The Viral Marketing Bets Behind High-Growth Voice AI Company Bland.ai, with Ethan Clouser (Head of Marketing)

Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Zoom webinars. That's right. Zoom webinars is the virtual event platform built to engage, connect and scale. I don't know if you know this, but I actually love webinars. And I'm not afraid to say that. I'm not afraid to tell you this on the podcast here. And my last two companies and now here at exit five webinars have been a big part of our content machine. And I know I'm not alone. Despite what you may have heard online about webinars being dead and B2B, they have this habit of saying everything is dead and B2B, including webinars, but they're not. And I can confirm we hear it constantly in our community webinars when done right, continue to drive revenue for marketing leaders right now. And it's one of our best performing channels here at exit five. A good webinar gives you a real reason to get your audience in one place around a topic that actually matters to them and that kind of engagement turns into pipeline in a way that a lot of other channels can't match. Think about how much time does someone spend with you sitting there on a webinar? That's super valuable. That's why we've partnered with Zoom to take our love for webinars to a whole new level. Starting this month, every exit five live session through the end of the year is going to run on Zoom webinars and events. Zoom webinars has an entire platform for running marketing events that includes registration pages to match your brand. The tools you need to promote your event and live engagement tools so people actually stay tuned in instead of half watching in another tab. And once the event is over, Zoom helps you follow up with each attendee and turn the session into clips, highlights and content so you can turn your webinar attendees into future customers. That's the difference between hosting a meeting and running a great event. We hold a high bar for our content here at exit five and I'm excited to be doing it all on Zoom webinars now moving forward. If you're a B2B marketer with a webinar program that needs a reboot or you're thinking about building one this year, you should consider Zoom webinars and come to an exit five live session. Check it out powered by Zoom. So you can see the platform in action all for yourself. Learn more about what Zoom offers marketers at zoom.com/exit five. That zoom.com/exit five. Hey, it's me Dave. This episode is brought to you by our friends at customer.io. Customer.io helps marketing teams get more impact from every message they send. So you can actually reach the right people with the right message at the right moment. Some might call it the holy grail and marketing with so much AI generated content flooding your inbox and feeds right now. It's more important than ever that what you're actually putting out is thought through not just AI'd into existence. Everyone thinks they're magically a marketer now because they have access to AI and all these tools and the result is rough. More robotic emails, more noise, more blood. We've all seen it. But marketing is a craft. I think that I'll die on this hill. Well, hopefully not die, but it takes creativity, thought, taste, and no AI can't do all that stuff for you. The best teams aren't ignoring AI either, though. It's a little bit of both. They treat it as infrastructure, built the right way and it can make marketing feel more human, not less. And that's exactly what customer io is doing, helping product led teams build personalized campaigns across email, SMS, push, in app, and web hooks using their own first party data. So messages feel intentional and actually land with your customer. AI handles the grunt work behind the scenes and sharpens results over time. So you can focus on strategy and not set up while still sounding like an actual human. See why more than 9,000 brands trust customerio to power their messaging, including notion, less mills, and Angie. If you need a new vendor to power your customer messaging, go and give them a look. It's customer.io/exit5 customer.io/exit5 You're listening to the Dave Gararcho. Hey, my guest on this episode is Ethan Clauser. He's head of marketing at Bland. They're an enterprise voice AI company focused on regulated industries. Ethan is 22 and runs marketing for an enterprise tech company that just raised $100 million. And if you spend a few minutes with him, you'll see why. He has a passion for the craft of marketing, especially building a brand, and why you need to build a brand to win in the enterprise today. We talk about his approach to marketing at Bland, which is guided by their culture of getting as crazy as humanly possible while still walking the line into credible enterprise territory. We talk about finding that third rail, that electric fence. We talk about their viral campaigns with soldier boy, the red phone car, and working with Toby from the office on their series. See announcement and how they measure these big swings and what channels they'll need to invest in as they move into an ABM motion and try to stand out in a sea of 200 competitors in the voice AI space. And we also talk about why it helps to do marketing at a company with a truly great product. Enjoy my conversation with Ethan from Bland. All right, what's up everybody? Back on the podcast, my guest today head of marketing at Bland Ethan Clauser, I say your name, Ethan Clauser. Nice. Bland AI is an enterprise voice AI company. You joined about a year ago as the only marketing person. Team is now seven people. I'm going to give you the punchline run after bed. I think it's right off the bat. I think it's pretty cool that you're a 22 year old guy who's the head of marketing at a company in the AI space that just raised a hundred million dollars. So I'm excited to talk to you, your member of our X to five community. And you got a bunch of cool stuff in here. I'm looking through our prep doc from soldier boy to series C stunt with that guy from the office. I don't know if you can mention that I did the office whatever billboard campaigns and talking about shifting from viral to abm. So Ethan, thanks for thanks for doing it. I'm happy to have you in an intrus start-up fashion. You were just at the office and there was a fire drill. So now you're home to do this podcast. Great. Yeah, they grabbed me on Amazon. Yeah. We were just talking briefly off the record in the green room before this. But just some context as to like how did you get this job first marketing hire at bland head of marketing. You have a marketing backstory though that everyone can relate to behind this. You started your own agency. Can you just give me like the couple of minute overview of your agency story? Yeah. So I realized later in my life like around 20 years old that I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I was sold the idea of YouTube videos that the best way to do this was be a software and that you could just use fiber or upward to hire a software engineer. This is like pre-clod, pre-AI, right? You can't really five-code things at this point. And I was like, oh, you know, if you just hire somebody on fiber like pay them $5,000, $10,000, they'll build your whole software and then I can market it and become rich. And I tried that for seven, eight months. Well then there's the other one. There's also the other one which is like, or you buy someone, you go to like acquire.com and you buy someone's thing and I'm like, wait a second. So I'm guy just spent like two and a half months and they're selling this company for like six grand. It's not a company. It's not a product. What am I doing? It's pre-revenue. Yeah. Pre-revenue. I love that. Yeah. So that I worked on trying to build a software as a non-technical person for about seven months