#106: Why I Hired a COO for Exit Five, Welcome Dan Murphy, Stories from Working Together in B2B Marketing

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts, everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far, we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z-u- dash dash l.com exit5 to learn more.

One, two, three, four.

Exit. Exit. All right, Dan's here. This is Dan Murphy. Dan is the new newly mended COO at exit 5. Dan, I'm so happy to be back working with you, my friend.

Me too. This is fun. I'm excited.

I haven't done a podcast interview in.

Like two or three years, so this is me coming out of my shell again.

Great. This is great. Well, you've come to the right place.

I have so many stories.

This is the wildly popular Exit 5 podcast.

I know, it's fun to be on it after just going like the sea of data that I've just gone through and then all the behind the scenes stuff now. Now here I am. I'm actually on it. This is fun. Yeah.

I have a story with this podcast. As I just spilled coffee everywhere. I initially, obviously I've pivoted this 15 different times. It was DGMG. I had a podcast for a little while. I called it B2B marketing leaders. I went back to Drift. They kind of took that podcast as part of me going back there. I was going to host a podcast for them. They had the feed. I left Drift. I didn't have that feed. I wasn't sure. I was kind of just like, I'm tired of talking about B2B marketing, blah, blah, blah. And then last, like, April maybe, it was like. It was like April 2021. I committed. Pretty hard to go in the. Maybe it's 2022. Yeah, 2022.

I've seen.

He's seen the numbers. I was like, I'm just going to do this podcast and I'm going to do it every week and I'm just going to shut up and see what happens. And it's been incredible. And it's not even the biggest podcast ever, but there's just something here with the. The messages that we get about it, the comments, the feedback. And people love. Like, the best episodes are like, hey, we got this person who does product marketing. We're talking about product marketing for hour. We're talking about demand gen. They like the CMO stories. We'll mix in those. But it's been pretty cool. And that's been one of those things in marketing that I've always felt a bunch of different ways is like, the response. And this is how I'm leading you into us talking today. So we're recording this on a Wednesday. We're going to try to get this out next week. So it'll be like the first podcast in December. You just posted your announcement yesterday. Yeah, the response was so. Wasn't it unbelievable?

It was so good. It was fun to see all the people that we used to work with come out of, you know, people I haven't talked to in two years at Drift or wherever, three years even, and just come back and just be so excited for us and just like, you know, that validation to what we. We felt like, you know, us teaming up again and this amazing business you built and just like the opportunity, but just seeing the validation of people being like, yes, this is it. And. And I'm in a totally different role. Right. I've never done quote, unquote operations before I've ever been a COO before, but it just felt really good to validate that. The excitement that we felt that so many people around us felt as well.

Well, it was cool for me also because, like, I've been just doing this alone For a while, obviously, there's like, there's been some people like Chantal, but helping me behind the scenes and people doing design and video and, and stuff like that. Jordan and the growth community guys, like, helping with the community. But it's really just been me. And I tell Leah, I tell my wife, like, how cool this, this business is and how well things are. Things have gone and are going, but there is just something like, as an entrepreneur, creator, like, to bring someone else into this world and like, you've seen what it's done to my energy the last, the last couple weeks. It's just cool. It's. And, And I, you know, I, I have that imposter syndrome still. Like, we all do. It comes up all the time on this podcast. It just is what it is. But to have you come in and dig in and like, you're looking at the data and you're. The data is one thing, but to me, it's always about that, like, response, the unmeasurable piece. And that's how I know something is there. And like, to feel that right away in week one is just like, ha. And that's, that's even why, like, on this podcast, I talk to marketers about, like, yeah, I love the data. I, like, I believe in the data and you got to have reports and you got to show that shit to the board. But like, sometimes, like, the screenshots and the words from customers and the, and the comments and stuff, like, play just as big of a role in somebody's perception of how, how this business is.

Totally. Yeah. I mean, we've been talking to sponsors, and sponsors don't even care about some of the data, you know, in some ways, like, you know, they, they care about. They don't even need to see anything else. Like, they're part of the community. They're people that, like, want to work with our community members that, you know, have seen, you know, the LinkedIn post, have seen the, the community and how engaged it is and how people are commenting. And it's like, in fact, it was until recently that, like, I actually pulled out some of the data. Like, I don't think even knew how fast the podcast had grown. You know, this year grew like 150% year over year. Like, your LinkedIn was like, your LinkedIn grew 272%, which is just crazy, right? Like, year over year, just given how popular it's been.

Like, what's interesting is it's grown. There's this weird mix. And actually this is something that. And like, Whatever. I can share everything on this podcast because I think it. It's interesting to people. But what's interesting about Exit 5 as a business is like, there's kind of like overlapping trends that, that are here. One of them is like the rise of community, community and content and kind of vendor. There's nobody. There's. There's no other non SaaS vendor doing what we're doing with Exit 5 as from focusing on B2B marketing. Right. And so there's this rise of like, niche communities. And this is not. This is not all SaaS. This is B2B marketing specifically. It's a. There's a big enough market there, but this is B2B marketing.

Yeah.

But then you also have this, like, there's also this kind of like, influencer creator piece of it because obviously, like, I created it and I have been the face of it and it was DGMG for a while and me giving my, like, hot marketing takes. And so it's like, there's overlap of like, community business and creator business. And so a lot of the LinkedIn stuff is related to me personally. But the opportunity that I saw into last year and it's taken me this long to hire you or find the right person to do this, is I really care a lot about diversifying the business beyond Dave, beyond me. Right. And that's because, like, I. I've talked about B2B marketing for a decade. I don't want to be Gary V. I don't want you in my house making, you know, showing me, like, making my coffee, talking about marketing. Like, I want to shift into, be an entrepreneur. And this is a product. This is a business that I own and operate. But I get to think about this creatively and differently. And it was really important for me to expand beyond Dave and to build Exit 5 as a brand. And so I think that's one of the things that. Bringing in you now this year that I'm most excited about is I think that the Exit 5 brand will have the ability to grow in the B2B marketing space and it won't just be like, Dave's hot marketing takes.

