#51: Want to grow your career faster? Be an early adopter

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.

All right, this is a short little mini episode of the Exit 5 podcast. I've done a couple of these and for some reason I get a lot of feedback and I see a lot of people post about these when I do them. And so I figured I would try to do them more regularly. And I think they're a nice break from the longer form interviews. So I'm driving to get myself some lunch and I figured I would record a short little one for you here today. And the topic that I want to talk about today is the advantage of being an early adopter. And this is specific to you in your career as a marketing person. You could be a marketing manager, an intern, director of marketing, VP of marketing, whatever it is. But the people that I've seen in my network, in my career, that have rose through the ranks the quickest or made a kind of outsized impact for where they were at their career and have created an advantage seem to have always been these people that are willing to try new things. And I think that advice on the surface seems really obvious. Try new things, right? But it's so hard to do that because we're all so caught up. Like it's really easy to be caught up in the day to day. You're like trying to hit the number. You're trying to hire people you're behind on this goal, that goal. You're so busy, you're slammed on this thing or that thing, and it can be really hard to see around the corner. But that's exactly where the advantage comes if you can be one of those people to be early on a channel, be early on a new platform. There is so much noise and competition in any channel, in any industry that you have to be looking for ways to find an unfair advantage. And so I've seen this a couple different ways. And so I used to work with this guy, Guillaume, who now runs Hypergrowth Partners. He's an investor and an advisor. And he was unbelievable at being an early tech adopter and trying new tools and kind of always being curious and willing to put new tools and new tech into play. And maybe he might try out 10 different tools and nine of them don't really work, but one of them gives him A huge advantage. And they're able to. He's able to crack a new channel or. Another person I think of is a friend of mine, Tom Wentworth. He's a CMO at Recorded Future. He's been telling me about AI and Chad, GPT and tools like Jasper for months now, and he's already been on that and it's creating a huge advantage for him. Or I even think back to something that I didn't realize at the time in my career. But I got on podcasting early and I was doing podcasting early, and that allowed me to not only help the company that I was working with, but build a brand for myself. And I was able to teach classes at places like General assembly and get paid to do mini courses and classes about podcasting. And then podcasting actually led to my job at HubSpot and I got a big salary raise for the first time in my life by getting that job. And having a podcast was an early channel for us at Drift at a time where there weren't many companies in B2B SaaS that had podcasts. And so you have to find a way that despite all the things going on, you have to carve out enough time for yourself. And this could be as a marketing leader or this could even be like, even if you're a specialist, let's say you run one function of marketing or you're one. Maybe you're not even running it, you're a product marketing manager. Can you find some time in your schedule, in your day to day, to try new tools, to try a new approach? This could even be. You read a book. You read April Dunford's book, obviously awesome when it came out in 2019, and you were one of the first people to read that. And you took what you talked about in the book and you brought it to work and applied it to your company at a time when nobody else was doing that. So I think one of just the very underrated skill sets is being an early adopter, not to use a buzzy kind of catchphrase. But you have to take those chances. And I think you can gain an incredible advantage if you can do that in your career. And so what prompted me to think this was this. There's so much talk about AI. And Jasper is one of the sponsors of Exit 5 this year. And that has me really interested in what they're doing in that whole industry. But it's just a reminder that, like, now is the time, especially if things are slowing down and there's a tougher economy or Buyers aren't buying. I think you always gotta be thinking about, like, okay, what are the advantages that I can create? Because that advantage can give you. You're gonna need that next year. You're going to have to. Maybe the number, maybe it's next quarter, the number grows 25%. Maybe it's next year, the number grows 50%. You're going to have to be finding these new tools, new channels, new ways to grow. And I think one of the ways you can do that is by being willing to test new channels. And this is something that I wish that I did a little bit earlier in my career. And it's almost a reminder for me now in the things that I'm doing personally, whether it's running exit 5 or starting different projects of my own, you got to be willing to, like, try new things. It's almost like the same conversations that I'm having with my kids. They're five and three, and I'm like, just try this new food. I promise you, if you try this, you will like this. It might not look like something you're used to, but if you try this, it's going to open up a whole new world of things that your mom and I can make for you, can make for you and give to you. Or we'll be able to have so much more fun. We can go to all these new restaurants and do different things if you just try these new foods. So be willing to take chances, try new tools, try new technology, be an early adopter. It's one of the great little tools that you can use to grow your career and help your company and make a bigger impact. All right, thanks for listening. Thanks for all the support for the Exit 5 podcast. I'll see you on another episode. If you like this episode, tweet at me. I'm Ave Gerhart on Twitter. Write me a comment or message on LinkedIn or just send me an email directly. Dgavegearhart.com I'm out.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

Of the 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 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 4,4000 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'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 got to 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 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. You can even understand how much or your organization 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 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 Chat, GPT 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 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. Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2nd half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's going to be here. But let's be real, most teams are still guessing when it comes to what'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'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, forecast 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 gotta grab an office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get space. You should go check them out. Go to paramark.com office hours. That's paramark.com office hours.