#214: Q&A with Dave | Brand vs. Demand, Personality In Your Marketing, and The Most Successful B2B Marketing Campaigns

In this solo episode, Dave shares his POV on marketing with answers to a bunch of burning questions, including:

• Balancing Brand vs. Demand
• Working with the sales team vs. serving customers
• How to inject personality into your brand
• The most successful marketing campaigns Dave was a part of in his career
• How to plan and brainstorm good marketing ideas
• The biggest mistake marketing teams make
• How to structure a marketing team
• How did you know it was the right time to start your own company?
• How to best differentiate in a crowded competitive market with similar feature offerings

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - Intro to Dave
  
• (04:40) - - Balancing brand, demand, and customer-centricity in marketing
  
• (07:18) - - Infusing personality into marketing
  
• (11:38) - - Most successful marketing campaigns and why they worked
  
• (19:00) - - The concept of marketable moments and creating momentum
  
• (22:53) - - Marketing at Drift and Privy
  
• (24:47) - - How to plan and brainstorm campaign ideas
  
• (27:48) - - Biggest mistakes marketing teams make
  
• (29:20) - - Structuring marketing teams for different business needs
  
• (30:07) - - The journey to starting Exit Five as a company
  
• (32:30) - - Brand marketing versus demand marketing for scaling startups
  
• (35:08) - - Differentiating positioning in a crowded market
  
• (38:34) - - Closing thoughts

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***
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Dave Gerhardt  [00:00:00]:
You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt. All right, hey, everybody, it's Dave. It's me here. I'm doing a special little episode, something I haven't done in a while. And I'm gonna do a solo episode because I did a Q&A with a marketing team at a cool company last week, and they asked me to come hang out at their, like, marketing team meeting. And I was the guest, and they asked me a bunch of questions about marketing, and I prepped for it, which I don't often do these days. And they had a bunch of a list of a bunch of great questions. And I was up early one morning and I wrote out all my thoughts and answers, and we had a great session with the team.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:00:52]:
And then now I have this amazing, like, Google Doc with all these questions and answers in there. And I was like, you know what? I should sit down and record a podcast for the Exit Five podcast for this conversation. And so I'm just going to hang out here for a little bit and answer some of these questions. And maybe it's interesting to you as you're walking around on a run, cleaning the house in the car somewhere. And I just also want to say thank you. I get so many messages from people who join Exit Five, and they say that the number one reason they joined is because they listen to this podcast. So many people join and they're like, hey, you know, I've been listening to this podcast forever, and I finally decided to join the community, longtime listener of the podcast, yada yada. So I just want to give a shout out to you.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:01:32]:
Thank you. And it's also what's cool about podcasting as a format. It's like you create this connection that is so different than any other channel. And then you hear my voice, you read my stuff on LinkedIn, you see my face in the community. You built a little bit of a different connection. So thank you for that. I appreciate all the podcasts, comments and love. So, yeah.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:01:49]:
All right, this was the first question. How do you approach the balance between brand and demand as well as customer centricity versus practical needs of the organization? To get more specific, some of the best B2B marketing mirrors B2C marketing, or at a minimum, is customer centric in that it is more empathetic to customer challenges and goals than it is concerned with pushing product, getting a conversion, et cetera. How do you balance the need to do good marketing with the more practical needs of the sales team, slash, broader organization? So my first response to this question is why is it assumed? The way that I read that question is that it's assumed that good marketing has to be at odds with the practical needs of the sales team. And so my kind of spidey sense immediately goes off there and it's like, is something broken there? Because why do those things have to be at odds? Why does good marketing not align with like delivering what the sales team needs? So there's something there because I feel like you should be able to scratch both of those itches with one scratch. They shouldn't have to compete because like, as a marketer you should be able to give sales the tools that they need to do their job, which is things like case studies, competitive comparisons, battle cards, you know, ROI models, research, analysis, whatever. And all of those things make for great resources to help people buy your product, right? Those can be packaged. It's like marketing to two different audiences, right? And so like, maybe for the sales audience it's going to be different than it is for the customer audience. But that case study, that battle card, that model, that data, that research, that should be relevant because ultimately think about it, the goal of marketing is to make sales easier, right? The goal of marketing is to make sales easier.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:03:26]:
It doesn't necessarily just mean that the sales team, it means the motion of selling a product. And so it should be like, you know, WD40 for your sales process. And so good marketing should make it easier for the sales team to sell. And good marketing makes it easier for someone to buy from you. And so I think good sales enablement there can serve both sides. I also think as a marketer you have to understand that, you know, your job is not just to do this like, you know, holier than thou marketing, right? Like do good marketing and good things will happen. Like not really. You kind of have to serve the customer, you have to serve the external audience, but then you also have to serve the internal audience, right? You have to appeal to the sales team.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:04:01]:
