#204: Inside the Exit Five Holiday Party | What’s Working in B2B Marketing and a Look Ahead to 2025 with the Exit Five Team

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. You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.

Oh, we're live.

Yeah, we're live. We're live.

Look at that.

Oh, dang. That hat's so good.

Look at that head. Hey, look it. Everybody's rolling in. We decided to start it a little early because we got some good vibes. So come on in. Welcome. Welcome to our holiday party.

It really is a party. I love it.

Are we supposed to have drinks? What. What's on the menu?

I have a soda.

Can you all stop talking and let the vibes just roll right now, please? Just let the music. All right, so we got. We got. There's a couple folks in here already today. This is the. This is my dream. This is like my dream of being like a. A dj, like talking over music, right? Dang. This is it, man. This is the dream. So ye. Oh, they got the trap. The trap Christmas. This is a very. A very trappy Christmas here.

I like it today. I mean, you could drop the playlist.

Yeah. I got you Patrick from Germany, 9:00pm thanks for joining, Patrick. 9:00pm 9:00pm in Germany. That's commitment.

Yeah, that is commitment. Thanks for being here.

Just holding her hand. We got a global audience right now. Everybody's here.

No, this looks great.

We're gonna get going in one minute.

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Hey, Sam's favorite guy is here. Ding. He's like, it's Ding.

All right.

Hey, what's up, everybody? All right, we're gonna. We're gonna kick this off. Sam's here. It's the holiday season, and so we. We wanted to do something. Actually. I don't like when people talk about I when they're on a team, you know? But for this one, I'm gonna say I. Because about two weeks ago, I sent a crazy message to the Exit 5 team. And I said, I would like to do a holiday party. I would like to do a virtual holiday party. And everyone was like, oh, awesome. Great. We got more things that we need to do right now, but we're here. This is going to be informal session. I got the kids here right now, and they don't. They don't understand that this is how we pay the bills. But it's all good. Go see mom for a sec. So we want to do it. We want to do a virtual holiday party because our community. Look at Jay Schweddelson is in the chat. Shout out to you, Jay.

So we got, like a real VIP here.

Yeah. We got the Exit 5 crew here. We got Ding and Eric here. We got Dan, we got Matt, we got Anna, we got Danielle. We got Ding and Eric. And we wanted to just do a little informal, like, end of the year vibe virtual event because we wanted to, we wanted to give out a bunch of awards to awesome people among, you know, in our community. We want to highlight some of the awesome things that have happened this year. And then also we're going to give you a teaser about what's happening next year. Because we're a real team, we're a real company. We got everything planned for next year already. It's unbelievable. It's December 17th. We have real plans for the year and so I'm super excited. So the team is going to be a part of this. Ding. I just want to also shout out to Ding. Ding runs an awesome event and video production company called Event Shark. We've somehow become friends through our love of music. And then we found the overlap of B2B marketing. We did a workout together in Austin. He's been to a bunch of our events and we were like, ding, we need you to be a part of this in some way. And he's much more charismatic and fun than I am. And so Ding's got a little game for us to mix this up so it's not just us presenting and talking at you the whole time. So real quick, if you haven't already done it in the chat, just put your name in the chat, let us know, like, who you are, where you're writing in from, and then also like, why did you come? I want to know why did you come to this? Just a quick one liner. Oh, Task. Task has had a big day today. You know, Tass is one of our 25 people on LinkedIn to watch. Right. Danielle, like jazz is riding high. So Chelsea. Oh, Chelsea's here too. Chelsea's in Asheville. Olivia is in Cape Town. Look at this man. Global. Vinny's in Sydney. Tass is in the house.

Zach's here. Zach's great.

Jess is in Buffalo. Pete's in. Nate's going too fast. Nate's in Denver. Uma's in San Jose. Vancouver, Canada. Stand up. Petra's in New York City. Stand up. Ross. My guy Ross is here. Ross, right. You know what? You know what I love about Ross? What did he do at Drive? Not only was he one of the best speakers, but he sat in the front row for two days. He wasn't on his phone. He was hanging out. He had a great sweater on and he just was a part of the crowd and I love that. So, yeah, well, you know, they had an inside track on why we're doing this. So they're here, so. All right, I'm gonna drive. I got some stuff that I'm gonna talk to you about. Hang out. Look at this. This just looks amazing. So. Welcome to the exit 5. This is not a webinar. It's a holiday party hosted by us. The Exit 5 team with Ding usually goes by the sales rapper, but I have taken the liberty of rebranding him to his. He's the marketing rapper. Uma wants to know when the Bay Area event will be. Uma, relax. We got you. Just hang out, hang out for a little bit. Have some eggnog. All right? And if you're on this webinar right now, actually, someone's going to be showing up to your door any minute. There should be a knock at every one of your doors with a customized glass of eggnog from Exit 5. So you're. You're welcome for that.

I wish. I love eggnog.

Do you? It's kind of weird to me. It's kind of weird.

