6 Marketing Problems Solved In 53 Minutes With Dave Gerhardt

Marketing is hard, but today we're going to make it easy. We're going to break down how you solve some of marketing's hardest challenges. I've got a special guest, Dave Gerhardt. He's bringing in five important marketing questions from the Exit 5 community. He and I are going to break down some common marketing challenges and we're going to give our own half baked marketing ideas around what we would do if we were in these situations. Let's get into today's episode. Before we get into today's show, here's a quick word from HubSpot. Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty incredible, but that's exactly what Sandler Training did with HubSpot. They used breeze, HubSpot's AI tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were pretty incredible. Click through rates jumped 25%, qualified leads quadrupled, and people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breez can help your business grow. All right, on today's show, Kieran is out with his new daughter, Hope. And I have a very special guest host. I'm joined by the one and only Dave Gerhardt who runs Exit 5 Media. He is a CMO marketing leader, past coworker 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 gonna just talk about some things that we wanna talk about today. Dave, welcome. Welcome, my friend. Welcome to Market against the Grain.

Oh, 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, kind of the setup was like I emailed Dave and I was like, hey, Kieran's out. Come host with me. 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 gonna just talk about some different marketing challenges. So I think there's gonna be something for anybody to learn from today's show. Cause we're gonna 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 hanging out with you and talking marketing. And I've talked about this with some people that I work with and I got a bunch of notes after you came on our podcast. And I think what I learned when I talked to you and even just watching some of your episodes with Kieran is there is not cookie cutter marketing advice. And giving marketing advice is very challenging. There's a lot of nuance to it, obviously, but I think you have a way of approaching problems. And I want to show people how you approach solving marketing problems. And I think now I feel like you could basically 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 just like first principle stuff that I think will be helpful for people.

Sweet. Let's do it. All right, well, we got what did the Exit 5 faithful have for us?

All right, 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 Marketing against the Grain and 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 got you.

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 tiiight. He wrote that it's pretty much my salary plus halftime of another team member and about 3k per month to spend. So you got two people. 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 one 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, before we talk marketing ideas, Dave, can we just talk a little business strategy? For our boy Craig here, yes, 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.

When you say pricing per event. So right now 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.

Okay.

That the people that have more 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 gonna 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 gonna be watered down. Right. Cause you're not gonna be able to resonate with that target audience, like in the deep way that's really going to work with them.

Yeah. 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 or 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 this is the time to start defining like an icp. And you need something repeatable here. Right. As an investor or just somebody who's thinking about scaling a repeatable business, 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 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 pay a sales rep to sell that thing. So marketing's gotta 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. Yeah. And like that's basically what's working from them. They've got him a half of another person's time and a couple grand a month, right?

Yep.

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 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. 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 context around who they are 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. Cause you're early on, you're a siege stage company. 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 didn't expect you to say that. Double down on outbound. But it makes a ton of sense already. Yeah, it's already working. My idea 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, you can't do that unless you have a clear story. And so I would say let's come up with a clear. And now. This doesn't have to be. This is 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 now let's go run targeted outbound campaigns towards those companies. And so I would go dig into those from the Dallas Mavericks to the bar down the street. There's gotta 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 double that and 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. It's $900 a year to get the premium version of ChatGPT.

They have that in their budget.

They have that in their budget and you can get so much strength in that. I 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, wow, stuff like that. I think there's something huge here with copy and email.

Well Dave, let me tell you, I'm going to spoil a little bit of a future show. We're going to have Emmy from my team come on. But we are using just the raw OpenAI API and we 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. 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 yeah, well that's just one of those like where focused and investing actually gets you a lot of leverage. And we're gonna have Emmy on to break down all the technical sides of it. But I just like that's a little hat tip to that.

Oh, can't wait. Is that model actually trained on? I was just trying to find this this week. Cause I wanna figure out how I can get emails to sound like me. Yes. I can't find a way I'm not technical enough. But like, my experience with ChatGPT 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 trained, ongoing, basically train it.

When you're working through the API, you can do all the training and fine tuning of ChatGPT from the OpenAI API perspective for that specific use case, because you're accessing the model and using that model for a very specific use case versus like Chat GPT, which is just kind of like the consumer grade version of it.

Two follow ups for you before we move on from Craig. Number one, how important does a company goal matter here? Because it's kind of like, okay, you got a tight budget, you don't really have a niche yet. I've found that like, if you're my boss, Kip, the CEO, I'd be like, give me a goal. Like, what do we, we need guardrails here? And I feel like a lot of great marketing happens when you have clear guardrails. Like, let's just go get 50 new customers this quarter. You get what I'm trying to get at for Craig here?

