5 Marketing Problems Solved In 53 Minutes With Dave Gerhardt

Marketing is hard. We're going to make it much easier for you. Today I've got a special guest, Dave Gerhardt. He's bringing in five important marketing questions from the Exit 5 community. We're going to break down how you solve them, give you some very tactical playbooks for solving them so that you can go and take these and use them in your own business. Let's get into today's show. I'm joined by the one and only Dave Gerhardt, who runs Exit 5 Media. He is a CMD marketing leader, past co worker of mine. And we are going to dive into some questions, some comments from the marketers that Dave works with over at exit 5. And we're also going to just talk about some things that we want to talk about today. Dave, welcome. Welcome, my friend. Welcome to Market against the Grain.

Oh, it's so, it's so fun to be here. We had an amazing reaction to having you on the Exit 5 podcast. And so when you asked if I would come on for an episode to co host, I was like, yes, instantly, yes. And I love this idea of helping people kind of doing some half baked marketing ideas. I got a bunch of questions from Exit 5 members.

Yeah. So for everybody watching, the kind of, the setup was like, I emailed Dave and I was like, hey, Kieran's out. Come come host with me. And like, I want to know the problems that marketers in your community are having. We're just going to give them some of our off the cuff ideas. We're going to brainstorm and we're going to just talk about some different marketing challenges. So I think there's going to be something for anybody to learn from today's show because we're going to be talking about a lot of common problems that people have.

Yeah. And I think, you know, one thing I've always appreciated and just like hang out with you and talking marketing and I talked about this with some people that I work with and I shared some, I got a bunch of notes after you came on, on our podcast. And I think what I learned when I talk to you and even just watching some of your episodes with Karen is there is not like, there's not cookie cutter marketing advice. And giving marketing advice is very challenging because there's a lot of nuance to it, obviously. Um, but I think you have a way of approaching problems and I like, I like, I want to show people how you approach solving marketing problems. And I think now I feel like you could basically serve, serve up any problem and let's figure out how we're going to work backwards and tackle that. And I think there's a lot of like, just like first principle stuff that I think will be helpful for people.

Sweet. Let's do it. All right, what we got? What, what, what? What are the exit 5?

All right, this first question, this first question is from Craig and I love this because Craig wrote I love this crossover. The two most listened podcasts that I have are Market Grain and Exit five. So that's cool.

Shout out to you, Craig. Thank you.

Shout out to you, Craig. So Craig says I'm a director of marketing, so you got to pay attention. Kip, I'm going to read this. You got to pay attention.

All right.

I'm director of marketing at a seed stage SaaS company, Event Vesta. Our tools help event organizers automate and unlock local marketing channels. We have about 600 customers from the Dallas Mavericks to the bar down the street. Our pricing is per event, so customers that host many events get more value out of our automation and we earn more revenue from them. Our ACV is $840, but it's been creeping up to 1200. Here's the challenge. Our budget is tight. You wrote that it's pretty much my salary plus halftime of another team member and about 3k per month to spend. So you had two people hat.

Yeah.

So one and a half and three grand. Right now we've primarily relined on outbound email because it's been incredibly cheap and worked well for US C600 customers as outbound emails getting more crowded and harder. Any ideas on how to transition to a more diversified marketing mix without cutting off the channel that brings in 90% of our deals? I've got ideas but would love to have some of your half baked marketing ideas.

Oh, this is a good one. This is a really good one. I like this one. First off, can we just talk before we talk marketing ideas? Dave, can we just talk a little business strategy with for our boy Craig here?

Yes.

The charging, like the value per event is tough. That's a tough business model. It doesn't fit super well in a SaaS model. Eventbrite has struggled with this problem its entire existence. So Craig, you and the founding team, I really encourage you to think about pricing and packaging and the leverage that you can have there because it sounds like you've got a good product, good product, market fit. I think you just need to get the economics better so that you can then in the future hopefully get more marketing dollars to spend.

And when you say, when you say pricing per event. So right now their, their software is priced like you're going to host one event, you just pay for that one thing.

That's what he seems to be implying, that the people that have more of multiple events, like, are better customers and pay them more. The challenge with that is that there are a lot of people who only have one off events and there are a lot of people who have very infrequent events. So it becomes harder to predict your revenue. The other thing is they don't really have a target buyer yet. Right. The bar down the street to the Dallas Mavericks is like, whoa, all right, who are you making this for? And part of it is like, we're going to give you some marketing strategy, Craig, but if you can't decide on like who do we actually serve, then all of your marketing is going to be watered down. Right. Because you're not going to be able to resonate with that target audience like in the deep way that's really going to work with them.