before I was you know several tens of thousands of dollars less in my bank account and no product to show for it that I thought, wow, the only thing that I've done up to this point I was working like a part-time social media job was I kind of know how to market things. And so I really went all into that, started the marketing agency and grew it to six years and five months. It was a lot of pure grit. A lot of just like doing buying courses, researching online. Like how do you. What was the serve? What was the agency? Sorry. I'm type, I thought if you think I'm not looking at you, I type notes while we're talking. Some lady always flames me in the webinar chat. What was the agency? What were you doing? What was the service? We primarily sold LinkedIn marketing services. So I got really good at that platform. Everything for content to cold outbound. You have to figure out all the hacky things, right? Like how do you scale LinkedIn cold out onto like 40,000 messages a month? Yeah, right. Because I don't know that many hacky things but like Matt and I, we were sitting in a conference room in New York and I'm like, wait, do people? I didn't really know anything about LinkedIn automation. I'm like, wait, after 10 messages, they like shut me off manually doing this. So like, how do people do that? Yeah, there's a lot there. Yeah. And I think one of the core skills that I learned through this process was how to continue to double down and make bets when things are working. So like I got my first few clients, got revenue in the door, but I always kept doubling down, which was like I kept hitting those exact limits that LinkedIn restricts you with. And I found one guy who knew how to bypass them. And I paid him all the money. I think I paid him like five or six K a month into the business, which for me at the time was most of the revenue I generated. And all I had said is, Hey, teach me how to do this. He taught me how to do it and became the best investment I ever made. Because then that got me to the six figure range really fast was what allowed me to sell the agency and then before it from there. What was it that told you that you were good at marketing? Like I think you said, you're good at marketing. I'm good at promoting things. And you didn't grow up as some people like the Gary V story of like, you know, tussling trading cards when you're like in second grade. What was it that gave you that marketing bug? Yeah, I actually always tell people I'm kind of an accidental marketer. Right? Like I wanted to build a software. And I was forced to have started marketing company because it felt like it was the only thing I can control from client acquisition and sales to fulfillment. It's like I know how to do this. And even if I don't, I can figure it out with like YouTube videos. There weren't a lot of other businesses. I felt like with such a low barrier to entry where I could do that. And so I got my phone in the door. And then I built a track record for being a marketing guide because it was a marketing company. And then when I tried to get in startups, that was where I continued the trajectory and ended up here. How did you, okay, so bland? Give me the overview. So bland is interesting because you have this specific positioning of voice AI for regulated industries. talk about how did you find this company, how did you get the job, and then if you can just kind of talk about what BLAN does, and that'll give us a good overview, and then I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions about what you've done. For sure. I found BLAN through LinkedIn cold outbound, so I just sent 40,000 messages and found one company willing to hire you. Pretty much. No. Our founder had made a post that he was hiring a marketer at that time. He would mention I was the first. I was actually the second marketing person, because there was a guy originally that went from seed to series B who had done all their marketing on that front end, and he was incredible, but had just left right before the time that I had joined. They had nobody to do their marketing. A series B company growing really, really fast. Our CEO had put out a job posting, and what he had put in the description was really resonated with me because he was talking about how we're hiring somebody with no experience required. We're looking for the weird diamonds in the rough that you wouldn't really expect to be able to market well, but have figured it out. I don't know. Resonates with me because I think especially when, and I think this speaks of things that are changing in Silicon Valley, even venture-backed companies, I think typically five years ago, if you just showed me on paper, there's this company. They just raised $100 million. They're doing this new thing. I'd be like, oh, they're going to go hire the CMO that used to work at Salesforce or used to work at this company or that company, but it's almost like, actually, maybe you answered this. Why do you think they didn't want that? Why did they want someone more like you? I think that's exactly who the founders are. Our co-founders started the company at 19 years old and I think 24 and they are all both. The story goes, they joined Y-combinator. They flunked at OIC, no revenue, rejected by 180 investors, like not much of a track record or experience. Over the past three years, they've been able to raise over $100 million, grow, blend, or where we are today. I think that they early on started hiring people that looked like them, which were people with low pedigree, very young, super scrappy. They just found that it worked. I think in that original job posting, he had mentioned that their lead engineer used to work at Taco Bell three months before joining Bland. They just come from the most odd places and so that has been a philosophy that we've carried out even to this day. When you joined, there was already revenue-ish? Yeah, yeah. We were a larger size company at the point when I joined. I had raised this series of things like six or seven months prior. What I will say though, is that Bland at that time had almost entirely built its brand and its revenue off of the viral marketing. The guy who was there before was incredible at coming up with good ideas and then making sure that those ideas would give people's attention. The story of really how we were able to raise our first round to the series A was we had roughly $3 million in the bank account and we decided to take one big bet that we thought would pay off well, which is to take a third of our runway and put it into a billboard campaign. This was two and a half years ago when AI billboards weren't really a big thing. We threw up a bunch of billboards in New York and San Francisco that would literally just three words, still hiring humans with the question mark and then we put a big phone number in mail. You've probably seen some of the ones that say stop hiring humans these days. That was a company that kind of stole the original idea that we had had of still hiring humans many years ago. But that billboard campaign took off and I hate those ads. I've seen that company is that creepy looking robot lady. Our idea was we wanted to ask the question, are you still hiring humans and kind of have it be an open-ended conversation and then we put the phone number there so people could call and experience the voice AI and did over a billion impressions on that campaign. I think from what I've heard from our sales team as we had full counters booked out across every salesperson and executive for three to four months in advance after that campaign. So that got us to several million dollars in revenue, helped us raise the series A and then we've just continued to do things like that. Okay, wait, hold on. So what was the pricing, was it like a low end, like our people buying like a $19, I have no idea about