#48: B2B marketing heading into 2023, growing your career in a down economy, continuing to bet on LinkedIn organic & more with John Short (Founder & CEO Compound Growth 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.

This episode of the Exit 5 podcast.

Is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers.

They've helped customers like lessonly drive 40%.

Of their revenue from Organic Search and they help Terminus make Organic search their number one source of demos.

Here's how it works.

Number one is results. DemandWell is built for driving the outcomes that B2B marketers care about demand traffic, leads and revenue. Number two is ease and control.

Junior team members can follow recommended steps.

Right in the platform, while experts can customize and maintain full control over their work.

Number three is speed. With everything in one platform, DemandWell helps.

You crank out content that ranks and drives leads in minutes rather than hours.

SEO expert or not, you can give.

DemandWell a try and listeners of the Exit 5 podcast can get a free.

Competitive SEO audit to see just how.

You'Re ranking relative to the competition.

Go to demandwell.com FOMO that's F O M O. And you can get a free SEO.

Consultation today right from DemandWell.

That's DemandWell.com FOMO FOMO.

And you'll get a free SEO consultation today.

1, 2, 3, 4.

Exit, exit, exit.

You know, I switched to Google Meet because it's free and that's what you're supposed to do because of the economy. You're supposed to just try to get everything for free. Right. People think they're like, cutting. I saw Pep actually posting this on LinkedIn. He's like, the way to. You're not going to like, cut a 200 software subscription. That's not going to be the way, the way out. What are you feeling right now? It's tough out there or what?

Yeah, deals are slowing down. I feel like the thing Q4 this year has been different than last year because everything's just taking a lot longer.

Yeah.

Like the CFO and the C level team, they're all going into that room and that budget meeting is taking three to four weeks or longer, rather than like two weeks it did in the past. So, like all these sales reps out there, I'm sure are just sitting there, like banging their head against the wall, trying to get a response from people if they buy something or if they're not going to buy something.

And then like, that game sucks if you're in sales because you're playing, like, how much do you follow up? Like, the contract is out and like, how you follow up. I could just see, like, I could see Armin just like pacing around the.

Office right now, looking over people's shoulders. Yeah, it's tough. Yeah. Not.

But it's okay. Here, let me, let me give you another.

Not a fun or marketing.

You run an agency, so it's different.

But you.

There are some companies that are spending like.

Yeah, yeah.

I think it depends on what you're selling right now. And it's. Yeah, like, there's definitely budget, but it's harder to find. I'm even noticing it. You. You texted me, you texted me yesterday and we had this Exit 5 jobs board, which is jobs that exit5.com and basically since launching it, like over the last year, so there's always kind of been 80 to 90 open roles. And that number is. If you look on the website, that number is measured as like jobs posted within the last 30 days. Because a company posts a job, it stays up for 30 days. It just has gone down every single Week and now let's see what it's at right now. I haven't checked recently. I Bet it's like 30 something. Let's see, 29. Yeah. See 29 open roles. And I'm used to it being 80 or 90, so like there's, there's lots of signs out. Everybody's feeling it.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. We're just seeing deal cycles slow down a little bit. I think hiring especially, like, I know a ton of really good people who are in CMO roles, director marketing roles, where I think for a while companies had job openings up still because they want it to seem like they're hiring. Because that's like one of the signals we've been sending out for the past 12 years is, oh yeah, we're hiring growth at all costs. Yeah, yeah. And they get late stage in these interview processes and then it just stops and they don't end up hiring anyone.

Yeah. Like I've been at companies where it's like we're hiring kind of like across the board, but not really specifically. And like we would have like, let's just post this role and like see what comes in and like then it comes to. Yeah, but there's none of that.

Yeah. Tough time. Yeah. Overall, I'm not seeing spend come down too much. I'm seeing certain companies pull back on spends or certain industries. But overall, I think I've been surprised at how much we're still seeing go into marketing at this point because of all the layoffs that we've been seeing across the industry. So we'll see what happens.

But do you think people are buying new stuff right now?

A lot of budgets are flat year over year. Yeah.

Why do you think that is? Is it, is it just like a chain reaction? Like, what's the actual cause of. If I'm a CEO and I'm running a company and we're actually doing pretty well, why AM I cutting 20% right now as a safety measure? What is the real reason, do you think?

Yeah, I mean, if you're still growing quickly and you're cutting at that rate, then there's a safety measure. I mean, hopefully you have some proprietary signals that you're paying attention to that are where your reps are like, look, you know, these deals are taking a little bit longer or I know we've been doing well, but here's the feedback we're starting to hear. And we haven't heard this in 12 years, but I mean, I think for the most part the companies that are cutting back are Starting to see some of the impact, or they were way out over their skis, like a Facebook or Twitter or maybe even a Google. Like, those companies have been scaling up, they've invested in R D, they've been looking to launch new products. Like, Google's been trying to find their, their second act for years. And, and they're probably realizing, okay, it's time to get back to the core business.

Do you think, in the long run. So obviously you're. You own a business that's being impacted by this.

Yeah.