And so if there are particular things that a sales team needs, it's your job to deliver it to them, to help them close deals and grow revenue for the company. Now it doesn't mean do shitty marketing, it doesn't mean do things that people aren't going to like. So how can you find a way to both do good marketing and deliver for the sales team? And then I also think this is what's great about marketing. This is why there's so much like debate about marketing on LinkedIn is there's so much nuance in marketing and Social media does not lend itself really well to nuance. Right. And that's why we get in arguments about marketing on social media. But you need to be able to hold two things that are true. Both of those things can be true.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:04:38]:
And so how can you do good marketing for the customer and the company? I don't always think it's true that it has to be either good marketing or push the product. Right. Your marketing should solve real problems for real people. And that doesn't mean that you have to ignore the business goals to get there. The sweet spot is being able to find ways to help customers succeed that also can drive the key metrics and help you hit your goals. So that was the first question. Second question, company XYZ said, hey, we have such a fun and unique personality internally, and we really want to highlight it in our external marketing. What are the best ways companies can find the balance between showing personality and having fun with their marketing while still appealing to larger enterprise brands who might be more critical when choosing a software? So I kind of always operate back to first principles on this one, but I bet you can guess if you're listening to this what I'm going to say again here.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:05:27]:
And hey, maybe this is a fun episode you can try to answer. You know, I'm curious to hear your opinions on these questions too. But my other question, my question right back is me. Why does it have to be at odds? Why does showing your personality mean not for enterprise? And why does selling to the enterprise mean that we can't have a personality here? Now, to me, personality, it doesn't mean you have to do things that are inappropriate or absurd or corny things. That does not mean personality. And then also there's this myth like selling to the enterprise doesn't mean things have to be, you know, white, bald guy in a business suit shaking hands with someone. Like, that's not the Persona either. And I think what always is going to work is being real, being human.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:06:09]:
And when you're selling to the enterprise that is still a human who has a job, who has concerns. And think about it, what does it really mean? What are the real changes in selling to the enterprise are often around security, complexity, compliance, more people involved. Right. It's a bigger risk. There is a lot of things to navigate internally. And so those things you could actually argue. Like we did a CMO panel when we were down in Austin and one of the guests was this woman called Kim Storen. She's a CMO at a company called Zayo Group.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:06:39]:
They're like A infrastructure, telecom, I don't know, some type of big deal, big deal infrastructure type of company. And she said, hey, I have the perfect example. Like we sell like multimillion dollar contracts. And I would. And for people who don't think that B2B is an emotional purchase, like it absolutely is, because in this case it takes six months to close a deal. It's often multi million dollars. Like that is more emotional than buying a hoodie, you know, scrolling Instagram on your couch. And so I think of that and I'm like, yeah, selling to the enterprise doesn't mean sprinkle your personality in there.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:07:09]:
And I think particularly as a company, the company has expertise and insights and you want to show that to your customers. And so bring the personality in. You should be able to bring that in, right? And so you, the way that you show your personality is by being real, right? Is by showing your real face, right? Writing copy with a certain tone. One of my favorite copywriting lessons, I don't know where this came from, but I've kind of taken this on my own over the years, was like, you know, we kind of think of personalization and marketing, right? And personalization and marketing. You need to personalize your marketing to, you know, make it effective, right? And have it make an impact. And so we think that personalization means like, you know, insert the name token, like hello Dave, as you know, and we have my job title. And so it's like, you know, hello Dave, SVP of marketing. You know, that's not personalization, right? Personalization is me.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:07:54]:
I'm writing an email and I've used this trick all the time. I'm like, I have an automated DM that goes out to all the Exit Five members and it says, hey, look, I know you know, this is an automated message, but this is really me. Who wrote this. I wrote this, you know, one day when I was setting up Exit five. It's me, it's Dave, blah, blah. Or I've used this in an email where it's like, P.S. i wrote this email from, you know, 35,000ft above the ground on a JetBlue flight from Boston to San Francisco. I hate traveling for work because I miss my kids, but there's something about being on a six hour flight where I can get so much work done.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:08:22]:
