's paying for you, you have something to offer, you need to find out what it is. Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:01]:

And so that could even be like Whether you have five customers or 500, there's gotta be some pocket of like, who is this for? I remember when I was at Drift, we changed our ICP like four or five times in the first year or two because it keeps building on each other. It's like, oh, we have a hypothesis of we think we're gonna be for this person. Oh, interesting. Like actually we can be for this person maybe not four or five times, probably two, two or three times. But you can keep building and making this more repeatable. And I think you, you eventually learn, oh, actually where we started out selling to product marketers, but we are really for demand gen teams. Actually, no, it's a layer deeper than that. It's not demand gen teams, it's inside sales teams and the marketer buys it to support the Inside sales team.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:39]:

So the ICP is inside sales. Okay. And then everyone gets rallied around that. Right?

Trinity Nguyen [00:20:44]:

That's so cool. I didn't know how the sausage was made in drip. We were customers. I went to one of the hypergrowth conferences.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:53]:

No, which one did you go to?

Trinity Nguyen [00:20:54]:

Oh, man, the one in 2019 in San Francisco. And I was, I was blown away of how laser focused in terms of the product messaging, everything that drift was. It's very clear to me as a marketer that this product was built for me and my insights, which is not the case with a lot of chatbots back in the day.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:12]:

No, well, that was, I mean, that was a key part of the differentiation, which was like, okay, look, everybody chat existed. Everybody knew, knew that chat existed. And so we couldn't come out and say like, no, no, no, we're, we're a different type of chat. We're better chat. It was like, no. And the opportunity that they found in the market was like, yes, everybody's used chat. We basically. It's a cool exercise in positioning because I think one of the strongest things you can do as a marketer is it's not, it's not necessarily about how you position your company, but what we did.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:41]:

We repositioned the competition in the minds of the people we were selling to. And it's like, oh, Intercom. Oh yeah. Because everyone's like, how are you different than Intercom? We're like, intercom. Intercom's great. That product is great. But it's great if you're using in app messaging. And, and like all their content was for like product managers and about growth.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:58]:

And so we like, we exploited that by being like, oh, you know, they're really building for product managers. And so it's great for in app messaging and surveys, what we're doing is built for you like the demand gen marketer who has the pipeline number on their back. And they're like, you know, people need a story, people want a story. And so when you can say, I'm building this specifically for you, that's why you get a couple hundred people out of hyper growth and saying like, oh yeah, cool. I mean, it's what attracted me to HubSpot as a 25 year old marketing manager who had to build a marketing plan for the first time and I'm like, you know, addicted to all of their content to help me do my job. It's the same thing. And so I think that was one of the things that we, we leaned into and on a positioning side of things, the Positioning at the company. It was so easy because we had this vision of conversational marketing.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:41]:

Basically everything in the product roadmap like fit perfectly under that umbrella. And so first it was chat and then we acquired this email company. And it was like at most other companies he'd be like, all right, how are we going to position this email company? Was like, we knew how we're going to position the email company because David and Elias, the founders are like, we're expanding the vision of conversational marketing. And so we're saying like email should be a two way channel to communicate. So it's conversational email. Oh, that's genius. And then it was like we acquired this like video tool. Okay, it's conversational video.

Dave Gerhardt [00:23:11]:

And so it goes back to the positioning work so well is because at the roadmap and strategy level, like I knew as a marketer it was super fun because maybe that product didn't exist yet. The roadmap didn't exist yet. But if you asked me, hey, where do you think your product is going in two to three years? I could, I could tell you that vision and I think the marketing teams who struggle with positioning and I've, I've consulted with some of them, I've worked with some of them one on one. It's like when there is no vision, it's very hard to, to do good positioning and to do good product marketing because I don't know what's pot. I don't know what's going to happen. Bey, like where the product is is today.

Trinity Nguyen [00:23:43]:

Right, but did the vision change since you joined Drift initially? Because you said that the product changed in terms of Persona. Right. So the vision also changed. It's more like the company aligned on one Persona use case.

