The Exit Five Podcast

#412 | We asked four B2B marketing leaders the same two questions: what’s your biggest win of 2026, and your biggest bet for 2027? At Drive, Dasha spoke with Casey Patterson (Snowflake) who explained how her ABM team sets off small “earthquakes” of AI change every week so they’re never blindsided by one big shakeup. Colin Kendall (SC&H) shared how a virtually unknown firm turned speaking at events into attributed revenue, and his bet on employee advocacy and personal branding for his leaders. Ross Simmonds (Foundation Marketing) named his proudest win – a team that runs, and outperforms him, without him – and...

#411 | Dave and Dasha go live with four B2B marketers to walk through ABM campaigns that sales ran - from account selection to pipeline. Joicee Lu, Account Based Marketing Manager at Snowflake, shares how personalized CMO video ads drove 3.3x engagement over static ads and VP+ meetings at 42% of targeted accounts. Jordan Voskuil, VP of Marketing at Amsive, explains how a “random acts of ABM” budget turned one warm intro into a 12-month, one-to-one play built around a single relationship. Jen Leaver, Senior Director of Demand Gen at Recurly, breaks down her “wake the dead” campaign, which reframed a lower-ri...

#410 | Drive was an extremely popular B2B marketing event for three years straight - it sold out in 24 hours its first year and got 800+ people to come to Vermont. And we’re retiring it anyway. In this rare episode, Dan Murphy (CEO) and Dave Gerhardt (founder) take you behind the scenes of Exit Five’s event strategy and what we’re doing instead of Drive. You'll get a sneak peek into our next big bet: small, intimate events in cities like NYC, SF, Boston, Houston, and Toronto, plus an executive retreat. Dave and Dan also discuss Exit Five's origin story...

#409 | Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs and author of “Everybody Writes”, takes the Drive stage to make the case for slowing down in a marketing world built for speed. Using episode eight of a 1987 Mighty Mouse cartoon as her guide, she contrasts “cow mode” (fast, efficient, easy to measure) with “sloth mode” (slow, deliberate, harder to quantify). Ann argues that AI has scaled marketing’s cow energy as the job shifted from being seen to being chosen. She walks through her ASAP (as slow as possible) matrix for deciding when to move fast and when to slow down, and a “wallop...

#408 | Dasha talks with Logan Lyles, founder of webinar-as-a-service agency DemandShift, and winner of the Exit Five Live webinar about webinars for this very play! They break down the five mistakes that keep B2B webinars from driving pipeline. Logan shares why emailing only your own list caps your reach, and how email swaps and LinkedIn event invites bring in new audiences. He explains why your thank-you page is a wasted high-intent moment, and how a two-step survey flow books demos before the webinar even start. Logan also shares how to give your live audience a clear next step without...

407 | Original air date: Jun 20, 2023. Devin Reed is the Founder @ The Reeder, previously Director of Content at Clari and Head of Content Strategy at Gong. Dave and Devin talk about his role at Clari and what the content team did. They discuss Gong's early content strategy, how to make long form content work, and what type of content works on LinkedIn today. They also discuss the importance of personal brand, bust some marketing myths, and more.

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406 | In this mailbag “Ask Dave Anything” episode, he gets into your most burning B2B marketing questions, concerns and challenges. There's no playbook for B2B marketing, but you can lean on the pros (like Dave) for advice when you're stuck. He shares his take on prioritizing brand or demand, then explains what he'd do in his first 90 days as a new marketing leader. He also shares his take on AI for outbound, the most underrated marketing investment, community vs. audience and whether AI is a bubble.

Timestamps: (00:00) - A solo mailbag: Exit Five members ask, Dave answ...

#405 | Dasha sits down with Casey Patterson, who runs North American ABM at Snowflake, to talk about what ABM looks like as AI reshapes it - live from Drive. Casey explains why the next era of ABM moves past the account to the individual, how her team goes from an account’s intent spike to a personalized gift in four days, and what she means by “tokenomics,” matching the right AI tool to each job. She shares how she inspires her team to disrupt their work a little every week so they never fall behind. Casey dives into her “database washing...