One glass is great.

I don't know, maybe it's because I didn't. I didn't grow up in a Christmas household. I'm more of a menorah guy myself. But the eggnog thing never really. Never really did it for me. Dimitri's here. Dimitri makes a mean matzo ball soup. I know that for a fact. So, all right, so here's what we're doing. We're doing a year in review. We're going to do community awards. We got game show with Ding. Then we're going to tell you about what we're going to do in 20, 20, 25. All right? And by the way, if you are watching this, I don't want anything else other than like maybe take a screenshot and Post it on LinkedIn at some point today or tomorrow, just to show people that you're here. That would make my day. All right, so it was an amazing year for Exit 5. We went from Dave's solo business. Many of you here, I'm sure remember a year ago, following my obnoxious self online, talking about the joys of solopreneurship and how the only way to have a company is to have a one person company and la, la, la. You know, obviously I changed my mind. We've had an amazing year. We brought in Dan, we brought in Matt, we brought in Danielle, we brought in Anna. We're going to turn the corner in January and open up another role. And I've told this team so much, but I'm going to say it again. Like, I've had so much fun the last year. I was basically burnt out talking about marketing. I've been doing this for a long time, back when I had hair. And the team has given me so much energy. It's so much fun to be working on this together. Like today we did this launch, we did 25 people to launch on LinkedIn. Just to be in Slack and working with other people. I think humans, I think we were meant to work with other people and to share in victory and defeat and give feedback and work as a unit together. And so just, just in chat real quick, I just want to shout you all out one more time. I love this team. I'm happy to be here. I'm proud to have you all and I'm having a blast. So we grew the team from one to five. That's number one. And we spent a big amount of focus on content. Our newsletter, we almost doubled the newsletter this year. We. We put out our 200th episode of the B2B Marketing Podcast with me, Dave G. And that's a lesson in marketing consistency right there. By the way. I almost gave up on that podcast twice. I stopped and started, stopped and started. And then when I committed to doing Exit five, I said, you know what? No matter what, I'm going to put out an episode every single week. Obviously we have an amazing team and our brand has grown, but the consistency of just picking that every Tuesday, we're going to put out a new episode. Now it's multiple episodes a week. That is such an underrated hack in marketing is committing to a publishing schedule. And it's amazing. I mean, you all see it on the team, right? Like we have. We see new members that sign up for our community. Almost every member is like, I've been listening to the podcast for six months and I finally decided to take the plunge and join the community. The podcast is the. The tip of the spear. By the way, in three meetings this week, I used the phrase tip of the spear. And my. I said tip of the sphere each time. Like Dan, Like Dan would tip of the fear. But it's tip of the spear. We had 12, 000 people register for our events this year. So we did drive anybody in the chat come to drive, shout out. I know a couple. You are in the B2B marketing. The B2B marketing Mecca that is Burlington, Vermont. Where is that coming from? We gotta have a DJ for from now on. We're not doing anything without a DJ ever again. So we had over 200 people come to Vermont for our first in person event and drive, we had 110 people in Austin and we did a bunch of virtual events where we've had 12,000 people for the year. And then most importantly, the thing I care about the most is our community. We have grown the community 79%. Great stat. Not 80%. Not 78%. 79%. If I was in a board meeting, I would say this is double. We doubled the community this year. And the big reason why is we brought in Matt. Where's Matt? Matt, wave to your friends and family out there. So we brought in Matt. Matt has been, you know, the community was honestly an afterthought for me. I would, you know, post there, right there, and then kind of post and ghost. We hired Matt to come in and Matt has truly treated the community like a product. He acts like a product manager. He's on calls every single week with members. He's taking notes, he's looking what other people are doing. He's deep in feedback and data and analytics. And he's really brought an awesome level of focus to the community. And there's been no growth hack that has grown the community. It has just been about treating the community like a product. And one thing that we've learned, a hypothesis that I had last year was like, we need more content in the community. We need videos, we need AMAs. No. Do you know what people want in the community? What do they want in the community, Matt?

Connections.

They want connections. You all want connections. You want to meet other people who are doing the same things you're doing. You want to build your own network. And that is what we want Exit 5 to be a lot of love, rightfully so, in the chat for Matt. But, I mean, what's cool about this team this year is you can see, you know, that Danielle's doing the content, you know, and Anna's put on our events and been behind the scenes in a bunch of stuff. You know, Dan is crunching the numbers somewhere in a spreadsheet and making this thing run on time. You can see everyone. It's not just my face out there. And that's made a huge difference. So some quick highlights. All right, so that's us. You know, us. Okay, Matt, want to hit on some of these community stats real quick? I'll let you just riff on this. I know we didn't really prep for any of this, but let's have each one of you talk over these real quick just to get. Get me on. I need to take a drink of water.