Don't you think in the long term this is going to be a net positive for companies? Because the playbook that everybody's been running for the last decade or so is going to change. It's not going to be growth at all costs. It's going to be proving the ROI on marketing. It's going to be steady growth of 10, 20, 30% a year. And I'm not a VC, so I don't know about if that's going to change or not. But you wrote something this week that I feel like you. There's something in there. And my friend Adam Schoenfeld said he's talking this, like, return to rigor.

Yeah, I love that.

Don't you think? Don't you think?

Even though I find it. You couldn't find. No, I found the post. I found the post. But you called me out on, on LinkedIn for that. Look, I look at these downturns in the economy. I always compare them to the forest fires that we see, the natural forest fires that we see, not the unnatural forest fires. But when the.

Are you saying climate change is real or not real? Separate podcast.

Separate podcast. But like when the forest fires come through, they burn down the inefficiency in the forest and then new stuff is built back up. Right. So the. A lot of what that does is it we needed this downturn in order to find efficiency because we were just spending money on everything. And we need to find the true efficiency in how big should Facebook actually be? How many employees should be there? Like all those companies, if you made a hint that you needed to hire someone, they were telling you to go out and hire that person. And we made a lot of. Everybody made a lot of inefficient decisions. We can't point fingers at any single company because we're all a part of this, like, kind of growth that happened since 2008. Now everything's contracting and we just need to find the efficiency in the economy. I think it's. Could be AI. I Think we're going to see drops in advertising prices. We're going to see a focus on innovation in developers and hiring for positions we actually need, versus some of the luxury that we've been used to probably really over the last five years. So this is needed. It's painful, but these downturns create opportunities. Like 2008, we got Airbnb, Uber. There's good that comes from these downturns.

Did you watch? We crashed?

Yeah. So yeah, that was crazy. The Uber one was crazy. Did you watch the Uber one Super Pro?

No, I watch it. I gotta watch it.

Yeah. The craziest thing about the Uber one to me was they tried to dramatize it, but they didn't even use some of the real material. That was even crazier than they had in the show.

I love Fyre festival. I love WeWork. So I got to watch the Uber one inside of companies right now. Like, so obviously you're talking about Facebook and the economy, blah, blah, blah. Like, I think the people that listen to this podcast are mostly in. In marketing jobs at SaaS companies, right? And I think that there's three camps of companies. I think there's companies that are just going to continue to roll and crush it, which is like, they have some scale, they have clear product market fit, they're in a. They're in a really good market and Maybe things are 20% slower, but they're going to continue to rip it. You have companies that are just getting started now, which is like, Adam's got this new company, their key play. They're getting started. It's actually, if you can do it, it would be a fun time to build because you're going to have to build from a scrappier playbook and build from the bottom up. I think the challenge is for those companies in the middle who are like 10, 20, 30 million ARR. Things were ripping like two years ago. And it's tough in the middle. And I think that's where the way out or the way through is going to be. To have to like, you're going to have to take a risk and you have to make a bet. And it's not going to be making webinars more efficient or making SEO more efficient. I think it needs to be like a. What can we fundamentally change in our company? Like, can we change the go to market model? At least from what I've seen, Like, that's when companies make those big step functions. Right now, like I was at Drift, for example, at a time when like they completely switched their ICP and went after a totally new motion. And that was like what unlocked the second level of growth. And I think that's the question that I would be asking if I was a marketing leader at a company like that is like, hey, the way for us to plan for next year is not to just make these small channel changes, but it's like, let's rethink and develop a marketing strategy. What is our strategy for this year? Right? And like how are we going to operate? And then what are all the channels? I think sometimes we just take all the channels that we have and we think we got to use them forever. And it's like this. To me, this is the time to like reevaluate the actual marketing strategy, right?

Get back to the customer.

What does that mean?

Well, like what you were saying with drift, I'm sure you had some enterprise customers at that point in time who you saw were getting ready to purchase this, who had a need for the product. I remember coming in, well, it was around the time you started building out Test drive, but you had some companies that you had been introduced to from your VCs and you kind of started to learn that use case in order to figure out how to get to 40 million or 60 million or 100 million, whatever it was you all were looking to get to. But how did you make that decision? Did you just think, oh, we're going to go to the enterprise or did you have some customers in that segment already?