Dave Gerhardt [00:23:55]:

Yeah, but I joined like they were selling it, but I joined very early. Almost at like the stage when you joined User Gems, where it's like first marketing person, they're selling it. It's not there yet. And it was basically a year or two of like they were selling this chat product. But we didn't call it conversational marketing yet. You know, it wasn't even until like maybe a couple million dollars in revenue that it was like, oh, this is what it. Like this is the repeatability thing. And so I think there was a lot of flexibilities.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:20]:

Like we knew it was going to be a messaging product and chat and probably in the sales and marketing space, but it wasn't perfectly refined until a year or two. Even if you go back and there was like a series B press release. I know because I wrote it. We called it conversation driven marketing in that press release. We didn't call it conversation market conversational marketing. It because we needed. We were doing this for a year or two and then like one time a customer in an email said to us, like, oh man, this, this conversational way of doing marketing has really changed. And we were like, oh, that's it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:49]:

And so there's this element of like the product marketer in you wants it to be perfect and wants a position to be like, nailed. But there is some, like, you just kind of have to. You can't obsess over the name so much. You can't obsess over the. That what you call it so much. You, you just need to keep going and collect more feedback. You know, I also joined the company early when it was kind of basically still pre product. And so there was a lot of exploration.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:10]:

And I think that's, that's an important time to, to gather all that learning in, in the, the phases of a startup, you know?

Trinity Nguyen [00:25:16]:

Yeah, no, I think Drift is definitely one of the best examples. When you have alignment in terms of vision, focus, Persona, how fast and how clear the messaging, everything will just cascade down the pipeline. Everything.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:29]:

They also had. The founders had vision, right? Like they, you know, they could have told you, like, what do you think their product's going to be in 10 years from now? They could have told you what they thought it was going to be. And that's the fun thing. That's fun from a marketing standpoint. And I know there's going to be many people listening to this who like, working at a company where like, they can't even get the head of product to even tell them the roadmap. Like, I saw a question in our, in our. We have this like, CMO community called CMO Club, and One of the CMOs in there wrote, like, how do you get the product team to share the roadmap? And I was like, I can't even, I can't even relate to that because I've just worked at a company where like, the head of product wanted me in those conversations. He's like, oh.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:06]:

He would literally come to my desk and be like, dude, we had this amazing meeting. Are you free right now? And I'm like, yeah. He's like, come here, come here. We had this amazing level of like, creativity and collaboration and he wanted to partner where there's other companies and they don't even, like, you know, they share it. They don't share anything with Marketing. They don't want to be involved in marketing. And that was, I don't think this is, I wrote about this recently but like, you know, all the content on LinkedIn and stuff is about like sales and marketing alignment.

Trinity Nguyen [00:26:29]:

Mm.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:30]:

I don't think there's enough about sales and product alignment and how important that is to the success of, of being a marketer.

Trinity Nguyen [00:26:36]:

Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm trying to like reflecting on our own journey as well. Like, I think like for us, like we work really closely with the product team because we are their biggest customers because we use our own product a lot. I think the challenge with our team is that we move the product team moves really quickly.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:53]:

So that's a good thing.

Trinity Nguyen [00:26:55]:

It's, it's a great thing. But like, for example, you look at the product roadmap, when I put in a slide, right, I want to see like four quarters ahead and they're like, no, no, no. Things going to change really quickly. I'm going to give you one quarter, which I get it, but I'm like, dang it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:27:08]:

Yeah, yeah, I got you, I got you. That, that part is tough. You're like trying to plan this thing you're doing next year.

Trinity Nguyen [00:27:13]:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. All the cadence for the launch, how do we sync the two team, all that stuff.

Dave Gerhardt [00:27:18]:

But anyway, yeah, what's the, what's the. Okay, so you got 11, you're in the teens of millions. You got 11 people on the marketing team. You said you're not an inbound lady. Outbound is your thing. Let's talk about the. What does your 11 person marketing team look like? How does User Gems do marketing?