Yeah, for sure. So first one you already talked about. You know, community membership doubled this year, and then also our monthly active members doubled as well. It actually doubled, which is great to see. It means that as the community grew, engagement scaled with it. So that was really cool to see. So every new member that we're adding in is taking part in the community and being engaged. We had obviously a lot of great posts and content in the community, but what I'm really happy to see is how many comments we've had. You can see there's an outsized number of comments to posts. And I don't know about you guys, but a lot of communities that I've been part of, Slack communities, whatever it is, a lot of people post, but not a lot of people comment and engage in the community. So you can see for us, it's almost the opposite. So that's been really great to see. And then, last but not least, two big things. We launched the CMO Club privately about a month ago. We have almost 70 members today, and we're going to go bigger with it in 2025. So we're going to make it. We're going to invest more there, get more members, but that's been going really great. You know, if you're in the CMO Club, let us know in the chat. I think I've seen a couple people in here that are part of the CMO Club. And then we also did the Marketing Leadership Accelerator this year. So we did our first accelerator type course. I think, Dave, you did one a couple years back, but this was the first one as at Exit five with the team, which was really great. I think we got a 50 NPS score on it as of yesterday. So a lot of people really happy with the program. And this is another area we're going to invest more in in 2025. So all good stuff.

Beautiful. Tas. This is not a roast.

You can't roast us.

Yeah, you took her off the list already.

Dave, why is Tess on events? We didn't stage with us. No, no, no. Relax, relax. Careful what you wish. So events was a big focus for us this year. We're running it back with drive. We got more to talk about on. On events. Danielle, can you just talk about the newsletter in the podcast real quick?

Me and my baby. The newsletter. I love the sound effects. I feel like I need you to just, like, follow me around. It's great. Yeah. The newsletter, it has been probably one of my favorite things I get to do every week. We've grown subscribers 92%. There's still time left this year, so if you are not subscribed and you should be head on over to the page. Subscribe and we've sent about 65 this year. I've written a little less than half of them, so I took it over in June and just kind of dove right in. And I'm very grateful that Dave and the team have trusted me to do that. And we've written some bangers this year. How to write a B2B newsletter worth reading. I mean, that's kind of meta, but promise. I didn't just do my own tips, I looked at other ones. A really good one. This was from Dave Kellogg. If you don't follow him, he writes Kel Blog. He's he had this awesome podcast episode on High Performing Traits of a cmo. So we turned that into a nice little issue, Guidelines for Building a Marketing Org. But the backbone of the newsletter is the podcast. And I would say that if you are looking to get into content, this is like a great way to do it because the backbone of the newsletter, like I said, is the podcast. I take those transcripts, I mine them for the little insights like a little gold miner in the in California in the 1800s and then I get them into the newsletter and bring them to you. So that's really the definition of content distribution and repurposing. So yeah, that's me. That's newsletter and podcast.

I love the newsletter. Love, just because I hadn't said it yet, founder mode for anybody wondering. But I love the newsletter.

Love.

Danielle's another another example of like the newsletter taking my stuff that I wrote on LinkedIn and turning it into a newsletter because I wanted email addresses. And then another example of perfect example, like Dave does a kind of shitty V1, then we hire someone to make it better. So brought in Danielle, treated it like a product. And obviously the numbers speak for themselves. But the meta marketing lesson is like the level of care that you put into this stuff, that is the ultimate growth hack. It's like we always searching for the shortcut for the optimization. What was the tweak? What's the subject line? It's like how about just put more effort and care and dedication into the things that you're creating. And we've seen that across the board. Going from a solo business to a team of five.

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, and you can even understand how much or 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.

Okay, now we got awards. Virtual drum roll please. Maybe some dj. All right, so we want to hand out awards. We got our top community contributors for this year. We got Garrett, head of growth. Garrett has Created the most posts in the community. Looking back, I'm not sure that Volume award is the right award, but Garrett, we love you anyway. Most posts shout out to you Garrett. Thank you for being in there. Love that. The Spark Award. Chelsea, our new friend from we met in Vermont. She landed an awesome new job at Chili Piper. She's super active in the comments. If you write a comment in there, you know Chelsea's probably going to have your back and have something to add or something to say. So shout out to you Chelsea and then Post of the year. This is a new award. Well, they're all new awards. New award by the Exit 5 committee this year. Post of the Ward Madav Bandari. This is what it takes. People want to know like how do I participate in how do I participate Next to five? We'll talk about the stuff you're doing and don't promote your company and add real value and share results. Madav wrote about basically how they created this SEO playbook at Storylane that grew traffic over the course of six months and he was very specific and useful. It wasn't like here I wrote this blog post, I'm going to promote it, go get traffic to my website. He wrote a legitimate article inside of Exit 5 just to share his SEO lessons and that's the stuff that I want to see more of and so I want to shout out people like Garrett and Chelsea and Madhav for being such an awesome part of the the community. So shout out to you all. Then we have the Momentum Maker Award in true Momentum Maker and Rising Star Award. So Marin is the member who has sparked a bunch of great discussions and brought people together with thought provoking posts this year. And Lindsay who is an up and coming member, a newer member who I see in there all the time. She's in the chat right now. She's in our CMO club. Shout out to Marin and Lindsay and then we got Craig. Craig is the most engaged community member. If you hit the leaderboard inside of Exit 5 that we have, you'll see Craig's name there always. He's always in the comments, always adding new posts, always writing back. My inbox is full with like you have a notification from Craig Heron. Super active.