I think typically it comes from like having some. I think there were some customers in the segment and I think they had hired like initially a handful of sales reps, like Maybe there was five and they hired five to 10 reps to focus on enterprise. And that business was doing really well with like almost little to no support. And I think the, the deals were bigger, the churn was less, the fit was better, like all the things. And so I was like, okay, let's go and scale this. That part is easy on paper. The hard part is moving on from all of the like legacy stuff. And so like we had a whole marketing motion that was built on inbound and brand and community and word of mouth. And I'm not saying that stuff doesn't work, it's very important. But when you're trying to scale something like the enterprise, it's a completely different playbook. It is, it's targeted account, it's targeted accounts, it's outreach, it's abm, it's dinners, it's events, it's one to one solutions, selling it's much different. And so it's hard to make that change because everything changes. Like Mary, who runs the blog, all of a sudden like her job, she feels like, wait a second, do not care about my work anymore. There's all those little, like, you know what I mean? There's those little downstream effects of that are like, well, I'm the VP of whatever and I've always been measured on this and now we're doing it this way, but we don't have enough there yet. It's like, it's a very confusing time. And I feel like the, it fails when the whole company is not like on the same page with it. I think, I think what was great is like to have the support of David and like he's a CEO and other people, like, I can't pick a specific example, but I remember him saying like, hey, I don't care about X anymore. That's not a person or a team. But it's like that thing like, don't worry about it, don't measure it that way anymore. Here's what I care about. And so I think eventually you get to the point where like even the way you report and the metrics that the. I remember, like the metrics that we would report on as a management team completely change because they have to have new definitions for this new world. And so just I'm telling that story because it's, it's a reminder of like, this is what it takes. And I wrote something last week about how so many things that come up as sales and marketing issues are actually like greater positioning and company strategy conversations. And so I think like to be a real marketing leader and to step up as a, whether whether you're CMO now or like you want to be one day, like you have to think like an executive, just the person who runs marketing. And so I think it's, it's that level of conversation that needs to be happening around the company. Like, hold on, let's. Who do we sell to? You know, what bets are we making? There has to be some product innovation and strategy. Like just as just a reminder, I know there's a lot of marketing people out there who are like either just got laid off or frustrated by what's going on, but you can't do this thing alone. It has to be a whole company level decision. It has a company strategy level thing. And it's like, what is the role of marketing in our company anyway? You know, the overall goal is to try to drive revenue. We have a marketing team we have a sales team, we have a customer success team. Instead of operating those three things separately, how do we mash them together and be like, how does each one of these play a role in helping us drive revenue? And I think that's going to be the way forward.

Yeah. And I think that when you're. And a lot of people in your audience are in this position where when you're in the company you're working in marketing, this decision comes in from the top. Listen to that decision. It always seems crazy to make a pivot to a different market. And for marketers, I've noticed it's incredibly intimidating to move up market and start going after higher ACV deals where there's more emphasis put on like the sales cycles get longer and the reps are, there's kind of more onus put on the reps versus really inbound driven marketing where marketing is teeing up leads for the sales team to knock out of the park. But listen to what's going on there because it's likely, more likely than not. Or you're kind of, you're on this horse, right? This company. The CEO who makes this decision is who you're. The next couple of years of your career is tied to pay attention to what they're saying and really buy into that. I think, I mean it's a tough thing for me to say broadly right now, but I think for the most part CEOs make pretty good decisions. And where I think a lot of marketers get stuck in their career is they say, oh, management's making this, this is a silly decision. Like look at how many leads I'm driving from the blog. Or look at how many leads I'm driving from Google. Search for this audience. Like we should continue to go after the small to medium sized businesses. And it's tough to make the transition and it's fricking scary. But I think it's paying attention to these shifts right now is really there.

Is I think the hard thing to understand and I think we can each say this now is like having been an employee, a manager and now like kind of rose through it. Like it is hard when that change comes in and all of a sudden they're like, hey, that thing, the way we used to do it, we're not doing anymore and we're doing this way moving forward. That's hard for us humans to like stomach.

Yeah.

And so we're typically resistant to that. And I hate, one of the things I hate about being a manager is a lot of times you have to. I don't think, like, be a puppet is the right word because it's not, it's not that dramatic. But it's like, right, my boss, the CEO, tells me, and him and the board, they're making this strategic change. So now I run marketing. And so like, all right, to what you said, like, I'm here. Maybe this is wrong. I don't know. But business, you do have to make bets, right? And so.

Sure.

And so you have to take that mentality of, like, I might not fully agree with this, I might think it could go wrong, but I'm, I'm bought in. I'm going to commit to execute on this strategy. Now, if you completely disagree with it, then you can choose to leave the company. That. That's your own decision. Right. But I think I do, I love what you're saying, which is like, you might have to, you kind of have to just, like, suck it up and commit to this and be like, all right, I'm going to try this and give yourself a year or whatever in your head.

Because the companies that are going to fail now are the companies that the executive team is split on which way to go, and they don't make a bet in one direct. Or the company where the executive team is not able to get the rest of the company bought in. And if you're listening to this right now, again, there are going to be naysayers among your audience that doesn't mean. Or among your friends within the company, that doesn't mean that not everybody is bought in. But at least live in your CEO's shoes for a minute. Look at the data the way you think he might look at it, or try to build the bold case for why you're making the pivot you're making. Because more likely than not, if it's coming down from the CEO, it's going to happen. So you can either complain about it, or you can get on board and try to help make that bulk case a reality. And that's where careers can be made.

And you might learn an entirely new playbook that you didn't have before, or it might fail. And you might have learned you're going to learn something through that failure now. Like, obviously, I'm not talking, we're not talking about, like, if your comp is completely tied to this thing and now all of a sudden you're going to make no money, like, yeah, you should. You got to be able to, like, make sure this is right for you career wise. But I, I do think you're right. It's a good way to frame it. There's like a, there's going to be a lot of uncertainty.

Yeah.

I would much rather have the whole team commit to this one strategy, even if it's ends up being the wrong strategy, than pick two strategies. Because that's where like all of the other bullshit comes up in a company. Like, I hated being. The part that I hate about being a manager though is when you don't have all the information. You, you like just hear about this for the first time and like it's not even fully baked yet. But then like you have to go and like tell that to the team and then the team has like 20 questions for you and you're like, I don't really. I'm trying to make this up too. But again, it goes back to that mindset that you had, which is like, I'm going to commit to this and I'm going to try to execute on.

