Dave Goes UNBOUND: 5 Things B2B Marketing Leaders Are Doubling Down On

Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Look, I hear about AI agents every single day on the internet, in the XFive community. But it's confusing. It's a little bit overwhelming, which platform should I be using? Which agents are actually worth building? How do I even set this up? There's a lot of noise out there. It's kind of hard to tell what's actually going to make the job easier, versus what just can be another thing to manage. Or is this just a cool little thing some guy wrote about on LinkedIn? Well, Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers. You can build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. This is really smart. They also just launch virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that can learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your whole website optimized. Humans, that's us, of course. We still get the final say over these robots, but this seems really useful. This is worth leaning into right now. Right? Agents have so much potential and using AI in a platform like Optimizely for the stuff that each or week. So you can get more time for the strategic thinking and actual fun parts of your job on into that. Let's make marketing about the craft of marketing. Again, I think there's something there. So go and check out Optimizely right now. See how their AI agents can help you with your B2B marketing operations. They purposely built this for B2B marketing. This is really cool. Optimizely.com/exit5. That's Optimizely.com/exit5. Go and check out their agents. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Webflow. Webflow is a website platform for the agentic web built for modern marketing teams to build fully custom sites that perform in AI search. No developer needed. Your website isn't just your home page anymore. It's actually the first thing an AI agent is going to read about your company and from there, decide whether or not to recommend you to a potential customer. Before a demo, before a sales call, before anyone on your team even knows that buyer exists, which means if your site isn't structured to show up in AI search, you're not in the buying conversation. It's as simple as that. Webflow is the platform marketing teams use to fix that. You can build a fully custom site without a developer, optimize it for AI search, govern your content, and actually see how agents are reading and interpreting it all in one place. Make your website your biggest growth engine right now with Webflow. Check them out at Webflow.com/4/exit5. That's Webflow.com/FOR/exit5. All right. This is a fun little change of pace episode for everyone. I was down in Boston for some crazy reason after Drive. I decided to go immediately next week back down to Boston to check out HubSpots Unbound event. It had been a decade since I had been there. I knew a bunch of people from the Exit5 community were going to be there. I wanted to go really with no agenda, just have some meals with people and be content Dave. I almost forgot to do this and Marissa pinged me and was like, "Hey, are you going to make any content while we're down there?" I grabbed my phone and I was literally just going down the escalator, saw a bunch of people, a bunch of familiar faces, and friendly folks, marketing leaders from pinning around the Exit5 community. At Unbound Live on the conference floor, I asked everybody two questions. I said, "Hey, tell me one thing you're doubling down on in your work life right now and tell me one thing you're doubling down on in your personal life right now." That's what you're going to hear. This mashup of episodes, this mashup of little audio voice notes that was recorded straight from my phone from the floor at Unbound. I hope you like this. It's a nice little change of pace. Send me a note. David, Exit5, if you want to suggest a topic for the future, have any feedback or just want to say hi to me and the Exit5 team, shout out to producer Marissa for making this happen. Last minute, here it is. Enjoy this little short little episode all about doubling down. The number one thing everyone is talking about at these dinners and lunches and around the venue. It's actually, I'm seeing less people interested in. It's different than it was three or four months ago about this clawed skill or that. The bigger conversation now, especially among founders and executives. It's like, how do we stand out? How do we differentiate? Everyone is saying the same thing or they're saying, "Hey, I powered this or I powered that," or you have all these beliefs within the market that a product can or can't do this thing or, "Hey, maybe why do I even need your $100,000 SaaS product at all because I have clawed?" The marketers at these companies, the number one challenge that they have to fight against, is one, the perception that AI can do all these things and so your $20 a month subscription at ChagyBT can do this thing for you. And the number two is there's just so much noise and so much competition in any industry because of AI. Everyone's adding new AI features and this and that. It's really hard to stand out. Even if you have something that's better, faster, easy to use, people like it more, people don't necessarily believe that