AI-assisted creativity: 6 plays from real B2B teams (Exit Five Live)

Hey, it's Dave. So zoom webinars and events has made our recent exit five live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against exit five. I love that. And look, in a world of AI Slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on air talent, though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our exit five live production team, our content team here at exit five, since they're the ones actually making this all happen. Marissa. I've been doing B2B content a long time. I know. It's hard to hold attention for more than 30 seconds, let alone a whole webinar, but zoom webinars helps recently. We've had nearly 2000 registrants over 500 live and hundreds of hours of watch time on our sessions. Maria, what would you say is driving that it all starts with prep. We do up to seven hours per session, choosing a topic, prep calls, building the run of show and so much more. Zoom webinars and events, everything's in one place, registration, emails, polls and analytics. So it's simple to run that cycle every two weeks. At showtime, I handed back to Marissa in Zoom's production studio with Zoom's production studio. I can set the scenes in advance. So on the big day, I just send them live with speakers and content already in place. Lean transitions, crystal clear audio and video. I feel like I'm running a big game back there. So this is why our webinars have been crushing it lately. Look, they just said we're spending seven hours per session on this. Don't just take our word for a come and see firsthand. We run these every other Friday. It's called exit five live now powered by Zoom webinars and events. So come and check us out. See this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com/exit5. That's zoom.com/exit5. Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI powered go-to-market strategy. Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties. Trusted by companies like DocuSign, DataBank, and Constructor, Convertive builds on the search and marketing work you're already doing and helps optimize your site. So more of your buyers find you and turn it into pipeline. Right now they're offering exit five listeners a free AI search review. They'll run the questions your buyers are actually asking through your Google and AI tools, show you how you stack up against competitors and tell you what's worth fixing. If you're looking for a refresh of your AEO strategy in 2027, this AI search review with Convertive is a great place to start. Check it out. It's Convertive.com/exit5. That's Convertive.com/exit5, and you can also see the link in the show notes. You're listening to the Dave Gerard show. What's up Dave? I think we're live. Dash are we live? Good to see you my friend. What do you've been up to? I haven't seen you since Drive. Did you survive the Drive Blue or whatever it is? I did. Is that because someone's getting mad at me like I created a super spreader event. There was an illness that I had for sure, but okay. The silver lining is the reason that there was a super spreader is because 400 marketers came all the way to never want. Yes. I was already sick. I've definitely already sick. Both of my germ-filled children were sick and I think I infected everyone. This is the last time you guys will be seeing this backdrop. I am moving. You asked what have I been up to? I've been moving. When we do a live, I will have a different backdrop. All right. It's good to see you again. We're back. We did a prep call yesterday. You were in the back of Inuber somewhere, Maria and Marissa. Another world-class effort here on the Exit 5 live show. We're back somehow. We haven't done one in three weeks because of Drive, but we're back here today and the topic of this session. First of all, a little background for you all. This is called Exit 5 Live. This is absolutely not a webinar. It's called Exit 5 Live. Today's topic is AI Assisted Creativity, I'll talk about what that means in a second, but first, here's why we do these things. Every two weeks, we do these live because I just was saying to our speaker's backstage, there's a whole lot of nonsense out there on social media about what's actually possible with AI. We run a whole business at Exit 5 where our job is to be a top resource for B2B marketing professionals, people who this is their job, they do this for a living, and you all actually have real jobs. You have something at stake. We want to showcase the real humans that actually can do this stuff inside of the company because it's a huge gap between what people talk about on LinkedIn and what a VP of marketing or CMO can actually implement into their company. We do a really good job of this here on this not webinar because we showcase real people from in and around our community. We have six awesome B2B marketers here today and the topic is AI Assisted Creativity. These are all people who are doing interesting things with AI inside of the company, not at odds with create. How would you explain this, Dash? How do you articulate this topic? AI Assisted Creativity. What are we going to show people today? We're going to show how real marketers create more content without sacrificing the thing that makes us marketers, creativity, thoughtfulness, taste, judgment. That's my best take at what we're going to be doing today in a bunch of different ways too. I've seen the plays, not going to spoil it unless you sound my LinkedIn pose, but they're all different, different ways of displaying creativity from lead magnets to like persona docs. So you'll see a range of things. Cool. Five minutes each, hey, let's roll the ad for today because before we get into it today, I just want to give a quick shout out to our friends at Walker Sands. They're sponsoring today's session. This is a radio. So this is the best part of this job. I get to do these ad reads feel like a radio host, like I grew up listening to sports talk radio. It's my only moment to do that. So this is brought to you by Walker Sands. Look growing your business is hard. Even when you have a full time team of marketers behind you, the good news is you don't have to do it alone. Look, in my experience, I think this is true for many of you out there. In every great VP of marketing, head of marketing or CMO, there's usually one, two or maybe even three agencies. And that's where Walker Sands come in. They help growth stage and enterprise B2B companies get clear on the business outcomes that matter most. They handle everything from strategy and content to creative PR, digital and revops to help you get there. They call this outcome based marketing music to my ears. They want to help you get results. We love that outcome based marketing instead of building you a growth plan based on something that worked for another company. They actually build your strategy, messaging channels and measurement around your goals. They believe that brand demand and revenue are all part of one conversation, not three separate ones. And if you're ready to make growing your business feel easier, stand out in your market and build pipeline going into 2027, Walker Sands is worth checking out. That's WalkerSands.com/exit5. We will have a link in the chat. I know for sure right now, number one thing in our community, everyone is already locking in the 20 to 27 budgets and planning. So good time to rethink what agencies you're going to have to support you. Dasha, my co-host here, fellow VP, you know, I'm not, I'm just a thought leader now. You're VP of marketing. You're co-hosting this webinar with me. What are we going to do today? We've got three things here. Take us into the run a show, please. Let's do it. Okay. So this is the format that you can expect from us today. First, we're going to introduce our six speakers. It will be rapid fire. We're going to meet everyone you're going to talk to today or