the company. So if I call, tell me, like, who do you sell that to? Enterprise? Yeah, we sell it Enterprise. It seems like a nightmare to deal with. Just want to get sales up standpoint. Like everyone calling this number on this billboard. It was fully AI. So that was the idea. It was like, we sell AI voice agents. And so the number was to talk to our AI so that they could experience what it sounds like. And at the time, voice AI was such a novel concept. So if you pick up the phone and you talk to a robot that sounds just like a human, it's that aha moment that they get to have, which is why I think they all went and then booked it. Oh, I got it. So calling the number was essentially like experiencing the product. Exactly. It was a demo live right in front of them. That's awesome. Yeah. Okay. So that was the head start. Okay. I remember you. You did a good job of not taking credit for that shout out to that guy. But that's great. Okay. But you joined the company in my head like, okay, you're young. You're this young guy. You're scrappy. You're a marketer. You started this LinkedIn agency. I would have guessed like, yeah, you would be good to be the zero to one guy. But I actually think like joining and already having a big base of recurring revenue and then having to grow like, that's more intimidating to me. Yeah. It was challenging because we had this really great base. We had revenue. We had decent kind of systems in place in terms of like, how do you go viral? How do we generate eyeballs? But what we didn't have is any of the traditional marketing things. So do we have email, emergency, you can just set up. Do we have any account based marketing motions? Do we have like a really good paid ad flywheel? All of these things were pretty much non-existent when I joined. And so it was very different than the LinkedIn and SMM agency world that I had come from. And I think the reason I was able to make it work was because I had a really good mentor in our CEO who comes from a marketing and advertising background. And so when he hired me, I think he was looking for a lot of raw, intangible skills of somebody who can just figure it out. And he was able to guide me through a lot of these things and give me the opportunity and space to learn the resources to learn. He told me a story the other day where like his mom was a heavy advertiser. And so at like seven years old, they'd be driving down town in LA and she'd be like, hey, what do you think this billboard is trying to sell you? And then they would do drills about like breaking down the world. Wait, wait, what do you mean? This mom was a heavy advertiser. I don't know. Like for a whole, I don't know. That was like all she did in her, like in her job, like she had experience like buying ads or she was in the industry. Yeah. Yeah. I just think it's a funny. She just loved that. Yeah. Okay. So, so you have this like viral motion. You had like, you're kind of a company built on this DNA of like doing these viral word of mouth type of hits, but what you were missing was like the machine. Can you tell me some of those things that you did, like specifically people, I want to come back to the viral stuff. I got to ask you about like the soldier boy stuff and the series C stuff. But since we mentioned, let's just talk about some of the systems and like, what did you do and what's relevant today? Because I think there's a lot of legacy stuff, but you, I think especially being younger and joining a company earlier and joining a company that the founders are younger and the company is like AI Pilled. I'm sure there are some different decisions that you made than maybe some people that listen to this podcast in the past would make. So I'm curious like, what did you do? What did you go work on? Yeah. I think for one, it was like, how do we increase the surface area of channels that we are being able to be seen on? Because with the viral stuff, you typically are only well known on some of the social media platforms like LinkedIn or X or YouTube shorts, right? Like we had a lot of eyeballs and impressions through that, but we had no, like people who go to events and aren't on social media had no idea who Blant was. People who only Google stuff had no idea who we were. And so it was figuring out like, how do we tackle each one of these channels one by one so that we can build up our presence here? I, one of the, you know, best things I did early on was hire an SEO agency who was absolutely crush, crush it for us. I think they've been at like 20% month over month growth since I hired them eight months ago. And so dialing in that channel, so we start ranking well on all the, I thought SEO is dead. I thought that doesn't work. Not at all. No, I don't know. So what do they do? What, how do they do it? What do they do? I think that because of all the viral things that we had built on the, on the back end, like we had really good domain reputation already through people citing us and talking about some of these campaigns. And so we had a good baseline in place. And so all they've been doing then is restructuring how we build our H1 and how we build our H2s. What type of like back landing pages do we have? They do three blog posts a day, like insanely high volumes so we can increase that service area. And I think all that just has been compounding very well. So it's like if you have this brand that is well known and in the social sphere and has word of mouth, they're kind of like connecting, wiring everything up behind the scenes. So like, oh, we should link to this page here. This, this page should rank for this, this keyword or that. Exactly. Yeah. And the same thing that it kind of goes in pair with the AEO, GEO stuff that we've been doing. We've had even crazier growth on that end, like 50% month or a month. Does the SEO company do the AI's SEO stuff for that separate? It is more or less the same. A lot of the output that what we've gotten is from the AEO GEO side has been from the work that they're doing with the blogs and with the landing pages, right? Because that's where the citations all the time has come from. Simultaneously though, we work with like a red in agency because that's a huge place where these eloents are citing things. I think one of the coolest and hard part as part of this whole process has been reforming what the LLMs think about us though. So in the early days of bland, we were a heavy developer focused platform, not really known as the enterprise secure solution. But as of lately, we have positioned ourselves in the market, as you said, Boisei for regulated industries. So we're working with some of the largest companies in the world who have the most secure environments. And so that's a different positioning. But like when you would look up bland a couple months ago, it would say in the LLMs, and then as for developers and not really for enterprises. And we've completely shifted that narrative to where I looked the other day, I typed in bland AI review. And it was like a marketer's dream. It said, this is the perfect company if you have your large enterprise with a huge call center. And then even on the cons, it was like, don't touch this if you're an SMB, which is like the exact way. That's great. Yeah, handling the, great. You were not for the small companies. Yeah. Well, I wanted, I pulled up your website because I think if I, and this is my first time looking at it, but like just based on our prep, right? I'm like going to this. I'm like, you know, viral AI kind of crazy stunts, billboards. But then when I go to your website, like this website says to me like enterprise high end. And so it's this interesting mix of like you can do those things and then you still come here. And like this is the actual perception. And I thought this was great. By the way, this 548 million like this, this thing