It to that point too. What I've always found in my career. And I've had a coach for eight years, I've had the same management coach and she's my therapist. Because being in middle management, having someone above you and someone below you, I'm not sure what the true definition of middle management is, but it's anyone under the CEO who has someone you're managing. Like what you're talking about there is so difficult, but like talking it out, you have to be bought in to what's happening above you and you need to feel equipped to have the conversation to your team as you're bringing that information down throughout the organization. And so I think feeling comfortable and having clear communication with the person above you is critical, but I've always found it.

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 used 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 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 href r e f s.com today. Go check them out.

Really helpful to have a coach or a mentor or someone who I can talk things through with. Practice the speech, whatever it is. Figure out the right ways to present this data to the rest of your team.

How did you get your coach?

A startup called yesware and they had coaches for everyone. And so I worked there for a little over a year. I met the person who would then go on become my coach. The company hired coaches for all of us. And so I left work. Yes. Where and didn't have a coach for a year. And then I, when I joined Workable, I decided to hire my own coach because there wasn't anybody who I was really going to be reporting into except for the CEO and I wasn't sure how much time they'd have. So I don't have Great advice on how to find a coach, if that's what you're looking for.

No, it's hard. It's hard because everybody, Whenever somebody gives advice like this, everybody's like, oh, how do you find a coach? And it's hard because I think there isn't like a. You don't just, like, Google that and then.

Yeah.

Or you can't like, afford the person that you want to hire as a coach. I was interested in hearing that because for me, it's always come from somebody that I worked for or with in some capacity and then develop a relationship with. And so, like, it usually just builds from there. It's very rarely like a cold so and so is looking for a coach and you get a cold intro to somebody, you know.

Yeah. Have you had a coach?

I haven't, no. Well, not formally, but, like, I work for. For Mike Bolpe at HubSpot and then he was an investor at Drift and an advisor at Drift, and him and I got really close over that time. And so, like, it wasn't formally, but I had him to be like, right, hey, here's this thing in the budget. Like, how the hell do I interpret this? Like, he was there to help me with that stuff, which is huge. Which is huge. I mean, and there's multiple people that. Tom Wentworth is another person that. That has helped me a ton in that capacity. I had a lot of time with David, the CEO. Like, he was a huge coach of mine and mentor of mine, and so I had it in the company too, you know?

Yeah, I. I like having someone outside the company. Like, I think Mike is great. He's one in a million. Because the amount of people who you can depend on to always pick up the phone or always answer the text or always answer the email.

Oh, all right, dude, I get it. Like, do you have to bury me like that?

No, I'm not.

Oh, you weren't talking shit. My bad.

But I think if I were. If I were to look for a coach now, one. I think there's some people who've had incredibly successful careers who are not in the workforce right now who you could probably reach out to. I always liked paying someone just because I wanted them to be accountable, to show up for the phone calls that I had with them, and Mike's one in a million and that he will actually do that. And he was incentivized because he was an investor in Drift, but I think going to LinkedIn, looking for management coach, looking for career coaches, you know, skipping the profiles where they have like text me in the subject line or where it looks super promotional, but looking for people who are connected to people who you've worked with and who you can respect, who you respect, and then getting a reference from them to say, hey, do you know this person? Would you recommend us working with them? I would say LinkedIn is probably a really good place to find a coach right now.

Also. Even just like, I think like building a friendship with you was one way of coaching. Like and obviously you were starting a company at the time. But I think like finding somebody who you can become friends with that is doing a similar thing in there at a similar point in their career. I mean, like you and I have been able to bounce countless things off of each other in some, in some way over the last couple years. And so I think like, if you can't find a coach, is there someone else in your industry that's doing a similar thing that's not like a competitive company that you can just kind of like shoot the with and trade stories with? I think that's also really beneficial because you're like, oh, interesting. Just it gets you outside of your company. It's like, oh yeah, we measure X like this or we're doing it this way and just gives you another source to be like, well actually my friend at this company, here's how they do it. And so I think that's, that's also a good way to, to do it is through your peer group.

Yeah, I don't know why I didn't, I didn't do that more early on in my career. But having those people exactly. Looking at like the KPIs, talking to them about the things that are actually working for them. Yeah, getting out, having coffee with people, being able to even venture about things that are happening inside your company, finding your support group is critical.

One of the reasons that I used to like going to Saster for like I used to go to Saster every year and I would get more out of it actually to help my career personally because like you would get somebody like, hey, I'm, I'm hosting a lunch with 10 other B2B SaaS marketers at these types of companies. Those like not even Saster sponsored things like the off site like lunch with like five or six other people. I would get so much out of that because I would come back with pages and I'm a psycho with notes and stuff, but I'd come back with pages and pages of notes and ideas and I just was such a learning machine about, oh, here's how they do it. Maybe we could do it this way. And I remember I'd come back and write these kind of recaps about, oh well John, they use this and they do it this way. That was so helpful for me. That was worth going to those types of events on its own. To just have lunch with four or five people and talk about what you, what you're doing for work and the.

