Dave Unfiltered: How to Market Like You Give a Damn, Pick a Lane, plus Breakfast Ideas (and more)

Dasha, remember when Mcheal from Optimizedly won our exit five live AI agent showcase the 2000 custom landing pages? That was really impressive. So he's their director of AI innovation and he built them with Optimizedly's agent platform one for every account in an ABM campaign. He built them from signals like job postings, press releases and leadership changes. That's like the holy grail of ABM. That's why today's sponsor Optimizedly is where I'd point anyone who wants to know what AI agents can do for marketing. Their agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50 plus prebuilt ones. They also launch virtual teammates. These are digital team members that learn over time, can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns and keep your website Optimized. Why do I need to go to work? Let me get those. Okay. I need one of those. Same. Being asked to look into AI agents, which I know a lot of you listeners are right now go check out Optimizedly. Put them at the top of your list and you can go build cool stuff just like McEal did. Check him out at Optimizedly.com/exit5. Hey, quick shout out to Webflow who is also sponsoring today's episode. Their team actually ran one of the highest rated workshops at Drive this year, which is our big annual conference. People raved about that one. Guy, their chief evangelist really knows AEO and you share a ton of advice on turning your website into an ongoing revenue driver. That matters a lot right now, right? AI is cutting into organic traffic. I don't go to Google and search anymore. I'm talking to my AI agents all day long. So AI is cutting into organic traffic and buyers, just like you and me are using AI to make purchase decisions about 95% of the time. Webflow, they're a great team to follow on this more than 300,000 brands. Can you believe that build on their platform? It helps you get discovered in AI search, build fully custom sites without a developer, govern your content and see how agents read it all in one place. And they just launched Webflow campaigns, agents help you write a campaign brief from your brand system, then generate on brand landing pages and matching ads together. Check it out at webflow.com/exit-5 and make your website your biggest growth engine in 2027. That's webflow.com/exit-5. You're listening to the Dave Gararcho. [MUSIC] Hey, it's Dave. This episode, a little different episode, mailbag episode, solo. Just me. They just blocked me here in a conference room. I got a bunch of questions from the exit-5 members in our community about marketing trends, conferences, strategy, what I eat for breakfast, what I do for fun outside of B2B marketing. I answered them all. I did. I answered them all. I have no voice left. I have no energy left. I answered all the questions in the community here in this mailbag episode. Plus, listen all the way to the end because I have an important call to action for you as a listener of this podcast. If you could just listen there and send us a note, that'd be awesome. All right, here it is. Mailbag AMA episode with questions from exit-5. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to an episode of the Exit-5 podcast. My name is Dave Gararch. I'm the founder of Exit-5, Exit-5.com. Ask your favorite LLM about it. I'm here by myself in this little conference room here in the co-working space that I'm at. The team has asked me, "We had an idea." Or maybe I asked it, classic ego thing. We want to do a little mailbag episode, just something different. No guest, just Dave. I got a bunch of questions from the Exit-5 community and I'm going to just sit here and answer them. I'll share my screen real quick and I can actually hold this up. So I got a bunch of questions about all types of things here in the community. Let's get into it. Okay, here we go. This is going to be a rapid fart. I'm going to see if I can answer all of these questions. Hopefully the team can edit me down to make it feel tight and concise. But let's do this. I'm recording this first week of October. So here we are. Okay, this question is from Eddie. And I mentioned this here. I said, I'll talk about bullshitting about anything. And Eddie said, "How does one bullshit about anything seriously?" Let's say you're on a podcast and the host asks a strange question. You weren't prepared for or just don't care about. Is there a rule/process you follow to answer without skipping a beat? Look, I'm going to say this for all these. These are like my opinions, right? I don't know what you feel in these moments. I have never had a problem with, if someone asked me a question that I don't have an answer to or don't know, I've had no problem and just saying like, I don't know that or I don't want to answer that. It's not awkward to me. I don't know. At this point, I'm approaching 40. I got a nice life. I got kids that love me. My wife loves me. I got a good relationship with my family. I like to read, work out. My mental space is good. There's nothing you could ask me really. That's going to send me into a place. And so I'm happy to just, you know, if it was a strange question, I'm going to either take a beat and say, "Hey, I need a second to actually think about a response there or I'm going to be okay with not answering it." So I know. I think it's some level Eddie of just like not really giving a shit. Like, I do give a shit, but I don't. And I know you and I think you could apply some that same type of energy. I think also the other thing is just realizing that like, what are the stakes really? Like, what are we really doing? Right? We're on a planet that we have no control over. I'm sitting in a on