The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)

#371 | Most B2B companies gate everything and hide their pricing. Funnel Leasing does neither, and grew from $3 million to $50 million in revenue anyway. Dave sits down with Alex Howe, SVP of Marketing and Growth at Funnel Leasing, to talk about how he built that growth engine with no marketing background, no paid ads, and no sales team pressure. They get into why his whole philosophy is built aro...

#370 | Most B2B marketers have no idea you can run TV ads for $50 a day. Dave sits down with TV advertising veteran Amit Sharan, SVP of Marketing at Tatari, to talk about this, and how to think about CTV as a B2B channel. They get into the difference between linear and streaming, why programmatic buying only reaches 15% of total TV inventory, and the case for retargeting your website visitors on T...

#369 | It's hard to know what works and what doesn't, what's real and what's not right now. So we tapped 9 B2B marketing pros, all specialists in their area, to share one thing that's produced real results so far this year. Here's how it works: 9 speakers, one play each, two minutes on the clock. When host Dave Gerhardt hits the buzzer, it's on to the next play. The audience votes on their favorit...

#368 | Dave sits down with Jonathan Hunt, VP of Content and Media at HubSpot, to talk about what it means to run a media company inside a software company, and why that framing changes everything about how you build a content team. Jonathan runs a 70-person operation reaching 50 million people a month across 17 YouTube channels and a creator network of 150. They get into how HubSpot thinks about t...

#367 | Dave sits down with Jess Cook, VP of Marketing at Vector, to talk about how she spent $12K on seven micro-influencers with zero UTM tracking and generated $1.1M in pipeline. Jess also breaks down why she started a brand podcast as an awareness play, how a B2C copywriting background at major CPG brands shaped the way she thinks about brand and standing out in B2B, and what it actually takes...

#366 | The B2B buyer has gone antisocial. No form fills, no hand raises, just self-directed research through Google, Reddit, and AI before they ever talk to sales. In this session, you'll hear from three marketing pros about how they built a LinkedIn influencer program that doubled branded search volume, why ungating top-of-funnel content drives more meetings - not fewer, and how to build an LLM v...

Most B2B influencer programs fail for the same reason: no defined success metrics before the first post goes live. Brianna Doe, founder of influencer marketing agency Verbatim, breaks down how to actually build an influencer program that maps to pipeline — not just impressions. She covers her "Creator Engine" framework, how to tier creators by authority and reach, and why 90 days is the absolute m...

Dave sits down with Eoin Clancy, VP of Growth at AirOps, to talk about what's working in B2B marketing right now. They get into the rise of the content engineer role, how to use AI to produce high-quality content without creating AI slop, and why webinars have become AirOps' top growth channel in 2026. Eoin breaks down the three signs that content is AI slop, how AirOps runs their webinar funnel e...

#363 | Louis Grenier joins Dave for a conversation about what it takes to stand out in B2B marketing when everything feels the same. They get into how people really decide to buy, why most B2B brands look and sound identical, and the marketing fundamentals that hold up no matter what's changing around them. The kind of conversation that reminds you why you got into marketing in the first place. Ti...

#362 | Dave sits down with Eddie Shleyner, founder of VeryGoodCopy.com , to talk about why great marketing copy can't be generated — it has to be written. They get into why AI writing feels flat, what separates copy that moves people from copy that just fills space, and why the process of writing is where the real work happens. Eddie also shares how he accidentally built one of the most-read copyw...

#361 | In this episode, Matt Carnevale, Head of Community at Exit Five talks with three marketers doing impactful work in AEO. AI search is changing how buyers find products, and most B2B teams are still figuring out where to start. In this session, each marketer shares what's working and wins they’ve experienced — from earned media and technical audits to homepage fixes and tracking AI visibility...

#360 | Dave sits down with Ishveen Jolly, founder and CEO of Open Sponsorship, to talk about what influencer and athlete marketing actually looks like for B2B brands — and why it's more accessible than most marketers think. Ishveen breaks down how a $5K March Madness campaign outperformed traditional ads, why your first influencer deal will almost certainly miss on the offer, and how to think abou...

#359 | Dave sits down with Casey Patterson , Director of ABM at Snowflake, to talk about what ABM actually looks like inside one of the biggest companies in enterprise software. Casey breaks down how she cold LinkedIn messaged her now-boss Hillary to get her ABM decks reviewed before ever working together, why ABM works best when marketing stops thinking about credit and just focuses on helping sa...