Best idea, I mean I've ever seen that I haven't done. Rand Fishkin wrote about the $500 dinner and just inviting like five to eight peers out to dinner, paying for the dinner for 500 bucks, best use of money. And it makes so much sense. Like the way I do it and the way I work, I'm better in one to one conversations is what I found in my career. So coffee is the way I go. But I've always loved that idea, wanted to give that a shout out.

That's a great idea. And I bet people would be surprised with the hit rate of that also. Yeah, you might be like I don't know, eight to 10 people, but I bet you'd be surprised at how well that goes.

Here's the thing. This is something that I think you and I have both benefited from. My 20s and early 30s, I invested in my network and then my network has easily paid dividends over the first four years of compound growth. But I think if the more you invest in that network, through those dinners, through getting coffees, through asking advice. Right. One of the best things I ever did in my life was ask Volpe for advice and that's turned into a long term friendship. And same thing with Tom Wentworth. Like invest in building up as big of a network, a deep network. Right. Quantity of people but quality of relationships and that will pay dividends over time.

Yeah, like I think you can approach that in different ways. Like I didn't set out to build. I wasn't like I'm going to build a network of marketing people. Watch me.

Yeah, me neither.

No, it's like I think you can do it through a company. And I think what was so fun about that point in time in my career, in my life with Drift is like through the company I was doing marketing and growing in my career and through my job we were selling to marketing people. And so I like we created our own events, I went to lots of events and because I was like representing Drift and people were growing this affinity for Drift, I was able to meet a lot of people personally and build my network personally. But I wasn't like cold, like, oh, there's a networking event tomorrow night. And I think that you can for people who like, aren't like that, I'm not like that at all. Like, I'm pretty introverted. I'm not, not going to show up at an event and go shake hands. But like through Drift events and through Drift content and stuff, like, I got to meet a lot of people. And so I think you can, you can do it that way too. And it's also another reason to like, why just take a different lens on your career. And so maybe right now you're at a company that's not growing. Things are hard, but you have an exciting, you have a good opportunity over the next year or so to like add more to your bank of like things you're going to learn and you don't need to cash in on that right now. But you're like, oh, interesting. My company is actually making this shift from this motion to product led growth and we're going to do it this way. Like maybe you can look at this as I'm going to spend the next year of my career like really just buying into this and learning. So then a year from now I have this whole other set of experience of experiences. And I think that was what was so transformative for me about working at Drift.

Was it?

It wasn't that the company grew so fast and did all this crazy stuff. It was like, I feel like every three to six months I got to like add something new to my bank of, of of learning how to do things. And I just, I'm happy this conversation is turning into this because it's a little bit more like therapy for people who are like trying to figure out like what the hell they're doing at this point in their career. It's easy. Like when everyone's high fiving and the companies, every quarter you got like new milestones and companies at these big parties. Like, that's easy to feel like I see where I'm going. But this is, this can be a tough time to figure out like how you're navigating your career right now. For sure.

Yeah. And you know, plug for exit 5, plug for getting on traffic think tank or finding a community where people are going through some similar challenges where you can ask those people and start to build connections with people. Try to look to make friends in the Facebook groups and bring them offline. Look to make friends with people on LinkedIn and turn those into phone conversations and learn from them. Where I thought you were going with the Drift thing was because I think when you're in a high growth company, you meet a lot of really successful people or people who have been a part of a lot of successful companies like HubSpot and Log Me in had, I think, pipelines between from HubSpot and LogMeIn going into Drift. But like, a lot of these people have seen success over a couple of companies and you can build up a really great network just by joining a couple of companies that. That are growing really successful. But be nice. I think you posted about this a couple of weeks ago, but like, nice guys don't finish last. I think one thing I'm happy about.

Is I definitely impose that nonsense that.

Didn'T post that maybe you were serious then. I'm like so thankful that at the times when I got really upset at Monster and logged me in like that I did not take my anger out on people inside the company and I looked to solve problems with them because I didn't realize how small the community I was in and how important those relationships would continue to be after I left that company. And so I'm glad I was nice to people.

Yeah, for sure. I have multiple examples of people that I met at opportunities earlier in my career that I'm still close with or like, still reach out to this day and send me opportunities or things. I think if you're always playing the long game from a relationship standpoint, that that does pay off.

All right, so I don't know. Your company is shifting. Your company is shifting. You're moving into a PLG model. You're moving into an ABM model. Yeah. I think the challenge can be how you rebrand yourself inside that company. Nice to be someone who's an expert in these areas. What would you be looking at doing right now? Well, I would say shifting.