hear from today. Then every speaker is going to have a special play. We're going to have five minutes to present their play asked questions. Because after each presenter, we're going to have two minutes of Q&A. So pop those in the chat. We're paying close attention behind the scenes as to which questions come in. And if you have a good questions, we'll read them out and Dave. And then at the end, you have a back question. We're going to ignore it. Yeah. Make it a good question. Skip your back question. Ask a good question. Get a good answer. So make a good. And then we're going to vote on our winner marketers. We're competitive. So vote for your favorite play, Dave likes to say, do not vote for the most charismatic speaker. We love charisma. And don't vote for Maya. She's trolling me in the chat already. She is speaking on this webinar, him and I said webinar, and she's already trolling me in the chat. All right. Hey, let's hit the next slide because one cool thing we added because we are marketers constantly innovating and tweaking. We've been doing little surveys before these things. Josh, Josh, my guy from back in the day, Josh taught me a secret. We should do a secret pocket. I mean, a lot about marketing back when I had a little bit more hair. We did a survey and we always like to ask a couple of questions about you all. Why are you coming in this? What are you looking to learn? I thought this was interesting, which is that we got 692 responses to this survey. Most everyone's using AI to do more content and less time, but that's not the goal. 18% said the issue is like we're only 18% of these people said we're getting higher quality content because we're using AI. And I thought that was really interesting just because everyone's talking about using these tools. We've all just gone to the slot machine and we're writing all of our blog posts and emails and landing page copy with AI, but we're not actually getting better results. I think that's why I'm excited to hear from these six today. Dasha, did I interpret that data? I'm a known bullshitter. So did I interpret that data right? I'm sold. I'm sold. And I think they're like tracks. Well, that's not the answer. That's the answer. No, you interpret it correctly. Yes. Yes. And that's why when I teed this up, I said like we're going to talk about why how you can create more content without sacrificing the quality because you don't want to be another company. Yeah. Green shot this. And it's your boss push back on that slap. Let's do the lineup. Should we introduce our speakers? Yes. We absolutely should. Producer Marissa. Are we ready for the eight top? Let's bring up our speakers. We can introduce them really quickly. Remember, this is rapid fire. Josh, take us away. Hey, I'm Josh from VK Marketing at SuperSide and I'm going to talk about turning for so-and-a-research into a prep doc sales actually wants to use. Amazing. Caitlin. Hi, everyone. I did not bring an iced coffee today. This is a peppermint tea. So no one jumped on me. I am the CMO at Blazile and today I'm talking about how to make magical lead magnets that wow your prospects. Alexandra, you're up. Awesome. Yeah. founder of Impact. I'm a beauty marketer of 16 plus years founder of Impact that helps teams build up their AI infrastructure for their marketing teams. It'll be talking through how to find prospects. You evaluate them and then creatively think about how you can engage them. Also Jessica. I'm just I'm a brand and creative leader exploring how AI can help more people and make create on-brand work. I was most recently at Aerobs today. I'll be sharing more on how I created an on-brand skill for the entire company to use and effectively create their own on-brand work. Sweet Mike. Everyone, Mike Frederick, SVP of Creative at Walker Sands. I'm here today to quickly talk about how to use the latest AI production tools and techniques to turn your slop into something super impactful for your business. Maya, round us out. Hey everybody, I'm Maya based in LA. 13 years B2B vertical marketing five years as leadership. I'm a PMM in a positioning walk so we're going to talk about connecting PMM and AI today. That's true. What are these folks get if they win this contest today? We've got an epic prize. So if you are the winner today, you are going to get an engraving. Dave has taken up engraver himself. He has two exits as one of his hobbies is engraving trophies. So you will get a trophy engraved by Dave. You will get a feature in the best newsletter in all of B2B marketing. Look at all these people that read it. It's epic. So you're going to get some well-deserved clout. You're good. All right. She's really found her voice here as my co-host. I love that. All right, let's do it, Josh. My guy is up first in the lead-off spot. No pressure. Set us off on the right foot. Josh, show us what you've done as SuperSides, sir. Awesome. Thanks, Dave. So, slightly more on my background right now are just finishing up us in his VP of marketing. It's SuperSide, product marketing background, actually starting a new role at Pendo next week. But I built this for SuperSide. SuperSide is a global creative services company focused on AI first video presentations, ads, more scale. And we're selling an enterprise motion to marketing and creative leaders. And on the creative side, really advanced in terms of how we use AI around design, ploppy, and briefing. But when we rolled out clots the entire company, go to market, really had to place and catch up. So we were seeing a lot where refs walking was still content in just a few minutes or prep. And that means they're using out-of-day sales content. They don't know much about the people they're talking to or not enough. There's no context historic context with how we've interacted with them in the past. And that means everything's pretty like generic, right? It's making the prospect do a lot of the work when we can know things. And as a product marketer, in fact, it's a real waste of work, right? Persona's positioning, value props, and customer stories already existing just need to be surfaced in the right way. So imagine if every call put the latest PMM content work in front of the people who really need to see it. So that's drawing up Persona's positioning, value props, approved stats, make your friends and legal happy as well as customer stores. So there's basically two big categories of what we use this cloud skill to develop, right? One is looking at what's going on with the company that you're actually talking to. So what are their hiring plans? What are all the open roles? Have they acquired new companies? Have they launched new things? Then they just get around of funding? Have they had changes in leaderships? Who are their top competitors? And where is their marketing of gaps? Right? All really useful information. So you don't spend the first 30 minutes of a call asking people things you should already know. And you can see an example here for ramp of what the skill can pull up in just a few seconds for a rep. The second is super important. It's who are you actually talking to within the organization? So we connected our cloud skills to really well-defined personas and back those to the buyers who are actually on the call. So we're getting at pain points. We're getting at, you know, in this case, our creative directors. They have too many competing demands. The senior creators are stuck on tactical work. Maybe they just fired an agency. And then the history with the account, right? Reps like to treat everything as if it's like this brand new relationship. But oftentimes, like, oh, we've talked to them four different times and we've seen it sort of fall apart. So really understanding the full context is you're walking into these meetings. So basically with four simple inputs, what company are you meeting with? Who are you meeting with? What's the goal of the