Trinity Nguyen [00:27:35]:

Yeah. So on the marketing side we have like, you know, typical demand, product content, social and we have events, we have a professional event person to help us with that. And then the rest is the ADR team. So we have four adr, one director roughly around that. So the way we do we build program is. This is really weird. We like the opposite of almost every startup in terms of like how we build our pipeline. So I guess from the budget I usually allocate between 80 to 90% on the pipeline, activities or campaigns, programs, and then 10 to 20% on brand depending on the season and the year.

Trinity Nguyen [00:28:11]:

What's going on?

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:12]:

Just to pause on that because it comes up a lot when, when you say brand, like what's in that bucket? T shirts.

Trinity Nguyen [00:28:21]:

Did you say T shirts? I think it's just like different investments on like the creative side, things that we know we can't measure. A lot of things that we don't really put like an ROI on top of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:34]:

That seems to be like a common trend when I talk to CMOS. It's. It's a. It's basically that 80, 90% is the like true demand gen pipeline generating, like we need to measure the dollars in dollars out of this. And then there's maybe 10 to 20% that is. Hey, we want to start a podcast. Awesome. I believe in that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:51]:

I don't think we should measure that as sales. And so that's like we can spend five grand a month on that. And that's going to be in this brand bucket.

Trinity Nguyen [00:28:58]:

Yeah. I wonder if that changes if you talk to CMOs in like 100 plus million AR. Because I hear that at that range, a lot of their focus is on brands and communications.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:11]:

You ever get off the airplane in Miami and the whole airport is like Cisco billboards.

Trinity Nguyen [00:29:16]:

Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:17]:

And none of them even have like the website URL on it. You know, how do you measure that? I don't know. This is why I'm like a media. I've run a podcast for a living. I'm not like a, you know, enterprise. But how do you even know how to spend that? Like, I don't know. So, yeah, I don't know.

Trinity Nguyen [00:29:32]:

Brand sentiment survey, somehow.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:34]:

Somehow do a survey. That's right. Yeah.

Trinity Nguyen [00:29:36]:

But on the pipeline. On the pipeline side. So we built it. Basically the main program for us is account based, which is crazy because most people kind of like different, like paid acquisition. We actually start out with account based is the core outbound. So we pick accounts that we know or think would be good fit to go after them.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:58]:

Okay, so your marketing motion is driven off of accounts.

Trinity Nguyen [00:30:01]:

Accounts, yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:02]:

How many are there? What's the universe of accounts?

Trinity Nguyen [00:30:04]:

The universe. ICP is probably around 15,000.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:07]:

Cool. And.

Trinity Nguyen [00:30:08]:

Yeah. And then we just kind of like pick 5, 600 per quarter to go after, using all kinds of signals to bubble them up, reaching out. So that's kind of like demand and adrs work together. And then on top of that, those are different programs like clothes loss, nurtures, et cetera, et cetera.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:24]:

I believe in all the brand stuff and the inbound stuff, but I do think I. I think this is such a. It's not for everybody. And what's like the asp of User Gems? Like, what is a customer roughly around.

Trinity Nguyen [00:30:34]:

Like high 20, 30.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:36]:

Okay, so you're not selling like, you know, a 29amonth, like subscription. Right. So it's. So it's different. I think that world is more high volume inbound. Right. But in this world, like I do think a lot of the kind of BS and the nonsense that we fight with sales and sales and marketing alignment and how do you measure marketing? Like, it's usually not an issue at companies that are account based and driven by accounts because alignment, you know, you're, you're, hey, These are the 500 accounts we're trying to sell to this quarter. Let's.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:04]:

We're going to measure our success by like penetration among those accounts.

Trinity Nguyen [00:31:07]:

Yes.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:07]:

Right. We're not like, oh, we wrote this blog post and you know, 15 people put their emails in on it. It's measuring, it's, it's a much more tangible way to measure like the alignment of sales and marketing. We're working together to get into these accounts. No one's arguing over credit. Did marketing do this or not? It's like, oh, did, did we get a meeting at one of those accounts? And like everyone high fives, right?