Yeah. So, so, so without even talking about marketing, it's like, okay, this is interesting. This is a seed stage SaaS company. So it's early.

Early.

The positive signs are like, it's early. They seem to have something that's working. They got customers from, to your point, the Dallas Mavericks to the bar down the street. They've kind of taken this shotgun blast approach. We have customers. But now the business advice would be like, it's not marketing advice, but what is our ic. This is the time to start defining like an icp. And you need something repeatable here. Right. As, as an investor or just somebody who's thinking about scaling a repeatable business. This, this model is not going to be repeatable.

Correct. And if you want to raise that a round, you need to get to this repeatability. Part of what's also going to help you get to that a round is also building a scalable go to market. Right. At 800 to 1,200 DOL annual contract value. For people who are not familiar with the term ACV annual contract value, what we're basically saying is that that's not enough money to like pay a sales rep to sell that thing. So marketing has got to do the heavy lifting for the most part of selling this product. And what we're hearing from Craig, Dave, is that it's all about outbound email right now. And like, that's basically what's working from them. They've got him half, half of another person's time and a couple grand a month. Right. And so I'm going to give you my first take on what I would do. This is the first thing hearing this and then I want to, I want to riff on it with you. The first thing is I'm going to give a controversial thing is like double down on that outbound email and make it super effective. Like use an AI model, train that model to get ultra personalized. Like be clear on how you, the people that are world class at outbound, they get really good at personalizing the content and they get really good at data scraping and data appending to make sure that they have as much contact around who they're emailing as possible, much context around who they're emailing as possible so that that message is going to resonate and have a higher conversion rate. So given that you have something that works, I think there are paths to make it better. Because you're early on, you're a siege stage company. You know, it's not like you've been doing this for a decade and squeezed every benefit out. So that's the first thing I would say.

That's great. I actually, I didn't expect you to say that. Double down on outbound, but it makes a ton of sense.

What's their area of strength already?

Yeah, it's already working. And so I'll give you my, my idea is, is kind of very similar to that. But you mentioned let's double down on outbound. Let's nail personalization, let's nail targeting. Well, if we, if we rewind all the way back that, you can't do that unless you have a clear story. And so I would say let's, let's re, let's come up with a clear. And now this doesn't have to be this where people obsess over this. This doesn't have to be your forever positioning. Right? I would say like for the next three to six months or for the next quarter, we are going to exclusively focus our efforts on like this one Persona. And let's go run targeted now, let's go run targeted outbound campaigns towards those companies. And so I would go dig into those from the, from the Dallas Mavericks to the bar down the street. There's got to be a pocket of 20% of those customers who are your best customers. They run multiple events, they're very happy. They tell their friends, find that pocket. Maybe it's only 10 or 20 customers. And can we go, can we go double that and take, take Kip's approach to outbound. But now instead of kind of spray and Pray Outbound. We're going to be super targeted and we got to work some AI into this. I think there's an incredible opportunity for a small team. You have one full time person between outbound email and the copy ideas that you can generate with ChatGPT. I would go spend the 900, it's 900 a year to get the pre, the premium version of Chat GPT.

They have that in their budget.

They have that in their budget and you can get so much strength in that. Yesterday I needed to write a video script for a new sales page that we're working on. I just had nothing. I spent basically an hour and a half like massaging ChatGPT to get something where I want and then I wrote it in a minute and I was like, what? Wow, that stuff like that. I think there's, there's something huge here with copy.

Let me tell you. I'm going to spoil a little bit of a future show we're going to have from Emmy, from my team. Come on. But we are, we are using just the raw OpenAI API and we are basically have trained OpenAI through all of our email data and the contact data we have. Because one of the big challenges we had was, oh, this is somebody's first contacts with us, the very first email that we've ever sent to somebody. Like, how do we know what they want? What does it like an actual good email look like when you don't know anything about that person? So we're doing this for inbound, but you could do it for outbound as well. And it took us about six to eight weeks to like kind of train and Test. But now OpenAI is generating the text and HTML into HubSpot. HubSpot is sending the emails and we're like 2 to 3x better performance wise than our previous. And like that is something a single person can go and do at a small scale. Right. Like that's just one of those like where focused and investing actually gets you a lot of leverage. And we're going to have Emmy on to break down all the technical sides of it. But I just like that's a little hat tip today.

And is that model actually trained on? I was just trying to find this this week because I'm trying to like, I want to figure out how I can get emails to sound like me. But the best I can't find a way and I don't, I'm not technical enough. But like my experience with Chat GPT is I've learned how to write the right prompts that can get me that voice, but I didn't know if there's a way to, like, have it be trained.

Yeah, yeah, you can. You can basically train it when you're working through the.