a podcast being interviewed about marketing. Like in the grand scheme of life, what is the real big deal about answering or not answering this person's question? I just, I think about a lot of things in life through that lens. That's also why I have no problem answering because what are we really doing here is how I think about that. And as such, I'll see second that. Okay. Diane, how many rounds of sits? So Diane, we worked out together at both drives and issues going to throw in a workout question here. How many rounds of Cindy is your record for anybody? It doesn't know. Cindy is a classic CrossFit workout. I think the proper one is as many rounds as possible in 20 minutes. You do five pull-ups, 10 push-ups and 15 squats. So I don't know Diane, but I did after drive actually Saturday morning. I did Cindy and I hadn't done it in a while and I got 14 rounds. I wasn't really moving. It was constant movement. I wasn't going super fast. I'm just good at pull-ups, push-ups, and squats. And then I do five strict pull-ups because I'm not good at kipping. So 14 is my recent record. Am I a fast walker or a slow walker? I'm a fast walker. I like to get my steps in, but Leah says that I walk like I have a side that you don't want to be on my right side because I guess I walk kind of crooked this way. And so my daughter's noticing this now too. She's like, "Dad, I'm on your bad side." So you got to be on that side of me. How do you protect creative time? And what does that look like for you now? I have a lot of time. I'm very fortunate in that we've built a really cool business. I have a great business partner, Dan, who's the CEO of Exit 5. And he's running the company day to day. And so we've created a schedule that allows me to be, I don't really have a lot of things on my calendar. And I have no problem saying that. And that's on purpose because the role that I play in Exit 5 is I'm very much like managing editor. They want me to sit around with a cup of coffee and slack open and reading our emails, listen to our podcasts, jamming on webinar ideas, working with sponsor, copy, being around as a resource. And so selfishly, it's my company have created the role that I want. I didn't want to be CEO, managing the day-to-day operations of the company. Luckily, Dan has created that and loves that stuff and is a good partner for me there. And so most of my day is creative time. I don't take a lot of meetings. And so that's kind of the one of the ways that I protect that time. But then also for me, I just know a lot about myself and the way that I can be creative is I need to work out. I do that every day anyway. I work out in the morning. If I have meetings or calls, they're usually after, say, 11 o'clock in the morning. And so I pretty much have at least every day from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. open for free creative writing time, working time, doing things like recording this podcast. What's one mistake you made? This is four questions, but she's a homie, so we'll give it to her. What's one mistake you made while growing this community you wish you could redo? I mean, there's so many mistakes. And I think that's totally okay. I don't have one like critical, crucial one. There hasn't been one. You just, I believe that you get a lot of at bats. And if you ship things regularly, you get lots of feedback and ideas. And I change my mind all the time, which I think is a gift and a curse. I think it's mostly a gift because it means I don't really. Okay, cool. We did something. People didn't like it. Let's go again. Like, we have another at bat the next day, the next week. Early on, mistake was probably just having the community in Facebook and then migrating to circle. And then now we have like an executive tier on Slack. That part kind of sucks, but I see the questions all the time. It's like, we're never happy with the tools we have. It's like, if I'm on HubSpot, I'm looking for something else. If I'm using this tool, I'm looking for something else. And so that's one mistake. And then I don't know, Diane, I really genuinely believe this is not me bullshitting. But I believe that every mistake, like leads to the learning opportunity. And so we're much more focused on director, VP, CMO, to in house to the chagrin of a lot of people, solo marketers, contractors, freelancers, people, agency people, they, you know, they take it as a personal slight that we're focused on that. But we've just learned this is I'm a product builder building a company. And we've learned that the sweet spot where we can provide the most value where people get the most value out of it is for an in house marketer. And so we've, I think you can appreciate this given your business, Diane. Like we've really narrowed in on our ICP. And I think that only happens over time. We're going on year five of now doing this as exit five. And you just constantly get feedback and learn and tweak. And you know, it's, why does every company of all time like go up market and find a different ICP from where you started? That's where we're going. I don't think that's a mistake, but it's something that we're doing and we're learning. Okay, Lindsay O'Brien. What's up, Lindsay? If Dan fired you tomorrow, would you do another founder thing? Go back to in house marketing or something else? Now I realize this is a joke. Dan can't fire me. Surprise. I'm in charge. I'm Dan's boss. Dan, I love you. if you're listening to this, does he listen to the pot? I don't know. But I'm the boss, so he can't fire me. He could get mad at me, but he can't fire me. So the question would be, if I decided to fire myself or if I was involved in some big scandal or something like, even though I'm a pretty boring person, when I