I would say throw some cold water on your face and tell yourself that you're not an expert at this thing and switch on to like, I'm not an expert, but damn it, I'm gonna figure this out and I'm gonna learn. And I think putting your ego aside and being like this was the hardest thing for me early in my career, which I was very good at content and communication type stuff. But as we started to add other things, my default was like, I'm a competitive person and I like to figure things out on my own. And my default would always be like, I got it. I'll figure this out. I'm gonna figure this out. And I think you have to. That's a totally like 28 year old arrogant male, like, whatever, way to go approach that versus now. It's like, nobody's expecting you. And I didn't realize at the time, nobody's. Nobody in the company's expecting you to become an expert on this overnight. They're not. You're just the one who's gonna like, lead what marketing has to do through this. And so this is where then you switch from. Like, okay, I'm gonna go in like MBA mode. Like, I'm gonna learn. And I don't mean NBA like Job Moran. I mean like mba, like Harvard Business School. And you're gonna go and you're gonna try to learn as much as you can about plg. And while you're learning about product LED growth, the best part is you're not just listening to these podcasts and watching videos and attending classes whenever and just sucking that. You're actually, you're actually doing it, you're applying it. And one of the most fun stages of my career was those first two years at Drift for me, because I remember specifically there was a talk that I watched from Lauren Vaccarello, who was just on the podcast. She was VP of marketing at Box at the time. I watched a talk from her at Saster about how they sold to both self serve small businesses and they sold to the enterprise and how they had to split their marketing funnel. And like, I didn't know shit about how to do that at the time. But I watched your video for 30 minutes. I took a bunch of notes and I was like, I came back with two ideas and we're going to put these in play. And so I would always write like in the company wiki. I would just try to share my work in public. I would write like a blog post on the wiki and I'd be like, I watched this awesome video from the VP of marketing at Box over the weekend and here are three things that I learned that I think we should go and do. I would write that up and I would tag in team members and I would send it around. And it's a way of like showing your work and like bringing people into that process. I. I remember another specific time where we were going to do like our first ABM campaign. And I didn't really know how to do that other than just like having read some stuff. And so I watched a bunch of content on it. I went to a couple webinars on it, I talked to other people. I found a playbook, like 15 steps and I copied it exactly and I turned it into Our version. And it was great because people inside the company were like, this isn't perfect, but like you've learned something and you're starting and now go do it. And then for me, the real learning actually becomes from, from the doing it. And so then we go and do it and we run that first campaign and it absolutely flops. Awesome. Now we gotta go and figure out why and we gotta tweak and that's when the learning starts. So I think like, find a way to go deep on one or two resources. So if your company is shifting to ABM right now, I would go try to learn everything that I can. And there's a lot of free information out there. You can get all that marketing knowledge for, for free on the Internet in some capacity today. And I would go and break up small chunks of that and go and put it into play as soon as you can.

It's iterative. What I'm getting from you is it's not you're going into the phone booth and coming out of Superman for this thing. It's the communication is key. So you're sending that signal through the wiki, or in my case it was. I used to send out a weekly email to the executive team that I worked with just walking through my thought process so they could see what I was thinking about, why I wanted to do things. And I was able to get a ton of buy in. But you're going to show the interest, you're going to show that you're bought in to the new strategy that you're going to go after. You're going to show why you're doing certain things and you're going to get feedback and that's a good thing. It means people think that you're worth investing in, you're worth giving feedback to. But I think it goes a long way with the companies that we work with.

Also when you do that, you share your work in public like that. It attracts like other people from around the company. And so what would be amazing is I'd write this post about like three ideas to try. Our first to go up market or do this enterprise campaign. And all of a sudden out of left field, some engineer who reads the wiki is like, hey Dave, actually there's a way on the back end that we could do this and that and that actually would save you two weeks and I could help you do that. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, like this. Okay, let's go. Like, yeah, you bring other people in or like a designer Hops in is like, hey, I bet there's an E. I bet there's an easy way we could test this version of the creative with something that we already have. You know, like when you do that, you bring in other people. And so I'm a huge fan of, of that approach. But I think it does take a certain type of personality and person to want to do that. You have to approach it with that, like beginner's mindset. You have to be hungry to go and, and learn that new thing. I mean, I'm not in a company right now, but like, if this was me five, six years ago, I would love to be the person inside of the company right now that's like, you know what? I think that, I think that short form video is really important right now. And everybody's talking about Reels and TikTok. But I'm starting to notice that in Google search, when I search for something, Google is starting to show me YouTube shorts and I'm getting answers. In one to two minutes, I'm going to start repurposing some of our content and I'm going to be the one to try to figure out like YouTube shorts as a channel. And here's why, and here's how we're going to do this, and here's how long it's going to take and what it's going to cost and blah, blah, blah. That to me is how you separate yourself and grow your career. And then, by the way, even if your company fails and this whole thing doesn't work, you got to just spend the last six months, like getting a salary while like testing new channels that you get to add to your resume inside of the company. I think that's a mindset that I would try to have right now.

A hundred percent.

Let's talk about LinkedIn. We'll switch topics. It's funny, people are like, I actually just happened to see this on Twitter. Harley Finkelstein, who's a, like president of Shopify, he Tweeted low key, LinkedIn is where it's at. And like, maybe every couple weeks I see someone who's like, pretty big, is like, yeah, LinkedIn is awesome. And you are now focusing LinkedIn, which is interesting because you're, you're, you run an agency and you typically used to do SEO SEM exclusively. Now you're, you're morphing and you're adding on content.

Yeah.

I want to ask you the Harley F. What's going on with LinkedIn? Why are you, why are you betting on LinkedIn. What are you seeing with companies that are asking to do it? What do they want?