Yeah dude.

And then Matt, Matt Cerna who's a CMO of Replicant. They're really cool. AI customer service company in the AI space doing customer service for the enterprise. And he is a new member of our CMO club and he's already been in there super active adding a bunch of value, helping each other out. And so I just want to shout out those people. Great. Thank you for you get what you give. And those folks have added a lot to our community this year. So virtual shout out to to you all now our top event contributors of the year. So we got Kanika Sharma, who put on the community event of the year. She did a LinkedIn profile and post tear down for us. And man, if this isn't a topic that you all want to know more about, like, what does it take to be great on LinkedIn? What does great copy look like? How do I write good post. Kanika is an awesome SAS copywriter. And as Tass says, Kanika, she's amazing. She is amazing. So that was a top community event we did of the year. Top speaker of the year. He. I don't know if he's still here or not, but if he was, he'd be sitting in the front row. Ross Simmons, he brought the energy to drive. He sat in the front row, he handed out books. He had great jokes and stories and anecdotes and specifics. Ross killed it at drive speaker of the year. And then top podcast guest of the year, OG friend. We go way back on the Internet. I haven't talked to her in a little while, but I wonder if she's here. Amanda. Amanda Natividad from Spark Toro. She was on the podcast to start last year. It was like in February. She had just come back from maternity leave. We were talking about coming back from maternity leave, deciding, you know, do you want to be CMO or not? The path to marketing leadership and what things she was doing as the solo marketer at Sparkturo. And if you follow her on LinkedIn, you already know that she's awesome. And so that was no surprise to me to look back through the podcast analytics and see that that is the most downloaded episode of the year.

All right, and then two newer.

So newer events. Two weeks ago, we did this. You know, we make it. We make up the rules here. So we did this session with Kip. Kip's a friend of mine, CMO at HubSpot. He is probably the second longest public SaaS company CMO. He's been, you know, we always talk about the short tenure of CMOs one to two years. Kip's been the CMO of HubSpot going on nine years running now. And we had him in our CMO club. Something that we're doing is bringing in amazing CMOs like Kip once a month to talk to our CMO club members. And the response was amazing. Like, Natalie Taylor called in from the airport because she had to get her question asked to Kip. The feedback of that was amazing, and so I just want to shout out Kip for being a part of that. And then virtual event speaker of the year, Diane, who has become another LinkedIn friend of mine. She gave an awesome presentation, just was an awesome contributor to our ultimate roast of B2B websites. And she's another person that's worth following on LinkedIn, especially if you're in the messaging, copywriting, product marketing position space. Diane rocks. And this is a great.

A great list of folks to build.

Your kind of virtual digital network around. So now.

Now that our QBR is over.

Thanks, Tas. I want to call up my friend Ding. We got a little game show. This guy's great at this stuff. I love these little things. So, Ding, I'm going to pass it over to you. Let's have some fun. Yeah.

How's it going, y'?

All?

First of all, huge. Shout out to exit 5. Shout out to Dave. I remember back in the day, I was in the the Facebook group, and then years later, here we are at the qbr, and that was a bar. We're all stars.

Hey, look, look. When you're in founder mode, when you're in founder mode, sometimes you get to pull the founder mode card and you get to do whatever you want. And I'm doing an event today to talk about my company. Damn it. That's right.

So for today's episode of Countdown quiz, I'm sure some of y' all have seen this on LinkedIn. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. It's the ultimate challenge for B2B marketers. And since we have the community of the best B2B marketers in the world, so we're gonna do this live. And to get us warmed up right now, we're gonna have Mr. Dave Gerhart himself in the first round. So everyone give a round.

Let's go. Let's go, Dave. By the way, and we're gonna bring somebody up next. So, like, if you want to participate in this, you get to prove it. So task. You talk a big game. Let's get you. We'll see who's next. All right, let's go, let's go. I'm ready.

All right, let's do this. So next slide, please. So the game right here is, Dave, you're gonna have 30 seconds, and you're gonna have to name as many B2B martech companies as you can in those 30 seconds. So are you ready? For this, I'm gonna start the countdown.

Timer for the fact, for the record, I'm honest. I'm an honest man. I could easily go to Chad gbt. This is off the top. So I'm here. I'm gonna.

And where we can see.

I don't have pants on, but other than that, I'm happy to participate. All right, so let's start. Let's go. Oh, we're starting already.

All right, we're going. 3, 2, 1.