do another founder thing, go back to in house marketing or something else, I think I would do the founder thing. I have realized this about myself. It relates to a lot of things that I'm good at in marketing. I like creating. I think that I'm going to be doing some type of creating in business, whether that's online, in person, buying and redoing a bookstore like Ryan Holiday, starting a podcast and being the next Tim Ferris, whatever the 20, 20, 6, 7 version of that is, I think I like the creative stuff. But I also have realized through Exit Five, I really like working with the team. And so I think that would be a key thing here. You know, I think if I were to go back in house, it would have to be a really cool and exciting and unique opportunity. But I like being in charge. I like being the founder. All right. This one's from Caitlin. Hey, Dave. Here's one. I believe that brand is an incredible asset that's worth investing in and that it's a true differentiator and trust builder in the age of AI, amen. When companies and especially startups are being asked to deliver mind-bending growth numbers, what's the balance between incredible brand building? No immediate ROI campaigns and the more conventional bottom of the funnel stuff. So she's curious how you'd think about it. And I said, look, I'll answer more on the pod. But I actually don't think there's a secret here. One of the challenges is like, I get this question all the time and I think we always think it has to be either or and I think this is like the duality of man or a duality of woman. You can do both. I think when I read between the lines here, it's really, how do you justify spending money on something that doesn't directly relate to sales, right? Because ultimately you know this in your heart. If you could just do it. You'd go do it. I own exit five. We've made a bunch of decisions that don't directly connect to revenue today but are now. And I don't have to answer to a board or a CEO or anyone else. And so it's like, yeah, of course we're going to go spend, you know, 100 grand and do that thing. So I think if I could be helpful in answering this question, I would say usually the way you solve this problem inside of a company is you have to show them like how people buy from you. Show the CEO and CFO, how people buy from you, how they make decisions. And you have to give them a vision for how you're doing marketing as a company. And typically when you have not shown them a vision, like here is our vision. Here's our strategy. Here's how we're doing marketing. Now they have a frame to think about, okay, so that means we're going to do things like some of these brand building things because we need to get people to know us like us and trust us. We're also going to do all these shorter term like direct response channels, but we're going to do these things. And here's three examples of brands you probably know, like did Nike only do direct response advertising? No, they did this and they did this. I think it's some level of like the way I would try to answer that question is by having a strong opinion on how our company should do marketing, right? I work out of this great building in Vermont called Hula. If Hula only did short term direct response things to drive new members, they would not drive new members. You can only advertise on Facebook so much, but they're doing things like being active in the community. They're hosting events. They have interesting people here sharing their stories. They're just doing random things sometimes that don't have a direct map to ROI. We need to be able to do those things and you have to be able to talk about that as part of this strategy. And that's why question is from Matt. I've read some of these, but there's new ones that I haven't read. So I'm doing those truly all in the flight. Matthew says, "Curious, what your thoughts are on AI outbound BDRs. Where have you seen it work?" Well, I think we've all been the beneficiary of the not so good version. Yeah, I don't know, man. Outbound has always been tough because there's this whole like, you know, people love to go on LinkedIn and post like, "This is the worst. Look at this awful email that I get." And I still get them. I get automated emails from, you know, some data services out there still think that I'm the CMO at privy, which like doesn't exist anymore as part of attentive or I'm the marketing guy at drift, which doesn't exist. I still get it like leads for drift. I still get those emails. So I don't know. I think that the only real measure of outbound is like, "Is it working in your company?" For me, it doesn't matter if it's AI or a human. It's like, "Is there a why you?" I learned from this guy, John Barrow's years ago. I love this thing. You know, why you why now? And so if you're outbounding me, it's the why you why now. And whether it's AI or a human, a lot of that is just typically either too long, too much information, not enough information or it's just that same kind of spray and pray. And so I think just because it's AI doesn't matter to me, how do you match up like, why are you trying to sell to me? Why me? Why now? I don't know. Don't really have a great pithy answer to that. I think we've all been the beneficiary of the night. Yeah. Here's my thing. Let me put this out there in the world. Side rant. If you have a LinkedIn account, there are some people that just, "Why do we waste so much time calling out examples of shitty emails?" People, "Who cares?" Like, I would never, maybe not never. I've probably done it. I'm a hypocrite, right? But why would I waste one of my valuable LinkedIn slots to complain about some shitty email someone sent me? I'm not going to do that. Okay, Sahel, for the last 