meeting? And what do they already know? You can develop this really robust output that not only is great for a rep, but when a rep is bringing in a subject matter expert, you actually have a hand-off doc that's worth using. And it's pulling on everything that's approved and already in your system. So how did I build it? Basically, it's one skill with five connectors and one approved library. The last part being super important. So I built the skill and cloud. I connected it to Salesforce and Jimini. Jimini is like a super gone, very similar functionality, though. We tied it to web search and then Google Drive and Notion. Notion is super important for us. That's where all of our most up-to-date and approved things live, right? And then we created definitions for what the output should look like. For us, that's a one-page brief. Maybe soon, if it's really robust, that's shareable both for the rep and for any subject matter experts that they're pulling in. And then we built into the skill six checks that run before a rep actually sees anything. And this is super important to say, okay, we want to pull this live every time. We don't want to use cash data. We want to pull it live every time so that if you just updated your positioning or add a new customer stories, they're going to get included in this document. We want to reconcile the CRM versus what the rep notes. So we want to make sure we've prioritized our data sources to say, this is the highest value data source. If there's a conflict, this is what we want to pull in. We also want to cite or omit things based on, you know, we want to basically root out anything that's being hallucinated. So I have a double triple check any stat that's getting into this. There better be a source in the link in it. We want to date every trigger. We want to flag anything where we might be making assumptions. And then we only want to use real proof. So case studies from a library with a link approved stats with the link in a source running at a time. So you can build yours really quickly, cleaning your sources, connecting your tools, writing the skill and then testing it on real calls and putting it where reps already work. So for us, that was a combination of Claude and then as a Salesforce widget as well. You got to see goes out there. You can also use this for job and versus going to come versus going to come to your house. Yeah, she's going to come for us. I love that you were like I ran out of time and just kept going. You had a question. I do have a question. Yes. Okay. At our company, our positioning and messaging right now with the pace of AI development is changing so fast. So how do you keep your inputs up to date is my question. Like I love the idea. But if your messaging is changing all the time as the product develops, what are you doing to conquer that? So we store that stuff in notion and I have it search for the latest positioning doc by D, right? So we always want to be overwriting. A lot of it comes down to like data cleanliness. So within your notion doc, I'll label it as current and make sure it's put in the skill. I'll have it pulled for the current version so that it's not pulling on old things. I got a question. Josh, I've known you through work for a while. You've been in this game for a while. AI for marketing overhyped underhyped. Where do you stand? What's like the 10, 15 second answer? Where do you sit on? I say incorrectly. It's not overhyped or underhyped super useful, but it's still you got to be smart and know what the hell you're doing to get value out of it. If you just dump stuff in like if my son dumps stuff in, he's going to get trash out. If I ask the right questions and really massage it for a while, I'm getting a ton of help out of it. So so you have you have taste and experience and if you're able to channel those things, you can use AI to get a lot of stuff that you say have to do manually, thousand percent, thousand percent. Cool. All right. Good job. Nice. Katelyn. Next up. Katelyn is next up. Katelyn has been known to send good direct mail side comment, but I'm just going to leave that out there not to pump her up before she goes. Go ahead. You're off to the races here. Katelyn. Awesome. Thanks, Steve. Okay. So I'm so excited to show you guys how to upgrade your lead magnets with AI. Quick background. I have been a marketing leader for 15 years. Previously, I grew YouTube channel to 120 million views. Now I'm the CMO at Blazel. We help companies activate LinkedIn as a channel for themselves. So kind of the through line of my career is I've always leaned really heavy and toward organic. And so because of that, lead magnets have been like an important tool in my tool belt. And with AI, there's so many cool things you can do now. And so how I think about this is I start with two things. First, I think what is something that I can give you that would be absolutely impossible for you to get on your own. And then I think how do I create a magic moment out of that thing? So center yourself there. And then in the context of what we're doing at Blazel, I started thinking and brainstorming that like, okay, well, everyone I think has this like primal need to understand like, how am I doing against everyone else? So what if I could show you how you're performing on LinkedIn, like give you some kind of like report card or benchmark where it compared you to all your peers and your competitors? So that was like the thing I wanted to create. And this is what it looks like. So it's a multi page report. It's fully customized for every person. And what this does is it's comparing me against 33,000 other marketing professionals. And I can see how my followers rank against other people, how often I'm posting versus other people, my engagements versus other people, how my engagements on different types of content. perform against other people and we bundle it all in kind of this report. And I think one of the cool things about AI is that you can create like these customizable kind of dynamic interactive experiences with lead magnets rather than the static lead magnets that I've used for most of my career. So I did look at Dave and Dasha on this and kind of put you guys head to head and compared you. Look at the follower discrepancy there, Dasha. Sorry. We're just going to be so bad. Gosh. Look at how many followers I have. It kind of sucks to be compared to Dave because he's in the top 1% for everything, but Dasha, you've got really solid numbers there. So, you know, I think you can catch him. Maybe everyone if you're not following Dasha, go over and follow her now and let's see if we can get her more can wow epic plug. I did not pay Caitlin to say this, but I love you. Thank you. It's crazy. All right. Give it up for Caitlin, everybody. So I sent this to Dave and this was the email that he sent back to me. And so for me, he's saying this is sick, very cool to see. And so I think back to those initial two points, which is did I create a magic moment for Dave and did I give him something that he would not be able to get on his own. And so that kind of gives me a sense that I'm on the right track. So what's happened with this? We launched this two weeks ago. We're seeing a 1.23% conversion rate of total web traffic. So like, we don't get a lot of website visitors. This is a good outcome for us. So I'm very happy with this. Now how did we build it? And before I start off, all of the marketers on like some scary spiral of like, how advanced did I be with AI? I'm in a preface this by saying, I did not build this entire thing myself. I had some engineering support, okay? But the overarching piece of this is we used to a company called Abify. Abify is really, really cool. It's a marketplace for publicly scrapable data. And you can literally download almost anything from Facebook ad libraries to TikTok deals to LinkedIn profile data, Instagram data, eBay listing