#404 | Dave chats with Hillary Carpio, VP of Growth Marketing at Snowflake, about account-based marketing. Hillary runs a 20 person team focused on ABM at Snowflake today.

They discuss why Snowflake has been an "account-based organization", ABM vs. Demand Generation, how to measure ABM, what an effective ABM campaign looks like, creating a tiered ABM strategy, how marketing exists to support sales at Snowflake and why it works, how tools like ChatGPT and Jasper can help ABM marketers, and more.

Timestamps

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#403 | We asked six B2B marketers a simple question: what’s the most creative way you’re using AI in your process right now? What tools you reach for, which prompts you run, and where you refuse to relinquish control to AI.

Each marketer shared their best creative AI workflow, from start to finish. Then, they answered questions live. 

What you’ll walk away with:

#402 | Dasha interviews Colin Kendall, CMO at SC&H, live at Drive. They discuss how a brand that isn't a household name can build a brand and pipeline. Colin attributes the success to events - his team turned them into a measurable revenue channel by going beyond the sponsor booth. They focus on getting their own experts on stage, and repurposing that content afterward to build touchpoints with people who'd never heard of them. He explains how to get time-strapped executives to build a real LinkedIn presence and why standing out in the age of AI slop means having a...

#400 | Lashay Lewis helps B2B SaaS companies create profit-driven content strategies. We talk about why a B2B content strategy should be built from the bottom of the funnel up, why she interviews sales teams to understand "life before using the product" and why she interviews customer success teams to understand "life after using the product" and how that influences content strategy, how writing influences buyers, the power of a strong company POV, training in-house writers and freelancers in a way that scales, where podcasting fits in a B2B content strategy, why search volume can be misleading, and...

#399 | Dave sits down with R. Ethan Braden, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Texas A&M University, to talk about big brand swings he took with NASCAR, Fast Company and SXSW to insert the university into the national conversation and change the perception of a 150-year-old brand. Ethan explains why Texas A&M University's challenge is reputation and how he got the whole campus telling the same story. Ethan also covers why he holds marketing to the same rigor as finance and engineering, and why his strategy involved going where other universities aren't. Ethan covers how he turned 4,300 faculty...

OK maybe it's not so secret, but it makes for a more clickable headline. 

We're doing an Exit Five Meetup in NYC October 15 and we'd love to have you. Tickets here: https://exitfive.com/nyc/ 

#398 | Dasha chats with Ross Simmonds, founder of Foundation Marketing and Distribution.ai, live at Drive. They talk about why most marketing content fails: it gets created once and then left to collect dust. Ross breaks down his full distribution playbook for a single blog post - from social and email to Reddit, shorts, carousels, and reposting on a schedule. Then, Ross shares the receipts: 10X traffic and a three-year-old asset that now gets cited in AI answers and still generates leads. He explains his rule to create ridiculously good content once and distribute it forever, the four E's that...

#397 | One of our most popular episodes ever, inducted into our Best of B2B series: April Dunford is a B2B positioning expert and author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch. Sales Pitch guides you through an eight-step sales pitch structure the helps you stand out and win business. Building on the concepts of the bestselling book, Obviously Awesome, Sales Pitch will give your sales reps a story that makes your product shine. We talk about her new book, lessons from her first book, and covered:

- Positioning vs. Category Creation vs. Strategic Narrative
- Lessons...

#396 | Dave and Dasha recorded this episode live during Drive 2026 - our biggest event yet. Dave explains how Drive nearly moved to Boston, and why he thinks keeping it in Vermont matters. They also went deep into how Dave wrote this year's keynote. He shares his struggle of building an outline with Claude that had no soul, and asking Harry Dry for help. Eventually, the talk became about one idea: connection. Dave also covers how that experience changed the way he gives feedback to his team, his biggest wins of 2026, and what he's betting on for 2027.