Trinity Nguyen [00:31:26]:

Yeah, 100%. I don't know why not as many companies get adopt this many understand that there's legacy systems incentives that kind of structured in a way that didn't encourage this. But it's a company buying the product. Is that company's name on a DocuSign. Why are you fighting just what's happening?

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:42]:

We fight because of internal metrics.

Trinity Nguyen [00:31:44]:

Exactly.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:45]:

It's like I don't get my performance bonus if, you know, 6,000 people didn't read our blog or something like that.

Trinity Nguyen [00:31:51]:

Exactly.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:52]:

Ye.

Trinity Nguyen [00:31:52]:

Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:53]:

Okay, so you got 15,000. You know, you got however, 15,000 accounts. You focus on 500 to 600 of them a quarter. What are the tactics of like actually going out and executing that? You know, there is Acme Corp and they are on your account list. Everyone's always like, so what, what, you know, what do you do? Do you just start calling them? You start emailing them? Like, how do you, how do you do that? I, I want to. Maybe we can just use like a made up account as an example. But take us into like, how do you do that?

Trinity Nguyen [00:32:16]:

Yeah. So, so kind of like the whole work stream, right? The first step is like, how do we pick which accounts to go after when? So we use all kinds of signals to bubble up, like, do they have any like past champions? Just join any new hires. Are they funded? Just raise funding? Are they hiring? Da da da da. Basically all of that, right? We give those scores. So in the Salesforce report, we rank all the ICP accounts based on the total scores, the fit and the signals. And then we just, the ABM team would just grab the first 500 every quarter and then they would start focusing on the creative. So we do one to one abms a lot. So like all these accounts will have their own set of campaigns that they're going to be served.

Dave Gerhardt [00:32:55]:

Sure. Is the creative like you think of a hook that would apply to everyone. Like what's the campaign we're running for User Gems this quarter or is it like account specific?

Trinity Nguyen [00:33:04]:

It's a mix. So each campaign we have multiple creatives. Right. So we have like some mix of like highly personalized to that account and some is kind of like one to many messaging but with that logo for example. So that's on the marketing side. And then while the marketing team's creating all those creatives, the ADR start preparing for the outreach. So in the past like every Friday the ADR teams will have like a prospecting hours that they would kind of go down their list of accounts and then select prospects. And because they know how the marketing team picks these accounts based on signals, they look for those signals in Salesforce.

Trinity Nguyen [00:33:40]:

Basically grab all the people that most likely to buy da da da da, add them into outreach. So since September last year we use our own AI to automatically grab all these people, put them into sequences and write emails for the reps as well. And that's it?

Dave Gerhardt [00:33:56]:

That's it.

Trinity Nguyen [00:33:57]:

That's it. And then we start tracking every quarter. Do they convert? Do they not? What's going on? How is the spend going?

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:03]:

What are the channels like? So email.

Trinity Nguyen [00:34:04]:

So you're sending outbound email, email calls, LinkedIn digital.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:09]:

It's all one to one. So like I'm at, you know if, if Exit Five was on your target list of accounts, I'm going to go to LinkedIn and I'm going to see a ad creative for my company.

Trinity Nguyen [00:34:18]:

Yeah, it was like hey, Exit five.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:20]:

Yeah. What tool are you using for that creative?

Trinity Nguyen [00:34:23]:

Blood, sweat and tears. Just canva and campaign.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:26]:

And you're making 500 versions of that creative?

Trinity Nguyen [00:34:29]:

Oh yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:30]:

With humans.

Trinity Nguyen [00:34:31]:

With humans. Humans are great. Yeah. No, we, we've run this for almost six years. ABM was the first program that we, we started like generating pipeline way back when. So we have a very well oiled machine. It's just assembly line and then you templatize it and then things just. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:52]:

And do you feel like you don't have. Is the company still bootstrap? Did you rate? Did they race?