HubSpot Salesforce Loom Knack Vimeo Paramark Zeld Slack Atlassian Notion Qualified Chili Piper. Demand Base. Clary Copy AI Jasper. Oh, my God.

Time is up. All right, y', all, everyone give a round of applause for riviera.

I counted 16.

That's almost. That's. That's more.

Kicked ass out. I'm tired of her nonsense. That tats are gone.

I'm gonna bring her on stage task request to join.

All right, let's go.

All right, Taz, we got more.

Yeah, I don't see her requested.

Where's the request at?

I see Jot John talking about no pants founder. Let's go, everyone.

Let's go. Welcome. Welcome to the spotlight. Oh, this is.

I'm more of like a keyboard.

We know. Oh, we know. That's why you're here. Yeah. I can't do.

I can't do this on the spot.

Let's go. Ding. Yeah.

All right, set of questions for you. So this format is called the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Countdown Quiz. So I'm going to be asking you to name five things from a category, four things from a category, so on and so forth. So this is the ultimate test. Taz, I know you talk a big game, but now is your time to shine. Now is your time to prove yourself. And I know that the chat's going crazy. How we feeling? Chat? You think Tas is going to complete the task?

I'm just going to leave if this gets too embarrassing. I can't lose all the clout I got from today.

All right, let's go. So if we get the. The next slide up, as we're about to get into it, hopefully you don't get one of these.

Wait, hold on. Zach. Zach said. Zach said when the teacher calls you out from the back of the classroom, you remember, like, in class, the two kids just, like, talking nonsense and ding, ding. You got something to say and you. Then you get called on and it's your turn. That's what this is.

No surprise. That was 100% me in school. And every like, parent teacher conference was. She talks a lot. My mom's, like, ways are up. Like, I don't really care what she does anyway.

Sorry.

All right, Taz, so we're gonna get started in five seconds. Ready? All right, five, four, three, two, one. All right, Taz, name five B2B marketing buzzwords that people overuse.

I love this. Okay, Streamline, revolutionize AI boosted. Shoot. Is increased growth or increased revenue buzzwordy? I don't know if that's buzzworthy, but those are the three that I see the most.

Dang it.

Give me some more. Who wants to help me?

Quirk?

Come on, chat. You got.

Come on, come on.

Synergy, Craig.

Sahil, Jet. Yes. Turnkey.

Yeah.

Industry meeting.

My favorite. Yeah. Unified circle all in one. Yeah.

By the way, I've never. I've hosted these things for a long time. I've never seen the chat light up so fast. Everyone has a buzzword. You want engagement in the chat, you just ask the people to put in a buzzword. Seamless.

Seamless.

All right, all right.

Solutioning. Or it's a verb now. Founder mode. All right, Taz, I think you passed round one. Let's ask the chat, because that last one is a little bit iffy with the revenue. All right, Chat. Are we accepting those answers?

No. No. Hold on. No. Dang. Remember. Remember whose company this is? It was not. This is my company. We're doing this for me today. I'm in charge here. By my estimation, my homie Task, and I love her. If she got, like, three out of.

Five, that's the honest answer.

Who's in? Who's got the math on three? Let me ask Chat. GPT. What's three divided by five? That's her grade. I'm not gonna cut it.

It's like a B. Yeah, like a 60.

All right, that's round one. That's round one. What's next?

All right, task. Name four martech tools. This should be easy because.

Can I just take it from what Dave said or no? Okay, maybe we should do some new ones. Okay, so Martech Tools. Let's see, what do I use?

Is.

Okay, ga. Does GA count? GA four. I'm gonna just name all, like, website related stuff.

Okay. Dang it.

This is like, I'm so on the spot right now, and I'm just, like, losing my mojo. I'm better in the.

Oh, wait, this is. So what you're saying is it's easier to be pithy behind the keyboard than it is to be on camera? Yes.

Like the guy today who Was on Danielle's post. Right. It's much easier to be Mr. Keyboard Warrior. Haha. Pointing fingers.

Actually, she's my LinkedIn bouncer.

You can phone a friend too. We could bring somebody else to name for martech tools to get another person up here.

I'm okay with that.

Oh, okay, wait. Lachey can get up here, but I'm going to say semrush before she does and ahrefs before she does, and then we'll see what she. Which she actually comes up with. Can I say HubSpot again? Like I feel like you said HubSpot. Everyone says HubSpot.

Feels like you're failing right now, if I'm being honest.

My mouth's falling down the stairs. Okay, get lachey in here. Look at her.

No, she doesn't want to do it. It's all good. It's all good. All right. We did this one. Okay. Oh, wait. All right, Tas. Thank you. I'm kicking you out. We need another voice up here. All right, who wants to be our next participant? We need a new fresh voice.

Bye, task. I'm removing you. Love you.

How do we. How do we do it? Danielle? Somebody raise your hand.

Yeah, you gotta just request to join and then we'll pick someone. We got three people right now. We got vinny, we got sahil, we got James.

Put Sahil up there.

All right, so you'll get ready.

