Dave Goes UNBOUND: 5 Things B2B Marketing Leaders Are Doubling Down On

Dave Gerhardt (0:00)

Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Look, I hear about AI agents every single day on the internet in the Exit Five community, but it's confusing. It's a little bit overwhelming. Which platform should I be using? Which agents are actually worth building? How do I even set this up? There's a lot of noise out there. It's kind of hard to tell what's actually going to make the job easier versus what's just going to be another thing to manage, or is this just a cool little thing some guy wrote about on LinkedIn? Well, Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers. You can build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. This is really smart. They also just launch virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that can learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your whole website optimized. Humans, that's us, of course. We still get the final say over these robots, but this seems really useful. This is worth leaning into right now. Agents have so much potential and using AI in a platform like Optimizely for stuff that eats your week so you can get more time for the strategic thinking and actual fun parts of your job. I'm into that. Let's make marketing about the craft of marketing again. I think there's something there. So go and check out Optimizely right now. See how their AI agents can help you with your B2B marketing operations. They purposely built this for B2B marketing. This is really cool. optimizely.com/exitfive. That's optimizely.com/exitfive.

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All right. This is a fun little change of pace episode for everyone. I was down in Boston for some crazy reason after Drive. I decided to go immediately next week back down to Boston to check out HubSpot's Unbound event. It had been a decade since I had been there. I knew a bunch of people from the Exit Five community were going to be there. So I wanted to go really with no agenda, just have some meals with people and be Content Dave. So I almost forgot to do this and Marissa pinged me and was like, hey, are you going to make any content while we're down there? So I grabbed my phone and I was literally just going down the escalator, saw a bunch of people, bunch of familiar faces and friendly folks, marketing leaders from in and around the Exit Five community. So at Unbound live on the conference floor, I asked everybody two questions. I said, hey, tell me one thing you're doubling down on in your work life right now, and tell me one thing you're doubling down on in your personal life right now. And that's what you're going to hear. This mashup of episodes, this mashup of little audio voice notes that was recorded straight from my phone from the floor at Unbound. I hope you like this. It's a nice little change of pace. Send me a note, David Exit Five, if you want to suggest a topic for the future, have any feedback or just want to say hi to me and the Exit Five team. Shout out to producer Marissa for making this happen last minute. Here it is. Enjoy this little short little episode, all about doubling down.

So the number one thing everyone is talking about at these dinners and lunches and around the venue, it's actually I'm seeing less people interested in. It's different than it was three or four months ago about this Claude scale or that. The bigger conversation now, especially among founders and executives, it's like, how do we stand out? How do we differentiate? Everyone is saying the same thing or they're saying AI powered this or AI powered that, or you have all these beliefs within the market that a product can or can't do this thing or hey, maybe why do I even need your $100,000 SaaS product at all? Because I have Claude and so the marketers at these companies, the number one challenge that they have to fight against is, one, the perception that AI can do all these things and so every $20 a month subscription at ChadGBT can do this thing for you. And then number two is there's just so much noise and so much competition in any industry because of AI, everyone's adding new AI features and this and that. It's really hard to stand out even if you have something that's better, faster, easy to use, people like it more. People don't necessarily believe that because they're skeptical of marketing. And so a lot of it comes back to how do you stand out? I think the number one thing for marketers right now is to really, it's less about tactics and channels and it's more about digging into company strategy, positioning, messaging, but not just website messaging, actually fundamentally go to market, like bringing marketing back. Marketing needs to have more involvement again in the four P's of marketing, not just, hey, here's this update we got from product or here's the packaging for this. Marketing, it's almost like strategy is going to be more important than ever, because all the tactics and stuff that can be done with AI or any of these tools, the harder conversations are like where the humans need to be involved, and that's the CRO talking to the CMO and the Chief Product Officer and the CEO, making big bets and strategic decisions on where the company is going to go. I think it's a great time right now for marketers or aspiring marketing leaders and current marketing leaders to really think about strategy. I'll give you an example. I was at dinner tonight with someone on Katie from Survey Monkey's team, and we just were talking about Katie on our podcast. I don't think this episode has come out yet or maybe it's coming out soon, but a couple of years ago, they rebranded to Momentive or something like that because they didn't want to be perceived as Survey Monkey in the enterprise. But it's actually funny because today in 2026, it's almost like being Survey Monkey, they're going back to their roots and back to their brand. And the monkey is actually what's going to make them stand out and be recognized. And so there's a whole interesting thing there that it's like, it's either people are talking super tactical about like how to use Claude to run their ads or they're really high level. And I think this is the really important part is like making marketing a strategic partner to the business in terms of generating revenue as opposed to obsessing over little channels. We need more marketers having a seat at the table with the product team, with the sales team, with the CEO and influencing and truly being the voice of the customer and understanding the market again. All right, so I'm here with Jonathan Hunt. He's VP of Media at HubSpot. Two questions I'm asking everyone.