Timestamps (00:00...

#395 | Dasha sits down with Freya Ward, Associate Managing Director at Headley Media, to talk about why MQLs get a bad rap and what to do about it. Freya explains why the problem is usually the framing rather than the tactic, how renaming MQLs changes how sales handles them, and what you should rename them to. They also get into how to run a workshop that aligns the team on what counts as a qualified lead, and three specific fixes you can make today for better sales and marketing alignment. 

Show notes

Gareth J...

#394 | Dave takes his phone to the conference floor at HubSpot's UNBOUND in Boston and asks 5 B2B marketing leaders two questions: what are you doubling down on at work, and what are you doubling down on in your personal life? He opens with thoughts on why strategy and positioning matter more than tactics now that AI makes everyone sound the same. Then you'll hear from Jonathan Hunt of HubSpot on treating brands as live experiences, Palmer Houchins of G2 on balancing AI efficiency with effectiveness, Sangram Vajre of GTM Partners on the power of one-on-one conversations, Jess Cook of...

#393 | Dave interviews Katie Miserany, Chief Communications Officer and Head of Marketing at SurveyMonkey, about why the company rebranded to Momentive to go upmarket and then reversed the decision after going private. Katie explains why sales believed nobody would spend six figures with a company called SurveyMonkey, what changed under the new CEO, and why she now sees the monkey as an advantage. She also covers her path into marketing from communications, why more comms leaders are moving into C-suite marketing roles, and the advice she followed when she took over the function: get close to the growth team and...

#392 | Everyone’s talking about AI agents right now. It's hard to know what's real and what's just LinkedIn noise. If you haven't built an agent yet, it’s hard to know where to start. If you have built agents, you might be looking for ideas for what to build next.

Wouldn’t it be great if a pro marketer would just share their screen and walk you through their best agents? Here's what I built, this is what it does, and here's how much time it saved me this week.

We agree! That’s why we b...

#391 | Dave sits down with Hailey McDonald, VP of Revenue Marketing at Sprout Social, to talk about what revenue marketing looks like inside a 16-year-old social intelligence platform with 30,000 customers. Hailey explains why demand gen has become the hardest role to hire for in B2B. She shares her core framework, how she maps segments against solutions, and how that turns into budget, channel bets, and pipeline tiers by vertical. Dave and Hailey also get into what it takes to go from  sales-led company to product-led growth, and what north star metric she uses instead of leads or pipeline. You’ll...

#390 | Dasha sits down with Connor Lewis, founder of Studio Lewis, who's produced 800+ B2B video ads for ClickUp, Zapier, and Ahrefs. Connor gives away the formula he tells everyone to copy. Plus, the system he uses to turn customer research into a dozen testable scripts. He breaks down three real ads on the record (why Monday.com's Viking ad works, and where the classic motion-graphics launch video actually belongs). He also explains how he got 56 ads out of a single shoot day using hook alternates and the three proof points that get video budget approved, and why he won't...

#389 | Dasha sits down with Kristina Frunze, founder of WebView SEO, who's spent 10 years in SEO and the last 3 running experiments on AI visibility for B2B SaaS. Kristina gives away the framework she uses with every client – SEO is the foundation, AI search is the roof. Plus, the 60/20/20 content split that puts the bottom of funnel pages first. Kristina also talks through the 3-layer attribution model she uses to show leadership what the work is doing when organic clicks are down. She walks through a full client case study on the record (a construction tech company that tripled AI ov...

#388 | Dave sits down with Melissa Rosenthal, co-founder of Outlever and former CCO at ClickUp, CRO at Cheddar, and VP of Creative at BuzzFeed, to talk about why most B2B content strategies fail because they're measured like ad campaigns instead of built like an actual media outlet. Melissa breaks down how she trains writers to think like journalists instead of bloggers, why third-party trade publications tend to outperform company blogs, and what it actually takes to run a media operation instead of just posting content. They also get into her wild LinkedIn distribution playbook - five posts a day...