Yep.

And we have the wisdom of the crowd now between podcast listeners and email. Like, you and I were on a call yesterday and we were talking about, this is a. There's so much to just curate from the experts already in this world and community. That's really exciting. Anyway, you. You and I first met. We probably first met, I want to say, like August or September 2017. I remember you joined Drift Right before our first hype, the first hypergrowth, the first event that we ever did is my timing. Maybe it was that summer, right?

I think I joined Labor Day of2017. So I think it was like, three weeks for hypergrowth. Was hypergrowth the end of September that year? Yeah, I want to say it was. It was in the State Room in Boston.

It was. It was end of September. And it was a crazy. It was a crazy. I'm gonna. I'm gonna go back. I'm gonna rewind. I'll tell you where I was coming from in this. And. And so this was June. So I had been at Drift for about two years. The company had grown crazy. I've told this story many times on this podcast. Like, I just came in as marketing manager Dave. They had brought in another VP over me. Not even over me. I wasn't supposed to be the vp. I just was, like, creating content. I grew. The company started growing. I kind of got, like, pushed into, like, hey, you're doing the marketing. Do you want to be the marketing leader? So, okay, cool. You're going to hire two people now? You're director of marketing. Keep going, keep going, keep going. June of that year, June of 2017, I was having. I had Annie, my. My first kid, my. My daughter. And right around the same time, I had. I, a couple months prior, had been promoted to director. But I'm still. I was still young, very inexperienced. David CEO came to me and said, like, hey, we're going to bring in a VP over you. And I was like, damn. Like, that fucking hurt. That hurt. And this has happened. I want to say this on the podcast because I want people to hear, like, how this happens. Okay? But whatever. I got two years in at Drift. I got equity. This is my upside. Maybe I'll actually be able to afford rockets. I'll be actually able to afford to buy a house one day. So, like, all right, I'm just gonna change my role. I'm good at this content. I'm good at this brand stuff. It kind of felt nice for a little bit. You and I talk about weightlifting a lot. It was kind of like I had, you know, 275 on the bench, and, like, we took it off. I had one 135, so a lot more runs. Ilya Merman. Ilya Merman came in as VP of marketing. I interviewed him. I thought he was going to be good, blah, blah, blah. You and Ilya had a history. He brings you in.

Yeah.

Early and right away, I knew that you were my kind of person because you had this blog. What was your blog called? Startup.

Well, let me tell you the other side of this because the other side of this is fun too. So I had a startup marketer. It was a blog that probably got a hundred visits per year. But what had happened though? This is the fun part about Drift and how it all worked out, right? Ilya was our VP of marketing at OnShape. He was my mentor. He's the first VP I worked with, taught me a lot. And then he was looking for his next thing. He was ready to kind of move on from onshape as we all do as leaders. We get to a point where like, all right, what's the next adventure? And we had just started using Drift at onshape and we were super successful with it, right? Like we were getting all these sales reps that were running up to our desk and marketing me like, hey, you're chatting with my lead. I've been calling them for two weeks. But you know, like, let me talk to them. And so I was like, hey, Elliot, like this company Drift is really interesting, right? Like, this product is great. The results we're getting are amazing. Look at this. And he's like, oh, maybe I should go. And I was like, why don't you go work there? And I even said that to him and he'll tell you, like, I was like, oh, you should go work there. So it was actually me behind the scenes, funny enough, like little Junior, you know, 23 year old Dan or 25 year old Dan, whatever. I was being like, hey, you know, this is a great company. And so yeah, I was writing about Drift on my blog. He went there and I even said to him in an email exchange and I've. It's somewhere in my email like, hey, if you go work there, I'll come work with you. Because I think it seems awesome. And this thing's growing really fast. And so, yeah, a couple months later, I was there, you were there, and off we went.

So you joined at that time. Maybe the team was like five people. Five or six or seven.

Yeah.

And it was right around. We had been there for two years. Marketing had done a lot. The company had grown a lot through inbrown, but that was a pretty wild wave. And then we also went through another phase there, which is like kind of from that first year on it was like hyper growth phase, but then it was like company growing up phase. Like all of a sudden now there's like hundreds of employees and org structure matters and job titles matter and who who does what and who reports to who and kind of all that stuff matters. And I think that's all stuff that at the time I would roll my eyes at. And I see a lot of it now differently about like why, why things happen that way and why they matter inside of a company. But that was an experience like, doesn't matter if Drift was successful or not. Like that was the period, I know in my career, I think in your career too, of like attach yourself to a company where there's just like a lot of shit going on and you're going to learn on the fly and have to figure things out. And I feel like before that for me I jumped around for. I worked for five different companies in six years. And then, and I was so concerned about leaving and taking that job because I was like, oh, what's everybody going to think? Like, here's this 26 year old dude who's worked at seven companies in six years. And like then I worked at Drift for four years and that company made my career and nobody ever knows, nobody even knows what I did before that. Give me one or two of your marketing lessons since we're talking to B2B marketers that are listening this from your time at Drift. Something, some things that you did or worked on that, that you learned about marketing. Let's, let's reflect back a little bit.

Yeah, I think, I think the first and maybe most obvious one in my head is like we had the saying of like we would do hand to hand combat right where we would go and try these like marketing tactics that were super scrappy and usually like, like what?

Give people some examples.