30 years, I've been dying to know who let the dogs out. Great question. I said, "I think it was DMX." A tier says, "What's the most underrated, unobvious marketing investment a team can make today that will pay disproportionate value, profit at dividends a year, or later from now?" Okay. I'll give you my answer here. It is called giving a shit. Maybe it's to giving a shit and having empathy. Giving a shit is like, I think everyone's in a rush to automate things and do the thing with chat GPT, but I think the truly way to do great marketing is to actually give a shit. Like, to be male-chimp and realize their customers love their product and to find customers who have cats and someone hand-knit hats for the cat, and they made it in this whole viral campaign, or to truly treat your marketing with care, with craft, with respect to the copy and the outbound email matters, the ads matter. I think there's a very still much a layer of like, "Oh, great. We can set it and forget it. We can automate all this stuff." So therefore we don't really care about it, versus, I don't know, the way I sit down when I have to write an email to my kid's school, there's a lot of thought and energy and effort that goes into that because I have to walk into that school and show my face to my kid's teacher or whatever. And so if I'm an asshole in that email or I write something sloppy, I feel like that's a reflection on me. I think because of Martek and AI and all this stuff, we've become so disassociated from like the actual marketing that doesn't matter, and so we just don't really care. And then related to that, I always talk about empathy, empathy here, meaning like, "Do you ever just think about how many emails you get? Do you ever think about when was the last webinar you went to? Which webinar did you actually sign up for and go to? Not just get the recording, but actually take an hour out of your day to sit down, not multitask, listen and watch and go to?" Okay, that's the lens that I want to use to then go create the webinar we're going to do. I think that's a really important skill. What's the biggest hype story being peddled in marketing today? Will brutally be busted in six months from now? I think probably AI, I think AI is a bubble, obviously. Both things can be true, it's very useful, but it's a bit of a bubble. I'm not an investor, this is not investment advice. Anthropic lost $42 billion, they said this week. I mean, I'm not a, I'm no genius, I haven't been on the ink 5,000 list, but like we're not losing that much money at exit five. And finally, are you at Doomsday or Doomsday kind of person? Neither, I've tried, you can ask me about this, but I keep trying to become a science fiction guy, and it's not doing it for me, and I know everyone says you just haven't found the right book yet, but I'm a pretty avid reader. I read lots of different genres, you know, I'm a pretty smart guy, I read, and I just can't get, are those even books? What is this? Is it a video game? Doomsday or Doomsday? Okay. I realize that, I thought you meant the book, Doomsday. I'm not a video game guy either, I could be, but I'm not. Caitlin said also what do you eat for breakfast, I'm a scrambled eggs gal, but we've been also, please send me a message on LinkedIn, Doomsday or Doomsday or Doomsday, is it a book or a video game? I don't know. Caitlin says what do you eat for breakfast, she eats scrambled eggs, but we've been doing a lot of cottage cheese protein bagels too, recently, for about a last year, I don't know if you can see me right now, I know, I got it going on, it's our castically, I'm 5,8, or whatever. I've been looking for a breakfast that is healthy, filling, high in protein, and doesn't require a lot of cleanup, or cooking, and for me, that has been overnight oats, this is a commercial for overnight oats, it's like a half scoop of oats, a scoop of protein powder, two big globs of like yogurt, Greek yogurt, I use Siggie's yogurt, that's just what we have in the house, a little dash of milk and a tablespoon of chia seeds, takes me five minutes to make, I do it right at night before I'm loading the dishwasher, and I go up to bed, I make that, and then I have that every morning, so I have breakfast, it's like 40 grams of protein, a bunch of good carbs, keeps me full until lunch, and you know, doesn't require a cook anything, overnight oats is really doing it for me, however, the reason I suck at meal prep is, I just get so bored, and I'm kind of bored of overnight oats right now, but it works for me, and I eat a lot of things for fuel, because, you know, life is busy, you can't always sit around and have the perfect meal, and if I don't eat, then I'm like, you know, next thing you know, it's 2 o'clock, and I'm at the gas station eating like Doritos and a weird protein shake, so I got a breakfast. Like, break for Zoom webinars, this is the platform behind the world famous exit five live. Someone on LinkedIn just said, I compare all other webinars against exit five live, now how good is that? So good, I want to print that out, send it to my mom, put it on my fridge, in a world of AI slot, we just want to make something that's worth showing up for, even a webinar. Especially a webinar, but don't you dare call the webinar even though I break my own rule, and do that all the time, it's a live session, our team puts over seven hours a week into each one of these choosing the topic, the prep calls, building the run a show and making it valuable and engaging. Zoom webinars is a big part of how we pull it off. We average 1,500 plus registrants per session, hundreds of people show up live and the chat goes off. Yeah, the last time we have a new high water market, 527 people live for an hour with