Totally. Because, you know, you and I talked a little bit about this on when I came on your show, Dave, which is like, once you have a goal, you can work backward to know what you actually need to do and what that normally tells you. Spoiler alert. When you have a goal, you that goal is somewhat based in what you're doing today. And so what you'll see is like, oh, 60 to 70% of that goal I can accomplish from the plays I'm already running. And you probably have 20, 30, 40% of that goal where like, I need to go build some new plays. But it actually tells you what those plays might need to be. Cause you'll know. Okay, well I need a thousand visits a month and I need to convert a hundred of those visits into demos or signups or whatever the, like the pre purchase step is. And then I need to convert, you know, 20% of those, right? And then that gives you the baseline math of, okay, I need to go run an ad playbook, a YouTube playbook, a text based search playbook to go and get them.

And so if marketing doesn't know that goal, do you push on the CEO? Do you say, hey, I need some vision here?

Like, yeah, yeah, the CEO should basically say, hey, based on our growth goals, we have to add 100 customers a month. How are we going to do that? And the CEO and Craig should be deeply Aligned on like, hey, we think we've got a basic model here that's going to get us a hundred or more customers a month if we go and do the work well.

All right. All right, we got a next question.

Yeah, let's go to the next guy.

Next question is from Pranav. He is a former marketing guy, former VP of marketing. He started a new company called Paramark. They do marketing measurement. New company, Seedish stage Startup. He says, how do you call out your icp, which is enterprise, without saying enterprise? Because that's boring.

Enterprise is super boring. First of all, the marketing measurement space is a tough space. So good on you for taking it on. I think, Dave, you and I have seen countless companies in that space and it's just a hard space to differentiate in, especially in the enterprise. And I think the last answer, Dave, kind of showcased who you and I were. You went like straight to positioning and I went straight to demand generation. Like, how do you actually get that? And this is actually a position question, so I'm interested in your point of view. The core question when you're playing up market though, is are you playing in an existing category or are you trying to disrupt an existing category? Would be the first question I ask. It seems like given that he's branded as marketing analytics, he's currently thinking about playing in an existing category. And so then you need things that are going to make you clearly different than the competition. And so if like you're relying on Gartner and a lot of the classic enterprise buying signals, it's going to be boring and you're not going to be differentiated. Right. Like, you're going to need really different unique customer stories. You're going to need interesting details on implementation and time to value and a lot of things that enterprise buyer cares about without calling it enterprise.

Yeah. One interesting thing that I've struggled with in a past company is customers don't often say enterprise or some do and some don't and some. Like when you say this is for the enterprise, to some customers, that means Fortune 100 companies.

Exactly. Enterprise is the most vague term in business.

It's very challenging. And then I also would say your icp. So a. That's just a vague term in general. Another example, I was CMO at this company called Privy and we sold e commerce software to small shopify entrepreneurs. So people who are doing like a million dollars in revenue or less in sales, and we struggled with what to call that because the technical term is SMBs. So like, when we're talking to Investors, they're like, oh, this is an SMB business. But none of our customers, most of them didn't think of themselves as small businesses. I'm not a small business. And so there's always this weird thing of like you say small business, mid market and enterprise, internal, external, that often means nothing. And so Kip said something interesting there which I would lean on, which is customer stories.

Yes.

People buy products. When they say, oh, interesting, this company looks like mine, I'm going to use that product. And so if you want to attract enterprise, whatever that means, Pranav, in your world, I would focus on, let's be really targeted with our customer acquisition. Let's be really targeted with ABM outbound. Whatever we're gonna do, let's go get some of those customers. And then we need to like just turn up the megaphone on telling those stories. And then when you come to our website, maybe, hopefully you can profile some of those customers. But even if you can, I think the use cases, you can use specific language that is very clear. That use case is for a larger organization than a smaller one. I wouldn't obsess over the term enterprise. This is basically a show me, don't tell me type of scenario.

Yeah. And I want to add one other thing that's important. Look, I know enough about the marketing technology space that if you're selling marketing analytics, we'll call it up market to more established companies. Right. Won't call it corporate enterprise, mid market, what have you, you are selling to essentially a person who runs marketing operations. Like that's largely who you're normally selling to. And those people buy tools that are going to make their careers better. Right. They're going to make them look good, that are going to help them have velocity. You've seen a lot of enterprise software companies invest a lot in their admins and core customers to do that. And if you're going to succeed in the marketing analytics space, you're going to have to do the same thing. Not only are you going to have to have great customer stories, but you're going to have to create customer champions. The right kind of training, certifications, the things that those marketing ops, managers, directors, what have you are going to want to do. And they're going to want to bring in your product because that product's going to help them get promoted. They understand the career benefits, all of those things. And if you don't make that clear to them, then they're just going to go pick somebody else who's going to do that for Them.