We would recruit people to be part of our Drift Navy. Remember that? We'd have like, or Drift army, whatever we call it Navy because we kind of had a maritime, maritime thing going. But we would just like bring people in as like part of like customers that we loved that were using our product early on. Like when I joined, I don't know, we were a couple million revenue or something like that. But you know, we didn't have a ton of customers, but we had really vocal customers. And so we would go and work with each of those customers really closely and make sure that we were, you know, using them to the best of our ability and helping them best our ability. And that's not just like cs, like working with them, making them successful with the products. Like we would bring them in, do webinars with them. We wrote a book and we got them involved in the book. We would DO tweets or LinkedIn posts for our product launches, for instance, and we would have them involved with it. We do product hunt. We were laughing about product hunt the other day, back in the day, how that was like in every month we would launch something new. And so we would go and recruit those people one to one and go and make each one of those customers a raving fan, like everyone talks about. Now you want to have delighted customers and how do you get there? And how to have hundreds of people raving about your product. Customers, Ray, product. And the way to do that early on is just work with them one on one. I would go meet with Zach Pines, right, Or, you know, Chris Handy or all these other people that, like, early on were our customers and loved our product and just figure out, like, how do we work with you and make you a huge evangelist? And so that was a, like a lesson with me. Like that, I think, stuck with me because everything before that, my career was just like, how do we get as many people on this email list and send. How do we rent an email list and send 20,000 people an email and get, you know, X amount, convert X amount of demos? And, you know, it really wasn't about those relationships in marketing and working with people. And so that was one that just stuck with me. And I think we ended up writing a book about it, right? This won't scale. Like, we were doing this tactic and then we were like, hey, you know, this is actually like a good lesson for other marketers. And so, like, that was part of the fun and drift too. We're like, hey, let's just write a book and talk about it.

So basically we had this. We basically kept a spreadsheet of customers. And where this stems from is I think we had a strong belief in the ability. Like, we railed on Gartner and Forrester and traditional pr, because we believe that through the CEO, David and Elias, the co founders, they had a pretty strong brand and they were pretty well known. And so we were like, why? Like, let's use that to our advantage. Let's use social media. And we were very. We were one of the first, like, B2B SaaS companies to really go hard on, like, LinkedIn and Twitter as an example. And what was amazing is you build relationships with customers and you let them in on some of your announcements and launches early. And then on launch day, instead of waiting and hoping that people are gonna write about you, we have 10 tweets or LinkedIn posts on launch day from people who have been using the product. And so like the founders were super smart in that, like, hey, let's build in a buffer period. And that like, and this is I think really important for marketing teams. It's like there's a difference between when the stuff that the product and engineering team is working on is done, done and working. And when you announce it, those don't have to be the same dates. And I think everybody's driving to, oh, this is going to be ready on August 1st, let's announce it. And it's like, no, no, no, wait, why? If it's ready and done, let's get it to customers, let's start telling customers about it on August 1st and let's spend two weeks and have them use it and get feedback and like, whatever and get examples and use cases and actually we're going to announce this on September 1st because now we got all this content line. You can just do better marketing when you've given people some of that first. And so not only would that help with the product stuff, but then on launch day it seems like that customers are just everywhere already talking about this thing on LinkedIn. And then to your point about this book that we wrote, this won't scale. That meant like everybody in the company or like, you know, four or five people in the marketing team and the founders and whoever in the company are like going to LinkedIn and like replying to every comment DMing people, picking 10 random customers and sending them like hoodies. Right? Yeah, that maybe costs 500 bucks.

Yeah.

But so incredibly worth it. And then people are taking pictures and they're posting online. So there's so much of those things that I think that stuff to me is going to be even more important now with like Everybody thinks that AI is just going to eat SaaS and like I'm a big believer, automate everything. I'm a big believer in AI and I think that a lot of stuff is going to get improved and process wise and stuff and you're going to be able to do so much more at scale. But it's going to be those types of things. Like I, we got to figure out how to do this. But I ordered, I ordered like a thousand dollars worth of Exit 5 socks and I don't have any plan. I just, we have like 50 pairs of them. Let's figure out who we can randomly send them to and that's a cost that we should eat all day. Like examples like that. And I think it was cool to work for founders who, who, who believe that. So we did a lot of that. Like things that won't scale. What about speed? What can you talk about speed and shipping work and how that relates to marketing? Because I think we had a pace of. We had a pace of work that you either got it or you didn't. And it was uncomfortable. But I do think that's a big differentiator and it's a testament for. You and I have been working together for, like, two weeks now. The amount of shit that's already gotten done is. Is insane. I'd like to try to unpack that with you on the mic if we can.

Yeah, let's do it. I'd say, first of all, speed was definitely a company culture thing. It wasn't just unique to marketing. Like, that's a big. Like, that's a big important part of any. You know, if you're. If you want your team to go faster, like, it's gotta be set from the top down, right? That, you know, we're gonna move fast. And that was certainly. David and Elias were very big on that, you know, the whole team. And that also meant, like, chemistry. Right? Like, we worked really closely with engineering and product and these other teams, CS and sales. And like, everybody was like, all right, we're gonna move fast. Right? Yeah. I mean, we had a bunch of tactics to get, like, one of the. One of the most important things. When we were hiring, we did a lot of hiring on the drift marketing team over the course of our tenure there. And one of the most important things was, like, figuring out if people that came in could go at our speed. Because it was unique, it was different. So traditionally, when you hire a marketer, you write a 30. 60, 90. Right? 30 days. 60 days. 90 days. What are we getting done in those first three months? I remember at one point, I don't know whose idea this was, but this doesn't work. This isn't fast enough. We need to do a 1730, which is the first day, the first week and the first month. What are you getting?

This is a very.

It doesn't.

This is a very controversial topic. People get mad at this. And, yeah, they're not mad, but this. Fine. You're allowed to have competing. We're allowed to think differently. Right. And people. People would say, well, how can you. I like to. I like to move fast and get right in and try to do stuff. There's a other school of thought that's like, well, how can you know what to fix? If you come in on day one, you're going to. You're going to fuck everything up. And you're going to break everything. To me, though, there's like a middle, and that's where the bad stuff happens, which is like, you hire somebody, it's now been 45 days since you hired them. You hired them because something was not working or you needed to grow it more or you need. Ideally, right. Then that. If the answer is no, then that question is like, well, why do we hire this person in the first place? Right? Yeah, but I think there's so much about, like, when a new employee, when a new team member comes on, everyone's kind of doing this, like, feel this person out thing, like, what are they gonna do? And you eventually wear, like the fact that Dan's friendly and, you know, likes the Red Sox and likes to work out or whatever, like, that wears off after two weeks and everyone's like, all right, well, like, how is this person contributing? I think you can make a huge advance. I think you can create a culture of getting shit done. If on that first day, Dan comes in and he's like, hey, this thing was broken in HubSpot and I fixed it.