us zoom does registration emails polls analytics and all lives in one place so running a polished session every two weeks isn't a scramble at showtime our team swears by zooms production studio they preset every scene and push each one live on cue clean transition zero chaos at least that anyone can see just please do not look at our internal slack all the caps lock in there don't share that that's our pro level webinar production powered by zoom check it out zoom dot com slash exit five learn more about zoom and all the webinars and all their products there and come see it live we do these basically every week now go and check them out it's called exit five live and learn more about zoom at zoom dot com slash exit five all right if you're at a BDB tech company spending over fifty thousand dollars a month on paid media compound growth marketing wants to give you two free sessions to build out your 2027 plan free okay I'm listening what do you get I know free is usually too good to be true but check this out in the first session they're gonna learn your business and in the second they will deliver you a custom plan so you'd know how to split demand capture and creation which channels drive the best ROI and where you're reporting has gaps and look I trust them with it I've hired cgm twice they're one of the best agencies I've worked with back in my day as a head of marketing twice well I've hired plenty of agencies as a BPM marketing and that is rare I'm more than just a thought later dasha you should know that so cgm helps high growth cyber security and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey with full funnel paid media a eo and a dedicated gtm engineering team ooh and a former VP of marketing started it so they actually get b2b that's right john was one of us back in the day so check it out you can go book your 2027 planning session right now at compound growth marketing dot com slash exit five that's compound growth marketing dot com slash exit five link in the show notes Alex said would you do early on to make exit five feel like a community rather than an audience and would you do it differently if you're starting today I wrote him an answer here I'll read this for the pod I never thought of a community or audience is being different really and I truth those are just marketing words I think a lot of time we just make things up like how did you make it an audience versus community I don't know what's the difference I just did it I don't I don't have some scientific like does not a real reason so to me I don't really know how those things are different I think for me the biggest thing has been being real and showing my face being in here writing 10,000 comments I think if I could pull up the analytics of my stats here and it's you know I've been treated like this the product since day one obviously I spend less time writing replies than I used to but now we have a team of nine people and it's like I don't have to do all that all the time now and so a big part of it was that but you know 10,000 comments showing my face adding humor I think people just want to know there's someone real on the other end and so that was a huge part of it is early on responding to everything showing your listening a boss told me once like hey you know I used to manage this engineering team and in the survey they said they wanted better snacks in the break room and like literally that afternoon I went out and I got better snacks and it's just like actually seeing that feedback loop and action really mattered and so I think like you know people's feeling like we have a pulse on things because they see topics come up and we do sessions about them or we've you know respond to members or hear feedback and make changes I think it's the one to one the hand-to-hand thing and then the other thing is like you know doing events in person man I've met so many people from online and then met them the first year doing drive in person and now we have like a personal relationship and connection I feel like there's a bunch of people here like I feel like I know like saw Hill or Lindsey who wrote a comment here I can read it differently because we've met a bunch of times in person and I think that matters there's a lot here I also think a lot of it is like revisionist is very easy to go back and be like you know what are the things you did intentionally and it's like I don't know it's like what do they call a survivorship bias like this just worked for us I can't say that all these things were like these genius strokes and I think a lot of times in these business stories in case studies or whatever you read online about how XYZ company grew it's like they make it seem like I was sitting around and had this like step by step month by month week by week roadmap of what we were going to do with exit five and that's just not true it's very much day to day week to week get more at bats get feedback make changes listen to people have a sense of what people want in the market that's the only way I know really all right Chelsea also the homey Chelsea on professional growth the CMO says I'm always ahead on marketing and areas of growth for me areas of growth for me are more about how I lead in a role and the technical capabilities how to build and grow the right team for my specific org and how do I create strategic clarity and leave my peers I've been managing people for over 10 years but tailoring that leadership to different audiences at my company based on what the needs are has been challenging would love any thoughts on this especially the strategic clarity part and how to train my tiny very ADHD brain to become a more structured thinker so Chelsea to me it seems like the difference between