#358 | Ben Wallis (Customer Lifecycle Manager, Quo), Jaina Mistry (Director of Brand and Content Marketing, Knak), Kremi Mestanova (B2B Content and Growth Strategist, Kremi Marketing), and Tyler Cook (Head of Email Marketing, Hypermedia Marketing) join Dave for an Exit Five live session on what's actually working in email right now. Ben shows how Quo built a Spotify Wrapped-style year-in-review ca...

#357 | Dave sits down with George Bonaci , VP of Growth at Ramp, to talk about what growth actually looks like at one of the most talked-about brands in B2B. George breaks down why Ramp has no CMO and why he thinks that's a feature, not a bug. He makes the case for attention as the new moat when execution gets commoditized, and shares how he went from hardcore attribution obsessive to betting on s...

#356 | Dave sits down with Brett Domeny , product lead at Webflow focused on AEO, to talk about what it actually takes to show up in AI search. Brett breaks down Webflow's AEO maturity model — four core areas that actually matter: content, technical structure, authority, and measurement — and why most of AEO is just good SEO done right. They get into how LLM crawlers work and what your site needs...

#355 | Dave sits down with Maria Scheifler to talk about why your marketing team might be getting less done as it grows — and what to do about it. Maria makes the case for running marketing like a product team: two-week sprints, a prioritized backlog, and a lightweight intake process that kills approval bottlenecks without losing control. She walks through the context-switching exercise that prove...

#354 | Sue (Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Monarch Money), Jonathan (VP of Marketing, Seamless. AI), and Naomi (Senior Product Marketing Manager, Customer.io) join Dan for a live Exit Five session on customer marketing. Sue breaks down how Monarch discovered that the best time to promote their referral program was during trial and the data behind a 64% lift in referral shares and half a million doll...

#353 | Tara (CMO, Optimizely), Julia (Director of AI Adoption, Optimizely), Lily (CMO, Three Play Media), Pejman (CMO, Menlo Security), and Kevin (CMO, CompTIA) join Dave for a live Exit Five session on how real marketing teams are actually using AI right now. Lily shows how she replaced two BDR headcount with a HubSpot prospecting agent and went from an 18% to 46% response rate on inbound leads....

#352 | Dave sits down with Uzair Dada , CEO of Iron Horse , to talk about why most B2B companies are overcomplicating their marketing and what to do instead. Uzair breaks down his three-part growth framework — get discovered, get chosen, close — and explains why most companies are wasting the majority of their ad budget targeting the wrong audience entirely. He also gets into how to actually show...

#351 | Dave is joined by Corey Haines , the founder of Conversion Factory, Swipe Files, and Marketing-Skills.com, which has over 20,000 stars on GitHub. He's been all-in on AI since 2023 and in this episode he shows Dave exactly how he works now. He pulls up his screen and walks through live keyword research from an API, 10 programmatic SEO pages generated in under a minute, a cross-referenced SEO...

#350 | Dave was a guest on Slate's Social Social Club webinar for a conversation about everything organic marketing and B2B social media strategy with Jeff Meltz (Head of Social at Atlassian), Brianna Doe (Founder, Verbatim), and Carmen Vicente (Social Strategist at Slate). If you are thinking about things like creating content on LinkedIn, making videos, writing content for your executive team, t...

#349 | Megan Lueders (CMO, Sonatype), Ido Mart (CMO, ManyChat), and Kim Storin (CMO, Zayo) join Dave for a live CMO panel from an Exit Five meetup in Austin. Megan breaks down how the pace of change in marketing has outrun every other function in the business. Ido talks about why your strengths as a CMO only matter if you choose the right environment for them. And Kim shares how she measures marke...

#348 | Dave sits down with Melton Littlepage , CMO at 1Password, to talk about what category creation actually looks like inside a company that's already won. Melton breaks down why 1Password is betting on an entirely new category called Extended Access Management, how they chose it over competing in an existing one, and the tactics behind it: lightning strike events, analyst relations, and embedd...

#347 | ClickUp drives millions of impressions for the company through videos and content for B2B marketers on social, and in this episode Dave sits down with Chris Cunningham , a founding member of the marketing team at ClickUp and the guy who runs social there now, to talk about how they do it. Chris breaks down why 99% of companies are doing social wrong, how ClickUp runs a weekly writers room a...