that's constantly taking up calls resolve to date. I love little social proof like that. And then I think this is a, this headline is a great example to me of I think we always want to search for like the really sexy or crazy or like punchy homepage headline. But I love this one, which is like, if you can make a, if you can say something that clearly speaks to a particular type of buyer like, oh, voice AI for regulated industries, this headline, this is one, two, three, four, five, this is five words that says so much. You know what I mean? Like you're saying like regulated that speaks to, okay, that must mean they can do this and must mean they can do that. Like, how did that line come up? Well, I think for one, I get really frustrated as a marketer every time I see a billboard, or I go to somebody's website and it's like AI infrastructure for GTM alliance. And like, I don't know what any of those words mean. And that's a good AI infrastructure for GTM alliance. Yeah, I don't know. It's just like a bunch of buzzwords that don't really mean anything. So as a marketing department, I've just really pushed our team to try to make everything as simplified as possible. We go by, okay, sure, we're for enterprises, but like we try to make all of our copy fifth grade reading level. Yeah. Built for high stakes, built for high stakes phone calls where security and trust actually matter. Yeah. And so the goal of the website copy is not to sound cool or esoteric. Like the goal is to clearly define what you do so that the audience understands immediately how you can provide value. And that's kind of in the philosophy for how we do all of our content. Do you think that the website serves a different purpose today than it did a couple years ago? Or like, how do you all think about the website in your funnel? That's a good question. I think that it has a very similar role personally, but I do know that a lot of people are maybe taking a different process after going to the website. Whereas it used to be website, go to the CTA, book a call so you can talk to a sales person. And I understand that it may be much more closer now to go to the website, feed the website into your LLM of choice and then get whatever output you are looking for on a specific question. And then finally, after you've done all your research, you might go talk to a sales person. So I think that the A, I think that the copy and the content that's on the website is just as important, if not more important than ever, but maybe the UI, the design, isn't as important if people aren't actually looking at it and they're just feeding the content to the LLM. Yeah. It's insanely important. Yeah. More important than ever is interesting because it almost has two audiences now. It's like it needs to resonate with humans and it needs to be crawlable, you know, by all of the LLM to properly understand what you do. Yeah. Yeah, just a shout out to Guy on my team too. Shout him out. Shout him out. We built this website. Shout out Guy on Ethan's team a month ago. His name is Cal. He had this idea we used to use Webflow, but like Webflow was such a pain just in terms of I didn't know how to use it. It was a very complex software for me to try and understand. We had to hire out an agency, but they were offshore and so there was the time delay and like if I wanted a new landing page spun up, I would basically be a three day turnaround. And this was unacceptable for the speed that we were trying to move. And he had this idea, what if we just use Cloud Code to build the entire website from scratch? And so that's what he did. So the entire website at bland.ai is fully custom code by a guy who had never built a piece of software day in his life. And so he shipped the whole thing from the ground up to where it's really good looking and professional too. You know, it's not like some decent. It's really good. It looks like a company who raised a hundred million bucks. Yeah. And so it took him a month to do. He coded the whole thing from scratch. What's his role in the team? He runs our brand actually. Wow. So I love this. And was he not a technical guy? No, we've never done a piece of code. So like if I'm like the PR guy for big AI, you know, like that's the story, which is like person who is a brand person, creative person. This is the story I think about AI, which is why it's cool. Can actually go do this now versus having to have an agency or all these other people do it. Like you have the idea, you go make it. Correct. Yeah. And what's cool too is that I actually provided a lot of value because now if I want to make a brand new landing page from scratch for a specific ad campaign for a customer, all I do is I open my cloud and I say, hey, make this landing page. And I wanted to roughly look like this or roughly saying this and it'll do it in five minutes, the entire page with our brand guidelines, everything fully optimized. And then I can push it to production and we're good. And so like it allows the iteration cycle to have gone from three days to now five minutes, which is huge. What if it breaks? It hasn't happened yet. So I don't even, I'm not trying to speak that. I'm not, I'm not trying to speak that into existence. But like, Dan and I have had this conversation about like, can we just like, vibe code our website? And I always just get stuck on the like, ah, the only thing that I don't like is that inevitably something with the website breaks and like no one knows like how to fix it. Yeah. That's a good concern. It happened. Yeah. Look, it's a made up concern, dude, because I've had a developer, you know, it still would be like, oh, we got the web developer, but you know, he's in Ukraine right now and like tomorrow will get back to him. You know, so it's always something. So that's cool. That's, that's promising. We liked, I like to hear that. Okay. Yeah. There's a lot of guard rails around it too. Like we can't ever push things without our engineering team, give him the okay and the approval and everything is very, you know, safe and secure. So we did all the way. Why is the engineering team involved in the website? Because it's in the GitHub and like kind of all, you know, there are separate places, but we just make sure we have all the right parameters in place to not miss anything. Okay. Because I know nothing about code. So I just, you know, type in that. Yeah, but you have to applaud. You basically learn it, you know, like, hey, reverse engineer me this thing. Yeah. Okay. So how do you run marketing? You got a team of seven. Anything you learned about, you know, I think having ideas is great. Having these viral campaigns is great, but everybody that I've interviewed over the years that is a successful marketing leader, they kind of come down to like, you got to have an operating system. You got to have some routine of like, whether it's campaigns or meetings or from how do you do your one-on-ones to how you set goals. Do you have any philosophy on this about a year into this company? Yeah. So I'll start by saying this. Everybody in our team and almost everybody in the entire company is full time in office five days a week in San Francisco. Yeah, I know people have different opinions on this for us. It has worked really well because not only do I get to build an incredible culture with the team, where's your office? We're all in North Beach down here in SF. And so we meet every day at 9.30 in the morning for 15 minutes. The entire team gets together and we walk through a simple three-step process, which is metrics, objectives, and blockers. And so in that 15 minutes, we make sure everybody's really aligned on where we are in terms of our metrics. What are the objectives that everybody needs to accomplish today? And then what are the blockers that are stopping us from achieving those objectives that we