data, Amazon listing data, like anything that's publicly scrapable on the web, you can probably buy it on Abify. For us, profiles cost 4 cents per thousand profiles that we downloaded. And then what do we do once we download that data? So once we download the data, we have to put it into a structured table. So that's an Excel spreadsheet for us. And then the profiles are all saved to this master database. So we have to start by seeding the database with several thousands of profiles, because otherwise, who are you comparing yourself to? We now have over 300,000 profiles in the database. So we've spent over $12,000 scraping profiles to be able to create these reports. Now once you have the report created, I had to design a PDF that would look really cool. And again, this is where I want to create that kind of magic moment. I want to look for the details that are possible with AI by being able to like customize the cover sheet, customize the table of contents, actually pull people's like photo avatar from LinkedIn into the report so that they see themselves. These are all things that weren't possible before AI. And then we just hooked up endpoints to our website. Next I want to turn this into like a LinkedIn post that people can share. And if you guys want to see this live, you can download your own LinkedIn report card and get the report using this form of code. Wow. Perfectly timed. That was great. Dave. Do you have any questions or can I annoy Katelyn with the type of earth questions? Please. Katelyn. I'm wondering, what do you do when someone actually downloads the report? Because like I take it that your company like this is aligned with your brand and like you want to nurture these people. So what happens after I get one of these LinkedIn thing download? Yeah. So you move into a nurture sequence. We know that usually you're kind of interested in LinkedIn as a channel. If you're downloading a report like this, you want to know stats or you want to start like a lot of people use this as like a benchmark of like, okay, I know my stats don't look great right now, but I really want to work on this and I want to see progress. So like it's nice to have like a starting point here. But yeah, mostly we're pushing into webinar series. I love webinars. Frankly, I don't think that they're dead either Dave. And so doing a lot of like education forward stuff with people once they download the report. It's weird you said that because this isn't a webinar, but I take your point. That tool was used to make the cards, someone missed it in the chat. So we used chat CBT to kind of categorize the different industries. And then we used codex and clawed to actually build the reports. Beautiful. Okay, get your report and get nurtured by Caitlin up next. We have Alex. He's been so good. All right. You ready? I'm going to kick off the timer. Awesome. Alex, founder of Impact, I'm going to be walking through a prospecting chain. Essentially, how do you go about finding an account on the wild, qualifying it and building an action plan around it? So to start, this workflow only works because there's a lot of context underneath it as a foundation. It has information about what a good account looks like, what a bad account looks like, what counts as evidence as signals as well. And my second brain, which every day updates and has information around who I've talked to, what the results look like, dates, as well as the resources I have available. So what I'm going to show you is a condensed version of the workflow in play, but it's essentially two phases. It's focused on collecting judging and the short list. The short list comes to me and I insert myself as the human in the loop because I want to be able to evaluate that output for two reasons. I want to be able to give it feedback whether it's working and reinforcing that good behavior or tweaking in and improving that workflow up front. And then the second phase is more usage heavy, so I want to be really just deliberate about what I push forward. And so if there's something I know about an account that I recommended and it doesn't need to go to the second phase, I'll opt out. Otherwise, I'll push it through and I'll go into deep research and report. So what you're seeing right now is a workflow. I kick it off with a plain language prompt. It pulls up a skill that has the workflow instructions and it references the two folders with context and finds accounts in that shape. It then gives me a recommendation. This case two accounts with information about why and then also calls it the near misses and what it parked. So 13 accounts didn't make the cut for fun. Z's I'm throwing in another account. This is coming through the pipeline or the target list or hurt through the great fine. It gets evaluated as well in this particular case. It's getting parked. So I'm pushing forward the to it recommended and it's going into deep research deep research looks across six to 12 months of data to see what's happened to the company and then gives me a slack message with a summary and the report linked to it. The report itself has information about the company. What's happening in the marketing today? Why now? And then the buying group with their contact information and then the play itself. So what to do week over week? Things to consider what to do before I actually kick off this campaign and then the evidence trail. The evidence trail. Let's me click through to make sure that anything it's claiming I can actually verify myself. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by optimizely. If you want to know what AI agents can actually do for a marketing team, optimizely is where I'd point you to right now for a real example. Last month, we ran an X to five live session where a bunch of our members showed off their best AI agent use cases and McKeill, director of AI innovation at optimizely, actually won the whole session. He showed us how he used optimizely's AI agent platform to run an ABM campaign that gave 2000 accounts their own landing pages built from signals like job postings, press releases and leadership changes, that's like the holy grail of ABM, by the way. Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for you, the B2B marketer. You can build your own agents like McKeill did or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. They also just launched virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns and keep your website optimized. If you're being asked to look into AI agents right now, optimizely should be at the top of your list. Go and see how they can help you reclaim your time and build cool stuff just like McKeill did. Check them out at optimizely.com/exit5, that's optimizely.com/exit5. Hey, Steve, today's episode is brought to you by compound growth marketing. They're a full funnel, demand-gen agency that I've personally hired twice. Yep, before I was just a thought leader, I was a real marketer and CGM was one of the best agencies that I worked with. They help high growth software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They've helped an enterprise cybersecurity company grow pipeline 168% year over year with full funnel media and an HR tech company grow 48% through paid search and they can do the same for you. They offer a combination of full funnel paid advertising strategy and execution, AEO and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you and this works because they were started by an actual former VP of marketing who really gets this space that you work in in B2B. Visit compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5 to see how they can help you meet your 2027 revenue goals that's compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. And then nothing pushes forward unless I act on it and want to kick it off to another workflow. So what you saw is not a new tool. It's actually built with my own cloud description. It's