Trinity Nguyen [00:34:56]:

We raised, we did raise in 21. Yeah, yeah. Series A.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:00]:

But it doesn't seem like there's crazy like crazy high venture backed goal. Like it doesn't seem like you're on this. You know, you've been there for five, for five years, company's growing nicely. It doesn't seem like you have these crazy growth goals that make marketing like unattainable. I think or maybe, maybe you do. Says the person who's not CMO at the company.

Trinity Nguyen [00:35:22]:

I'm like, look at all these like gray hair. No, I think our leadership team and the board's pretty reasonable. When the market was unpredictable in the last couple of years. But before that we were tracking along with the typical triple, triple, double, double, all that fun stuff. But I think the team, the leadership team is pretty seasoned.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:49]:

So the campaign you described to me is that the main, is that your main motion and then are you doing other stuff to surround that?

Trinity Nguyen [00:35:56]:

Oh that, that one is now just one of the many. It was the main motion for a long time and now we have like the usual like paid acquisition throughout the buyer journey, nurturing, retargeting, all that stuff. We retarget people during sales process too. So when they talk to AES we also help them multi thread to other people and then we apply all of those campaigns that we do in the pre sales also to post sales.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:24]:

What about as far as like showing the product experience? Right. So the main thing you're trying to drive people to is to request a demo or book a demo. Right.

Trinity Nguyen [00:36:33]:

That's majority of our CTAs.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:35]:

But I don't want to talk to sales, I want to see, I want to see the product. I want to have a free trial.

Trinity Nguyen [00:36:41]:

Yeah. The hard thing for us so like to see the product is something we're working on I think for so long. Usergen's product is kind of set it and forget it. We wanted to make it so seamless so there wasn't much to show because it's just, you know, workflows, data that's already changed. So we're working on something that to show so people can kind of experience it, especially with the AI aspect. But on the second part is like the free trial, this one's a little bit tricky because we did test with this over five years. Like when we give people trials it's a little bit hard because then your sales cycle becomes really long because people waiting to see how they their own trial turned out in terms of pipeline and we couldn't influence it. And when it's free, people actually don't pay attention to it as much and Put as much resources because for usergems to work, you need to connect to your CRM.

Trinity Nguyen [00:37:30]:

So it's like a jet fuel for your pipeline.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:33]:

You need the data. There's no way to show that without. Okay, you wrote just before this, you actually wrote, we hit our Q4 targets. My proudest metric is this one. Pipeline grew 26% while our spend decreased 27%. We effectively doubled our outbound capacity this time last year. I was one of the biggest naysayers when it came to AI for outbound. Doesn't seem like that's true anymore.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:56]:

Let's talk about AI. Let's talk about how you decrease the spend and let's just talk about where does AI fit in your toolbox as a marketer and how has it helped you specifically with outbound?

Trinity Nguyen [00:38:06]:

Yeah, this one's for outbound specifically. So obviously the target always increase. So like the pipeline growing, that's a given. The spend. There are two aspects of the spend. One is the like the program spend. And second one is just like the headcount capacities. Right.

Trinity Nguyen [00:38:23]:

The program spend. One thing is because we want to make sure that the company can grow efficiently and have a healthy run Runway. Another thing is because I'm a crazy boss. So our team is extremely strong in paid. Too strong that, like our ads are like really catchy. People love it, but we too good at it. It's really hard to win the team off of it, but I want the team to figure out other programs and channels. So at one point, we're trying to do that for a long time.

Trinity Nguyen [00:38:52]:

Couldn't do it because it's so addictive to get the paid performance. So one point I'm like, okay, we're going to cut this. This is the max we're going to spend on paid. Figure out how to hit the number. So that's part of it. The second part is the constraints.

Dave Gerhardt [00:39:07]:

It's not you're laughing about it, but like constraints and guardrails make a big difference.

Trinity Nguyen [00:39:11]:

It was very stressful for all of us. All of us. But yeah, I think you got to kind of wean yourself off of it. Second piece on the ADR capacity piece. So coincidentally, half of or many of our ADRs happened to have babies during September, October, November. So naturally, the capacity was slashed in half. And then this was when we rolling out our own AI agent. I told the team I don't want to market something until I'm convinced.