need to solve immediately? Do you guys like kick a hacky sack around while you do this? No, I might do that next time. Some guys on like a bongo board. I had a cell. Everybody hates me on YouTube. It's like, just got to keep dinner up there. Like it's my podcast. I'm going to do what I want. Hey, it's me Dave. I want to give a quick shout out to our friends at Vector for sponsoring this episode. If you run an ABM motion, tell me if this sounds familiar. Marketing spends weeks building a program. The accounts are selected. Channels are mapped. Budget gets approved. Then it launches and sales ignores it because it's too complicated to actually use. If that's relatable, your ABM strategy probably isn't the problem, but the operating system underneath it is. That's what Vector fixes. Their platform lets you build ad audiences from actual people. The ones on your site, clicking your ads, checking out your competitors. That means no more guessing based on job titles and hoping the right person sees your ad. How good is that? DataDog is a $1 billion revenue enterprise behemoth and they run their ABM motion exactly this way targeting real signals instead of generic titles. Vector built a playbook with their head of global ABM in campaigns at DataDog, breaking down his whole entire approach to enterprise ABM. So if you want to learn how to build a proper ABM program that scales, this playbook is worth a look. It's DataDog. It's a great one to study. Check it out vector.co/exit5. You can see all this info there. Go check it out. It's vector.co/exit5. Hey, it's Dave. Look, I want to tell you about Drive 2026. This is our annual event we do for the Ex-Five community. It's a 2-day B2B marketing conference in Stove, Vermont. We built it for marketers who want to get smarter and actually connect with their peers. This isn't a generic industry conference. It's a small, intentionally designed event where the programming, the venue, and the schedule all work together to create the conditions for real conversations. Attendee spend two days getting into the tactical details of B2B marketing, what's working, what's not, and how the best teams are thinking about the problems that actually matter. This is all about workshop sessions and discussions that are built around participation, not passive. Listening, I want you to actually come and be there. If you're going to take the time to leave your family, leave the office, get outside of work, like actually be here, take notes, pay attention, and make it all worth it. And here's the thing though, the B2B marketing stuff, that's what's going to get you to just by the ROI on your ticket. That's why you're going to be able to tell your boss that you want to go to this. But the best moments of drive don't happen on stage. They happen at breakfast on an afternoon hike over a drink after dinner. Somebody's going to be roasting marshmallows at this place. It's that type of event. We designed this for this connection. This is on purpose. Long breaks, unhurried meals, and opt in activities where people spend time together outside the session room. Because look, we're all people. Where else in your life can you talk to someone else who understands your job as a B2B marketer? I go to my kids swim lessons. I can't sit there and talk to that next to me about B2B marketing. But you can through the exit five community. And that's what drive is all about. It's September 8 through 10, 2026 at the lodge. It's Bruce Peak and Stovermont. Check it out exit five.com/drive to learn more about it. It's exit five.com/drive. And I hope to see you there on the metrics thing. So what would be a daily update on metrics that somebody would give? Yeah, so everybody on the team has two KPIs. The first is a shared collective KPI for the entire department, which we have called estimated pipeline value. It's just basically how much pipeline is marketing driving for our sales team. I'll tell you in a moment how we built out this model because it's one of the coolest things we've done here at BLAND. But everybody reports on that. And that is our team goal. There's bonus incentives tied to it. This is my way of trying to make sure that everybody is oriented towards the same collective goal. And they know that every action that they take, they will somehow be benefited for and the team will benefit for. So how would someone, how would someone like the brand guy influence that with the brand one? It's a bit tough because his is not as a tribute. But I think the whole thing that he did with the website. Well, that right. He made the website. That's the store. That's literally your store. The guy built your store. That's how it's actually good. He's actually good at it. Yeah. And so, and he'll come up with like creative campaigns. He's always working on what is our backdrop for the events. What's the activation that we do there? He's working on the giftings that we send out for ABM. So like these are all things that maybe aren't directly attributable to him. But because we have a generic team goal, we have to increase pipeline value. He knows that every action that he does should have that end goal. So if I was on your team and I was like, Hey, I want to start a podcast for for for for bland. Would I have to tell you a story about how I think that that podcast is going to lead to pipeline in order for us to like do it. I would say yes. You just have to make it slightly compelling point. But I will say is that like we also have we have the team KPI and then we all have individual KPIs. The individual KPIs are set in accordance to their specific role in the scope of their role. And so like before our content marketing lead all easier to do is make high quality videos that communicate our product well to our buyer. And so his KPI is he has to do X amount of high quality videos every single quarter that have to get shipped again he is incentives tied to this and whatnot. As long as he hits that KPI, then he can do whatever he wants. So he wants to start a podcast on the side. He can do that assuming you know if he's like, Hey, it's going to cost $20,000 to do to set up and it's going to take me an extra two hours of my time. If there's nothing else that I have that I would prefer him doing and I know he's still going to get his main KPI done. Go for it. I mean, I think that everybody on our team is super capable and we're small enough where they can come up with their own ideas and take bets. So seven high quality video whatever the number of high quality videos. Yeah. And our most of those like how do you is high quality just a word that you use or is it actually a qualifier. Yeah, we we try to define it the best way possible. And we have examples of like what the video should like in order to qualify. But yeah, I'm asking this because it is where a lot of things get stuck. It's like, and I wanted to just hear you have an example because it's not always. Oh, this person needs to make a video that leads to three new demos of bland. It's just like. It's just a little tagline on the project that's like, Oh, if we, or for example, how I would answer that podcast question. Yeah, we want to do this podcast because we want to reach leaders in regulated industries. And we think if we can interview him on the pod will build relationships with them that will help open door. It's kind of like that, right? It's like, Oh, check like that. Our intentions are right for doing this channel. Doesn't necessarily mean can we directly prove that these six videos. Draw X dollars in pipeline. Correct. Because that individual KPI is what I was that was the most important thing for their position to move the needle. But then the estimated pipeline team goal is their freedom and ability to be able to determine what they think is most high leverage. Albus did that goal. Okay. So daily stand