#387 | Six B2B marketers share tactical plays for using AI to make content that doesn't sound like AI. This Exit Five Live session breaks down a set of specialized agents that lifted blog traffic 700% in six months, a 23-step agent that researches and writes AEO content straight into WordPress, and the winning play: turning original survey data into an ownable narrative. Also on the agenda: a structured review process that replaces vibes-only QA, a Claude skill trained on stakeholder feedback so drafts land pre-aligned, and five rules for using AI to learn faster without outsourcing your thinking. One thing...

#386 | When your ad budget is zero but your creative ambition isn't, three simple techniques can still make you scroll-stopping. Dasha Shakov sits down with Shlomo Genchin, founder of unbore.com, the "unofficial school for B2B ads," to break down what actually makes a B2B ad good. Shlomo walks through his two-part research process for beating the blank page, then unpacks three frameworks - A World Without, Visual Analogy, and Personification - behind some of his highest-performing client campaigns. They also get into hiring actors on a budget, winning over a nervous CEO, and why Shlomo believes advertising...

#385 | Five B2B marketers share their single best-performing webinar play - with the real numbers to back it up. This Exit Five Live session breaks down the exact tactics behind a signup flow that 5x'd conversions, a post-webinar follow-up system that closed $1M in pipeline in a week, and a series format built to compound results instead of resetting with every session. You'll also get a look at running a webinar program like an in-person conference, and how to borrow an influencer's audience to solve the cold-start problem. Real plays, receipts, and step-by-step mechanics you can steal for your...

#384 | A lot of people say B2B marketing is boring - those people couldn't possibly be in B2B. Take Clare Corriveau, VP of Marketing at Tekmetric: her buyer is an auto repair shop owner who isn't on LinkedIn, doesn't check email, and isn't downloading anything. Clare walks through how Tekmetric built its messaging around a founder who ran a shop for a decade, why every new hire visits an actual shop before touching a campaign, and how peer groups and an unmanaged 6,000-member Facebook community became a real lever in the company's growth engine. This episode focuses on...

#383 | YouTube is the second-largest search engine on the planet, yet few B2B marketers know how to use it optimally. Dasha Shakov, the newest Exit Five podcast host, sits down with Samu Kovács, founder of the B2B YouTube agency KS Media, to unpack why he calls YouTube the hedge against AI slop. Samu breaks down the research process his team runs before writing a script, what belongs in a hook that keeps people watching, and how clients repurpose high-performing LinkedIn posts into YouTube videos instead of starting from zero. They also cover the realistic 90-day timeline for r...

#382 | Rob Sobers has been CMO of Varonis for 15 years - through its growth from startup to public company doing over $700 million in revenue. Dave talks with Rob about how he's stayed sharp enough to keep the job this long, starting with the fact that as an engineer, he still writes JavaScript and even fixes bugs on the Varonis website from time to time. Rob explains why no manager on his team oversees work they don't do themselves, why he'd rather keep marketing simple than layer on complexity as the company scales, and his "reasonableness test" for deciding which programs...

#381 | Dave sits down with Emma Robinson, Head of B2B Marketing at Canva, and Christine Siegrist, VP of Consumer Marketing at Canva, to talk about how the two teams operate as one org instead of fighting over lead credit. They get into Canva's matrixed structure across consumer, B2B, and international, how signals from free users turn into team and enterprise upgrades, and why Canva built a dedicated data science team so marketers can make bigger creative bets instead of smaller, "provable" ones. They also unpack the Love Your Work campaign, why out-of-home ads make a consumer brand feel...