because they're skeptical of marketing and so a lot of it comes back to how do you stand out? I think the number one thing for marketers right now is to really, it's less about tactics and channels and it's more about digging into company strategy, positioning, messaging but not just website messaging actually fundamentally go to market. Bringing marketing back, marketing needs to have more involvement again in the four P's of marketing, not just, "Hey, here's this update we got from product," or "Here's the packaging for this," or he's like, "Marketing, it's almost like strategy is going to be more important than ever because all the tactics and stuff that can be done with AI or any of these tools, the harder conversations are where the humans need to be involved." That's the CRO, talking to the CMO and the chief product officer and the CEO, making big bets and strategic decisions on where the company is going to go. I think it's a great time right now for marketers or aspiring marketing leaders and current marketing leaders to really think about strategy. I'll give you an example. I was at dinner tonight with someone on Katie from SurveyMonkey's team and we just were talking about Katie on our podcast. I don't think this episode has come out yet or maybe it's coming out soon, but a couple of years ago they rebranded to momentum or something like that because they didn't want to be perceived as SurveyMonkey in the enterprise, but it's actually funny because today in 2026, it's almost like being SurveyMonkey, they're going back to their roots and back to their brand and the monkey is actually what's going to make them stand out and be recognized. There's a whole interesting thing there that it's like it's either people are talking super tactical about like how do you use Claw to run their ads or they're really high level and I think this is the really important part is like making marketing a strategic partner to the business in terms of generating revenue as opposed to obsessing over little channels. We need more marketers having a seat at the table with the product team, with the sales team, with the CEO and influencing and truly being the voice of the customer and understanding the market again. Alright, so I'm here with Jonathan Hunt, he's VP of Media at HubSpot, I'm two questions I'm asking everyone. What is one thing that you're doubling down on at work and what's one thing you're doubling down on in your personal life? Okay, at work, it's going beyond thinking about brands as just being channels, but thinking about brands as being things that people experience across all different mediums and touch points. So brands as events, as webinars, as YouTube channels, as newsletters. What's an example? Like one of your shows is a brand? Like, yeah, my first million, for example, like imagine that being a live multi-thousand person event at the 92Y. So things like that really showing up in ways in New York. Yeah, exactly. Guys, sorry, it's too cool. Yeah, but really, really understanding that customer for human beings too and like they want to experience your brand and not just YouTuber newsletters, but in real life as well. Yeah, do more in real life. Okay, and then something you're doubling down on in your personal life. Examples are like, you know, someone mentioned like, I want to read more. I used to read a book a week and I want to get back into, you know, playing pickleball or I want to learn how to cook. Yeah, yeah. I'm probably trying to get probably trying to be more present for my kids, I think, in general. I never ending. What does that mean for you at home? How does that play out? Oh, you know, not delaying things for multiple weekends and feeling really bad about being this like absentee father figure, but like trying to show up more, you know, and like being okay with the fact that they busted at four o'clock in the afternoon and I may have a meeting in 30 minutes and be like, you know what? That's okay. Good. It's a feature not a bug. Yes. All right. Good job. I'm on the escalator with Palmer Palmer's VP of Marketing at G2. Actually, someone yesterday asked me one of my favorite brands of all time B2B brands. You know what I said? I bet you said, I'm going to guess MailChem. I said, I mean, I said that. I would say the same thing. Your OG MailChem guy. We're here at unbound/inbound. Yes. What's one thing at work that you're doubling down on right now? I know everybody's saying AI, but really for our side, it's like, what's the balance between efficiency and effectiveness? Because I feel like everyone's been like, oh, AI, AI, everything. And it's like, what's the outcome? Like, what are we driving? 12 hours. And so I think my team sort of, we're trying to figure that out and do it in the right way. Okay. Side questions. This is not my right. No question. You're here. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you worked at MailChem. Yeah. I know you. I know you get marketing a certain way. How do you guide them to like not AIFI, everything? Like they're like, lean into the productivity piece of it versus the like, hey, you're a designer. I don't want you to go use cloud design to like, you can still design and trust you to be a designer, same way with a writer. Okay. But it's like, what are you doing to be more productive to maybe get to that final version? Faster. And yeah, that could just be like, hey, I'm not spending as much time like taking notes doing this because I can just go reference that in general. or whatever it is. That's the thing is, I don't think AI for marketing's one size fits all. And I think folks are trying to kind of say that, like, oh yeah, let's just go get the draft all done in cloud, maybe not. - Add some of your sauce on you there, like a weirdness. I just, my whole talk for our event last week, I was trying with AI and it was terrible. And I went back to like just Dave's weird, you know, it was like be yourself and it wasn't really, you're like AI helps you get to like, hey, I need help outlining this. You're just like thinking, organizing my thoughts, great. But like it's probably, you're probably gonna come up with something better than AI. - Okay, personal life, something you're doubling on. - I'm doubling down on my, you'll like this when my gym routine. I've gotten into a good, like Monday, Wednesday, Friday, sort of go, I go to, it's funny, I go to what you call a, what do they call it? A silver hair gym, like it's attached to a hospital and it's me and a bunch of 70 year olds. And so I also, I feel great, like I'm going in. I'm doing, I live in a small town in Vermont. I live in a small town in Vermont. I go to gym very early in the morning. I am the only person in the gym at that hour on your 70s. - I've made all these friends of like, you know, retirees and the only place I've ever been to hit on in my life. (laughing) - I don't think I've been hit on yet, but I gotta, I gotta, I gotta leave. - One more minute, I gotta leave, just go. - Oh, you have such incredible balance. - It's awesome. - It's awesome. No, but I, like, like, like my ex-classes on Friday. - I did, I did, I did. I did take a golf lesson too recently, but I'm not ready, I'm not ready to commit all in on goal. I'm not ready to commit all in. - All right, thank you Palmer. - All right, look who I ran into Sangram's here. Sangram, good to see you, my brother, how you doing? - I'm excited, you're, I mean, I just, I've been to this place. - This is my 10th year. - Okay, 10th year speed, that's crazy. 10 years. All right, I got two questions for you. What's one thing in your work life that you're gonna double down on? And what's something in your personal life that you're doubling down on, why not? - I think I'm gonna double down on one-on-one conversations. I think it has been eye-opening how many partnerships and things that I wasn't even thinking about that happened just because I had one-on-one conversation, the whole idea of having hundreds of people won't work. So one-on-one is what I'm gonna double down on. - Okay, love that, one-on-one, one-on-one, what about personal life? Something you're gonna double down on your personal life? - Well, yesterday there was a conversation by Mel Robbins, she was speaking here and she said, you know what purpose is? Purpose is not what you do. Purpose is the impact that you have on others when they see what you do and how you do it. So I'm gonna double down on my purpose. I thought, I'm gonna build this great company and do all these things. I'm like, no, no, no, no, I wanna see the impact that people have and what they gonna do, a result of how I do what I do. So I think it has to be framed in my purpose. - Thank you, brother. - I'm here with Jess Cook, VP of Marketing at Vector. She's wonderful. They crushed it at Drive. We're now at Unbound. You had 650 people in your session yesterday. That's amazing. I wanna know one thing in your work life and your personal life. So one thing in your work life that you're doubling down on or you're like long on and one thing in your personal life that you're doubling down on, trying to do more of. - Hey, it's me Dave. This episode is sponsored by Zoom webinars. Zoom webinars lets you host polished engaging webinars that actually drive pipeline. We recently switched to Zoom webinars for exit five live. I don't know if you've seen this. It's been everywhere. I think our conversation about webinars, everyone's talking about webinars right now. Let's do great webinars. That's what we're talking about, right? I've been super happy since we moved over to Zoom. It's just really the high quality. It just, some of it feels different. Our webinars feel professional and polished. Our media team shout out to Marissa and Rhea. They've been putting a ton of work in behind the scenes to get this thing right. And it really helps us run these exit five live sessions and put on a performance. This is not a webinar. It actually feels like our performance and the results have been there. Our attendees and our teams been really happy. The platform gives you everything you need to run a real event from branded registration, built in promotional tools, live engagement features and post event follow up that helps you convert attendees into pipeline. That's the difference between hosting a meeting and running a great event. If you're a BDB marketer with a webinar program that needs a reboot or you're thinking about building one, you should go and check out Zoom webinars, right? You know Zoom, but go and check out the webinar product. And come to one of our upcoming exit five live sessions