becoming a marketer and being a manager or an executive and in their different roles right being the individual marketer you get paid and you're measured on your ability to like do the thing well to run the good event but the CMO here sounds like they want you to be more of a we throw around the word strategic thinker but I just think that means like being a business partner inside of the company not Chelsea managing an individual channel as part of marketing but seeing where this fits brought like larger and broader in the set of the company and I look I know this is hard for people but you have to realize if you have a job and you work for someone else and you work inside of a company you have to match how you work to that style of the company or leave or go do a different job right or quit but you often have to like figure out how do they think how do they work what does leadership want and you have to align what you're doing to the goals and priorities that the leadership team is setting and if you don't agree with them you can either quit or you just got to be like all right yeah fuck this but I'm going to do it anyway and you have to kind of get in line I think one thing I've learned from this business from my experience in the past I was talking to a friend of mine who owns a small business yesterday I'm not a small business expert but I've just been around teams and nothing it's like the number one thing is incentives drive behavior period show me the goals of the company show me the goals we've said and I can show you what people should are are going to be doing and also why they're not doing things the reason you can't get on the same page with sales or this person's not going to do that thing inside the companies because usually they're not incentivized to do so and you could be a good person and have this altruistic view of the world but they're just not going to do the thing because I don't know yeah like growing the podcast is just not really how I'm paid or measured and so it doesn't really matter and I think that to me is the strategic piece you know how can you spend more time with the CMO and understand the things like you know she cares about and understand what's important her job and really learn how to serve her better that is going to be the thing that will help you maybe solve that problem or not what do I know right I worked for myself for a while no Robert Hanson Dave Gerhard if you were starting B2B marketing from scratch today as a new head of marketing and a blank slate what would your plans playbooks in first 90 days I know everyone's going to hate this answer but there is no playbook that my playbook is there is not one and so I think this is what's really fun about business and any job really is the first 90 days well I would come in with a plan I wouldn't be let me get onboarded for 90 days but really it's like I don't know I need to understand the competition I need to understand the market I need to understand the product I need to understand the customers I need to figure out where the gaps are what the opportunities are because again I'll say this for the millionth time I say this all the time everything works webinars work ads work direct mail works tiktok works partnerships works resellers work co-marketing work everything works you have to figure out what you can actually pull off and that is so often predicated on like your team your talent the budget the mark everyone says higher a players well what if you can't what if you don't have the budget to what if a players don't want to work at your company then you have to hire someone who's not an a player and you know pay them less because that's what you can afford and how can you find that person and train them like there's just too much nuance here and I think ultimately it comes down to like having a deep understanding of the customer the market of the business and then being able to pull some levers and make some plays that said I know you're looking for a specific answer here for me and B2B the number one thing still comes back to in B2B I like to always think about how can you be the top resource for your customer if you sell to cyber security to finance to developers to IT to sales to marketing to accounting to finance whatever it is I think it's a great strategy because in B2B it's a considered purchase you're not just going to see an ad and buy you need to try to build a relationship with that person I think everyone in a job usually needs to know how to do their job better or some people the top 1% ish type people want to do that and so the job in marketing and B2B marketing can be how can we be an educational resource for them how can we entertain them how can we be fun funny entertaining informative useful specific then you figure out how that plays out for them Tammy said why doesn't the exit five community have a dedicated slack community and not just the CMO circle sorry I just really want slack for us good question not some secret cabal plotting against everyone here we've kind of over the years it was on Facebook and then I moved it to circle and then everyone's always asked what about slack and what about this one about that I think there's a bunch of examples of successful communities on all different channels we do have a membership for VPs and CMOs these are executives I think most of them are at companies over 25 or 50 million it's not because we're discriminating against anyone that has a lower revenue tier we've just found there was a group of higher level VPs and CMOs that came to us and said hey we'd love to have something a little bit more different and just for us okay cool and we were like you know what let's just try something new let's