Oh, I like that. Just to riff on that, if I'm early stage, I think based on what I know now, I would go super niche, like totally focus on one role. Like we are the analytics platform for VP of marketing ops at B2B SaaS companies in this thing and just tell the heck out of those stories because the founders have this bias and founders are amazing because they can suspend reality, right? But they always get defensive because our product, it doesn't just do that, it can also do these things for a hundred Personas, I'm like, great, go build a hundred million dollar company and then you can sell to multiple Personas like HubSpot now does at this level in the billions of revenue range. But right, the best thing that's going to help you get traction is to be very specific for a specific Persona. So I would blow up enterprise and I would go to Kip's point and say, who is that exact person that we're trying to sell to? Let's really nail that person. Let's go find 10 to 20 of those customers. And by the way, when that lands, then you can then easily expand to another Persona with the same because then.

You build the right integrations for them, the right features for them, you have the right messaging for them and they're so happy that they're going to be the flywheel that helps you expand beyond that. And like again, the game of a startup is survival, right? Like you can't do everything because you'll die. You know, like you just won't be for anybody. You have to be for somebody early on.

So you can't do everything because you'll die. But the more that I've seen, I'm sure you see this in all the companies and people you work with. I almost believe that almost everything can work, like, exactly.

This is the most crazy thing to me is everybody's out there looking for like this very prescriptive path. If you just go study all the remarkable businesses that have ever been built, there's no clear same path. No, the only clear same path is they had some beliefs that they held true. They were clear on who their target buyer was. Eventually they got there and they relentlessly worked to serve their customer. And they normally had some macro market tailwind or wave that they surfed that helped them be really big and successful. But there's not a clear playbook.

Go back to our last example. If I didn't tell you the channel, I said, here's this guy, he's a director of marketing at a seed stage SaaS company, they're an event marketing tool. The ACV is $1200. You'd be like, oh, well, probably content, inbound, social media. That's how they're getting most of their customers. Actually, no, they're doing outbound. Yeah. Okay. And so it's like, should you be on YouTube, should you do TikTok, should you do ABM direct mail? Yes, the answer is yes. But it's when any of those things can work. But it matters when, to your point?

Well, it matters the skills that you have, you can't be an expert in all those things. And to be a good marketer today, you, you have to be an expert craftsperson in the area of marketing that you're focused in. And so if you're a seed stage marketer, you got to pick one or two things to be really skilled in in the early days.

All right, Pranav, focus on the customer, not the name.

Exactly.

All right, Kip, this is a good one for you. Dig into your nurturing. Dig into your MOFU days here, my friend.

All right. Marketing, nurturing, marketing.

Maybe, maybe. I don't, I don't know if I've interpreted this right, but this question is from, from Brandon Lee. Brandon works at MongoDB. So this business is a hyperscale PLG, aka the company is MongoDB with millions of active users, but also millions of inactive, dormant users. We have a sophisticated onboarding nurture that every user goes through based on individual in product signals. Furthermore, many users kick the tires of the product, but may not actually have a production, use case or pain point that they're solving for immediately. But we do see a small percentage of users come back to the product after months and even years of inactivity. I'm trying to move with this dormant audience that was compelled enough to sign up, but are not regular users of the product. My question is, what are some re engagement tactics that you've seen for a dormant audience that could be successful here?

Oh, this is a fun question. I really like this one. All right, so if somebody's dormant, right. They once had intent, but they've like clearly disengaged with your product or your service. And so I think historically what people have done is, you know, they tried different content hooks, right? Like, oh, maybe you care about this part of our product now, or I know you're in this role. And so because you're in this role, this new thing might get you interested and get you back into our product. And that works a little bit. But I don't think it's the best solution. The best solution I think here is how do you get the right intent data on your users? And intent data means like, what are they out there shopping for right now? What are they actively researching? What are they trying? And. And so a lot of intent data providers like G2.com, six sense some of those companies would be the path I would go down. I'd be like, cool, how do I then go and get the right intent signal, the why now Data Basically like, why should I reach out to this person now and what should I reach out to them about based on what I know about them? Because we have seen the highest conversion rates always come down to intent data. If you can pick the 20% of the users in a given month that actually have intent and can get them the right message, you will be able to re engage those dormant users at probably 50, 100% higher of a rate than you're doing right now.

So you're talking about so intent data from those kind of third party.

Yes.

Data providers could intend data also be like recent activity on our site?

Definitely. It could be web behavior activity on your site. It could even be behavior activity of peers or colleagues at the same company that you basically build a model around and say, oh, these four people are doing this kind of similar thing. Maybe this other fifth person also needs to do that similar thing and maybe we should try to engage them there.

Yeah, so I'm just wondering if like maybe they've done this. So I don't want to give like obvious advice here, but of course you got millions of dormant users. Kip is pulling on an interesting thread here. It's like, sure, we can reach out to all of them and say something, but can we layer on something? So let's go try to find which pocket we should go focus on. And so maybe layer on like, okay, let's analyze this data. This group of people have not visited our website in six months and so there's no chance they're even thinking about us. So if we want to reach out to them, it's got to be a different message verse. Let's like try to trim this down. Oh wow. We just found 5,000 users who actually have done X, Y and Z behavior today. So there's got to be some scale and you're going to have different messages to different audiences. And I would obviously start with the lowest hanging fruit. Run that analysis and let's come up with some. This is like basically lead scoring. Right? Let's, let's Come up with some type of score and figure out who we should go reach out to. And then you can determine, like, what message we're going to reach out with to all these different audiences.