Yep.

Tiny thing. Not like a make or break the company thing, but like, huh, yeah, cool. That's.

Yeah. We didn't condense 90 days into a month. Right. Like was the intention, wasn't that it was just a focus. What is like, that's especially true with any kind of hiring. Like you, you went out and you had a problem of some sort. You said, I need to solve this by hiring someone to do it. Right. And so, like, you're not going to get all of it solved in the first 30 days, but if you get that first little bit of motion in the first day and then a little bit more in the first week and the first month, you know, you're on the right track. That's. That's a better on ramp. That's a better onboarding. It's not just for the company. Right. It's also for the employee. Right. Like, if you have that level of focus and you can, in the first 30 days, get them moving in the right direction versus the first three months. I mean, if you do that across the entire company, as you're scaling a company, which is kind of what we did. Right. Like, you get way better results than you would if you just spent everybody. Okay. In the first three months, we're going to get X, Y and Z done. So I, I think it works. I'm a big believer in it. I've done it. We did it at Privy. I actually didn't have a one 7:30 here at exit 5. But we just kind of, you know, started rolling into getting things done anyways. But I'm a big believer. I think it works. I think if you haven't tried it, you should try it because it's, it is a really good framework to get people up and running. Yeah.

And I think you can break it down and think about what, what's the role like? If you come in as content manager, there's gotta be something you can see right away that you can make better or improve.

Yep.

And if people are getting offended about you coming in and making changes, then it's going to be difficult as the company scales. Let's talk about marketable moments. What were marketable moments? We did them at Drift, we did them at Privy. Maybe we'll bring them to exit 5. Can you explain what they were, how we did them, why they're a big deal?

Yeah. So this predated my time, but actually we kind of just started getting it going I think by the time I arrived. And then I sort of became for whatever reason the organizer of each marketable moment because most of the time it was product based.

The, the market prior to your existence. The, the marketable, the mark, the, the organization for the marketable moments was done by yours truly, which meant we went really fast. We had great headlines, but there was, there was a lot, there's a lot of process and opera. It wasn't very, it wasn't very repeatable. And so I think you brought a different level of operational planning and rigor. But basically we had been doing them. We did a product launch every single month and we found that that created a lot of momentum. But then we wanted to scale that and make it more repeatable. And that's kind of where you came in.

Yeah, I mean we were at that point of growth too for company stage, where it's like, I think this is maybe part of the. Most of the. All the things that went right and where the strategy worked best. Like this was the best part, which is like in this stage of, let's just call it, we're growing from like 2 or 3 million to 10 or 15 million. I don't know exactly what it was, but like in that stage, roughly we were investing so much in product and features and the people that were early adopters of Drift, because it was a new technology, it was a new way of doing things. The people that were early adopters, we were just like hammering them with everything that they wanted. Basically. Like that was the intention. So like that Smaller group of, let's call it a thousand customers or whatever that were using us. Like, we were just. The product team is just listening so intently and just nailing every feature, everything that they want, every integration. And so at that stage of growth, for the first, like, year of me being there, these marketable moments, this concept of like, we're going to launch something every month, we were basically launching a new product feature every month, right? We call it a product launch, a new product every month, but it's usually a new product feature. And we just had this nice collaboration of like, product was building something that customers really wanted. And then you, I think, had really shown, like, we could build this megaphone, but also like the story and this narrative around each feature. And then we brought those things together and that was a marketable moment every month. So the first, like 12 months of me being there, the first year, we had every month a different launch. We had stuff on abm. We had stuff around integrations with like Salesforce and HubSpot. We had all these different things that we were launching. We different types of chatbots, you know, and every month, it was like the first Tuesday of every month. That was our commitment. And the product teams were even structured around that, right? So we had, I think it was like three different product teams at the time. And each one had a launch every three months, right? So they had three months to build and then they'd go to us and like, all right, we're ready to launch next month. Here's what we got. We would go get some customers using it, we'd go get some social proof. And then that next 30 days later, on the first Tuesday of, of that month, we would launch, you know, whatever it is we were going to launch. And so that was a really, really important motion. And there was some content and stuff. We did some other things there. Like, we did some like reports and guides, I think sprinkled in there as well. But like, we really focused on, on the product launches. And just because of that stage where we were at, that was so powerful and that made customers absolutely love us. And we gained so much trust doing that. Again, it wasn't about like, we were doing all these things to get new customers as much, but like, how do we make these people, people that are using our product already, super successful? And so that whole motion, I think, was part of the. What really triggered us to kind of hit hyper growth and scale so fast.

Yeah, I think I'm a believer in that marketing. There is a lot of perception and I don't mean this in like a sleazy, I'm not trying to use this in a sleazy way, but like perception is reality a lot of times within a startup and if you're not constantly shipping new stuff, people don't feel like you're, you're iterating and innovating and improving things. And the more you can show up, especially as you're trying to become established as a brand, you need more opportunities. It's no different than advertising with like reach and frequency. Right. You need to, you need to be there often. And I think that I'm a believer that marketing can create momentum for the company. And so what we did was say like, wow, the product team is shipping like crazy. Let's just not, let's not just like dump all this in the product and be like, you know, here, go use this new stuff. Let's try to structure this a little bit better and let's, let's make it more consistent and let's give it a deadline and a date. And so it was the first Tuesday of every month. And that was such a important, seems like such a silly detail, but that was such an important guiding principle to like rally the company, rally the product team, rally the marketing team. We knew and we did at the beginning of the month to give us like a nice bump in website traffic and interest and attention heading into the month to help, to help close deals. And so it also forced us to go beyond a blog post and you know, my inbox is full of emails from SaaS companies doing their like monthly product update that, that no one read. Instead we turned it into a launch. And so the launch might be a new integration with Salesforce, but we didn't just write a blog post that said like new integration with Salesforce. We maybe we actually did a 50 person customer event out in San Francisco to time it with that launch.