#380 | Eight B2B marketers get two minutes each to pitch the single best marketing play they ran this year - and the crowd votes on who moves forward. Dave Gerhardt and Dasha Shakov hosts the second round of the Exit Five B2B Marketing Blitz, and this episode covers a lot of ground: updating old blog content to win AI search citations, turning product into research that got a company's CEO in front of Congress, an AI agent that rewrites website copy for different buyer personas, why LinkedIn articles are quietly dominating AI search results, scaling influencer marketing from...

#379 | Dave sits down with Patrick Shea, SVP of Global Marketing at BlueVoyant, to discuss how enterprise marketing really works inside a $175 million cybersecurity company built heavily on partnerships. Patrick breaks down the difference between hyperscaler tech alliances and reseller partnerships, how BlueVoyant defines and qualifies leads by account rather than volume, and why he treats partnership stakeholders like a market of their own. They also get into the cost-per-opportunity formula Patrick uses to win budget back from finance, why he's trying to kill long-term planning in favor of annual focus areas and the wild HubSpot coincidence that made him...

#378 | Dave sits down with Ethan Clouser, Head of Marketing at Bland AI, to talk about running marketing at a 22-year-old-founded, enterprise voice AI company that just raised $100 million - at 22 years old himself. Ethan breaks down Bland's early viral bets like the "Still Hiring Humans?" billboard, why they bought Soulja Boy's voice rights for an AI phone campaign, and how a giant red telephone car became one of their best marketing investments. Not to mention, Bland AI's marketing team built its entire website with Claude Code - coded by a guy who'd never written a line of code before...

#377 | 80% of B2B brands are completely forgettable - and it's not because their product is weak. Dave sits down with Louis Grenier, founder of Stand The F*ck Out and author of the book by the same name, to unpack a study he ran scoring 100 B2B companies on how distinctive their brands actually are. Louis breaks down the real difference between "distinctive" and "different," why almost no B2B SaaS company has a mascot (and why that's a missed opportunity), what Wiz and Mutiny are doing that most brands aren't, and why sound might be the most underused...

#376 | Eight marketers. Two minutes each. One live bracket to crown the best-performing paid ad play. We brought back the Blitz Exit Five Live session format - this time for the Paid Ads Playoff: a head-to-head paid ads showdown, where marketers pitch their single best ad from 2026 in real time to our live voting audience. The plays cover a lot of ground: scroll-stopping creative for an unfamiliar category, testing TV as a full-funnel channel, measuring out-of-home, a 9-minute LinkedIn video that beat every short clip, incentivized demo offers, ChatGPT ads, fighting Google's AI Overviews in paid search, and the most...

#375 | If you can double your ad's click-through rate, you can usually cut your cost-per-click in half. Anthony Blatner, founder of Speedwork, sat down with Matt Carnevale to walk through how he's using AI to run LinkedIn ads at scale for clients right now. The conversation covers connecting Claude Code directly to the LinkedIn Ads API to automate bid management and reporting, building personalized ad campaigns, landing pages, and lead magnets for dozens of segments at once, and using account-based marketing principles to get LinkedIn's algorithm to reward you with lower costs. It also gets into avoiding content that reads...

#374 | Most B2B marketers think brand means bigger budgets. This episode shows otherwise. Dave sits down with Ryan Narod, VP of Marketing at Rippling, to talk about what it actually takes to build a brand people recognize in B2B. Ryan walks through the real campaigns behind that shift - from scrappy iPhone videos and webinar promos to high-production customer films and their Super Bowl commercial. Ryan breaks down how he built a content flywheel, why injecting real humans into every piece of content matters, and how they measure brand impact without losing accountability to pipeline. It's a practical...

#373 | Dave sits down with Rebecca Busk, CEO and Partner at Kvalifik, to talk about what it actually takes to show up in AI search. Rebecca breaks down the three types of prompts you need to rank for - foundational, core, and must-win - and why most AEO content fails because it's too generic to ever get cited. They get into the technical side of AEO like crawlability and schema markup, why Reddit and community platforms carry more weight than LinkedIn in AI citations, and a ten-point checklist for content quality you can run against your own site today.