All right. And then Sahil, good to see you, brother. Next. Next event, we're gonna. I love the DJ play, but Sahil plays in a rush cover band and I think. I think there's a play with us in that for an extra event. Just saying. Yeah, let's do it. All right, go ahead. Ding. Let's. Awesome.

Sahel, welcome to the stage. So now we have our next question. We got a little sneak preview of it, but Anna, we can get that on the stage. So are you ready? Boom. That Dave Geart has worked at drift.

Exit 5. Are we counting the facebook group? It's not a company, bro.

I need two out of three.

Exit five and trips. The correct answer.

There's another one.

The correct answer would have been privy. There was also HubSpot. Nine months. Nine of the most glorious months of my life spent at HubSpot. There's also a constant contact would have been an acceptable answer. They were an email marketing software company that got their lunch eaten by mailchimp. And then I started my career at a PR agency called low as Paul and partners. But Sahil, good to see you. Always. Great hair. Great Job. Thank you for everything you do, but I really. I'm in on serious. This is it. I enjoy seeing your face Everywhere in Exit 5. And thank you for. Thank you for being a part of this thing. All right. Okay. How many more we got? We got another one. Oh, yeah.

Let's. Let's. Round two. Let's get a new set of questions up.

All right.

All right.

Maybe it's a little harder than we're going around two.

All right, I'm bringing Ross on stage.

Yes.

He wants to come.

Perfect. Bring him up.

If you get these wrong, I'm gonna violate you with the sound effect.

I'm ready for. I'm ready for it. I'm nervous.

All right, let's go. All right, Ross, let's do it.

So round two, Ross Simmons. And guess what? If you mess up here, we're going to distribute this clip forever.

Distribution. We're going to distribute this clip everywhere.

I love it. Let's do this.

All right, Ross. So let's.

You ready? Five.

I'm ready.

Ready.

Three, two, one. Let's hit it. Red logo.

That's.

Dude, I'm gonna give you one to get you started. Your favorite company. Reddit. Red logo. There's one.

Reddit. That's fair. That's fair. Reddit. Let's go with Toyota. President's Choice. Adidas. Santa.

You'Re a Canadian. Guys.

Important Hortons in the mix. Yeah, I don't know. This is. That's a tough one. Red logos. The psychology of red. Nobody uses it.

Big company, Black space.

Rackspace is Rack.

Sure, sure. We'll give it to you.

Wwe, nwo, Wolf Pack. Anybody? Nothing? No, that's it.

All right. He did it. Thank you. That's a hard man. That's tough. All right, let's keep it. I'm keeping him up. I'm keeping him up. Dang.

Oh, I got this.

Rain.

We've got Rudolph. We've got Blitzen. We've got Comet, We've got Cupid, We've got Donner, Prancer. All of them. And some people would even say olive. Get it? All of the other Raiders. We also have all of them. All of Olive.

Yeah.

That's the dad.

Yeah. Good job. All right, can you name three holiday classic holiday ad campaigns?

Coca Cola, Santa. That's the best. Then we've got. That's probably all I've got.

Let me think.

Coca Cola.

What do you got? Dang. You wrote these questions, so give us the other two. I'm. Put you on that. Wow.

You put me on the spot. So here's the part where I get exposed. I actually only knew that one. Hey, we got in here. Rachel says the car with the big red bow. Any car brand that is. That's factually correct. I see Budweiser, Hershey. These aren't very specific, Chat, we gotta do a little better.

Yeah. What do you. Tell them what you want, but John.

Lewis ads every year.

They were so emotional.

Volcano.

Volcano ad. That's a great one.

The volcano he wants for Christmas. Yeah, that's what he wants for Christmas. Yeah. Nice. All right, we got one more. All right, Ross, name two things that make a perfect B2B. Marketing.

Oh, I got one. It's sent from me.

Yeah, real good.

One that's sent from Danielle. One that seems personalized, really comes off as if it's human. One that doesn't say in the ever evolving world of aka not written by chatgpt. And one that has a PS. You got to throw the PS. And people are sleeping on the PS's these days.

I love that. Big fan of the PS. Put the content in the email, then do a PS is where you can reference the link again. You can tell another story.

What does PS stand for?

Parlez vous? Si vous. Play. No, no. Damn.

Postal script.

Postal script. Yeah. I don't know. I don't even use my brain anymore. Just ChatGPT does everything for me.

That's hilarious.

I love it. All right, Ross, good to see you. Good job.

Likewise. Thank you all.

Have a great next year being an awesome member of our community.

Thank you all.

All right, lovely crowds. Crowds going nuts. Okay, let's keep it moving. We want to do another guest. I want to put. I want to make Dan our next guest actually right now, so. All right, round three.

Just have a bunch of names.

All right, Dan.

Yeah, just give me names.

Corporate gifts that people give during Secret Santa.