You can also do the converse of this, Dave, which you can say, here are my best and most active users. What have they been interested in? How did they come in to discover my product? And can I have my dormant users kind of go through that same process? It's like, oh, wow, I know these kind of five pieces of content are the front door for my most active users. Oh, maybe. I actually try to engage my dormant users to go start that journey and move them through that journey. All these strategies will work. You'll have to just try cohorts of each to figure out what's going to be the most fruitful. But all of them are going to give you some leverage.

This is an interesting challenge. You know, HubSpot, you all must have everybody in your system in the world that you could sell to.

I wish, but not all of the.

Point that I'm trying to make is like, in the earlier stages of your company, it becomes like, well, we need to go and acquire, right? This is like a different issue. It's like, we can reach them, but why are they not interested? Do we have the right message? Do we have the right offer? And do you ever wonder though, like, how do you decide when to move on from this? Like, is it possible that these people are just never going to be interested? Is that a possibility and you should just not spend time here?

Oh, I think it's a high possibility that a high percentage of them are never going to be interested. So you would decide to move on based on the equation you just gave Dave, right? Like, if MongoDB has everybody and they can't go do a bunch of new acquisition of the technical users that use that product, then they've got to squeeze everything out using the Playbooks we talked about. If there's still a huge part of the market that they don't have and users aren't engaging with, then I would actually spend some of my time here, but not as much as I would doing brand awareness and demand generation to go bring those new users in.

Yeah.

Hey, everyone, we'll be right back to the show. But first, first, let me tell you about a podcast that I love. It's a podcast called I Digress. It is hosted by my friend, Troy Sandage. It's brought to you by the amazing HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for anyone in business. And I Digress is great. It's got 30 minute episodes and the podcast is all about helping you eliminate complexity, complications and confusions in your business. It's really heavy in frameworks and strategies to help you scale and solve, sustain your success. And recently, Troy had a really great episode. It was called Branding Secrets. Leveraging Style to Change the Narrative, Boost influence and Profits. And that was with his guest toy, Sweeney. It's really good. You should check it out. And you can listen to that or all the episodes of I Digress anywhere you get your podcast.

All right, let's move on from Brandon.

All right, let's do it.

This question is from Heliana. She is a co founder and CEO at a company called Video Deck. VideoDeck is a video production company for SaaS companies.

Oh, nice. Okay.

We grow mostly through outreach, organic search, and referrals. While we do get quite a few referrals from happy clients, I feel like we don't do anything to incentivize them. Question. What are some referral program ideas that actually work? What are some ways to incentivize your clients? Slash relevant connections to recommend you without be too pushy and insulting.

I'm going to be really honest. I've had a hard time getting customer referral programs to work. Have you ever had one work, Dave?

It's hard.

Like, no. A little bit. But let me describe the problem statement. See if you agree with it. Dave, which is like, customer referral programs work great for consumer companies because there's an obvious incentive you can give to that consumer.

Right.

It's much harder when it's a B2B company because they're like, hey, they're doing this for their job. They don't care about the extra 25 bucks, what have you. Normally, what they care about. The thing that we found most successful is they care about, like, special access, special swag, things that make them feel cool and give them identity in the community and amongst their peers. Those are like the incentives. Because when you're talking about customer referral programs, incentives are a huge part of it. And getting the incentives right are a huge part of it. But I don't know if it's the place I would double down and spend my time.

Yeah, you know, I'm with you. I'm with you. I haven't been able to get them work in like, this crazy, predictable, repeatable way. And I found that oftentimes, I guess as the company grows bigger, companies try to do this where the enterprise sales rep works in a clause into the contract that says, like, you'll be a case study or something. Right. And, and that's different than actually having somebody be a referral and recommendation. I do think an underrated strategy is asking.

This is.

I'm always surprised, you know, this might be the most. I'm always surprised when I've asked somebody to write a recommendation or even I've just noticed like people who have service providers, agencies or whatever who have helped me with stuff that I'm building when they're like, hey, you know, it seems like you're super happy with what you're doing. It'd mean a lot to us if you gave us a quick testimonial or referral. Could you just record like a two minute video? I'm surprised at how often I say yes to that. If I feel like the intentions are really good and I'm like, you know what? That person was really impressive. They really did help me. Yes, I did pay them money for this task, this project, but I want to see them win. I do feel like there's a pocket of that. And so I feel like just asking. And I would just ask everybody, ask every happy customer. But you're probably selling a service that is, you know, relatively expensive. Video production is not a cheap task. I often see it's like a 25 gift card. No, that stuff doesn't do it for me and I don't think that's going to work.