Well, a couple of things. So let's back up. The growth model for SaaS companies that we've been living in is triple, triple, double, double, double. You're trying to basically compound revenue over a 7 to 10 year period in order to be able to go public eventually. And so channels that don't compound, like ppc, typically they max out at a certain level, or outbound email, typically you're maxing out at a certain level in terms of what your potential reach could be. So one of the things that I've always loved about SEO is you create a piece of content and it starts to grow from the very beginning and then you create another piece of content on top of that, and then you create even more content. All of those pieces of content that you create in one month grow for the next 12 months. And so you do see these characteristics of traffic to your site and the number of leads coming in, compounding. And I think that form of kind of marketing strategy is really important for companies to be able to unlock in order to continue growing past 10 million in revenue, or 20 million in revenue, or 40 million in revenue. All those spots where you famously start to slow down. And so when I look at how you can grow on LinkedIn, where you develop content, you optimize your content, you get better at distributing your content, but all that while you're growing the number of followers who are following you, that gives you greater distribution, it gives you greater kind of engagement and everything. And so I think the characteristics of like a newsletter of SEO and LinkedIn, where they compound over the time, the more you post, the more followers you have, the more reach you get, is really important. Since I started my business, like I said in my 20s, I built up my network and I have a lot of people who I used to work with that log me in at Workable at Monster, who come to me now and say, hey, I'm at this new company, would love to have you come in and help us out. And a lot of that has been through just staying top of mind with people by consistently posting to LinkedIn. A lot of the growth that we've seen at compound growth marketing over the past couple of years has been through getting access to people who are in my network or getting in front of new people who had never heard of me before, but started to see my content, agreed with it or were interested in it, wanted to learn more about what we were doing. So I've been Seeing that for the last four years, I really doubled down on it over the last year. And so we've seen LinkedIn content be really successful. I think LinkedIn as a social network has a lot of staying power because people are reliant on it for their careers. We haven't seen as many social networks pop up around careers as we have for personal, where it was MySpace, then Friendster, then Facebook, then Instagram, then TikTok and maybe Twitter. We've been there a couple of times and so I think there's a lot of staying power. So those two things really combined. It was the main reason why I focused on LinkedIn content as a channel for us. Plus they continue to innovate with newsletters, with video, with different types of content you can post on LinkedIn. Although not a lot of people claim to be scrolling through LinkedIn every day, I can tell I always have people who I never would Think are on LinkedIn coming up to me and saying, hey, I saw your post the other day about XYZ and I actually think.

Like people that are, yeah, there's something about that. The reason it's not all industries, but I feel like a lot if you're in the business world, especially in the tech, which I hate that word because it's like everything is tech now. Most everything is tech. But the resume for so many people has now shifted from like a resume to LinkedIn. And I don't mean like, I don't mean physically what's, what's on your resume. I mean like you as John Short on LinkedIn is like if you're looking for jobs, that's kind of how you browse for other companies, you connect with other people. That's your kind of digital Rolodex, to use like outdated term for whatever reason. Twitter is not that, Instagram is not that. But for LinkedIn it's like, I think it's because the platform is rooted in like business connections and now it's morphed into a content platform. But I totally agree with you. A lot of people will say like, well, who's on LinkedIn? And I think obviously if you're listening to this podcast, you're on it from a career perspective and that's, that's why it's such a great place to be from a content standpoint. To me it's like the modern blog, except there's a built in audience of like people that are, that are in your world are going to already be there and the organic reach you can build is significant there. I Also think that I hear a lot of people talk about LinkedIn and they say that followers is a vanity metric. And I totally disagree with that. Followers is not a vanity metric because the more followers you have, the more people see your stuff. The more people see your stuff, the more people interact and engage with your stuff. Like you posted. Hey, we're doing this new LinkedIn service. Okay. Are you going to get John more inbound? Just answer me objectively, are you going to get more inbound from that post? If you were an account that had 100,000 followers, or if you have an account that has 10,000 followers, what's the answer?

100,000, right.

And so, like, that's why it's not a vanity metric, because the goal is to increase your audience size. Now, maybe likes on a single post, that doesn't matter in the long term, but I think, sure, like, the audience does matter. And so the way that I would measure it would be followers, you want more people to follow. And to me, on, on LinkedIn, a follow is somebody is opting in to see your stuff. So if I see a John Short post in my feed and I now click on John Short and I connect or follow him, that means now that next time he posts, I'm going to see that in my feed. We did this so intentionally at drift in the early days where we had a list of 100 to 200 of our dream customers and we were proactively connecting with them on LinkedIn because roughly making this up, it seemed like everybody always accepted the connection. Eight out of 10 people accept the connection. So now all of a sudden, the CMO of some big company that we're trying to sell to now, she is connected to me first connection on LinkedIn. Then next week I post something relevant that she might see and she likes and comments on that. Then salesperson happens to reach out. It's like all these little touch points matter. And so I think it's. I think it's a great place to be.