every other Friday. It's two Fridays a month. You can see it in action. Check them out, check our sessions out. I think it really gives a good example of what you can do. Go and check them out zoom.com/exit5. That's zoom.com/exit5. Hey, it's Dave. The episode is brought to you by compound growth marketing. They're a full funneled demand gen agency. Look, I personally hired them twice. I think I was the very first customer before I was even a thought leader just when I was a VP of marketing, a real marketer back in the day, right? CGM was one of the best agencies that I've ever hired. I think that's because they understand the job. The founder John came from this background, knows what it's like, knows the life of a marketing leader. And they help high growth, cybersecurity and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They offer the combination of AEO modern paid advertising strategy 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 a former VP of marketing. Like I said, John, he really gets this space. I think that matters. By the way, for B2B tech companies, CGM has a special offer for people who listen to this podcast. You can get two free sessions focus on media planning to learn what channels are driving the best ROI. How much you should be investing in demand capture versus creation and how to invest up funnel effectively? Hey, this is a really smart offer. So go check it out compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. Go check this out. Get some free help. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. Bye-bye. - Okay, work life. I really got into cloud code this year. We just took our website off of webflow. And we hard-coded it. And we moved it over to like GitHub. - Yeah, she was really so happy to be here. I know she and I are in the, her no devs were harmed community together. - Okay. - It was amazing. But yeah, so I'm excited just to see what else I can do there. Like really surprised myself with how much I learned and how much I was able to build. - Why was it powerful? - I think it completely removed the intimidation factor of AI for me. Like I just made myself do it and I figured it out. And now I'm like, oh, I can literally do anything. - And how did you do it? Did you block a Tuesday or a weekend or like what was the, 'cause everybody talks about what was the forcing function where you actually sit down and do it? - It was this event. Like we had to have this new site live by yesterday our product launch. And so, the deadlines are good for you to make it happen every time. And so yeah, it was like 80 hours of just like sitting down figuring it out, making it happen. - And you did it, not a website development. - I did it. - Which is incredible. - It's my free to learn. - Yeah, it was fun. - And it's a bit of that. Now you can basically like prompt to make updates on your site. Like you're like, I changed this page to this. You don't have to, there's no dependency. You don't have to wait for it. - And then today, like we, I've sat down this morning. I like made a couple changes. Some little updates. - Like you're sitting having a coffee, like making updates. - Yes, yes. - It's incredible. - Okay, that's a good one. So more cloud code for Jess Cook. What about in your personal life? - Well, you know, in my effort to always be more like, dig your heart. - You just shave your head? - No, no, no, no, sorry. I can't do that. However, I do want to double down on my efforts at the gym. - Okay. - I've been lifting up. - I will do that as a corporate executive and a busy model. - I think the only hack is really just wake up earlier. - Like that is it. Like that, just another hour in the morning when the kids are not awake, that's it. - What time do you wake up now? - Right now, I wake it up at like 5.45. I think I gotta make it a 5 o'clock wake up. - I know, the difference between five and 5.45 is like, I'm the end, so. - Big. - Okay, Monday through Friday, every day. - I would love to like really be consistent. Like three days a week, lifting. - Okay. - Yeah. - I have confidence in you. - Thank you. - You can do it. - Thank you. - You have a plan. - I do have a plan. - I like it's not like you haven't done things while being tired anyway. - I mean, it's like 13 years. - Exactly. - Exactly, and your kids will get older and you'll only be tired. Leigh and I were talking about this. It's like, right now we can go to bed early. - Yeah. - But when they're like 18 or 20 and you're wondering about where they are, I'm gonna have to like stay up late, wondering where everybody is. - Yep. - So, and reactions to unmounting this event. Why are you here? What does it do for you? - It's funny. We've been talking about, we were driving last week here now. There are like events on two totally different ends of the spectrum, right? Like this one is just enormous. It's huge, just 12,000 people here. And drive is so intimate and like, can't, right? - Okay, so I'm here, I'm sensitive because a bunch of the feedback was like, "Drive feels like a conference now." And I'm like, "It is a conference." But I took a video going down the escalator yesterday. I'm like, "This is a conference." - The world's a part. - The world's a part. But yeah, I think, you know what's funny is we were saying last week, I think we got