So I think what you are saying is the best advice, which is like don't over engineer the program, just ask people. I think the magic is can you find the right moment to ask? Can the ask be really simple and can it be automated?

Yeah.

Right. Like there are a bunch of service out there that will send handwritten notes. Right. Can you pay to like automate at 15 days after the end of a contract to have that handwritten note go out and just ask for any referrals? Yeah, if you can. To your point, Dave, you're going to get many more than you think.

Yes. Okay. I like this. I have an actual specific idea. I think one of the things that people miss here is the ask seems too big. And so like if you just email your customers, you're like, can you refer us? You're like, I don't know when I'm going to bump into. Sure. When I bump into someone who needs video production, here's what I would do. Seems like you sell to SaaS companies. I know there's a lot of. I like LinkedIn to me is the place to be for this. What I would do is I would, right now or next week, I would write an email. I would get a list of all of your happy customers from you, the co founder and CEO, and say. I would say, hey, it's Heliana. And you could run this against ChatGPT. You could just copy my words exactly, do whatever. And I would make the subject line. And the subject line would be quick favor. Hey, you've had a lot of success with us producing videos for you. Whatever. Talk about the relationship. We're really trying to grow this year and we have some big goals since you're one of our best customers. It would make me so happy if you just went to LinkedIn and just wrote a quick post about what your experience has been like with us. Here's two examples of things you can write and here's how to Tag us on LinkedIn. When I do something like that, I'm always surprised at how many people do that. And then you're just asking for somebody to write a LinkedIn post, which to a lot of people is just a transactional thing. Sure. I haven't posted anything in a couple of days. I can write that for you on Friday. I would do something like that. And then maybe once a quarter, just put that on your calendar as like a recurring invite for to yourself and just be like, send an email and ask for referrals.

Yet another idea you could do is basically do the outreach, whether it be LinkedIn or email or what have you, and just be like, who's your favorite SaaS marketer or founder that you know? And be like, oh, cool, it's Dave. Well, is it okay if I reach out to Dave and reference the work that we did with you all?

Yes.

And they'll be like, sure, that's fine. And then you, the founder, can go and say, hey, we just did some awesome work with XYZ company Dave, and we think we can do the same work for you. Do you want to chat about it? And that's not a full referral, but it's close enough to a referral that you're going to get a much higher booking rate than just like a cold email.

Yeah, that's a really good one I've been getting. So I work with this guy Jordan from this company growth community. They helped me. Basically. I moved exit 5 last year off of Facebook into Circle and it was just, it was a huge project and he helped me do that. He did an awesome job. And he just asked me, could you be a referral for us? And maybe once or twice a Month, I get a message on LinkedIn or an email from someone saying, like, hey, I'm thinking about working with Jordan. What's your experience with him been? And I'm happy to reply, like, two sentences, and I'm just like, he's great. If you're thinking about it, do it. And that's essentially the same thing. But I'm not out there, like, giving referrals.

Exactly. So our advice is rethink about how you think about what a referral program actually is in B2B. Ask for the referral, and then we gave you a couple of ways that you could go and ask for it.

I think you gave the best one, which is like, just don't spend so many cycles trying to try it and then move on.

Exactly. The fact that you don't have one big channel that is how you acquire customers is actually my concern. Find one big channel that you're an expert at that's going to acquire customers. Like, our first question day, it's like, they were great at outbound email. They needed to diversify, but at least they found something that works. I have a hard time with any company that doesn't have one thing that is far and away the thing that works for them, because that means they don't have any, like, scalable, predictable play yet.

All right, I got two more I want to get into. This one's from Felipe. He's the head of marketing. He said, first of all, this is awesome. Second, you, Kip and Kieran are all marketers that grew a good and specialized audience. They leverage it at their companies and for what I know. Do something on the side as advising you created a business from it. How do you think about the ways that you can leverage this audience? How did you start something on the side and did their audience mean something to their companies?

That's a good question. I mean, this is in my wheelhouse. In your wheelhouse, too, Dave. Which is like, distribution's undefeated.

Yeah.

Like, if you have an audience that cares about something, there's always a way to make the financial ramifications work. Always. It's impossible for it not to.

I just think, like, the common thread. I think people overanalyze, like, this side thing, this audience, like, did we decide to build an audience? Is like, no. We were people who are passionate about the craft. The thing that we do, which is marketing. You see this in other industries. You see this in sales and HR and finance and, you know, engineering, whatever. You see this everywhere. We kind of came up in an era where digital Marketing tools were the norm, especially social media. And today you have access to all these platforms. You have LinkedIn, you have every social media and publishing platform. And so if you're passionate about the niche in which you work, you can attract opportunities to you by writing about that stuff online. It's not dissimilar from inbound marketing methodology from. From 2006. And so I think there wasn't some big thought of plan. It's like, share this online. I think that's the opportunity that you have. And the advantage is, out of 100 people, not everyone's going to do it. You know, 20 of them are going to roll their eyes at you, 70 of them are not going to do it, and maybe six to eight of them will. I think that's the opportunity. So writing online is undefeated.

