This episode is from Drive 2024, our first-ever in-person event for B2B marketers in Burlington, Vermont. Dave hosts a marketing leadership panel with Peter Mahoney, CCO of GoTo, Tara Robertson, CMO at Bitly, and Amrita Mathur, Head of Marketing at Zapier. These marketing leaders open up about their experiences and share actionable advice to help you lead, manage, and set goals for your marketing team.

Dave, Peter, Tara, and Amrita cover:

Why business literacy is so important for marketing leaders
How to set goals for your marketing team
Each panelists biggest career risks — what worked, and what did not
Practical frameworks for managing short-term demands while staying committed to long-term goals

Timestamps

(00:00) - - Intro to Peter, Amrita, and Tara
(07:01) - - One Piece of Advice for Marketing Leaders
(14:29) - - How to Set Goals For Your Team
(23:40) - - Framework for Short-Term vs Long-Term Pipeline Goals
(26:14) - - Budgeting for Short-Term vs Long-Term Goals
(28:44) - - How to Work with a Difficult Counterpart
(31:07) - - Panelists’ Biggest Career Risk That Worked
(35:56) - - Panelists’ Biggest Career Risk That Did NOT Work
(38:32) - - How to Lead your Team When You’re in a Leadership Rut
(46:53) - - How to Navigate a New Leadership Role
(50:17) - - Making Uncomfortable Decisions as a Leader
(53:30) - - Does CEO = CMO?
(55:13) - - When to Reconsider Your Strategy
(58:38) - - Closing Remarks

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 Zuddl.

We’re halfway through 2025, and one thing’s clear: events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking - you name it. Everyone’s leaning in.

Events are a core part of our playbook this year at Exit Five. So far, we’ve hosted two virtual sessions each month, one large virtual event, one in-person meetup, and we’re deep in the weeds planning our Drive conference coming back to Vermont this September.

Zuddl helps us run a smarter event strategy - from driving registrations, managing invites, automating comms, reminders, analytics, tracking. Their Salesforce integration also makes it simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without pulling in ops.

On top of that, the differentiator with Zuddl is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us - and that’s how we’ve been able to keep the momentum going with 12+ events already this year, with plenty more to come.

If events are part of your marketing strategy, you need to look at Zuddl to see how companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike, and Iterable are using the top event platform for Business events in 2025.

Head over to zuddl.com/exitfive to learn more.

151.Commusings: When Lightning Strikes