written instructions into log. So the instructions themselves are how to collect, how to judge and then also when building the report, how to pick the play. And this is where it gets creative. It understands that I can build a landing page that I have resources already available, that I can also clip and slice videos that I'm part of and then give me a recommendations and how to approach them. It also knows where I am geographically. So if they know that they're nearby, try to reach out and grab a coffee or if they're going to an event because they talked about it on LinkedIn, go and try it be at that event or they might have a warm, you know, mutual contact, can there be an intro? And so that's the instructions and then the template for the report itself allows me to actually digest what's coming to me, the information. and then the run of the outcome log tracks the run so that I can actually know what happened this run and the next run understands what happens as well. The instructions themselves have parameters so things like it's allowed to not know so it doesn't try to fill in the blanks and give me an answer. It tags everything it sees a scene or guest and then has the links to anything it's seen and the dates as well. There's a passive fail gate so that it knows where the buckets are for parked rejected or pursue and it isn't read into silence. So if it doesn't find like a hiring post, it doesn't assume that they're not hiring. It claims unknown unknown means if there's many of them. Park it. Park it means revisit later or I have clients that actually just put them into a paid targeted ad campaign instead. I have two versions of messaging because I look towards folks that are either no marketing teams or have lead marketing teams and they get different engagements. But it can be different personas. It can be different verticals. And so considering what you might want to use today first is your criteria really writing it down in a way that I can read it. So something like I'm looking for a high growth company is not definitive enough. It doesn't know what high growth means and it might define it itself. Is it a year over year revenue increase? Is it a hiring post increase as well? And then make sure it knows to tag its evidence that if a guess it can note that but not qualify on guesses that anything missing is not necessarily a no and then test it out against what you know is already working. If an account is a right fit put it through that workflow see if it comes back as pursue then it's working if it's not it might be your criteria that needs to be tweaked in might be something within the rules or rubric that needs to be changed. And so for me this has changed the time I spent looking for accounts but also how I meaningfully engage them whether I can see them in person invite them to an event emails kind of the last thing that we'll do with this outbound but it gives me the opportunity to meaningfully engage them. Excellent. So it seems like you've gone really deep here. I'm just curious. So number one, what is your top AI tool of choice? Something that you're using the most in your work life and the number two is something that you see yourself doubling down on when it comes to AI this quarter. What do you want to do more of here? Yeah, so for tool has been Claude Claude does a lot on its own everything it used here today was public information that I was able to find with bright instructions in the right rules. It has access to things like Apollo but it asks me before it leverages that to enrich it further so it can provide a lot of things publicly and it can do quite a bit is just the setup that you know you put behind it. And what I'm trying to keep on leading into as I learn all of this is figuring how to connect different automations and where I can start giving more trust to AI and that's the evaluations giving a lot of feedback. Making sure there's a loop involved and having different AI judge the output itself and then learning how to trust that as well so that it can be a bit more autonomous and do a little bit more without me. One quick question in the chat kind of a loaded question the answer if you can did the conversion rate and other stats increase after introducing the workflow such a marketing question but did this produce better results for you. This version of it is fairly new because I've used to be doing outbound and how one is a lot of noise and it cold up on is not necessarily the best version of this but this play is now around finding opportunities to meet the person or find intro through warm contacts so still TBD but it is giving me really valuable information about how to engage them. Like I'll do all that events and people that I know cool all right thanks Alex hey quick two second break here just to tell you as we move some things around behind the scenes we've been doing a bunch of events lately because I'm long on meeting people and being around you imagine that like this vibe is so high imagine the version of this in person so two weeks from Thursday we're doing a meetup in New York City we did this last year there's not a ton of room there's a hundred spots we sold about fifty tickets yesterday. I'm going to be hosting a panel we're going to do a live episode of our podcast there talking about what's working what's not things are going to double down on or cut heading into twenty twenty seven and New York City is always great to go there just a good opportunity so if you're seeing this and you're in and around the New York area the pages up right now exit five dot com slash NYC me Dan Matt Allison from the team are going to be there plus panel plus some snacks and good hang out bring your hand sanitizer come see us and we'll see you in New York OK. All right back to the readily scheduling program oh Marissa's in my year thing repeat the URL that is exit five dot com slash NYC exit five dot com slash NYC or just ask Claude when is the exit five NYC meet up I'm sure Ben has us ranking for some page in there OK Maria also posted in the chat to make it super easy all right we've got Jess are you ready I'm going to kick off the timer. I'm ready I'm not going to tell you who but someone on our team is a super fan of yours I don't want to embarrass them I don't want to say anything but you got a lot of fans over here on the exit five bench. I'm fans of you all thank you. All right brand skills for everyone so hi again I'm just I formally led brand of air ups and a platform and actually in between jobs I start something new and exciting on Monday but today I'm going to walk you through a library of skills created for the company early in the year. As soon as cloud desktop was introduced to everyone and before I do that I'm going to quickly just walk through what skill is if you can think of a skill like a reusable playbook or even a style. Guy for AI agent that basically gives it your instructions once and then you can reuse it across projects so instead of prompting over and over and over again it basically is one script that you can use and cloud or codex can pull it automatically typically. I'll share that step around so you can kind of poke into these resources why did I create a library of brand skills I envision those very scary scenario in my mind that if I did not do this now that everyone at the company had these AI super powers at their fingertips they would just be shipping slop left and right to like debt one pages social assets and because my team was very small is effectively myself and like two other brand designers. We just didn't have time to take on that like huge level of production work so I was future proofing a realistic slap again in scenario if you will and then. Also the time saving like I mentioned that comes from reprompting so nobody wants to go into cloud or codex and say use this fun use this logo again using same color palette