It. Well, it's definitely undefeated. I'm going to reinterpret your questions, like, how do I change my life? I'm doing something that's interesting, but, like, I live a different life. I want to change my life. And there's a couple ways to change your life. First is you believe something that's going to be really important that most other people don't think is important. It's going to be right. And for like, Dave and I, that was marketing on the Internet a long time ago. Right. And like, wow, it turns out just having conviction on that for a long period of time was pretty life changing. The second thing is find some way to be a leader in that thing that you think is going to be really important. I wrote a blog, I wrote a book, I did all kinds of stuff, but it was always through a lens of, I care about this thing, I care about this topic. I'm very passionate about today's point. There's some skill I want to get better at. And I understand that if I can build an audience and community here, that gives me more options. Like, I'm obsessed with optionality. Like, I want as much optionality as humanly possible. Like, I don't want to be boxed in. When you have optionality, you can kind of make different plays work. And I think that's like the magic of doing what we're doing. It's like, most people would think, like, oh, it's cool that Kip's doing, like, YouTube shows. Like, I'm obsessed with doing a podcast. Like, I want to be really good at this.

Sure.

In the short run is a terrible monetary investment of my time. In the long term, it is a amazing life skill to, like, build and have and so, like, I think that is kind of the opportunity there. It's like, find something and really commit to it and double down on it. And most people won't do 200 podcast episodes. They won't write a thousand blog articles. And if you do that, you just kind of almost win by default.

I love that. And the benefits are like, you're happily employed at a company, you're an executive at a company, but the benefits from having this content is partnerships, employees hiring, recruiting, brand. There are so many benefits. And so it doesn't always have to be like, oh, you're going to go start this side hustle thing. I think creating content, you see it in every niche. You could be a plumber, and you're a plumber and you want to grow your business and you just decide, yeah, yeah, I'm going to be the only plumber on LinkedIn, and you would clean up.

The most powerful thing that I don't think people talk about enough, Dave, is you never have a cold conversation ever again.

Never.

Right? And, like, you're seeing that now. Anybody you talk to, you're like, oh, I saw this episode. You did. I have some questions. Right? And it's like, you never have like a. Oh, hey, it's awkward. Nice to meet you. What are we going to talk about? It's like, no, somebody has consumed something you've done, and, like, you always have a jumping off point. And the interaction, the connection's always better. Better.

Yeah. But I will say, like, there is no shortcut to doing this.

No, I wish.

You've been talking about marketing for a long time, and you mentioned podcasting as an example. I think today people will go to my LinkedIn and be like, oh, look at this guy. He just writes on LinkedIn. He's a LinkedIn thought leader. I started my first podcast in 2014. Nobody was talking about podcasting then. I didn't do it to build an audience. I didn't do it to get famous. I didn't do it to get rich. I did it because I was nerding out listening to a podcast about startups called this Week in Startups that Jason Calacanis hosted. I was just getting into the startup scene in Boston, and I was like, man, there's like a buzzing startup scene here in Boston. Why is nobody talking about that? Somebody should start a podcast about these companies. And the guy who I was working for at the time was like, you should do it. And I was like, I don't know how to do it. He's like, it. Go figure.

It out, man.

And that was the thing. I did 60 interviews that year. I met 60 different people. I met investors, advisors, future bosses, people I'm still connected with today. All because I was the only one who reached out and said, hey, I'm Dave. You've never heard of me, but I started a podcast about startups in Boston. Can I come to your office and interview you for an hour? And like the hit rate ON that was 90%. And that was the thing. So there's many variations of how you can find a way to make this work.

The very short answer is how you change your life. You just decide to. You just decide to and you start taking some action and you just make it part of your life. It's like I record two podcasts a week and that's just what I do.

And you can't worry about what people are going to think or what their reaction is going to be, or if all your friends think you're a huge dork. Like it. Just who cares to make that change, you got to do. Last one. This is from Brooks. Brooks has a question that may open up an interesting angle. Brooks. I'll be the judge of that.

Don't get ahead of us, Brooks.

Don't get ahead of us, Brooks. The background is I run a solo content strategy and execution business. Been working with SaaS clients for years and a main focus in the past few years has been working with B2B AI startups. I've worked with both mature and early stage companies. Question. Unsurprisingly, I've noticed many early stagers are very engineering led in markets that are volatile and supremely bleeding edge. Since these startups are just building out the marketing function, are more focused on product development than Even your typical SaaS company. This often leads to me spending a lot of time re explaining basic content principles. Any advice on how to effectively communicate the importance of foundational content and positioning to highly technical engineering led organizations with loads of potential to capture early market share?

Whew. That was a big question. Are you tired from reading that?

No, I just need a drink of water.