Trinity Nguyen [00:39:46]:

I need to see that it works for us. So you can kind of like see all the stars align in Hindsight. So we use the AI to augment the capacity of adr. So we didn't have and everything just worked out as if we planned it. But it was very nerve wracking to kind of like see would it get there. So yeah. So that's how we got to the Q4 result.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:09]:

Okay. So it's a little bit of a forcing function, which is great. I mean that's how this stuff happens. But it also is like a good lesson of like, if you want to make a change in your team, you had a natural one. But sometimes can you just force, you know, here are the guardrails. Go figure it out. Go make it happen.

Trinity Nguyen [00:40:23]:

Yeah. And we uncover some like non paid channels that. It took me a very long time.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:29]:

To look at you doing inbound stuff. It's not just outbound.

Trinity Nguyen [00:40:33]:

Right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:36]:

What are you excited about in marketing right now for, you know, for the company, for the team?

Trinity Nguyen [00:40:42]:

Gosh. Everyone's like, of course you're gonna say this is AI. But now I'm a believer because I'm like, it does work, like as long as you kind of like think about it through fundamentally and then set the guardrails and try to do it. So I'm really, really excited about this because we just did our planning for this year and then the pay team is like, yay, we hit our goal. Here's a new goal. Like, can we increase our spend? I'm like, how about now figure out how we can do it together without increasing spend first until this whole thing breaks and then we put money in it. So I'm really excited to try use AI to grow the team capacity. And then another thing is like how to bring AI into the workflows of the rest of the marketing team and the rest of the company.

Trinity Nguyen [00:41:24]:

Not as in like we have an AI project, but more like think about like the daily workflow. How do we weave it in naturally? And I think the outbound side's getting there, but the rest of the company is not quite yet. It's still kind of like a ad hoc one off.

Dave Gerhardt [00:41:37]:

Yeah, I think there's a lot of, there's going to be a lot of learning. It's like, it's like being like, I keep going back to like it's like marketers discovering the Internet. We got to figure out how to use it and how to use it in the right way and how to use it in a way that like if everyone's doing it, if everyone's doing the same thing, well, what's going to be the Opportunity. So if everyone's blasting people with the same AI outbound messages, then of course it's not going to work. And so what is the opportunity to make it yours? And that is like the creative exercise as a marketer.

Trinity Nguyen [00:42:07]:

Exactly. I feel like it's very easy for people to see kind of like one step ahead. Kind of like, oh, everyone's going to do the same thing, but then how about we push ourselves to think about like two, three steps ahead of.

Dave Gerhardt [00:42:18]:

That's always been true, though. It's like everybody, oh, start a podcast. Everybody's got a podcast. Start an email. Start doing email. Everyone's doing email. Start going to events. Everyone's doing events.

Dave Gerhardt [00:42:26]:

It's, it's. Everyone's always going to copy what everybody else is already doing. So it's like, how do you innovate within that opportunity?

Trinity Nguyen [00:42:33]:

Exactly. But yeah, so I'm really excited about that. It's funny you mentioned that same thing with webinars. I'm trying to convince the teams that like webinars. I know it's not sexy, but it's just a medium. They're like, okay, boomer. No, no one buys anything from webinars or emails. I'm like, it just.

Trinity Nguyen [00:42:52]:

We only have limited channels to reach somebody.

Dave Gerhardt [00:42:56]:

Okay, I'll talk to them. But give me. I'm a. I guess I'm a boomer too. I'm 37. That would make me a boomer in this generation of how the people we work with. But a webinar. How is a webinar different than, than you watch YouTube, right? You watch Tick Tock.

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:10]:

It's. It's an information source. Right. And like, exactly. You know, you're selling a product. Right. So, so your User Gems customers is like, what's your, who's your ideal customer?

Trinity Nguyen [00:43:19]:

Demand gen. Yeah, demand gen. Sales leaders as well.