launch that on slack we have that it's called our CMO council we're soon rebranding that should just be called the executive membership mat if you're listening to this and you haven't done it yet take a lap that's great hope he listens love your buddy my guy mr. two maza so yeah we have it on slack for the execs I think ideally we would find a way to have more people in there it's just you know migrating tools part of or platforms, all that stuff. But yeah, I think there's a world mad actually set from we're thinking about it. There is something that we'd love to get more people involved in the Slack, but TBD, I don't know. Crass is always greener. David Drexler says, "Since you offered the topic of hair, have you considered this truly worth a watch?" It's not what you think, right? Should I just do this, this feels risky, but I'll do this live and see if I, uh, - Great. - They gave me so much in my life. - Oh, geez. - I just wish the one thing they hadn't passed on was the baldness gene. - It's been devastating as a woman to have a problem about this. People can be very cruel. - Millions of you have come to us at Bosley Hair Restoration to help ease the heartbreak of baldness and to have your hair restored naturally to its original hairline and density. - Yeah. - Until I'm back there. - What's the punchline here? - Did your hair do? - All right, so I know I have not. It feels like a lot of pressure. It's like watching that live on the podcast is like, hey, listen to my joke and I have to react to it. I think I look great. I have no plans to go to Turkey and get my hair did. Actually, the best thing I did was started shaving my head in my late 20s 'cause now all my friends that are approaching their 40s and are starting to really show their baldness like they're holding on for dear life and they haven't had the courage to shave their head yet. So I was a early adopter there. No big deal. Next question is from Joe. I feel like you've mentioned it in different places at different times with my ass Dave, anything question would be. What do you do outside of work that helps you bring your best self to work? Joe, great question. I talk about this often because it's funny if you look at my content online, you're like, man, this dude just loves B2B marketing. I do, that's part of my job, but I'm a much more well-rounded person and a full person outside of work, Joe. Thank you for asking. So there's a couple of things. I deeply rooted in family. I just love, I got two kids. My wife, I love just being with them. So I'm a really simple guy. I feel like all I've wanted my whole life is to have a reason to stay in on a Friday night and not go out drinking or (laughs) and I have that now, it's amazing. And so, I go to bed early, I love being a dad. It's just so fun to see my kids be curious and learn about life, so fully invested there. I think I'm a better, people who don't like me online, they would never want to know this, but I think I'm actually a better being a dad and a parent than I am at my job in exit five and being a B2B marketer. So that's a big thing for me. I have to exercise a lot. I've learned about myself, I'm like a dog. I kind of just exercise myself every day into a state of happiness. I actually do think there's a big thing there with mental health and drugs and stuff where man, if we could just get more people exercising, it's clearly to me we were wired that way biologically, like to run away from predators or something that your body makes you feel good. And so I always caveat this, when I tell people my schedule, I don't wanna be seen as one of those people who does all the things and gets up at the crack of dawn, but I'm just gonna tell you what I do and there's no projection or judgment around it, but my alarm goes off at 5.30, I wake up, I brush my teeth, I go downstairs, I chug water, everybody's still sleeping. I make a cup of coffee, it has a scoop of creatine in it, a little half and half and some maple syrup. I mix that up, I have that coffee, I have a little workout space in my house. If I'm bored at home, I go to the gym, but I typically do strength training in the morning because I wanna be outside later in the day. I like to do strength training and cardio every day. I'm not on some type of program, it just makes me feel good and it's a huge part of my thing. So I do, I lift weights for 45 minutes, it's in the morning. Go wake my kids up, breakfast, drop off school, and then usually from eight to nine, after I drop the kids off at school, I try to do some type of cardio outside that could be as easy as a walk for an hour, and I like to do it two for one, which is bring the dog. I think the best thing in the world is to have a tired animal that you exercise together and the dog loves me because of that, so I either run, rock, hike, or just walk, try to be outside no matter the weather because I spend my days inside doing B2B marketing stuff and so I wanna get that cardio in outside. And then that's pretty much it, man. I like to work out. I like to work, work gives me a lot of purpose, not in some crazy workaholic way, but I feel like we were meant to work and to be on a team and to have a community of some kind and to work on stuff together. So I like to work, do something productive, to feel like I moved my work life and business forward that day. And then I'm typically back home around three o'clock, pick up my kids at school if I can do it that day. If I don't have any big things going on, we hang out at home, pitch to my son, draw, or run or chase my daughter around like this. That's it, man. I'm in that phase of my life right now. It's very simple and I cry every time I see the Instagram content that says one day when you're 80, you