Why is it that a Coke tastes so much better on an airplane than it does at home? And so like sprinkling in little nuggets like that let people know that I'm real, I'm a real person. I think that's how you bring personality into your marketing. There's also things you can do that are fun, that might be on brand. And so, like, if you've ever used mailchimp, back in the day, I remember I would use mailchimp for my first podcast or my newsletter. And before you'd send out mailchimp, there'd be like a sweating, like monkey hand, like pressing a red button right before you. It's like, are you sure you're ready to send this email? And like, little touches like that. Or they sent out knitted hats for your cat. Little touches like that can also work.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:08:54]:
And so enterprise or not, like, people buy from people. Real people, real faces. This will always win. I think something that I'm proud of that we adopted at Drift when I was there that David the CEO pushed us on was like, no stock photos. We always use real employees or real customers. Small things like that are huge. Like, look at Patagonia's branding as an example. It's all real people, real customers, employees or people using their product.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:09:15]:
And I think the best brands are not made up characters. It's hard to be that character. It's hard to come into work every day and think about what it means to be on brand and so bring the real you, the personality into your marketing. I think that's how I would do it. And then I would also throw an objection flag with like the. I don't think that selling to the enterprise means you can't bring your personality into your marketing. All right, next question was, what was the most successful campaign you ran and why? And I listed out a bunch here, so I'll quickly go through them. One of them was at Saster.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:09:47]:
So Saster, big annual conference. We had gone to it a bunch in the past when I was at Drift. We didn't want to. We had the money to spend on a booth, but we didn't want to do what everybody else was doing. That was a big part of our identity and our brand. And so we didn't want to spend on a booth and we wanted to come up with something creative. And we were really into like Salesforce, kind of like crazy Marc Benioff Guerrilla MARKETING plays and we were like, what are some of the things we could do with that? How can we bring that into our brand? Nobody's done stuff like that for a while. And so Saster was at San Jose Convention center or something like that.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:10:15]:
I don't know the area that well. I'm just a Boston guy now in Vermont. But we found out that there was a train station that would take people to the event and found out that we could wrap the train station so all of, like, the bus stops and the train stops right outside, we could wrap them with, like, Drift branding and some message for basically fraction of the cost that it would have cost us to get a booth there because nobody had thought to buy it. And so we did that. And so we started to get all these pictures and messages on social media because people were arriving at this event and they saw. They saw Drift from the minute that they got off the train. It seemed like we were a huge part of this conference. We didn't have any booth.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:10:48]:
We wrapped that. I went with one other person on the team, and we filmed videos and podcasts around the event, and it was amazing. When I brought this question up in that meeting, though, someone said, well, how did you measure the ROI of that? How did you know if it drove sales? Well, first of all, the reason we went to the event was not like, we need to go to this event because we need seven sales meetings. I think we would have taken a different approach. We wanted to do something from a brand standpoint where we want to go there. We want to get people to know us, get people talking about us. We want to become memorable. And as a result, we did get a bunch of inbound messages from people after that.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:11:18]:
But the goal was not like, we need to go book X number of meetings. We also rented a sprinter van, and we picked up VIP customers and other people. We posted about it on LinkedIn and we said, hey, if you need a ride at Saster, take a ride in the Drift van. We had this van that was, like, wrapped, and they had, you know, snacks and air conditioning and wi fi on it and whatever. And we gave people rides from the airport to the event, and that earned us some love from customers. So that was a good one. Another one was this. We called it Drift love.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:11:44]:
It was drift.com love. It's gone now, RIP sadly. But we had so much social proof and word of mouth online that we just started aggregating it all into one, like, killer, endless scrolling landing page. And I like this idea because I think so often people know that the marketing team, like, you know, makes the case studies, makes the testimonials. But there's something different about, like, seeing truly social, social proof. So, like, things that people said on Twitter and on LinkedIn about us aggregating all that and putting it into a landing page was awesome. We also did billboards in San Francisco, but instead of it being like some drift message. We had two or three tweets that people had sent out about our product, and we put them on billboards and we made them stars.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:12:28]:
And we found, like, billboards near their office or on kind of random streets. And you could just basically, a la carte, buy one. It was super cost effective. And then each customer actually went out and, like, took a picture with their billboard. It was pretty amazing. We also took over the Nasdaq, you know, that big billboard in Times Square that everybody does now in SAS. Congratulations on raising, you know, your $32 million Series B, whatever. When we launched our book Conversational Marketing, we wanted to, like, go to Times Square and make it larger than life, because I was studying Ryan Holiday at the time, and I ended up getting a call with Ryan Holiday and kind of picking his brain about how to do a book launch.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:13:06]:
And he's like, the thing about a book is, like, you need to make people feel like it's larger than life. If people feel like the book is everywhere, they're going to buy it. More. Books are very like, you know, keeping up with the Joneses type of thing. And so we kind of built this whole launch strategy around perception of the book. And so we had this idea of how much is it to rent the Nasdaq? Boom, let's do a book launch. Let's get our book on the NASDAQ in Times Square on that big billboard. It was some insane cost for the day, but found out that we could rent it basically every half hour.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:13:34]:
And so you could rent it in half hour increments. And so for a fraction of the cost, we rented it for 30 minutes. Three of us went to New York and we took pictures, we videotaped it, we made a vlog. We have all this footage from social media that lives on forever. And so we only had the book on the billboard for like, 30 minutes, but we have pictures, and we got to put in our website and put in our marketing for everybody else. They thought that thing might have been there for weeks or days, and so it was an amazing play. Another thing we did was all of the Hudson News, you know, little bookstores in airports. We were able to pay some fee, and it was pretty reasonable from a marketing budget standpoint.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:14:10]:
But basically, we got to have our book standing up on the front table at, like, 20 Hudson News airport locations in airports around the U.S. for like, eight weeks. And that was amazing because everybody that went to the airport, like, whether it was employees traveling for work or customers, guess what they did. They Went into that Hudson News and they took a picture of the book and they posted on social media. It was amazing play. We self published a book. And so instead of writing just another ebook or blog post, we realized, you know, people want physical things. They like the physical thing that you can mail, that you can touch.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:14:46]:
Right. That you can, you know, mark and write on. And so we self published a book about how we do marketing at Drift inside of the company called this Won't Scale. It was stories from our marketing team. We interviewed a bunch of people on the marketing team about it. We wrote it, we put it together. It was no cost, it was free for people. That thing went super viral in our niche.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:15:02]:
And I don't know what the ROI on it was, but all these plays added up to create this incredible affinity and awareness for, for us. Small things, like, this is fun because I didn't get to talk about all these ideas with the team because we ran out of time. But small things, like not sexy things, but doing dinners with like two customers and 10 prospects, those worked really, really well. There's just something about that in person connection and hanging out for two, three hours with somebody. When I was at Privy, my favorite campaign that we did was we did an April Fool's campaign. So Privy was a SaaS software that we sold to B2C companies. So it'd be like E commerce store owners and our customers would be like, you know, Butcherbox, right. Or some type of subscription business.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:15:41]:
We had this idea of like for April Fools, let's announce that we're selling like Privy Box, which is like a boxed up version of our software on CDs, like you know, AOL back in the day. And so we made this landing page. It might still actually be up. Let me privy.com bot or maybe they. All these companies I've worked at, now they've taken. Oh no, it's gone. Yeah, they take them down. So that was fun.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:16:00]:
And what's funny? That was April 1, 2020. And I remember like inside the company, people were like, is it okay to make jokes right now? You know, like we're in the. We're, you know, Covid just happened. Can we make. You can make jokes. It was fine. We were making jokes about COVID It was about selling this software and then the last one. I think the overarching theme for all of these is like creative ways to get attention.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:16:17]:
That's what's fun about marketing to me. It's not doing things that everybody else is doing. I do think marketing is a game of attention. You have to find the opportunities where you can, like, stack the deck and get people to pay attention for you and use them as a way to then tell your story. And then the last thing that I had in here that I didn't mention was this concept of marketable moments. So we tried to launch something from marketing once a month because marketing is a game of attention and it's a momentum game. The marketing team can be creating momentum for your company. Ideally, you're working closely with the product team, and the product team is always shipping.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:16:49]:
Because ultimately, what's the point of the business if you don't have product to ship? But you can't expect a big product launch every single month. And so we would sit down with the product team, we'd kind of lay out the roadmap. Okay. You know, in Q1, we have this in March. Okay. So that means in January and February, marketing, we gotta come up with our own launches. And so we're gonna do this book or we're gonna do this event, or we're gonna create this. A swipe file of some kind.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:17:09]:
And whatever the idea was, it just became this way for us. And we did at the beginning of the month, the first Tuesday of every month, because we wanted to, like, stack the deck from an attention and traffic and sales pipeline standpoint so those deals could close later in the month. But we always launch something the first Tuesday of every month. And that was such an amazing forcing function for us as a company. Deadlines drive decisions and drive action. Having that on the calendar and being like, we're going to launch something every month. And then also it allows you to do, like, less but more. Right.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:17:37]:
And so instead of just kind of like, blog post, blog post, blog post, ebook, webinar data, we would always try to rally things around, like, how can we make this part of, like, this big marketable moment, this big launch? And if you send me a message, if you listen to this, email me dgavegearhart.com or DM me on LinkedIn. Or if you're in the Exit Five community, send me a DM of this. And I'm happy to answer any questions about the concept of marketable moments. Okay, Another question. What was different about marketing at Privy versus Drift? What did you learn doing marketing and E commerce? I said, what's interesting and relevant for everyone here is maybe that it was closer to being the same than it was different, which is a pretty awesome lesson. Drift became like Enterprise B2B. And that was not super different than, like, high volume SaaS. Privy was more of like a PLG kind of low price, high volume subscription.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:18:22]:
It was really like the fundamentals applied. Like it wasn't that different. You need strong positioning and differentiation, strong messaging. You need great customer stories, proof product marketing examples. And then it's just like the tactics might be different on how you execute those things. But I think it was a lifelong lesson for me in marketing. It's like, oh yeah, whether I'm helping my accountant do marketing or selling B2B SaaS, like the principles are going to be timeless. And I think that was an awesome lesson to learn.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:18:48]:
There were some differences. So like, yeah, we're still selling to businesses. But the difference was at Drift, customers often had like a 50 person marketing team and at privy it was a one person marketing team. Privy was a much lower ASP. So privy is like high volume, touchless, buy it on the website. Ideally you don't talk to anybody. There was also a big Shopify app store play. So Privy was a big Shopify app and the app store was huge.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:19:11]:
There was like ads in the app store, SEO and optimization. And so that was a big SEO play for us there. And Drift was more like, you know, mid market enterprise where we're working with a field sales team and helping them book meetings and close deals. All right, how do you plan and brainstorm campaign ideas? What is your process? Well, the first thing is I hate the random brainstorm. Like dance monkey, you're creative. Dance give us ideas. I'm not very spontaneously creative, but if I have an idea, like if you have an idea and we can spend some time talking about the idea and then I can have a day or two or some time to like kind of let it marinate. I'm much better coming up with ideas that way.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:19:46]:
And so for any plan or campaign idea, first, why like what's the forcing function or event? And so like how does this map back to our company goals? What are the company goals? Like you can do anything. Anything in marketing works. TikTok works, YouTube works, email works, Ads work, dinners work. Right, but why are we doing this? Like, what's the bigger thing that this maps back to? And having it map back to a specific launch or campaign and having a deadline, that makes a huge difference. Guardrails. Guardrails are huge. Like I said, we can do anything. But you need guardrails.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:20:13]:
So like, when does this need to happen by? What is the budget? How do we want it to look or feel? Who else has done this? Well, what does good look like? What does Bad look like, what do we not want to do? For example, we wanted to do an event for Exit Five this year, but I wanted to do it in September. I wanted to do it in Vermont. I didn't want to travel anywhere. We had a limited budget and so, boom, those are perfect. I'd rather have guardrails than no guardrails. When you can do anything, it's almost impossible. I don't know, should we do a 10,000 person event? Maybe? I don't know. So having those guardrails was huge.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:20:41]:
You gotta sit down and map out those things. Then also I find, like, just the more work you can put in on the brief up front, like, hey, we wanna do a new website. Okay, great. Before we do that, let's go pull three to five examples of like, which websites do we like and why do we like them? And this is why ChatGPT or Claude is amazing, because you can say, hey, I really like this. A terrible example. I don't think it's a good. It doesn't do it for me. But like stripe, right? You want your website to look like stripe.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:21:05]:
You're not a really good designer, just like me. You're not a good designer. Well, I'm gonna ask ChatGPT, like, here's the Stripe website. Can you describe that in, you know, terms a designer would use? And then I'm going to go find two or three other examples and I'm going to say, hey, we want our site to look and feel like this and here's why we like it and here's why we don't. What does good look like? Pulling together three to four examples, like I said, okay? I said that I hate brainstorming. I don't like live meetings. I need time away. So let's meet, let's pull together the brief, let's let it marinate and let's sleep on it.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:21:32]:
There's just something about, you know, I don't know if it's on a run or being in the shower or just like when you're not trying to think of that idea, then boom, that idea hits you. And it's very hard to just sit on a zoom call and like, try to come up with an idea. However, I do like the idea of like calendar blocking and time blocking specifically to work on that idea. And so like, after I've had a little bit of time to marinate on it, it's like, all right, I'm gonna block 11 to 12 o'clock on my calendar on Tuesday and I have to write the Version that I want to write during this time. So I'm speaking at this event. I need like an hour or two to put the deck together. I'm just gonna give myself like a ha. I think again, this is like a guardrail and deadlines force action.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:22:09]:
If I give myself all week to make the deck, I'm never going to make it. But if I can say I got two hours on Tuesday afternoon and I have to just deal with whatever I produce during that time, that is always going to be better than when I can just kind of work on it throughout the week and never gets done. Also, to be a better brainstormer, you have to be okay with your bad ideas. You need to get the bad ideas out. You got to get the ideas flowing. And so, you know, Dan and I are trying to come up with the name for drive, our event for Exit Five. We were stuck on it forever, and then finally we were like, all right, no more. Don't worry about what either person thinks.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:22:39]:
Just like, go, here's the concept. We want it to be like a place that you stop at because kind of building on this theme of Exit Five as a destination. And we started coming up with all these names and finally, you know, we just firing off names into a Google Doc and then we must have put 20 or 30 names there and like Doom Drive. Okay, I like it. Is it the most sexy name in the world? No. Is it like the most groundbreaking revolution idea? No, but I like it and it can work. Somebody recently told me that the naming part is hard because until you've named it, it doesn't become real in your head. And it's like, yeah, your kid.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:23:10]:
Once you've named your child, you can't imagine naming them anything else. And I think that's true with like Exit Five, with drive, with anything I've ever named. When I first name it, I'm like, eh, it's okay. I'm never like, oh man, this name is sick. And then just becomes a brand that you make it. And I think that's a good example there. And then last thing is, you gotta be able to take inspiration from everywhere, not just your industry. So I'm, you know, I'm at the grocery store looking for ideas.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:23:33]:
Just my brain is just kind of always wired now to be switched on for thinking about marketing. And I think that is true among the great marketers that you just gotta stay curious and take inspiration from everywhere. All right, what's the biggest mistake marketers and marketing teams make? Simple one for me. I think it's alignment not being aligned to company goals. Even this week, our team at Exit Five, we were like, hey, like, let's go. You know, we could do such a better job with YouTube and we can do this and that and that and I think that's great. But hold on, wait. We have two big goals this year which is like, you know, goal number one, goal number two, this YouTube idea.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:24:06]:
Absolutely. This could be possible. Absolutely. This could be a thing. But like, how does this feed back into those two goals? And do we have the time and bandwidth and capability? And team was like, no, we don't. And so, you know, half of the job, half of this job in marketing is being able to just say no to stuff that you could do that could work. And so just being aligned on that and understanding what the company goals are and just being ruthless about the top two to three priorities, understanding that, yep, we can do anything. Yep, we could be at the Gartner summit, but we're not.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:24:32]:
Instead we're doing this. And here's why. And these are our two goals. Just focus on those, you know, one to three specific items and that is kind of where it's all going to come from. How have you structured marketing teams in the past where 15 people. I haven't been in the game for a little bit, so don't take my advice, but I've talked to a lot of marketers, talked to a lot of marketing leaders through Exit Five and my content and I've done this job in the past. One thing I've learned is that typically when people ask this question, they want some answer they want to have like, yeah, we got, you know, there's brand team, there's demand gen, there's product marketing and then there's this. I think the biggest lesson is that there's no perfect structure or playbook or cookie cutter way to build and structure your org.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:25:09]:
You need to think more about the customer journey and the jobs to be done and like build pods or small teams around that. And so what is the go to market motion? You have, hey, you got a field sales team. Like, you know, you have SDRs, you got to have meeting setters and all this. Like, you got to build the team around that motion. That team would be different than like, yeah, we're high volume, like PLG company. Those are going to be different. And so the go to market motion matters. But also like be realistic about like which team can you afford, who can you have? You can have this pipe dream to have all these like, you know, little teams and Everything.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:25:38]:
But you kind of have like a low budget and you don't have a big network and so you're not going to be able to hire all A plus plus people. You got to hire some interns and some people looking to make their first name somewhere. And so all of those variables play into this thing and so come back to like think about what are the jobs that you're trying to hire for, the jobs to be done for like your marketing or what do we need to accomplish? Who can you get build from there? I talked to Chris Walker recently on the podcast and he is into this concept which I like, which is splitting marketing into two kind of separate teams. And so there's strategy and there's pipeline and so strategy. Because a lot of times there's a lot of over. There's like these two teams are just very different and they need to work together to be effective. But when you kind of put them together and trying to go them together, things get weird. And so I like this idea of splitting marketing into two separate teams.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:26:25]:
You have strategy, which is things like product marketing, content, creative thought leadership, social PR and pipeline creation which is demand gen, ABM ops, paid digital sdr, bdr. Like that strategy and pipeline. How did you know is the right time to start your own company? And how did you identify this need? Did you see the need first? Did you look to identify a gap in the market? I didn't start this company on purpose. I started as a side project in 2019. I was CMO at Privy and I kind of wanted to start my own like blog slash newsletter slash podcast about marketing. And I wanted to charge for that content because I thought that knowledge and information and audience that I had was really valuable and I thought people would pay for it. So I started kind of recording solo podcasts like this with screenshots and notes and I started on Patreon. I expected to get, you know, 20 to 50 members, maybe I'd make 500 bucks a month from it and like contribute to my rent really quickly.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:27:16]:
We had about a thousand members. It was doing $10,000 a month in revenue. And one of the early members, Henry Johnson, messaged me and he was like, hey man, it's cool to listen to you rant about marketing. But like there's a thousand of us in here, let us talk to each other. And that was huge unlock. He's like, you should add a Facebook group. And so I added a Facebook group and that was V1 of the community and kind of just kept building on the side until Like, I had product market fit before I even went full time on it. And after Drift sold and Privy sold, I was basically doing, like, consulting for a year, and I had a bunch of clients, and then the market kind of really went shitty.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:27:52]:
This was like, 2021 into 2022. Kind of a lot of that consulting dried up. And it dried up in a way where, like, I didn't want to put in the work required to, like, build a consulting practice there. I think I would have had to, like, I was just kind of doing consulting where I just. You can hire me for, like, a, you know, relationship retainer, right? Like, I can be on speed dial. I'll be on slack. But I wasn't like, you know, I didn't want to be, like, fractional CMO. And so I was kind of doing that plus Exit Five.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:28:18]:
And in 2022, I set a goal for myself to basically, I wanted to try to maintain the revenue that I was making from consulting and other projects and just do it entirely through Exit Five. Because we had a couple thousand members, we had demand from sponsors. Like, we had something there. And I just. I had the financial flexibility and freedom to go for it. But also, it was already, like, 20, 30k a month in recurring revenue. And so I basically was able to start my, you know, go full time on my business while it was already. There was no bridge from a cash perspective.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:28:48]:
And so I was able to do that. And I did that for a year before deciding to, like, hire full time. And now, actually, this week, we just sent out an offer to our sixth teammate, and it's been an amazing ride. All right, I'm gonna do one more of these. For scaling a startup with minimal marketing resources, how do you think they should think about brand marketing versus demand marketing? So I said, well, what does brand marketing mean to you? Does it mean colors, fonts? Does it mean doing billboards? I think a lot of times we say brand marketing is like, you know, more corporate marketing, like, you know, T shirts and pens and billboards. And I have kind of seen brand marketing as reputation. It's like, this is your reputation. Strong brand helps demand.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:29:24]:
And so it's not like you're doing demand. You know, you have to choose one. I think they work together. Demand needs to be number one. Obviously, you need to deliver pipeline and deliver results. But demand, it doesn't have to be demand versus brand. Like, demand doesn't mean do shitty marketing. It means, how do we do good marketing? To me, that is brand marketing, right? There's brand marketing.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:29:44]:
Like, I Go to the airport and I see, you know, Cisco billboards everywhere. I don't know how they measure that. That is way beyond my, my pay grade. Pranav, if you're out there listening, you can tell me how to measure that. But I think of brand as reputation. And so I think the two need to work hand in hand. And you build a brand by having a strong point of view, strong positioning, a clear customer, showing your customer that you get their world, you get their life, becoming the number one source of resource and knowledge and information from them. And so they should be paired together.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:30:12]:
But if you're talking more of like the brand harder to measure stuff, like, hey, we want to start a podcast. I don't think a podcast is hard to measure. I think a podcast is hard to measure if you're doing it because the goal is direct sales. It takes time to do that. And so for there, it's probably like you'd want to think about splitting your time and budget and resources into probably like, you know, 70% of the resources are spent on like true sales, you know, clear sales, ROI things. And then 30% is spent on the brand harder to measure stuff. And on that harder to measure stuff. Man, I made this mistake twice, which is you have to be making your future bets now before you need to scale them.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:30:49]:
And so like, hey, next year the plan grows 50%. Well, you're so focused on this year that you're never like growing the trees, growing the crop that you need to harvest next year. And so then I would get into the next year and it's like, oh, man, we need website traffic to grow 50%. Well, damn it, I should have like made that investment in SEO two years ago and would have been here. And so that's why you gotta be able to split out that budget and be able to make investments that are not necessarily like short term ROI investments. Okay, I said last one, but I'll do one more. How do you best differentiate positioning and messaging in a crowded and competitive market with similar feature offerings? I love this. This is the number one thing I think that is relevant for marketers right now, especially in the world of AI.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:31:26]:
There's so much commoditization happening. Is that word commoditization? Commoditization happening in product. And so, number one, I would say don't play the feature game unless you have some type of like, trade secret or like your way you're like, the way you do it is literally different than everybody else. And obviously lean into that. If you have some secret there but otherwise I would be trying to elevate it. Because all of us marketers, we can make that feature checklist that just like shows that we're better than the other person, the other company. And so there's lots of ways to pick a differentiator. It could be you differentiate based on the Persona you target.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:31:58]:
You know, people will ask us, like, hey, what's different? You know, like, I'm a Pavilion member, why should I join Exit Five? I don't know. I don't know how to sell against Pavilion. But what I can tell you is that because they offer something different than we do. But I can tell you that we're specifically focused on B2B marketing. And so if you want a community of B2B marketers, that's great. If you want more kind of general go to market stuff, then maybe you'd think about Pavilion. And so maybe you sell to a different Persona. At Privy.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:32:22]:
Privy was essentially a pop up, an email form builder, a pop up tool. There was lots of people who did it in this space, but we said, hey, we're the only ones that are building this for you specifically, like the solo E Commerce founder, like, we got your back. That is a differentiator. You can also differentiate by features, a specific service. You offer your point of view, how you see the world. Like at Drift, it wasn't so much about differentiating on features. It was more about, hey, we created this idea of conversational marketing. We're teaching you a new way to do marketing.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:32:48]:
Come and do it our way or you can have an enemy. And so at Privy, we made the enemy marketing knowledge. Hey, we're the number one marketing resource for small businesses. Like, we know you're not a marketing expert, but we are. And so we have the content, the podcast, the training, et cetera. We're not just a pop up tool. It can also be you just do it better. You have better product marketing.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:33:07]:
Hey, we're all kind of the same here, but we have better examples, better proof, better testimonials. Like, there's two pizza places in town, they offer the same exact types of things. One of them makes a better pizza. Like, how can you show that? How can you use that in your marketing feature? Differentiation just becomes tough because it's like, like I said, we can all kind of make the feature comparisons that skew our way. And it's also just like information overload for your customers. Like, hey, yeah, here's a hundred of the things they do. Here's a hundred of the things we do. And like, cross reference them.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:33:34]:
The game changer is like the narrative. Can you make a story that's bigger than the features? Give somebody a story to latch onto you, give them a reason to buy from you. That's your philosophy. It's not necessarily about your features. Like, win on philosophy. Think about HubSpot, right? They didn't win because they had more email features than Marketo. They won because they created this idea of inbound marketing. They had a whole philosophy of how marketing should work or.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:33:57]:
Or with drift, we took a commodity feature like chat, and we turned it into conversational marketing, which is a movement about changing how businesses connect with buyers. I don't think you have to create a category, but I think you do have to come up with some story. There's a quote from Seth Gooding that I liked, which is like, he says, basically, the reason why this stuff matters in B2B is because in B2B, someone's either gonna buy, like, the cheaper thing or the thing they've bought before. And so if you don't give them a story to tell, then they're just gonna default to like, yeah, well, we just used Salesforce at my last company, so I'm gonna buy that. No one's gonna get fired for buying that, or no one's gonna get fired for buying, like, the lower cost one. But if you're new and you're a startup in the market, you're trying to take out the incumbents, like, can you create a story? Can you create a point of view that is bigger, that resonates with your, you know, your ideal customers and your buyers and really try not to differentiate on features at all. So, all right, that was 37 minutes solo podcast. I hope that was interesting and useful to you.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:34:52]:
If it was, send me a note. Dgavegearhart.com Send me a DM on LinkedIn and be like, hey, man, listen, your solo episode, that was great. Or please never do that again. Just keep hosting your interviews. But either way, I thought I would do this. I thought it was interesting and, and just, you know, time to reflect and share some of my lessons too, in addition to talking to these great guests on the podcast. So thanks for listening. Leave me a.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:35:13]:
You know, what do they say? Smash that like, yeah, smash that like button. Subscribe. Join the Exit Five community at exitfive.com and I'll see you later. 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 B2 marketers at Exit Five. And you can go and check that out.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:35:40]:
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. 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 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.

Dave Gerhardt  [00:36:23]:
Learn more exitfive.com and I will see you over there in the.

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