but the skill library was really like a big time saver for that. So how did I do it step one if you are design team or if you already have like a fully built out brand style guide and figma or canba that is an excellent place to start so before figma how to really strong mcp I literally went in and took screenshots of our entire brand style guide. I dragged those screenshots into cloud code along with our logo files or font files and first I just wanted it to organize everything for me super cleanly before I gave all of that information into the skill file. So I asked it to create a landing page for me this is also as I was learning cloud code back in February and I had it codify from those screenshots our entire color palette how that looked in codes this would eventually get fed into the skill our type system which fonts to use how we treat eyebrows headlines body copy type scales very very dialed in and as soon as I got all of this defined and I thought it looked really good I then basically copied this URL and pasted it right into. pod and I use cloud skill builder and this is the most meta thing about cloud is that they have this amazing skill that actually helps you create skills and so you can start with their skill builder or you can just prompt cloud like you see here let's create a skill together I pasted in that URL of the style guide and it got to town it got to work and starting building out the library so I went through a journey of failing a ton when building these skills I honestly never built a skill before my entire life. Let alone that I know what it was or what it did and so where I ended up very recently was learning about how to nest skills within each other. So instead of creating one master skill that contain all the styles for all of the various permutations and outputs your brand might encompass I created a parent skill which you can see up here and then that parent skill had children and those children can look like different asset types of social assets or decks or your web system your voice and tone guidelines and depending on what you ask cloud or codex to create let's say it's a social asset. It'll first call the parent skill and then that parent skill will basically scan the children skills for social asset and call that one. It's a really efficient way for the skills to be working together as a family because the skills won't work if there are two jam packed with information they'll basically time out and will burn tokens. Real quick again feel free to screenshot this it'll be the deck I leave behind but it took me a while to learn how to structure skill effectively and so they should be brief they should contain you know the family of skills up top that way the parent skill knows what skills tools and files to call. And then you should give it a purpose what matter to the road. If you're going to try this on Monday if you don't already have your brand defined and figmar elsewhere I suggest you start there that way you know what you want your outputs to look like. And then again you can use cloud or codex to build your visual skills and just start testing and see how it does and keep giving it feedback. All right the homie dasha has some questions for you but a lot of love for Jess in the chat would love to know where she's going and what she's doing because it seems like a hot commodity in the marketing game there dasha you. You had some questions line up I had a feeling this would be right up your alley yeah I love this I'm curious just personal curiosity how. How deliberate, like AirOps did this thing where all the headshots had like the same kind of grainy look. Yeah. And the deliberate was that because I think that move is genius because no one ever has consistent headshots, but everything that comes out of AirOps looks so consistent. Are you the person behind that and like, how deliberate was that? How was that thing born? Yeah. I am the person behind that. So that was done for the rebrand that I loud and worked on last year before we announced a series B and the whole story behind the brand strategy was effectively giving an homage to content of the past as we look to the future. And we were really inspired by those black and white hand-drawn Wall Street Journal like stipple illustrations. And so we decided to make that our headshots and then it had like a very nice effect on LinkedIn because if you saw someone with that headshot, you're like, oh yeah, they obviously work AirOps. Yes. You know, it's so smart. I think like as a marketer, my takeaway was if we ever like do a rebrand, we should have a consistent approach for headshots because like when you have, I don't know, guest speakers or whatever, it's so hard to have everyone look consistent. Someone got their headshot in the '90s. Someone created it with AI, but everything that comes out of AirOps, everyone looks super consistent. Awesome. Okay. Thank you, Jess. We are onto our next speaker, Mike. You are up and I'm about to reset your timer. We're as part of the timer is only we and the guests can hear it. And so it's like our guest goes, oh, and then we don't, and the audience has no idea what just happened. Pretty anticlimactic. All right, Mike. Welcome to the show. Just 10 seconds. It's my bad, my bad. I'll give it back to you. We're live with Dave and Dasher. Perfect. For me as a creative director, just so you know, I'll tell you a little secret. I don't view AI as a process improvement tool to me. It's all about opening up creative possibilities for your business. And let me share a quick example with you in the B2B security industry, their products have always been about surveillance and security. But AI technology is now baked into those products. So they can provide more things like business insights and intelligence or client, Hanwavision North America asked us to campaign around that messaging. So in 2005, we created this campaign, cleverly taking their product off the wall and bringing it into the business to showcase these AI enhance insights that these products can now provide. Now, to make this happen, we used mostly traditional production stock photography, product photography. But for the motion you just saw, we used AI. And we used one platform in that case, mid journey, to make the character move. Now the campaign was a resounding success. So Hanwav asked us to continue it this year. Trump starts just a year later and what you can do in AI production right now with the tools and technology available is light years ahead. We're able to make the character way more compelling instead of using mostly traditional production. We're able to move in and use almost all AI production, we're able to seamlessly move that character into the vertical industry that Hanwavis sells into. What's really cool about what we can do now, though, is video. What we can do in video emotion, and this is just a behind the scenes look of something we're working on right now, but you can see the clear difference in one year from how we could move it with one technology in mid journey to what we can do today in motion. And why say it's not really all about the process is because the process is still complex. The process still takes a lot of human creativity and ingenuity. This is just a look at all the prompts and thinking that my creative team went through to make that campaign. So there's still a lot to do in terms of process, but how it all comes together today is using node-based AI, greater production tools. We use figma weave and what figma weave does is one subscription, one payment that gives you access to over 200 of the world's best AI platforms or model variations of those platforms. Now, what I mean by node-based, if you're not familiar, if you looked in the upper middle, that's a typical prompt you put into any AI platform, but what comes out are options from a myriad of different AI platforms. So you get to