Yeah.

At the same day that the launch video and the press release and product hunt dropped. And then later that week we did a webinar with a partner about Salesforce. Like you can build these things in and you know, we were lucky to be working at a product driven company where product was the driver of the momentum. And that's not true at a lot of companies. So that was amazing from a marketing standpoint. Like if you're looking for marketing jobs, I want to take the marketing job at the company where I'm blown away by the product and engineering team and how much they're shipping and what they're doing. And that was a huge Ingredient for us. Right. But then what's interesting is we went to another company later, Privy, and it just was much. It was just much was much different. The team was smaller. They didn't have as much. They didn't have as many engineers. This is not a knock at all. Just was like, literally Drift raised, you know, 100 million from. From the top tier investors culture, different culture. They're not shipping as much. But we got on the whiteboard with Ben, who's a CEO and said, like, all right, what do we got in January? In January we have this. We got translation across the app. Okay, cool. February, we don't have anything. March, we don't have anything. April, we're going to have this. Okay, great. I love that challenge as a marketer. Like, let's. Let's figure out how are we going to drive that momentum with no ingredients. I think. Yeah, you know, I think anybody can. If you got the greatest ingredients, anybody can go and cook with that. What gets me excited as a marketer is like, in those situations where like, we got to create momentum and I think that's something that we did that was unique about our time at Drift and at Privy.

Yeah. And we'd fill in the blank. We say, hey, we're going to do a book later this year for Black Friday, start Monday. Let's announce it in April. Let's get pre sign ups.

Right.

Like, we would do those things and figure out each month. All right, March is missing. Like, let's do, you know, the report, you know, for email marketing or whatever it was. And then having that cadence and having a marketing team too. Right. Like just working towards that. It's kind of like a product team is always working toward. Well, not always, but sometimes we're working towards a deadline or at least like a sprint or something like that. Marketing teams don't usually have guardrails of time. They just kind of make up events and they kind of work around them. If you have the first Tuesday, for instance, of every month, and the marketing team kind of has a sprint, if you will, they kind of have like a emotion and they have to work towards that each month. Like, that made it so that the creative team, the demand gen team, product marketing, content, were all like working together and figuring out like someone was in charge was the organizer, bringing all these teams together, putting together the plan. And that's where we built process and all this stuff into it. But, like, that was a really good rhythm for a marketing team to be in is like, we're all working towards this. Like Regular occurrence of like and hey, not every single Tuesday. The first month is going to be this huge thing. Sometimes it was more targeted. We realized like, we're not going to make these big splashy things. If we do that every single month, eventually we'll lose steam. Right?

The one that ended up driving out of all like the cool, sexy, fun stuff. It was like introducing our par dot integration and that was the one that drove like the most pipeline.

Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, exactly. So like, but, but in that example it's like we don't need to go make a big splashy like product hunt about pardot. Like we know who those people are on email. So how do we just do a better job communicating with them? How do we make an awesome video? How do we make it super simple for them to set up? Like, can we do things in marketing team like hey, just you know, respond to this email, we'll book the call with your CSM4. Like you can focus in different areas and you can do different levels of marketing based on what you're trying to get.

This stuff is hard to, it's hard to do. I think one of the cool things that we had at both companies was founders who wanted marketing.

Totally huge difference.

And it's a huge difference because I think we get to do, you get to take bigger swings, you get to try fun stuff and it is hard. I do think part of me is like, I think earlier I over indexed too much on the stuff that was like, we'll just know if it works. And like I believe so much more in measurement and repeatability and predictability and all that stuff. Now I believe in all that and marketing ops and analytics and all that stuff. But I think so much of being successful as a marketer today is you can't just do the very measurable direct response. Like we need to hit, you know, we need 50 sales meetings this month and that's all we're going to do is focus on activities that drive those 50 sales meetings. Because you just don't. There's just, it comes in from so many other channels. It might be from the podcast. Your podcast might have no ROI for six months. And then all of a sudden you hear, you know, you get a six figure enterprise level deal from someone.

Yeah, Microsoft comes through.

Yeah, you know, or just like to have to do some of these things. And I think especially, I think especially you got to understand like this the social media era that we live in where like you can be your own publisher, you can create your own Momentum. This is not B2B software of 20 years ago. You don't have to wait for Gartner and Forrester to validate that you are legit. You can go and do this now through great marketing, through great storytelling, through great content, through social media, through copywriting, email, creating your own content. I'm just a big believer in that stuff and I think we did both of those things.

Today's episode is brought to you by Ahrefs. You probably know Ahrefs as an SEO tool, right? I've been using Ahrefs personally for over a decade to see how we rank and see what's driving traffic to our site. Content marketing has always been a big part of the playbook. I use their product at Drift, at Privy and now we're using it at exit 5. But over that time, Ahrefs has evolved.

A lot and they're not actually just.

An SEO tool anymore. They're a full on marketing platform built for marketers like you and me who want to grow traffic, understand our audiences and make smarter business decisions in the AI search world. Their marketing intelligence lets you see what's driving traffic to your site, to your competitors, understand top performing content, paid keywords, backlinks. You can even understand how much your organic traffic would be worth. Put a actual dollar amount to all that organic traffic that you're driving. They've also got tools for AI powered content and keyword research. 24. 7 Site monitoring, real time analytics, backlink tracking, brand mentions, you name it, you can do it all in one place. With Ahrefs. It's really a marketer's dream. If you're a marketing nerd like myself, one of the coolest features in my opinion is their new brand radar tool, which allows you to explore what people and AI says about your brand, topic or niche. You can do this to do amazing research to help understand what's actually happening in AI search today and just what the conversations are online about your brand. Plus you can try their free analytics tool to show you how many visitors you're getting from AI search like ChatGPT or Perplexity. And look, as a firsthand user of this, so much easier to use than something like Google Analytics. I love it. We use it on our site. I've used it for Exit 5 and we just found out that over the past 30 days we've got 105 visitors to Exit 5 from AI search. 95% of that was from ChatGPT, 5% of that was from Perplexity. But it's really cool to Understand? And this is the way that search is going and shifting. So Ahrefs not just an SEO tool anymore. It's a legit marketing platform for anyone serious about growth in today's AI driven search world. If you do any type of content marketing at all, you gotta go check them out. Go visit ahrefs.com that's a h r e f s.com today. Go check them out.