up. That's key. Yeah. Yeah. No, look, I have no no shade on the office thing. Like I was just talking to Dan about this yesterday. I'm like, you know what? I think that I am very tired of being here alone in my house. And we have a team of eight people. We have a great culture. I think we would be at least 50. We would grow at least 50% more if we were all hanging out in the office every day. Yeah. Yeah. And everybody and really enjoy showing up to work. You know, we have a weekly team lunch where I'll go out and just enjoy life and hang out with each other. I think what we've built there is really special. Okay. So that's that's a part of it. What is so daily stand up? What else is in your head of marketing mix? Man, I I don't know. It's pretty it's pretty relapsed. Like everybody. Okay. Let me ask you a better question. Ask a better question. Get a better answer. Yeah. You do seem to do a lot of viral, you know, campaign. Right. Do you have a wait at drift? We did these things called marketable moments. And we try to do we just said that we're going to do one thing a month that like we're going to get people to talk about is do you have anything like that? Or running some type of regular once a quarter we want to do a big splash once a month we want to do a blank. We're going to run a six month campaign about X. Yeah. I think that like at the stage, there were that we're at. We still have a lot of different channels that are untapped. So this whole month, this whole upcoming quarter, my only goal is how do I build a really solid ABM program and then scale it. And everybody in the team has usually specific tasks that when we get into the objective section on the on the daily standup, it's like, here's what you're doing. And order to help us with this ABM thing. So our events marketer is building out specific one off events or dinners that she's hosting that I can then invite our ABM list to our growth coordinator is helping build out one on one personalized outreach videos that we can send to everybody on the ABM list. Another events coordinator is working on giftings like we have everybody that kind of ties into this core objective of what we're trying to solve as a marketing. I got it. Yeah. So right now you're trying to shift the mix from what you're doing before to be more to do more ABM. We're trying to keep the overall character of bland, which is this company that's really exciting that does fund things that will hire a soldier boy to come do a wine tasting with, which is something we have happening this Friday. So we brought them back out to do a private wine tasting with some prospects and customers like who doesn't want to meet him in this setting? Yeah, I don't know. Look, I am a little bit of a music guy. I fancy myself. You know, I got into the game when soldier boy was coming out. So for me, that's interesting for an enterprise. I don't even know who your customer is like, maybe yeah, that's cool. Can you tell me about this? Anyway, because this is in my prep notes, you guys bought soldier boys voice rights for an AI voice campaign in Atlanta. He was the first rapper to automate his voice with AI. And wait, where the heck did that idea come from? Why did you pick him? What did you do with it? Please tell me speaking of soldier boy. We have a mutual friend. I think he would like worked with him at some point and he kind of sent us the idea that there was an opportunity or what's this thing? Maybe in a situation where he needed a little bit of money. It's an opportunity to say he needed some cash. And soldier boy is also this perfect figure because his time of peak popularity was early OG internet like OG, like internet, social media marketing. That's what people think of. Yeah, which for our ICP, you know, call it anywhere from like 30 to 50 year old, you know, people that are executives in larger companies like this was the area in which they were, you know, in high school college listening to this type of music. And so people have a lot of a lot of positive affinity with him. This type of music that rabbit goddamn rap music. You should have got Mike Jones. This might have been before your error, but Mike Jones had that not he put his phone number out there. That was lay, you know, hey, what was it? Anyway, I'll get it later. I'll wrap it up for you. We talked about that one too. So, so, but at the same time, like everybody knows who soldier boy is. I think I'd Google it. It's like whatever 50% of the US actually knows who he is yet he has kind of fallen off for the last decade or so. And so it's this weird in between point where like he's not as expensive as he probably should be, but he's still a celebrity that everybody knows his name. And so when we have the opportunity, we talked to, you know, his manager and him and like, it seemed pretty aligned. And so what we did is we bought the rights to his voice with exclusivity and we and we decided what does that meet? What does that even mean? Like buying the rights of someone's voice? What does that entail? It means that we can use it his voice when they're a platform and anybody can automate their phone calls with soldier boy now. So this is like a real thing that people do. Customers of bland will use soldier boy to automate their phone calls. So like if you call into a restaurant that is using this voice, soldier boy will pick up the phone and he'll take your order and no process the payment. So I could create a support line for exit five and we could use soldier boy's voice for that. Correct. Yeah. So that's what it's like. Now anybody using bland can use that and can you use him anytime in your marketing that you want? I believe so. Yeah. We had in the contract something about I could fly out to Atlanta. We did a full day of shooting. I don't know if you've seen but one of our big ideas early on was we bought a big red telephone car. So this is a fully street legal vehicle that drives on the road, but it's a massive telephone. So if you just Google like bland AI telephone car, it was one of the best purchases that we ever made because we still use it like two years later. And we I shift the telephone car out to Atlanta. You can see soldier boy right there. Yeah. I shifted out to Atlanta and we did a full filming day with him. How do you drive in this thing? Where do you see dude? You have to look through the numbers. It's a stick shift. It's like a 1960's needle that we turn into a telephone, insured street legal like the whole thing. Sometimes we'll drive it around San Francisco or conferences. The most recent conference we went to it was actually our activation. So we figured out a way to get it inside the conference and we just let people hang out in it, take photos, call our number, like do all the inside the phone car. This is actually crazy because you got so much like you know, double Excel magazine. They don't care what your product is or who you, you know, but they're writing of soldier boy as the first rapper with a telephone car. But that is going to be something that increases your word of mouth, which matters because of LMS on the internet. This is amazing. Right, right. Exactly. Yeah. We had a lot of fun with this. I think we did like 60 million impressions in the first week, which was a really good CPM for, quote, so even though you're like going up market and doing ABM stuff and focusing on the enterprise, do you think you can still do this type of like marketing stunts, grill, a marketing and B2B? Yeah. I think we can't afford to stop. The ICP customer that I talked to knows that this phone car exists. They know about the soldier boy thing. They know about the recent collaboration we did with Paul with a series of you video. Is there a lesson? Is there a lesson there? Yeah. About what approach to marketing works today? I think the brand is really important. And