choose and the AI is helping you make the stuff that works the best. And then you go to your next prompt again, it opens up options from all sorts of different platforms. So you're not creating sloppy, not creating homogenous stuff that everyone else is creating. What you're doing at the end, you have this end asset that's made up of all the best AI, whatever works best for what you're trying to communicate. Now, that doesn't mean we don't use single use tools. We use them all day every day. Claude in particular is amazing for creating prompts for tools like figma weave. Now, what this allows us to do today and what can allow you to do today is do your production in many different ways. Anyway, from AI assisted, like that first sample I showed, all the way to AI led, like that last sample I showed, and what we often hear from our clients and what you often might ask yourself, well, how do I know what's right for my project or for my brand? Well, there's no single answer for us. We're asking ourselves and we're asking our clients a series of different questions. Like is AI going to strengthen or distract from the message? How's the audience going to feel about using AI? Hey, New York's got a new law. You have to label it as AI if it's a synthetic performer. So will the audience care? Is there room for less control and more iteration? And it's maybe hard to see here. So if you just boil it down, it's really a decision tree. And it's something we put ourselves through for every project we're working on and something you can do as well and something I'd be happy to share with you if you just ping me a lantern, but it can quickly tell you what's the best use of AI from assisted to integrated to full AI led for any one of your projects. So again, back to that process versus possibilities, I'll let my friend at Hanwa close us out. The real power of AI isn't accelerating the process, but expanding what's possible. Dave, I didn't need your 10 seconds. My bad, it's all right. You're good. So we got a couple of questions for you. Dasha has one and I want to ask specifically about the New York City, hold on me, let my hunger games, Jurassic Park song. One question about like the New York City, you know, in New York, you have to label that. Has anyone had to answer that question and decided to not use AI? How would you coach someone through that? Like you have to disclose it, but you use it anyway. That's a really interesting nuance that I haven't thought through yet. Yeah. And it's the whole state of New York. If it's a any heart or a representation of a human, it has to be listed as an AI generated synthetic performer. And it definitely has. We have had clients that said, I don't want that out there. I don't want people to see that or it gets in the way. And we're assuming other states will follow suit as well. And it's not just that. I mean, if you're making ads on any of the meta properties to, they'll often auto label it as AI generated if their algorithm sees it as. So it's a real concern and it's good. There's nothing wrong with that. It's good. But if you want your campaign to be authentic and you want human to human connection, maybe you shouldn't be using all AI anyway, but this helps make that decision maybe a little easier because they're going to know right away that it's not even the way I can create very human like characters today. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I have a question from the chat. I guess I'm just curious more broadly, like, what is your tech stack to create this? The video models are changing so quickly, are you using one model to storyboard and another to actually create the video, like, what is your process there? And then I guess the second part of my question that also came in is, what is your process for storyboarding all of this out? What have you found to be most effective? Yeah. It's a great question. And it all starts at the idea. It doesn't go to the tactic, whether it's a video, whether it's a static thing, it all goes back to the concept. It's still a very human process with human creative teams. But we use AI, you know, in depth to help us bring those images to life, help show clients or show stakeholders what it might look like. And that process is not much different than it's always been to create storyboards. It's just AI makes it a little quicker and allows us to show something that's a little closer to what production reality would be. And in there, we might use the singular tools if we're just trying to crank out a sample image or we might use, like I said before, a figma weave where it allows us to pull from really any of the models. But we're not going in and saying, hey, I've got a technology brand and letting AI come up with a concept. But it's still too homogenous when you do that. So it's still very human lead of coming up with the idea and it's using AI to help you produce what that idea is. Awesome. Next person is up and presenting. Hello. Hello sir. I'm Maya. Hands on keyboard. I want to ask a couple of questions of you all as well. I am a product marketer by upbringing. So I'm very familiar with all the like invisible work that happens across go-to-market teams, including AI systems building these days. How many of you right now are working someplace, and also in addition to your remit there, being asked to build AI systems to help you do this work. And how is it going for you where I am on month two of a small sabbatical between roles and Caitlin, okay, cool, cool, anybody else, awesome, Lindsay, Daniel, Sarah, yeah, it's hard, right? What I found was, yeah, no time for it, right? Oh, Madeline, shout out. We had really aggressive goals, revenue goals to close. We could not stop the velocity of work toward those goals to build an AI system. And so this was the greatest thing about leaving. I left and I said, hey, how can I build this system for myself? And so that's what I'll tell you a little bit about today. This works for you for yourself, if you're a product and you're not. searching for a job. You want to productize yourself. It works for you if you're in-house or in an agency, etc. So it's like the backbone of everything we've heard today and we'll get into it. These are the nine grounding positioning questions that I hope that everyone can start with. Everyone's familiar with like positioning. So your value props, your differentiation, but I actually took some notes from Dave and his early work around, you know, the change that you wish to see in the world in the old game, new game, and found that these nine questions are the best nine questions to really give yourself your teams, your AI systems, the true backbone of what you are doing together. You and your customers, you see that shared purpose question. And I'm using a word here called canonized. So canonized means that these answers are the source of truth for your systems. Okay, so you save the answers, answer those questions, put them into positioning, into markdown files or documents, right? Markdown file is just a fancy name for a document. Set the rules for how your system will use this information. This is the most human, most important aspect of creating governance. And then actually use these across real work, right? So have your system move from building it, answering those questions, setting the rules, using in real work, and choose something like a website, right? Like I started building this entire system around my own website. All right, so here's what I use. I use a combination of codex and clawed, mostly codex, visual code studio. This was the clincher for me, as soon as I learned visual code studio, my life really changed. But this is not super hard. And it's also something that you can always fall back to to ask AI how to teach you to do this meta prompting. So that's always a fallback. And yeah, Figma is huge. That's what created this presentation. And of