I want to talk about your, your career. Going from a manager, like you were like product marketing intern. Like from product marketing intern to marketing manager to, to VP of marketing. Eventually when you know you, you, you were at Privy, Privy got acquired by Attentive. You had some time there as VP of Marketing. Just to the, to the people that listen to this, that are managers, directors or whatever, want to be V, want to be vp, want to be cmo. What's the biggest difference between that manager level person and. Or maybe talk specifically about what false beliefs that you have. What change in your mind? How do you, what does it mean to become an executive? You know what I'm trying to get at?

Yeah, for sure. I think I. When you said product marketing intern, I was laughing because I thought you were talking about. When I joined Drift, I was like, no, I think I was a product marketing manager at that point.

No, weren't you like a, Weren't you like a product marketing intern at HubSpot In HubSpot.

Yeah, I forgot. I. Yeah, yeah. So I started my career at HubSpot and I was doing, I was making videos for the product marketing team. Like I was learning how to do animation to try to. Yeah, I don't think we ever really went that far with it. But anyways, I think, you know, early on in your career, when you're an IC and you're doing the work you can get a lot of. Like what I had was I was in an environment where I could stand out because I think I was kind of figuring out this marketing team. I was working hard and I was a really good ic. And so as soon as I became a good ic, I was like, oh, I'm going to be a VP one day. Like that's just automatically. And I'm going to be a great VP because I'm a good ic. And that's a false belief. Right? Like, I think there's another thing going on in marketing too where it's like, people that are really good ICs sometimes think that they have to follow a path to become a vp. And like, you know, engineering culture, you don't have to do that. If you, if you just want to be a great engineer, you don't want to be an engineering manager, that's fine. You can follow that career path and you can make a ton of money and, you know, whatever.

Yeah, Nobody cares that you get into work at 11 and you don't do any meetings. It's just like, oh, you get to just be an engineer.

Yeah. And so, like, I guess it doesn't feel like that's quite the same as marketing. Like, there's so many people that I think have kind of begrudgingly worked and moved into leadership roles in marketing. Not so many, but there's some people that have done that. And it's like, I wish in marketing, it was like, for people that just want to be a great ic, they could just go and crush it and make a ton of money and be happy and do that. So anyways, I think being great IC does not equal being a great vp. And I learned that going through that because I went through the motions and figuring it out as well.

How many one on ones or walks did we have? And I think we had a. We had a great relationship in that, like, we were able to be very real with each other. And I would be able to tell you, like, look, man, I know that it might make sense to do it this way, but, like, I'm under pressure to do it this way. And the CEO said this way. Yeah, it's kind of like, yeah, I actually think this is a Gary Vee line, but I steal it all the time. And it's so true. It's like, and you're gonna experience this soon. But once I had kids, I was like, oh, that's why my parents were such a pain in the ass about the way doing that thing. And then like, yeah, now that I'm a parent, I'm like, on my kids about things that used to drive me crazy. And I think that this same is true in, like, learning to mature and become a manager and a leader and executive. It's like, yeah, like, I can't. You. You can't be over there gossiping and like, talking shit with like, those four people and, like, can't be complaining about your boss in front of other people. You can't be doing this, you can't be doing that. There's a certain level of like, you gotta. You gotta grow up and change that and accept that that's what. That's what that job is now. I'm not poo pooing either path. You can be an IC forever. I'm just saying, like, if you want to take that manager path and become a vp, it's very, very different than that IC role for you. You got to play. You have to play all the games internally. And are you. Are you going to be willing to do that?

Yes.

Do you want that? I joke now that, like, I think everybody, before they get promoted, should take a test. Like, are you sure you want to. You want to be a VP or whatever?

Yeah. Well, do you remember? Do you remember? So, you know, fast forward here. Privy got acquired. You were leaving to go double down on exit five. I got to take over running the team. And it was the first time I was a vp, and I think within the first month or two, I texted you and I was like, man, I'm so sorry for questioning you on certain things and, like, not having your back at certain moments. And, like, we had. Had done five years together, basically, where, like, you were my VP and I was your director, and, like, I was trying to help do things. And there's a lot of moments where I don't think I fought you on things, but I kind of played devil's advocate, as we would say, or I would kind of, like, you know, push back on things. And, like, there were some moments for sure where I, you know, I was being, you know, a little jerk about things. I'll just say it that way. And so I remember just, like, getting into it and just. And I had a great team and I wasn't having trouble hiring, and, like, we were pretty much on center, like, this is after you left, and, like, I was in a good position, but I still felt like, oh, man, this is so draining, trying to lead people and get everyone on the same page and, like, focused. And I immediately, I think I texted all four of my previous bosses, but I texted you first. And I was like, man, I'm so sorry. This is. This is harder than I thought it is, you know, like, getting people together and focused. So.

Yeah, well, it's like, it's. It's hard. But then there's also, like, there's all this nuance of, like, you can't always share all of the things. And so, like, I know that. I know that the CEO is about to fire the VP of sales, and there's going to be this massive shakeup inside the company. But, like, that's not going to happen for four weeks. And, like, I can't tell you that yet. Yeah, that's just one example. There's just like, constant things like that, or like, I'm Having a really hard time with this person in the company. And, like, I don't want you to go do that thing with them right now. There's just like, it is people, you know, you have to be. It's a change. It's literally you're changing. Like when you're, when you're an ic, you're like, I can be the greatest marketer in the world and that's what's going to get me promoted and be successful, right?

Yep. And I can just go deeper and deeper on that. Right. Like, I can. But if you're moving up a ladder, you're just learning new skills, like every time you're moving up. Yeah.