One thing going back to the follower metric, you connect with that CMO and then you post content and she's seeing your content. She may not like your content, but if she sees that a hundred people have liked your content, that's going to give you more credibility in her eyes too. So that's another place where I think we think about vanity metrics. And sure, I mean, you could say likes are vanity metrics, but they also give you social equity that can be powerful in terms of building up how much somebody is paying attention to you. So I think that's a key point. I also love what you're talking about with the versatility. You can use LinkedIn from an ABM perspective to go after very specific targets in very specific companies. You can also use it for the small to mid sized companies where you're looking to create one to many types of content. So I use it at three different stages in the funnel. I use it to identify and find or uncover or have people connect with me who are interested in the content I'm creating. That's net new. I use it to reengage with my audience, people who I've worked with in the past, people who are currently in my network to let them know that I have a pulse, that I have an agency and we're continuing to work. So that's the second that leads to referral business or those people coming to me. The third one of my favorite is mid funnel. When I'm working on a deal, a lot of times I'll handle objections proactively through the content I'm creating on LinkedIn because I know that the deals in my pipeline are worried about XYZ issue or want to know that we have the capability to do xyz. I can't communicate everything to them over an hour long call so I can post case studies, I can post additional content that's going to move them down the funnel. And I've been able to get a lot of people to re engage with me who have gone dark and also have had a lot of people say oh I saw in the middle of the sales like oh, I saw that content that you posted the other day about how you did XYZ with this company and that was really useful for me. So it's incredibly versatile and there's a.

Whole other like level of that which is from an employment branding standpoint to build a reputation in that, in that industry, people will get to see you, they'll get to read your perspective, hear from you before ever, ever working with you. I think the way you can use LinkedIn to actually promote things though is to rarely if ever promote a link. Like I see people do this all the time. They start posting and it's like every post is like click here to register for our event. Here's a link to our new blog post. It drives me nuts when companies do this and I know they try to do this, but they'll share like a link to their like event registration page and I'll click on it and it obviously has all the UTM codes because somebody on the digital team was like, we got to track this. And it's like, yeah, you probably drove six signups from that. Where the complete. The actual way to do it would be like to hardly ever promote something and then write this like long form post where you're like sharing something that's a great hook. A story related to that and then in the comment. Now you can pin a comment, which is huge, on LinkedIn and so you can be like, the link is in the comments and then the comment is actually where. So like you actually have to drive people to something. But I found that there was a point in time where I used to just promote drift stuff. Drift stuff, Drift stuff all the time on LinkedIn and nothing really worked. And then when I stopped doing that and kind of talked more broadly about marketing, and then maybe one out of every 10 posts was like a link to a drift thing. That's when I would post something and be like somebody be like, dude, that that LinkedIn post you wrote drove 200 webinar signups. And it's like, well, yeah, because you have this audience primed and they actually want to have it.

Right.

So then it becomes like, how do you measure LinkedIn? Well, that's how, when I, when I post something there, like people actually go and sign up for it. However, if every second link that I posted was a link to a webinar, it's never going to work. You have to actually have a content strategy.

Yeah, LinkedIn's very different than Google in that they want people to stay on the platform. The goal of Google, despite what all the newspapers will say, the goal of Google is to get people to come to Google and then click through and get to a result. A lot of people call that the bow tie. With LinkedIn, they're looking to keep you on the platform. So I think one, if you see a link, if you see somebody post a link on LinkedIn, you're scrolling past it. But their algorithm is also built in such a way where I think they favor the content that is built natively for the platform. And, and that isn't going to drive users off the platform. And you just need to make sure to engage users where they want to be engaged rather than trying to drive them off the platform.

I have one specific example on this. So I was speaking at this event for this company called Superside two weeks ago and they asked me to like help promote it on LinkedIn. And so instead of just like being like, hey, I'm speaking at this thing, here's the link I wrote this like maybe 500 word post. And it was like when it comes to driving revenue, we obsess over tactics. We so often when so often the root cause is positioning. And I wrote about how sales and marketing, like it's really a positioning issue and what great positioning does. And I said all the way. At the end of this, I wrote, if you want to brush up on positioning and find one to two new ideas to help you get unstuck. Right now I'm doing a virtual session with superside tomorrow, November 30th and anyone can register. The link is in the first comments below. First comment below. See you there. That promo post to promote a freaking webinar had 441 likes and 58 comments and probably drove like a hundred people to sign up for that thing. And so like that's how you have to do it. You have to treat it like writing a blog. Like a decade, a year, a decade ago. Like writing a good blog post and then having like a CTA at the bottom of it. That's what works. It's not just having the CTA that's going to like having a fine post. This is great. It was fun. This is a nice, nice conversation. John. If you don't know John short, go to LinkedIn and type in John Short. You can also check out his company, which is Compound Growth Marketing. Can't say enough good things about John. John's been a resource and a mentor of mine. He doesn't know that from a marketing and demand gen perspective for like the last five to seven years. And if you need help leveling up what you're doing in B2B marketing, navigating these times, building an organic LinkedIn strategy, social strategy, SEO, SEM content funnel, they do it all. Hit them up. Compound growth marketing.com. you should hire me, man. That was like. And we'll be right back after this break. All right, John, I'll talk to you later, man. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Goodbye. See ya.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

Of the exact Exit 5 podcast.

If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates, plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros.

Whether you're deep in your career and.

Want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch that that's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do. And they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you gotta do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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' 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 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 Office hours. That's paramark. Com Office hours.