I'm tired from listening to that. That was a big one.

I sounds like you're selling to someone who doesn't want what you're selling right now. For sure. Right.

Also, like, I think that maybe the founders are right. Like I think it's just early and they should get product market fit.

Totally.

Yeah. And let them go get product market fit.

So Brooks, you're trying to sell content strategy to people who are not ready to get content strategy. Now, there's two approaches. You could lose all your hair like me and beat the drum so hard trying to teach these founders about the importance of marketing. Could you do that? I believe you could. Is that going to be more effort than maybe going a little bit upmarket and redefining your back to icp as we talked about a bunch? Why don't you go focus content strategy and execution on companies who already have product market fit and could you be more successful and this be a less stressful business? What do you think about that? Kip?

I agree with you. You know how there's moments of your life that you just kind of remember, like you're still sitting there? Right.

And is this one of them?

Well, I mean, every conversation we. You as well.

I meant because of Brooks's question.

Well, no, but Brooks's question jogged one for me. Right. So a long time ago at HubSpot, we used to do in person field trips. Now we do virtual field trips where we go and like, oh, there's this topic. And we go talk to a bunch of people on this topic we care about. We try to get a bunch of expertise in a dense period of time, kind of debrief and debate, and you learn a bunch of stuff. It's one of the best things you could ever do. Pro tip out there. We're having a conversation with this guy named George Hu, who was at the time the CEO of Twilio. Before that, he was the CEO of Salesforce.com and he just sat down at the table and he's like, all right, here's the first thing I need to know. Are you distribution constrained or are you product constrained? Is your product good enough to sell to people and you just can't get it into their hands? Or is your product lacking the features and functions it needs to really have the proper fit in the market? And you're just like, oh, geez, that is just like the perfect question. And this is the perfect question for any of these startups that you're working with out there. It's like, if they're distribution constrained, then you're selling them the thing they need.

Yeah.

If they are product constrained, then you're not selling them the thing they need. The thing they need is focus to go get the product where it needs to be. And I know there are a bunch of people who are going to be like, well, but you got to do the two in parallel. And you know, you can't just wait till the product's ready. And I'm like, Largely you can, right?

This is so good because this is like rewind all the marketing problems back to these like, first principle correct type things. Don't you feel like in a service type business, isn't it always going to be better to just be super niche, like niche as far down as you can to build the type of business that you want?

Well, niche and very opinionated. I will tell you, the best service operators I've ever worked with or I've hired or whatever are always like, this is exactly who I work with. Do you meet these criteria? Because if not, I don't want to work with you.

Yeah, totally.

Right. Like, think about it. Like, that is like, they're like, look, totally. I work with, with these types of companies at this very specific stage. Are you at this Stage? Here's the 20 questions I'm going to ask you to make sure I believe you are at that specific stage. And you know what? It works. It works.

They qualify you and they're like, are you?

Yeah. You're not qualifying them. They're qualified.

Can you pass? Go. But you know why? Those are smart, seasoned people because they've been burned. They have run an agency and tried to appeal to 15 different clients and they're like, this sucks. Like, and I talked to somebody yesterday and on the surface I thought he was an ABM consultant. He's like, nope, I'm not an ABM consultant. I do LinkedIn ads for B2B SaaS companies. At this stage, I'm like, you're gonna be successful.

Yes. So we gave a bunch of advice there. Focus on who you're selling to and be sure that when you're selling to them that they're distribution constrained, not product constrained. They don't need to go and actually work on that product.

Excellent.

Now, Dave, I have a question for you. I have a couple questions before we finish on our last, like five minutes here. The first is we're getting ready to have our team kick off. We got a couple of them over the next couple weeks. And I was like thinking about everything I was going to talk with my team about. And one of the things is like, man, you know what, it's just really fun and exciting to be a marketer now. And like the last couple years it wasn't that fun and exciting to be a marketer. And like, I don't know, I'm like feeling very happy, very excited. Then I saw you had a tweet and you were like, I'm having fun. I didn't realize I wasn't having Fun. But I'm having fun now. Why are you having fun? Like, why are we both so happy and having fun? Like, what's happening out there, you think?