And the job, the job is to be there for your team. The job is to, to, to be there for your team. And that means that if you got to take. If it's 4 o' clock on a Tuesday and someone texts you and says, hey, can we chat? And you're going to have that. They're going to be crying. They're going to be crying and like, this is. Yeah, that's going to happen. We're all humans. Like, people get frustrated at work. There's stress, there's tears. Even in B2B sass, like, it just is. What?

Right. More than you think, probably.

Yeah, way more than you think. And yeah, my friends who have done, like, actual hard things in life, like in the law, you know, the law, like a police officer, military, or like rolling their eyes. Luckily they don't listen to this. But you can't, you can't say that. You can't say that. But, but we're all, we're all people, right? We all have shitty days and we're all frustrated. We're not going to all like, the people that we work with. But, like, that is the job of being the vp.

Yep.

And then, like, you have to do that. You have to play this weird dance of, like, you got to do right by your team, but you're also on another team. You're on the executive team. And so you're one of five members on that team. And so you're kind of playing this, this dance. Anyway. It's, it's an example of like. Yeah, I used to, I used to roll my eyes at, like, a lot of this, like, management and executive training and. Because I just wanted to go fast. But, man, that stuff, that stuff matters and you, you gotta be trained in that same one, you know?

Yeah. And I feel like throughout, throughout my time of, like, working closer with you, you know, in 2017 to becoming VP four years later. I think one of the great things and one of the things that everyone should be seeking out is a mentor that's going to be as transparent as possible with that. I think you are always very transparent with me about, you know what? You could tell me you would. You're thinking behind the scenes on why we're making certain decisions, how we're changing our strategy. Hey, you know, we hired, like, you hired over me, like, two or three times when. When we had to. Right. And. And when you're. And you're in that position, you don't really understand it. You're like, why I wanted to do this, and I thought I was ready for this. And, like, our egos get the best of us sometimes. But, like, you were very transparent as much as you could be with me. And I think that makes a huge difference with, like, getting ready to be in a leadership position. Right. Like, seeing having a leader that's going to give you as much behind the scenes. Like, I've had that a couple times in my career, and I thought, you know, you did a great job of it and. And really helped me, like, understand what's going on behind the scenes so that when it was my time to be there, like, I knew how to act, I knew how to, like, operate. That. That made a massive difference for me.

All right, we could talk for three hours, and I want to do that. But tell me about. Tell me about Exit 5. What do you think you're going to do? What are you. What are you excited about? You know, there's thousands of B2B marketers that listen to this. Let's. We don't have the full. We can't tell them the full plans, but, like, you're a couple weeks in on this. Like, just drink, damn it, Dan. Drink some of the Exit 5 Kool Aid and talk about it on this podcast.

For sure. Yeah. I mean, again, it's not the numbers. It's like, what you see and what you feel like. I was in the community last night and just trying to jump in, trying to be helpful to people and the level of engagement. So why did I join AZ5? Let me start there. Right? Why am I here1. Working with you again? Obviously, we have a great work history. I think collaborating is just awesome. There's so much stuff we can do together. I love the way we work together. You come up with these crazy ideas, and then often I get to go figure them out. And I love doing that, and you love doing your part. So it's like, that's great. That's a huge part of why, you know, I want to join. But like peeling back the layer and like looking inside the community, like, you know, understanding it, you know, I've been part of the community for about three years now and it's just, I mean.

I don't know, it's just, I don't.

The word that kind of comes to mind is like, it's just insane the level of commitment people have towards each other in this community. I was looking at, people were posting, hey, I have a new website. Give me a tear down right? Like, give me some feedback on all this stuff. And like people are making loom videos. They're like 10 minutes long.

Like, yeah, it's nuts.

And just, hey, here's everything I saw and like these little things about, you know, I'm like, how am I, how am I going to, you know, as, as a new member of, of the team going to be as helpful as some of these other community members? Because they're being so great.

So like, so these are the things you and I, even though this is for the podcast, these are the things like when I was saying to you yesterday, like, I think, I think initially out of the gate, the biggest opportunity is to do a better job marketing exit 5. It seems silly, but it's like that, like people are like, well, why would I, why would I pay a couple hundred bucks a year? And it's like telling those stories. It's not, I think the people who cut, the people who join and this is our fault on the marketing, on the way in, the people who join and like want to just, you know, post once and think they're going to get 20 comments and be like, wow, this is the most viral place ever. It's the long term. Like, you might need an, you might need a recommendation for an SEO vendor one day. You might need a freelance video editor. You might have a board meeting in two weeks. And you've never prepared for that in your life. And like, how do you, how do you do that? And I think that you and me coming up there wasn't really a resource like this or we had to. I got lucky in that. Like at Drift, for example, we were funded by the tier one VCs. And so I got exposure to this by like being able to like go to Sequoia and travel and visit other companies and meet with the CMOs of like, fate. I met with the CMO of Facebook and the CMO of Survey of ServiceNow and the CMO of Palo Alto Alto Networks and that was insane. But I had to get on a plane, I had to be away from my family for a week and I only could meet with three or four people. I think we have the opportunity to do that at scale inside of the community and that's a mission that I can get excited about.

