In this episode, Dave sits down with Mychelle Mollot, CMO at Knak, a platform for creating, designing, and optimizing email and landing page content. Mychelle shares her wealth of experience, having led marketing efforts at IBM and various startups. She discusses her approach to leading marketing teams, scaling brands, and embracing AI in B2B marketing.
Dave and Mychelle cover:
- How Knak built a brand and captured demand in a space without a known category
- The balance between meeting short-term goals and dedicating some marketing budget to high-risk, high-reward experiments
- How AI is evolving from a standalone tool to being embedded in the core functionalities of marketing platforms
Timestamps
- (00:00) - - Intro to Mychelle
- (06:05) - - Embracing Diverse Career Paths to Become a CMO
- (10:49) - - Leveraging Big Company Skills in Startups
- (11:40) - - Influencing Resources Without Ownership in Large Organizations
- (16:02) - - Weekly Team Meeting Tips
- (19:03) - - Mychelle’s OKR Framework
- (23:49) - - How Knak Creates and Captures Demand
- (25:21) - - How To Understand and Target Buyers
- (32:03) - - Having AI Discussions With Your Team
- (35:37) - - AI is Shifting from Core Component to Creative Assistant
- (36:59) - - Integrating AI into Core Tools
- (42:41) - - Sales and Marketing Alignment
- (46:03) - - Navigating Relationships as a CMO
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.
The Exit Five CMO Podcast (Hosted by Dave Gerhardt)