Well, I think for me, one of the things was just changing my mindset. And I like that. Playing offense instead of playing defense. I was a little bit like, I'm not sure who I am, I'm not sure what I want to be, and I'm not sure what thing I want to go after. And then one day I woke up and I'm like, stop being a moron. Don't chase new things. Right? Like, to Craig, Craig wanted to chase new channels. And you're like, double down on what's working. And so I looked at what's working at this point in my life, and that thing is Exit 5. And that thing is building this B2B media company. And I was like, man, I don't want to talk about B2B marketing forever. But what's fun is I decided to go all in, hire a team. It's changed my view. I'm like, oh, no, I'm now an operator. I'm not the B2B marketing guy. I get to, like, find creative ways to grow that business. And once I made that change, it was like a magnet that just attracted all these interesting people. I'm on with you. I talk about marketing with you. Like, I wasn't talking to people that I looked up to or want to be peers within a while. And I was just kind of feeling like, man, what I'm doing is lame. But then, like, I talk to you, I talked to some other people that I'm close with in the space, and I'm like, I got that energy again. I think you need to, like, get out. It's like when you haven't been working out in a while, and all of a sudden you go to, like, a soul cycle class or you do something, you go to Barry's boot camp. You're like, yeah, there's 30 other people here of the same goals and same mission as me. Like, I'm fired up again. So that helped me big time. That's a big thing. It's not a marketing tactic. It's just, like, just being around other people with shared goals and who want to do the same things are going to push you. I've found myself a peer group again. That kind of pushed me from kind of stale ways of thinking. And then the third piece of this is like, I hate to say it, but it's AI. I'm sorry.

No. Well, that's part of why I'm excited is because the world is changing. Like, yeah, my Vision Pro gets dropped off in, like, an hour or two, and I'm super excited. It's the first thing that I've spent money on in, like, a long time. But I'm, like, deeply excited to, like, use. I know it's going to be bad in a bunch of ways, and it's going to be clunky in a bunch of ways. But, like, the difference and the interesting aspect of it is, like, it's wild. Right. And, like, that, to me, is super exciting. And I think in your answer, you actually gave the best advice of the entire show, which was be decisive.

Yeah.

If you took anything away, like, a theme of all the questions you gather from the community was indecision, Lack of confidence and indecision, Right?

Yeah.

If you literally just write down what am I unsure about? And you make a decision. Right. Like, there's like, this old cheesy quote. I think it was like a Dr. Phil quote or something, where it was like, there are no right decisions. There are decisions you make. Right?

Yeah.

And that is essentially 100% true. If you make a decision to commit to it, it will be the right decision, whether it actually was or not.

Oh, it's so good. I just had a question from somebody the other day, and they're like, hey, I have a brand naming question. Like, I'm really torn between this name and this name. And I'm like, please just go. Just does not matter. The name is what you're going to make it. And if this is the thing that's blocking you from getting started, like, you need to just. You need to just go. I love that indecision. Because, like, we've talked about also, there's so many ways to win and so many ways to be successful. You need to go marching down that path and, like, just remove all the other variables. I struggle personally when there's, like, a hundred options. I don't like that. It's like when I go to the doctor, I like when the doctor's like, this is wrong with you. Do this thing specifically. I don't like when they're like, well, you could do this and you could do that. I like that decisiveness. I think that's great advice. Kip. On AI, though, Dave's like, I got.

To get my last word in on AI.

I just think we don't get opportunities like this often. If you're into business and marketing and sales and the fundamental shift that's happening this Is the Get with it or get lost.

I'm going to blow your mind for a minute because that's not what I've been. This is what I've been thinking about. If you think when we got into this game in the early 2000s, mid 2000s, it's easy to be like, oh, it was social media or oh, it was SEO. It was. We had search engines come to power, we had social networks created, we had broadband Internet that was cheap and widely accessible mobile, we had cloud computing, we had this thing called the smartphone and the iPhone and the Android. We had all of these shifts that just basically transformed the next 10 to 15 years. That's what's happening right now. It's not just AI. Think about Starlink. You can now get faster than fiber Internet in the middle of the most remote part of the world like that. This is real bananas.

So, you know, I'm up in Vermont, my in laws lived in the woods and for the 10 years of dating my wife, they literally would go to her house and there was no service. Of course they have faster Internet than I do now.

Yes. But like, and think about the spatial computing, AR VR space. You think about all of these trends, even some of the decentralized technologies. Like I don't think crypto is going to ever be main mainstream, but some of those technologies will become mainstream. And like we are about to surf a new 15 year wave and if you pick any part of it and have some conviction and invest time, you are going to be successful just as it grows and matures. So AI. Yes, but it's like AI is only a part of the opportunity that like we're actually sitting on right now.

Damn it, Kip. I'm all fired up again. I. What am I going to do? This is a Friday. I got to go. I have a hundred new ideas already.

That's great. Go, you know, go ski. You can't play golf yet. We'll play golf in a couple months. It'll be great.

Okay.

All right, thank you to the Exit 5 community. First of all. And if you haven't checked it out, go check out exit 5 will drop a note in the show description. Please leave us comments. If you have questions, drop them in the YouTube if there's enough questions, Dave and I'll do an encore episode. And Dave, thanks for taking some time away from the Exit 5 famine community to come join us on marketing. It's the grade today.

Thanks, Kip. To my point about hanging out with people that give me energy, when you asked me to come on. I was like, got to make sure I'm here for that. Thank you for having me. I'm a first time caller, long time listener of this show, and I'm excited to listen to my own voice in a future episode.

Love it, man. Thanks for being here. Thanks, everybody. See you on the next show.