Candles, candle holders, video ipods, ties and shot glasses. Shot glasses being the only legitimate answer. Honestly, someone gave him a video iPad one year and he hasn't been the same since. No, the Office. No, it gets that reference. Come on. No, no, wait. Tell me the Office reference. I'd love a show the Secret Santa episode where I don't want to ruin it. I mean, it is like 15 years old, so everyone hopefully has seen at this point. But that's okay. Dwight and Michael argue over the video, iPad or ipod. No, I need to read it. You gotta watch that one this time. Here. It's perfect. All right, two of his five answers. Two of his five answers were about candles, which you know, someone said in the chat, that's a real life experience. But why do we hate? All right, go ahead, Ding.

All right, Dan, name four content formats on LinkedIn.

Okay. My guy Matt has taught me a lot about this this year. First one, text post, video post. Matt, don't get mad. I'm gonna screw it up. Is it a. It's a document, but it's a sliding document. It has a name. It's like a slideshow. Rhymes with schmaracel. Yeah, yeah, that one. And is that three or four?

Three. Carousel.

Yeah. And then a bro tree. Yeah, that's the fourth. Good job. All right, I'm tagging in Anna next. I'm tagging in Anna next. Anna, you're next on the hot seat with. You know, this is a holiday party with Dave and Ding and team. All right, here we go. Go ahead, Ding.

All right, Anna, name three B2B influencers.

And you can't say Dan.

You can't say Dave Gearhart. You can't say Adam, you can't say Matt.

Can't say Daniel.

Okay, this is easy. I'll say Tass, Lachey and Ross. There we go.

Love it. Perfect timing. We released a list today.

I know.

Obviously we all know that I'm the only thought leader worth following. But separate. All right.

The best hair.

Thank you. Appreciate that. Actually, I had to go sign up for volunteering for my kids school today. I had to go to the police station. I had to get fingerprinted for like a non supervised volunteer and the policeman asked me my height, my eye color and my hair color for hair color. I said none and he just giggled.

That is an option.

All right, Anna, good job. Most effective, most efficient answer. All right, here we go. What's this one? Ding.

All right, name two holiday movies that feature work or corporate life. You can't say Die Hard.

Ooh, the holiday.

Holiday party. That's one office party or something. Can't say. What about Die Hard too?

We'll count it.

That's like dancing. Candle and candle Holder, Elf.

That's a good one. Okay, that's my answer.

That's you.

Yeah, I just watched the holiday two nights ago. Hot chocolate. It was great. I love that movie.

Yeah, that's one of my favorites.

Good one.

Daniel much? I'm sorry. Much better than love, actually.

Okay. All right, Danielle, I know you want to answer one right now, so I'm putting you where you're up next. Name one way to celebrate a team win this year.

Ooh, shout them out on LinkedIn.

Very on brand. Very good. Yeah. Okay. All right, give it up. That was fun. Fun little segment. So I'm gonna wrap us up. I said we were gonna spread this around, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna see if I can do this real quick and get. Hold on. I'm having technical difficulty, so. Okay, Anna, you tell us dates and events. So we gotta. We're gonna just quickly share what we got coming up in 20, 25, and then we're gonna. We're gonna get. We'll let you get out of here. But for events, what do we.

So we have a couple more meetups next year. So we're coming to Boston at the beginning of March. We'll be in the barrier, and we'll be back in Austin in November for our three meetups next year. Stay tuned for the dates. We're still locking that in, but we're excited for that. And then we'll be back at Drive in September, back in Burlington, Vermont. So stay tuned for whenever that releases as well. But there will be a wait list and early bird tickets. So stay tuned, keep your eyes peeled. And we're excited about that for next year.

We went back and forth. We. After telling everyone we weren't going to make Drive any bigger, we were like, we're going to make it bigger. We need to go bigger. We're going to go somewhere else. We came back full circle. We're running it back in Burlington. We'll have. We'll have room for like 20 or 30 more people, max. We're probably going to have to raise the ticket price a little bit to keep it exclusive, to keep it feeling good. If you came last year, we're gonna. You'll know early. And then, you know, we hear you that there's lots of places we could go. We could go to London, we could go to Chicago. But we're just. We're starting small. It already feels like a lot of travel after being like, I don't want to travel for work again. Here we are. But we're gonna go to Boston, San Francisco, Vermont, and Austin. That's gonna be great. All right, Danielle, my friend, Danielle, you got a glow today. Tell me about some of the things that you're excited about from a content standpoint in 2020.

Yeah. So the big one is we are finally investing in putting a lot of great content on our website. We have launched Soft Launch. I'll say Soft Launch. Our new product called Article. It's our spin on a blog. But basically we're taking all those awesome insights and putting them into guides, playbooks, things that you can reference on there. So very excited about that. Yes, Ross. And maybe we'll even end up on Reddit, who knows? And then super fun sneak peek because you guys are here. We're doing our first ever Exit 5 report. Coming late February. It's going to be the state of B2B marketing salaries. So very excited for that. I'm using my political science degree chops, qualitative methods, putting those back to use for the first time in my career.