so much like traffic and value at being at our booth at drive. - Yeah, here it's more like-- - Here it's gonna be like the connections we make. Like we have a ghost tour tour dinner tonight. I think that's gonna be the big driver for us of Pipeline this week. It's just like real personal stuff. - Even your CEO, Josh, you guys have a podcast together. It's been your whole thing and you did a talk in front of 650 people here yesterday. Why do you think that was such a popular session? - I think because Josh and I are bold enough to just be ourselves, people really love our chemistry, like our interactions together, our professional relationship. And I think people wanted to know like how to capitalize on something like that, how to build it, and how to capitalize on something like that in marketing. - All right, Jess Cook, live at 940 at Unbound on day two. I'll walk you to your booth now. - Are you with my guy on it? He runs marketing at Tatarie. What is Tatarie, TV ad platform? - TV ad platform, the big dogs. They do Super Bowl ads. I'm asking everyone two questions. Number one is, what is something that you are doubling down on at work right now? - It's gonna be the obvious answer. You've probably heard 15 times already. - TV, AEO. - Oh, AEO. - I haven't heard that one yet, yeah. - Okay, why is it like, what and why? So what are you doing to double down on that? - You and I talked about this on your podcast where I was one of those marketers with the nature of our business. I didn't invest in SEO really, 'cause we were just one of the top three people that you would look at. - You're gonna have to do TV ads. - You know, you're selling to bigger companies. And so now people, I don't need to explain this to you. People are searching in a different way. And so you actually got to create a lot of content. You've been interviewed. actually transcribing YouTube videos. That's made a difference for us being cited in these out what does that mean transcribe a you like they ought to matter to be a transcript for you taking the transcript like putting it somewhere and they were not we actually had to go back to some old videos that were being automatically to be a fuck we are creating more videos with the intention of was being searched by LLM side by LMS rather than being watched white is that on oh and are the videos on YouTube yeah so like you don't care if the video has 17 views interesting I'm also not making it in this perfect production quality type of I want this awesome video on YouTube that tells you so how it might explain CTV 101 it might explain what you have to think about when you're doing your dear TV let's go you try to joke today we're like for diverse it's worth a searing it's S.U.O. on its video using any A.U.O. tools how do you imagine this tell me yeah re-examine called bluefish like a pro-bound commander they're able to site but show us our favorability in our visibility scores we look at it on a weekly basis and we see all the things that are trending up versus you know what so what we're losing ground and then we focus on creating content those areas is it like instead of just looking at the website what matters is website plus the LLM's like and so they'd give you that what is it what is it I'm trying to say like it's aware we're being cited so sometimes it could be trades you know like hey this article on this trade website that you guys were mentioned in is like getting cited a lot so maybe see more of that maybe I want to do more VR there or maybe I should want to do a sponsored particle there maybe here's this kind of a log that I never really would have paid attention to but it's actually really eye-ranking are you able to understand like the impact of ranking for something like getting pickup or those blogs leads to more people coming back to your site and just someone raising their hand for a devil so getting back to the site you obviously have likes UTM's and all the kind of tracking methodologies but we also have the good ol hajiri about us okay and we are seeing more and more of people putting in a a clot or a cheat anti next next question we're doing an interview right up and so then last last question same question for your personal life what's something in your personal life you're doubling that with football smack man I'm not gonna double that one a lie around all day it will watch football okay that's because we're out of comments with 13 that was like I'm sorry I've given I've given all year I'll accept I do all the things now we're back at football see football dude Dallas Cowboys I'm sorry to you last hey thanks for listening to this podcast if you like this episode you know what I'm not even gonna 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 a number one private community for B2B marketers at exit five and you can go and check that out instead of leaving a rating or review go check it out right now on our website exit five dot com our mission at exit five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing and there's no better place to do that than with us at exit five there's nearly five thousand 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 a hundred percent 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 exit five dot com and I will see you over there in the community