I define brand as the association that people make with the thing. So if you're familiar with like the origin of the word brand, right? It's the whole, they used to stick brands on cows. And so not school me. School me young man. Tell me. Okay. Cool. So this is not my thing, but like we, uh, stood into the game. The original way, where the word brand comes from is farmers used to brand their cows. So they would stick tag in their ear or somewhere on the cow. And it would be to determine that they were the owner of this animal. And so what would happen is that people would be wandering around. They would see the cow and then they would make an association depending on what the brand was. So if you saw the cow, you're like, Hey, it's such a John on it. Depending on your association with John, whether it's positive or negative, you will treat the cows separately or differently accordingly. And so it'll be like, if you hate Paul, then you might kill a cow and eat them for dinner. If you love Paul, you will probably return it back to Paul. And so the brand is the association that you have with the stimuli or the thing. And so what we try to do a blend is we try to create really cool viral experiences that create a positive association with bland. And so we want to stamp our logo. We want to stamp a brand on it. And so that when people see that thing, they associate it positively with the experience we get them. And do you have like a full, that's great, by the way, I love, I love just talking to people. This is what I like. People are going to listen to this and this, these interviews make me happy because it's like these are the things that I love in marketing. This is what makes me love marketing. That's why I got into the job. It's not to like make sure that the nurture email campaign is sent out or to spend, you know, half of my year negotiating with Gartner on like how to get them to talk about us. It's like, let's do this type of stuff. But on that thing, on like the what you want bland to be associated with, are there, are there guardrails for these campaigns? Like it doesn't seem like you're a lot of people that do this brand type of stuff. It's very like they're trying to take shots at competitors or call out the old way versus the new way. Do you have a philosophy on doing this? You're kind of just like, Hey, we got soldier boy in a car and it's working. You know, you're not really like being controversial, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. We act a lot of our ideas, like probably 80% of the ones that we come up with, we have to cut because we don't think that they will capture an up-intention. We don't think that the brand sentiment will be positive. I think it's just a lot of throwing out ideas, giving people the space to come up with stuff. And then we always just try to think from the perspective of our ICP. So like, would they stop scrolling if they saw soldier boy in front of a big red telephone car? And then it stops scrolling and we can then figure out how in the video to communicate what we do as a product. And then would they like that experience? And so that felt like a good idea and a good bet to make for us. And just like the why now, do you think there's anything related to trends right now with marketing and AI and the world and business in general that makes this approach even more relevant than ever? Like are other cut, do you have to do this to succeed or can you write a thousand blog posts and that can also work? I think that can definitely also work. In a crowded space like the boy say, I landscape though, where the industry is moving so fast there. You know, I went to a conversation the other day. I think there was 200 boys say I competitors. It was absurd. But when I look at all of their booths, this is a really good example. It all was the same buzzwords, the same jargon, boy say that drives ROI, boy say, I that actually saves you time. And it's like, I don't care. Everybody's saying that. So how do you stand out in an environment? One, you say something like boy say, I per regulated industries so that the regulated industries people identify with who you are as a company, you really niche down. And then also you get something that captures their attention. So that was the one where we took our full phone car, drove it into the conference and stuck it there. And nobody else had a car in the building, let alone a telephone car. And so both of those things working together have served as well. Ah, you're making us. All right. 40 minutes in and I got the hook for this, which is like, it's how this B2B brand stands out in a sea of 200 competitors. And you're all well funded. And this is what makes a job fun. It's like why it's like a game. It's the game of all right. There's 200 other competitors all saying the same boring kind of stuff. What are we going to do to stand out? I think that's a key ingredient to your approach to marketing. Yeah. If you were in a different industry, may have it no competition than you might take a different approach. Yep. It helps do that. I'll just say this point like our product team is phenomenal and the direction that our founders went early on. Yeah. Helped a lot from a marketing perspective. So every other voice AI provider in the space decided that they wanted to build some type of a wrapper around frontier providers. So they take open AI, they take in through object, they stitch it together with a Texas Beach provider and some inference and then they call it a day. What our founders decided to do was build the entire stack from scratch. And so they decided to build custom LLMs to build our own Texas Beach model in house so that we controlled what we had full reliability. We had full security since not none the data went to third party sources or were bouncing from API to API. It's more suited for voice because you can decrease latency. Like the whole thing was built for this idea that real enterprises need all these features. They need reliability. They need scale building. They need observability. And so that helps a lot too when you have a real product or different shader like that. I can just state the facts and tell the truth and people want it. State the fact exactly. If you have a great product that's like, I mean, I can tell you studied marketing and gone and read some of the classic books and understand that but it's always been like own your facts. And if you have great facts like the facts are the best marketing ingredient that you can have. Did these guys have prior experience in the space? Like how did they go? Why are they the ones to go and rewrite the rules and build this a new way? No prior experience. I started by trying to automate insurance denial appeals, which you know, as you can imagine was very unsuccessful. And our CEO one day in typical engineering fashion wanted to order take out from a local restaurant, but they only took phone orders. And so he decided he didn't want to actually call them. He wanted to try and stitch together AI to call it. And this was again, this is like, Chaturgy 3 had just come out like it's really bad. But he in the matter of 24 hours figured out a way to get Chaturgy to make a call to it was like five second latency at the time, but his idea was, hey, I finally figured it out. And if I can get value from this, some other people might be able to and then they just started obsessing over the industry and the product for the next few years. Did you know the product was that good when you were interviewing? Yes. I think the ability to demo by just simply typing in a number into your phone and calling it. Is really helpful for prospects and for hires every part of my onboarding when I bring on a new person into the org. I spend ample time having them call the number, having them watch real life production calls. Like