will give anything to have one of these days back right now. And so that's the phase of life that I'm in and that's all I need. I also like to play golf, playing less golf lately, but I like to just hit balls, chip around, practice, coach my kids teams when I can, like a coach baseball. We got lots of soccer and activities. So that's what I'm doing right now, Joe Ray. Send me a message on LinkedIn and let me know, okay? Emily says Dave, you've been to more marketing conferences than many of us, aside from Drive. Obviously we've love a rundown of your top picks and why, like which ones are worth the expense of convincing your boss, using your stipend or even paying your own way. Look, I tried to answer, I really don't. I've the only events I've gone to in the last couple years have been ours for exit five for Drive. I did go down to check out HubSpots unbound this year 'cause I hadn't been there in 10 years and I had some meetings that I wanted to go see people at, but really don't, Emily, I don't have an opinion for you. This would actually be a better question for the broader community to see which trade shows are worth going to. Oh my gosh, did we make it? I'm gonna pass out, this is great. Last question here is from Matthew. Dave, what's something younger you really wanted that you don't care much about anymore and what's gone the opposite direction? Yeah, I think younger me probably wanted to be, like a professional athlete or something like in sports and sports were just a huge part of my identity and my self worth and all that stuff. And now I'm like, I don't care about any of that stuff. I don't even watch, I used to watch NFL for 10 hours on a Sunday red zone, you know, just sit there all day. I haven't watched a football game in 10 years directly correlates with my kid, but just doesn't do that for me. And so I don't really care about sports and that type of stuff. I also really used to be into like sneakers and Jordans and Nike's and Air Max's and all this stuff and I don't really care about that anymore either. So I've gone completely in the opposite direction there. I think probably just being in a good play, I'm very fortunate, you know, to have a healthy family, a nice business and a good life. I'm a simple man, give me that. Let me wake up, work out, eat good food, hang out with my family, see my friends. I do think that one thing that's gone in the opposite direction is I used to feel like everything can be online. Who cares, I'm going to hold out my bunker in Vermont and I've realized the last probably three years that I'm extroverted and I'd like to be around people. I like my own time alone too, but I think being around people really gives me a lot of energy and I've kind of changed my opinion that man. I think I need to be working on a team. I think I need to be in an office with people. We don't have that now at X5 who knows maybe one day or a future company, I will have that. I don't know, I need to be around other people, can't just hold out and like, you know, collect your coins. And then also I think it's very important that as much as I've talked about kids and family, I think it's important to have, you know, your friends and be able to take a guy's trip or a girl's trip or to do whatever you do. Some of my wife and I do is like, we don't really keep score with each other at all, which I know some of you all do that. Talks at couples where, you know, husband goes away, wife's got to go away, wife's got to go away, husband's pissed because he's at, no, we don't do that. We support each other, Leah wants to go and you know, have a weekend with her friends. Heck yeah, go do that. I'm not some idiot dad that can't watch the kids at home. So I'm taking a lot of shots. I gotta hang up this podcast. All right, thank you all for the question. This has been a mail bag. We didn't really talk about that much marketing and I think that's great. A little mix of personal stuff, marketing stuff, mail bag episode, one for the hopper for Marissa and Maria. Look, give us some feedback. We want to know, I want to know specifically, what do you want to hear more of? We're in this stage right now. We're investing in all of our content, specifically our podcast, email us. I want you to do the take this action, email us [email protected] with the subject line podcast ideas. Tell us topics, companies, people, what do you want to hear? Do you want to hear interviews with big name, CMOs? Do you want to hear interviews with people doing marketing at companies you've heard of? Do you want to hear people you don't know who they are, but they can talk really smartly about SEO and a tactical stuff. Do you want more outside of work stuff like this? Tell us, we're all plugged in in the content machine here right now and we're thinking about what types of stuff we should be making for 2027. So send us your ideas and feedback. We'll read them all and get back to you. Thanks for listening to this episode. Exit five podcast, I'm Dave, I'm out. 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 the 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 exitfive.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 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 wanna become a member for the year. Go check it out, learn more exitfive.com and I will see you over there in the community. (upbeat music) The best marketing leaders have a strong agency to backing them up. up. And Convertive is one I put on that list, especially if AEO is a priority for you right now. It definitely is. And a good one is a lifesaver. They bring fresh creative angles and go deep on specialties like AEO when your team's short on bandwidth. 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