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:23]:

Okay. So, so you're, you're focused on demand gen and sales leaders who want to grow pipeline and increase sales inside their company. The best opportunity for User Gems is to be positioned as like an expert in helping you do that. And we're going to do an hour session on helping you how to. Helping you do that. And so maybe 100 people will show up live and that's great. Maybe 500 people will watch the replay and get it recorded later. It's also like a Trojan horse for creating content not to, you know, not to help you pitch the webinar to your team.

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:51]:

But I just, I'm using this on this podcast as an example to just show like, how all these Tactics and techniques can be timeless when you zoom all the way out and think about, well, are we caught up on the term webinar or are we thinking about what the delivery actually is? Right.

Trinity Nguyen [00:44:04]:

Yeah, exactly. I should have talked to you like a year ago. The team's now bought in because by chance I figured out how to call webinars. Call a show. So like, like an Isaac show, An ABM master class show.

Dave Gerhardt [00:44:17]:

Yeah.

Trinity Nguyen [00:44:17]:

Then that show's cool. Yeah, it's still a webinar.

Dave Gerhardt [00:44:20]:

It's still a webinar. We call them, we do them. We do them once a month for Exit five and we just call them live sessions. And I make a joke and I'm like, it's a webinar. You can call it a webinar, but they're, but they're good. I also think there's huge value in doing these shows, you know, shows, webinars, live sessions, beyond the direct sales roi. Because even just like I've been taking notes this whole time in this podcast, right? Anytime you do something like this, it's like having a sales meeting. It's like having a pitch, right? You're refining your story.

Dave Gerhardt [00:44:47]:

And so like, even if people don't buy User Gems because of the webinar, what if your pitch just got like 10% better or like you found something that you said on this webinar that was like, you know, chat like lit up when you said that. It's like, oh, that's a signal that we can use. It's like a stand up comedian, like testing their material in a way. And I think that's such a valuable piece. Piece of marketing.

Trinity Nguyen [00:45:09]:

I love that. I'm going to use the analogy of stand up comedian. I think that will land very well.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:14]:

Yeah, right. I mean, think about like when you joined User Gems, right? You're the first person, you're doing product marketing. You're just testing the messaging, right? And so like, you know, right now you have this thing on your site, outbound AI that converts without cringe on January 15th. Great. Maybe that helps you accelerate deals. Maybe that helps you, you know, bring in new people. Maybe you just learned that like this topic crushes it. And now we have a whole new set of creative and stuff we can be doing around this, like Outbound that isn't cringe concept.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:40]:

Concept. There's, there's a lot there. Anyway, Trinity, it was great to hang out with you. Good to see you. Good to have you on the podcast. I hope maybe we can get you to one of our events or I don't know. We can if, you know, if you. Maybe we should.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:52]:

We need it. We need a mi. I know you're tired of Miami, but we need a Miami event.

Trinity Nguyen [00:45:56]:

Oh, my gosh. If you come to Miami, that'll be awesome. Let me know. I'll help you source locations. You know Jane, Sarah from Dextra. Woman, I don't know. Okay. She's also here as well.

Trinity Nguyen [00:46:07]:

So making a note. An event together.

Dave Gerhardt [00:46:10]:

Yeah. This is an awesome group of CMOs down in Miami. All right, Trinity, great to see you. Go check out userdems. Go follow Trinity on LinkedIn. That's my favorite is, you know, you've never been on the podcast before. My favorite thing is, like, after we put your episode out and three weeks later you send me an email and you're like, I didn't know you had so much reach. I got 15 messages from people on LinkedIn, so that's what I want.

Dave Gerhardt [00:46:30]:

Maybe you go work with her. Maybe you could go buy User Gems. Just hang out. Just. That's the best type of feedback. So go find Trinity on LinkedIn and follow her. Okay. All right, see you later.

Trinity Nguyen [00:46:39]:

Thanks so much, Dave.

Dave Gerhardt [00:46:44]:

Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review, because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit Five. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exitfive.com. Our mission at Exit Five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit Five.

Dave Gerhardt [00:47:13]:

There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are. So you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exitfive.com and I will see you over there in the community.

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