there's this one call that's my favorite that I show them, which is like a customer that we have did a call and on it, the customer who was ringing in was like three minutes into the conversation. And then our agent says, also, if you would ever want to talk to a real human, let us know and we can make that happen. And she goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, I thought you were the real human. I didn't even, sorry, I've been in this call for like five minutes. I didn't even realize you were a robot. And so those types of experiencing experience. is being able to show them to candidates, me getting to see stuff like that on them. - Oh my gosh. Well, what I think is so cool talking to you, it's like, guy who's really fired up about his company, doing creative marketing, I think it's so underrated, and I write about this sometimes, I've like, everyone talks about marketing in B2B. Everybody talks about sales and marketing alignment, you know, and you're gonna go through this. As you do the ABM stuff, I'm sure, the really underrated, the most important is sales as marketing and product alignment. It's like, oh my gosh, give me a great product. Give me good founders in the space, like let's go. That's all the right ingredients. It's harder, and I think this is the thing people don't often wanna say is, yeah, of those 200 competitors you have, like probably a lot of those products are shitty products. - Yeah, really bad. - Yeah. I have two questions that I keep typing over that I wanted to get back to you, 'cause you mentioned it. You mentioned acting, like you guys acts a lot of ideas. What's the forum for having these ideas? Is it in Slack? Is you have a weekly meeting where you throw a bunch of ideas out, and then how do they come to B? - Yeah, so I think there's two different types of ideas. There's the ones that we come up with ourselves, and there's the ones that we use agencies to help us with. So we can't take credit for everything. What I will say is that we are the type of company who enjoys spending money on marketing. We think that there's a really high return on investment, even if it's not fully attributable. And so if there's a really great agency that we've worked with in the past who can dedicate ample amount of time just coming up with creative ideas, we're all willing to pay mine to get that help. And so those sessions are really helpful, brainstorming with them. - That's an important lesson of the game, though, that you've already learned, which is like, you don't have to create ideas themselves. Most everybody, you look at every company that has a Super Bowl ad, none of them came up with those ads themselves. They all had an agency that did it. - And I'm a huge believer of contractors. So our team is intentionally lean, and what I try to do is have one or two domain experts who run a department in marketing. So it's brands, demand, gin, et cetera. And then give them full access to whatever resources they need, whether that be capital, whether that be contractors and agencies, 'cause I just believe that you can hire contractors or agencies who are world class at what they do, and you can get their high-leveraged output at a fraction of the cost. And so with a creative agency, we've always gone great our life from that, so we continue to do it. When it's just us coming up with ideas, we like to do round tables sometimes. Our kind of main ideas is let's just throw out everything we possibly can, and let's be as controversial as possible, and then let's dial it back. So go as far as you can, and then let's just figure out how do we bring it to which just come on that line where it's enough controversy or enough novelty to get people's attention, but people still have a positive association with a brand. - Yeah, I like that, that's good. Yeah, you have to get to the electric fence to like, there you go, where you should be at. Right, and if soldier boy made the cut, I'd love to know what didn't. (laughing) - Yeah, yeah. - But you also mentioned brand sentiment. Was that just a thing that you said, or do you also measure that as part of your marketing efforts? - No, I think it's more anecdotal. I get to talk a lot of customers. - It's a gut feeling, like all man, people did not like that, that did not go over well. - Yeah, and thankfully, we have a large, kind of sounding board that we use, and if there's multiple people who are like, this is not going to go well. Like we've had times where our CEO or one person's like, we have to do this, we have to do this. But then the rest of the team is like, I don't think people will appreciate it. We usually will veto it. And then sometimes when we need to call them if they guns will ask the investors, and then it usually almost always gets shut down. So that's always a good rubric. - Yeah, like what do you all think of this? - Yeah. - Yeah. - All right, Ethan, this was great. I could spend hours with you. I'm hoping there'll be more forums for this, and it's fun. Doing this podcast gives me an insight into like, which companies are doing interesting things, and I got, I'm gonna hit the, I don't do this. I'm gonna hit the follow on the bland. Blonday, I company page because, I wanna see what's going on over there. But thanks for coming on the pod. I'll obviously see you in our community, see you around Exify, but keep doing an awesome job. I love stories like this, which is company kind of in a traditional space, lots of competitors, outsmarting people and innovating with fun marketing, which is like, that's what a, why a lot of us got into this job. And I hope people get that sentiment from the podcast. If you do send us an email, hideexify.com or we'll link to Ethan's stuff right here. The best thing you can do is like, send him lots of messages and LinkedIn connections after our podcast goes out, 'cause that makes me, makes me really happy and let us know that this landed. So, all right, go get you guys back to the office. Firejules over, get out of here. - Absolutely, thank you Dave. - All right man, bye. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you liked 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) Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Walker Sans an integrated B2B marketing and growth services agency. Growing your business is hard. Even if you have a full-time team of marketers behind you, predictable growth is tough. You have to tell me about it. The good news is you don't have to do it alone. In my experience, and I've interviewed more B2B marketing leaders and probably anyone on this planet, there's often a powerful agency or two or three behind every great CMO or VP of marketing. That's where an agency like Walker Sans comes in. They help B2B marketing leaders get clear on what actually matters most, business outcomes. Instead of starting with what channels should we use, Walker Sans begins with one very important question. What business outcome are we trying to drive? They work with you to build every part of your strategy, messaging, channels and measurement around that North Star goal with support from their marketing toolkit that spans strategy, content, creative, communications, digital marketing and revops. Walker Sans has been helping leaders turn disconnected channel activity into measurable business impact for over 25 years with customers across enterprise software, AI, manufacturing, supply chain and many other industries. Their outcome-based marketing model is built around the idea that brand, demand and revenue are one conversation, not three separate silos. I love hearing that. If you're ready to make growing your business feel easier, Walker Sans is the agency you should consider adding to your team. Go and check them out at walkersans.com/exit5 to help your business drive measurable growth. That's walkersans.com/exit5.