course, your source material is so important, right? All of these source materials that ladder up to support the answers to those nine fundamental positioning questions. So in my operating system, instead of showing you my really messy visual code studio, a screenshot from that. Here it is. This side is the foundation. This side is the work. They are part of one tree in my file tree. I'm still new to this off, still learning. And so you can see here the positioning here. I have some beliefs in there. Basically, everything that others have already been talking about as well, creating video sales enablement, leave magnets, brand skills, all of these can go here as guidance. You can tell the system how to govern that information and then how to apply it. So that is a little bit for me. Foundations so necessary, Todd, for sure, when in doubt meta prompt, ask your AI friends how to learn that is exactly what I spent the entire month doing after I left my last job and excited to apply it again next month when I start anyone. Go. Good job, Maya. We've got time. Producer Marissa said we've got time for one question and then we're going to run the winter. So what's your process around updating skills as positioning and other messaging evolves here, Maya? Yeah, I mean, I found that especially in the AI era evolves faster than ever before. But I do find that some of those foundational questions like what are you unique differentiators who can serve some of those things, don't change. And so it's important as you go through those answers to identify what does change like perhaps your product capabilities change and what does not change and canonize what does not change and then go back on a regular basis and update what does change. The good thing about such a system is once you update the foundation, everything else that water flows down it is also updated. All right. Is it that time? That sure. I think it's that time. I've been waiting for it. Let's roll that thing. So here's how you're going to pick a winner here. And I just actually saw someone posted their first real trophy I've seen in the wild. So it does exist. But here we go. This is it. I don't want who was the best presentation about which of these will you try? Will it be Josh, Caitlin, Alex, Jessica, Mike, or Maya, which of these AI creative things in marketing? Do you actually want to take and bring back all Jessica's coming out? This is like that water gun game at the fair that I was just at. You know, also we're going to do deep dives on more of this stuff. Maria has some stuff in the community. We've been doing AMAs on these. We'll talk about in a second. But do we have a final result here? How many votes are in? Oh, it's close. This is where we need the music. The votes are still coming in. If you're hearing my voice and you haven't voted yet, please put a vote in on this session. Okay, I think we're going to be the determining vote. Can we call it? I think we could call it. Ladies and gentlemen, let's give it up for Jessica. The proud you all. Hopefully you'll take this to your new job and proudly display your new trophy. Or if you do get a new job, go back and negotiate a 10% increase in pay now that you are the owner of one of these coveted exit five trophies. Dash, are we allowed to ask for anything? I haven't been looking in the producers chat here. Where do we go from here? We got to do a little announcement. A lot of questions came in the chat. Hopefully Dave, you know where I'm going with this. A lot of questions in the chat. And the good thing is that there's a place to answer and get all of those questions answered. So Dave, take it away. Talk about the community. Why do you start this thing? And what can you do inside? I'm not going to tell you why I started this thing. It's been four years of hard work working on this thing. But yeah, we every time we do these, we do get a bunch of messages. I wish there was more. I want to go deeper on these things. And so Maria has been doing an awesome job in our community. So if you haven't good exit five calm, you can join in our community there. We're going to have a bunch of these top speakers come in and do an AMA and get some of these questions answered specifically. It's fun. If we can do this asynchronously because you can actually post something about your company, they can hang out and answer specific questions, but also give us feedback. Let us know what you want more. And so we'll do that there. And I think we got one other thing. And if you want to be on one of our next sessions like this, our whole thing is like, this is not about me or Dasha having hot takes about marketing anymore. We're just the host here. This is all about you. We want to feature your examples. So if you want to be like Josh, Caitlin, Alex, Jessica, Mike, or Maya, you can actually be part of our experts network. Reach out to Maria directly or go to exit five calm slash network and apply next session. We're doing. We're going to pivot a little bit from all this AI stuff. We got one on ABM October 9th. And then we'll see you in New York City. If you're around on October 15th. And then real quick, we do like to measure everything being the good marketers here that we are. So we like to get feedback on all of these sessions. Do you just give us a rating real quick? How would you rate this session based on did it hold up to the expectations that you had going in the copy we wrote in the landing page? Did you get value and useful knowledge from this? Give us a rating here. Those really help. We look at them all. We rank them. We feed them to Claude and we say Claude, which should the next topic be? No, we don't do that. But we do look at them. All right. That's it. Thank you to everybody. This was an awesome session. Appreciate all our speakers. Almost 300 people here live shout out to Marissa Maria, the content team, Dasha, my co-host. We'll see you on the next one of these. If you're one of our speakers, don't leave yet. Just want to say high, real quick backstage. Otherwise, we'll see everybody on the next exit five live in two weeks, all about ABM, okay? See you later. See you. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit five and you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating and a review, go check it out right now on our website exitfive.com. Our mission at exit five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. There's no better place to do that than with us at exit five. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers, building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out learn more exitfive.com and I will see you over there in the community. Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by customer IO. They're one of our longest running sponsors. Customer IO helps marketing teams get more impact from every message they send so you can reach the right people with the right message at the right moment. What we love about customer IO is that they have a great team of marketers who really care about the craft. They just get marketing and understand our audience. Molly, Rosie and the team bring something creative every time that we work together at our exit five event in Austin. They handed out cowboy boots in our newsletter. They shared an AI prompt cookbook and that drive last month they were giving out Airbnb gift cards and AirPods. They believe marketing is a craft that takes creativity, thought and taste and know AI can't do this part for you. The best teams treat AI as infrastructure and built the right way it actually makes marketing feel more human not less customer IO helps product teams feel personalized campaigns across email SMS push in app and web hooks using their own first party data and today more than 9,000 brands trust customer IO to send their messages including notion less mills and Angie. 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