In this solo episode, Dave shares his POV on marketing with answers to a bunch of burning questions, including:
- Balancing Brand vs. Demand
- Working with the sales team vs. serving customers
- How to inject personality into your brand
- The most successful marketing campaigns Dave was a part of in his career
- How to plan and brainstorm good marketing ideas
- The biggest mistake marketing teams make
- How to structure a marketing team
- How did you know it was the right time to start your own company?
- How to best differentiate in a crowded competitive market with similar feature offerings
Timestamps
- (00:00) - - Intro to Dave
- (04:37) - - Balancing brand, demand, and customer-centricity in marketing
- (07:15) - - Infusing personality into marketing
- (11:35) - - Most successful marketing campaigns and why they worked
- (18:57) - - The concept of marketable moments and creating momentum
- (22:34) - - Marketing at Drift and Privy
- (24:28) - - How to plan and brainstorm campaign ideas
- (27:29) - - Biggest mistakes marketing teams make
- (29:01) - - Structuring marketing teams for different business needs
- (29:48) - - The journey to starting Exit Five as a company
- (32:11) - - Brand marketing versus demand marketing for scaling startups
- (34:49) - - Differentiating positioning in a crowded market
- (38:15) - - Closing thoughts
Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.com
Join the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletter
Check out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/
Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership
***
Today’s episode is brought to you by Walnut.
Why are we pouring all this effort into marketing just to push buyers to a “request a demo” or “contact sales” button?
Come on, today’s buyers don’t want to talk to sales right away. They want to explore your product themselves, see how it works, and understand its value before booking a meeting.
That’s where Walnut comes in.
Walnut empowers marketers and GTM teams to create interactive, self-guided product experiences in minutes. Embed these experiences on your site, in emails, or anywhere in your funnel to let buyers engage on their terms, from awareness to close and beyond.
That's the beauty of Walnut - you're getting a platform that your sales and CS colleagues can use to showcase the product too.
And the best part? You get real intent data—see which features prospects love, where they drop off, and what’s actually driving pipeline. Demo Qualified Leads are the new MQL.
Over 500 companies, like Adobe and NetApp, use Walnut to drive 2-3x higher website conversion rates and 7 figures in pipeline on a yearly basis. So do you want to drive more leads, shorten sales cycles, and actually show your product instead of hiding it behind another typical B2B CTA?
Go check out Walnut.io. And if you tell them Dave from Exit 5 sent you, they'll build out your first demo for free!
The Exit Five CMO Podcast (Hosted by Dave Gerhardt)