Well, it's actually fun too with the community because it's like the people aren't writing to get likes necessarily or get a certain number of likes or get a certain. Which is what most marketers are doing on LinkedIn. We're all writing so we can get high engagement and people seeing our stuff. Right. With, you know, Exit five in the community, it's all about who's commenting, the type of feedback I'm getting, right? I. There might be two or three comments on something, but they're absolutely perfect. And like I'm going through trying to like, how can I help these people? I'm like, they're already being helped. Like, what am I? Like, like it's amazing the level and the types of people and the. We went through, we went through the analysis of like where these people work, you know, in the community. And it's like, and even like just the logos and the names, it's like you're Getting top tier B2B SaaS, marketers that are going to give you a tear down. If you're a marketing manager at a, you know, small funded company and you just did your first website overhaul, which I know what that's like. I've been there, you know, that's like you've been there and you're like, oh, I've got to go show everybody this and you know, and you can post in there and you can get VPs and directors from like product marketing leaders from like the top, you know, B2B companies that you would, you know, you would never get a response on. On LinkedIn, for instance, if you just, you know, direct message them like you can get that negative five right. Like, and it's just insane that level of engagement and the types of people that are getting involved. And so that to me again kind of get back to like why I'm here. I was like that. I just didn't know that as much and now I know that and I see that and it's like there's just, and that's just the community, right? Like we've talked about this. Like this is a media company. There's so many more things you want to expand. There's so many more things you want to do this is great podcast. There's more trainings, there's more templates, there's more examples. But it's like a lot of the answers are in this community, and we want to do a better job of exposing that to people and helping people find those answers faster. Like, can we get the search bar on the. On the homepage of exit5.com so you can just find it and go in and get it, right? Like, what are we doing to get more people, you know, the answers that they're looking for?

Oh, that would be sick. Like, you could search on the homepage, but then there'd be like, login, and you have to go and check that out.

Yeah, you just click it and you say, all right, go. Go check it out. Join our. Join our team.

I saw somebody can't. Like, I get all the emails and somebody's canceled. They're like, yeah, I asked a question and nobody answered my question. And so I'm canceling. I'm like, well, that's fine if that's how you want to use it. But then I go in and I go to the search and I type in, like, ABM and I see like, 72 posts about ABM.

Yeah.

I'm like, damn it.

Yeah. I mean, like, if you ask a question the way you just Google something and you just take what you googled and put it in the community, These are smart B2B SaaS, marketers. They're not going to spend time on something that you could just go find. So I would guess that person maybe could have just found that on Google or something. Like, if you have something where you're use it the way you would use talking to a friend, right? Like, it's not like, it's not Google, right? It's like you want to go talk to a peer and like, you're going to. You want to go sit in a roundtable, a little mini conference, and get a bunch of feedback, and I'm going to pull up the projector. I'm going to show you my new website, or I'm going to show you this email campaign, or I'm going to give you. Show you. You know, Or I'm just going to cry in front of you and tell you how hard it is to be a VP of marketing, and I'm going to have 12 VPs of marketing tell you, how do you get out of that mode of this imposter syndrome and move forward? Like, that's what it is, right? Like, you get to go into a conference room and have those people yeah.

That'S the other thing. That's the other thing that I want to try to replicate for me, like traveling for work, like going to an event as going to an event, like Saster. For me as like an up and coming vp, the biggest ROI was actually not even at the event. It would be like there was like a VP of marketing. There was like a VP of marketing, like lunch and like eight, Eight people at similar stage companies were all going out to lunch together, small group. And I'd be like, oh man, you're struggling with this too. Like, it wasn't even like finding answers. It just was like a therapy group support session. I think there's a lot we can do in there anyway. No more secrets. We can't give it. We can't give it all away. I'm super excited to have you, to have you on. I think we should, you know, we'll find a way to, to make you a regular, A regular voice on the pod. You gotta say pod. If you have a podcast, we'll, we'll make you a regular voice here. Because I think that there's so much that we're gonna dive into and talk about over time. There's so many more lessons, but I wanted to at least get you on air for a little bit so people can hear your voice.

Yeah.

Especially now. You're gonna be, you know, Dan will be active in the community. He's on LinkedIn. Go, go and send him a message right now.

Yep.

Danexit5.com Tell him something that you like about Exit 5. Tell him something that you don't like. Tell him something that you want to see. Connect with him on LinkedIn. Find his post inside of the Exit 5 community. We're here, we're doing this. We're, we're building a team. We're growing. This is becoming, you know, this is no longer Dave's little side B2B marketing project. This is very real and I couldn't be more excited and I'm super happy to have you here doing this with me, my friend.

I'm really excited too. One quick plug I'll put out there is just. I, I don't know if you know this yet. I have seven meetings on Friday with members, so I. And I have eight or six more the next Friday. So let's go. Every Friday for Exit 5 members, I just do this really quick plug. I'm available. I'm going to have office hours. You can book me one on one. If you're looking for help, hiring, if you're Looking for help, figuring out the next step in your career, looking for a job. You're running into a problem. Or maybe the Exit 5 community hasn't been able to give you a solution yet. Whatever it is, my door, quote unquote, my door is there. Jump into the community if you're a member. It's. There's a link in there. You can book time with me and looking forward to meeting and chatting with all of you.

Also, I would say that 80% of the people who listen this are not members. This is actually one of the outside of LinkedIn. This podcast is the number is a number.

Well, it's time to for them become members then. Let's go.

Yeah, so I think your code, let's keep your code as an Easter egg. Let's keep your code active through this podcast for next week. So the code is DAN20. Yeah. So go to exit5.com if you're not already a member. You can use Dan's code DAN20 and sign up. You'll get a nice little secret discount and we'll see you in the community. Dan20 and it's time.

Awesome.

All right, goodbye.

See you Exit.

Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2nd half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's going to be here. But let's be real, most teams are still guessing when it comes to what' actually working in marketing today, which channels to double down on, which campaigns are worth running again or not, and what's just noise, what's actually contributing to pipeline and what's not. It's Messy. This is B2B marketing and that's exactly where Paramark comes in. Paramark is a marketing attribution platform that shows you what's working and what's not so you know exactly where to invest your next dollar. They use marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to give you a full picture of performance across every channel, tactic and regional. And it's built by a marketer made for marketers. And right now they're hosting a special office hours on helping you with your second half of the year. Planning, forecasting and putting your best foot forward for the rest of this year and into 2026. It's not a sales pitch from them, but this is your chance to get real help from their experts that are at the intersection of marketing and planning. Bring your data, bring your questions, your roadmap, and the Paramark team is going to help you figure out what's driving results, where to cut and where to invest moving forward. So stop guessing and you can smarter right now with the team at Paramark. But you got to grab an office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get this space. You should go check them out. Go to paramark. Com Office hours. That's paramark. Com Office hours.