AKA Chad gbt.

Yeah, exactly. As you see in bothering Dan.

That's half of my day, those two things.

And then we're doing some more virtual events. So if you were an attendee of the ultimate roasted B2B websites, we're doing something very similar come March around email. It's going to be fun. We're going to bring the heat. It's going to be a great time. So that's what we got coming up.

For content just to echo, like just to go deeper on that for a second. Like, we've seen so much traction with our private paid community. I want us to think about, like, I want us to think about having a free lever of all this stuff. And we've seen a tremendous amount of attention and awareness and success with the podcast. And so the, the hypothesis is like, whether you pay us a dollar or not to join the community or to go to an event, that's okay. How do we make Exit5.com the number one resource for B2B marketers? And so you're going to tell your friends, oh, yeah, hey, you want to know how to like, structure your marketing marketing team, go to Exit five. They got an article about that. Right. And so that's the big thing. It's like, how can we get more really thoughtful resources created for free on the Exit 5 website? And I think that that's something that's going to really play out, play out well over the next year. Okay, Matt. Mr. Community, what are you excited about in the community?

Yes, sir. So of course my Siri came up when I said, yes, sir. We're doing more accelerator. So we did the Marketing Leadership accelerator this fall in February. I'm really excited about the accelerator we're doing. We're doing an AI accelerator. I don't have all the agenda for it yet, but essentially, if you're a B2B marketer, we're going to try and pack the most important things that you need to know about AI and the things you need to get better at when it comes to AI. So that's going to be really exciting. That's going to be probably launching sometime late January, early Feb. So keep your eyes peeled for that. Second thing is CMO Club. So we're going to go bigger with CMO Club. We've launched it in private this year and we've gotten really positive feedback. So we're going to open it up to more people but we're going to still focus on small, tight knit connections and groups here. So we're going to focus in all the right areas with CMO Club. And then last part, Community Pass. Community Pass is essentially what we're going to call just our regular Exit 5 community. So not CMO Club. It's just a community as you know it today. And you know we're going to continue to invest there. Going to try and mix in, you know, more playbooks from members and try and get them sharing the great work that we're doing. So everybody can, can see gonna focus, keep focusing more on matchmaking. We're planning to upgrade our matchmaking programs. That's going to get even better. And then last but not least, we're also going to try and bake in more AI into the community. So we're working with the Circle team on a bot in the community that's essentially going to help tag the experts in the right post when they come up, just like I'm doing manually today. So we're going to have more ways to get the right people involved in the right conversations and then hopefully find ways to reward them through gamification. So that's what's what's up.

Coming. Awesome. And keep an eye out for us. Follow everything we do. Exit5.com you can follow us on LinkedIn. Early in the new year, we're going to open a new role for our six teammate on the team. And so maybe that's you, maybe that's somebody you know. We're going to continue to grow and keep the feedback coming. We have an amazing, an amazing part of running a business like this is the feedback loop, right? We get comments on events like this. We're in Slack right now sharing screenshots about what people are saying. We get podcast reviews, we get emails, we get comments in the community. It is all driven on your feedback and so continue to share your ideas with us, continue to push us. The other thing I would say is we're also, we're very bullish on being like a curation business, not a creation business. Obviously we do create content, but we're not going to have the Hot takes. I don't want to be in the hot takes business, but we're sitting on this incredible community of 5,000 marketers, thousands of people in our community. Many of you don't get the opportunity at your companies to write about marketing because you're not a marketing company. You know, you do marketing for cyber security. And so you're not going to be able to write a blog post about the three cool things you did in marketing and publish it on your website. But Exit 5 can be that platform for you. And so maybe there's an opportunity to be on our podcast. Maybe there's an opportunity to do an AMA in our community. Maybe there's an opportunity to speak in our event. Maybe there's an opportunity to write a guest post for our site. Stay close to us. Send us an email hixit5.com like we are always looking to feature you with thoughtful, relevant content that you're doing in your day job. And that's a big part of our vision for this brand and for content for the future. So, all right, that's it. Thanks for hanging with us. That was an awesome 48 minutes. Go check out Ding. Check out what they're doing at Event Shark. If you haven't already hired Event Shark to do videos for your next event, you are falling behind the curve. So shout out to them. Just don't hire them up so much because they're a keep our house for next year and I don't want to be out there filming on my. So thanks you all. Appreciate it. Love hearing the comments. Thanks for hanging out with us on this little virtual holiday party. I hope you have a great, safe, happy, healthy rest of the year. I love this team. I love what we're doing. I'm having a lot of fun.

I gotta testify, the greatest marketing community is exit 5. 3500 strong. You better recognize real engagement, real experience.

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.

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That than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers.

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You over there in the community. 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 gonna be here. But let's be real. Most teams are still guessing when it comes to what's 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' 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 region. 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 plan 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 officehours that's paramark.com office hours.