Demand Gen Plays for the Antisocial Buyer

**Dave Gerhardt** (0:00)
Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends at Optimizely. Optimizely is the AI platform built for modern marketing teams helping you create content, run experiments, personalize experiences, and optimize your website, all powered by agentic AI.
I want to be the person on my team who actually knows how to build with AI, not just talk about it, not just use Claude to ask silly questions, but I want real output, something I can point to and say, I built that and it saved my team hours every week. If you want to be that person, check out this resource. Team at Optimizely is super smart in this area and they've developed a new AI marketing certification called Opal U. It's a five day live course designed for senior marketing leaders who are ready to ship more with AI. This is a structured hands-on program with just one hour a day for five days where you'll build three real AI agents that saves 10 hours a week, plus you're gonna learn five prompt engineering techniques that actually produce usable output, how to feed your agents the right context so they write and think like you, how to connect them to real data sources so they're pulling from what actually matters to your business. And you'll do all of this alongside 50 other senior marketing leaders just like you dealing with the same challenges. And at the end, you'll present what you built, get feedback, see what others created and leave with 10 new ideas for what to build next. Plus 20% of Opal U graduates have gotten a promotion or a new job after completing this. That's pretty cool. So now's the time, check it out. Opal U kicks off every Monday. You can apply right now, optimizely.com/exitfive.
Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a shout out to the team at Vector for sponsoring this episode. Vector is a contact level ads platform. Look, you probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel, people that you can't identify or follow up with, people you can't target with any real precision. So you end up throwing ads at job titles and hoping that the right person sees them. Vector fixes that. Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people, the ones in your site, clicking your ads and checking out your competitors. They just launched their MCP server that lets you connect AI like Cloud and ChatGBT directly to their platform. It connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Which ad creatives are fatiguing right now? Which companies are engaging but not converting? Which actually driving pipeline right now? What new ideas should we be running? This is an amazing way to use AI and Vector together. It turns your data into something you can use in the moment. Head to vector.co to learn more. That's vector.co.
And if they ask you how you heard about them, tell them Exit Five.

**Mason Cosby** (2:37)
Please see you.

**Dave Gerhardt** (2:40)
You're listening to The Dave Gerhardt Show.
The modern B2B buyer has gone antisocial. I like that, I can be antisocial. No form fills, no demo requests, no hand raises. They're asking AI about your product, forming opinions before they talk to sales, and by the time they do, they're already halfway to a decision. We did an Exit Five live session recently and got into exactly what demand gen looks like when the funnel starts without you in control, and the room was fired up, because this is where B2B buying is going. The whole way we use the internet is changing, and it's changing what it means for sales and marketing. Judy Kimball from ConsenSys made the case for ungating content and running LinkedIn influencer programs to reach buyers before they raised their hand. Hunter from Tekmetric showed how to build for AI visibility, so LLMs cite you accurately, and why a share of voice and AI answers matters more than last touch attribution, and Mason Cosby from ScrappyABM broke down why he measures content in hours watch, which I loved. He said they want seven hours of content watch. That's what matters to them, not leads generated. Here's a live session we did on how to win with today's antisocial buyer. This was one of the highest rated sessions we've done, I think ever, Dan said, 4.8 out of five. So check it out if you need to know more about modern marketing and why the funnel is a whole mess. You're going to really enjoy this episode.
AI is awesome, but you can only talk to Claude and get answers about marketing so much. I think we get a lot of value in talking to our peers. That's what we want to do with these Exit Five live sessions. We bring in members, people from in and around the community who are doing something right now as it relates to your job in B2B marketing. Today, the topic is all about the new way of buying. What does a marketing funnel look like in a world where AI is answering all my questions? We have Judy, Hunter, Mason, and myself. I'll host. I just was saying it's a really exciting day, buzzy day here in Vermont because it's the last day of school. All of us were backstage saying we have fun outdoor, outside plans after this, so we'll have a good little session and then hopefully everybody can have a nice start to the weekend. Before we get in, can you just let me know that this is working? So put in the chat right now, I'd love to have your name, where you're writing in from, and then also just like why did you join? Why did you take an hour out of your day to be on this? You certainly could just get the recording later. Why are you here now? What are you hoping to learn out of this session? Drop that into the chat and I'd love to get some feedback because I don't have any comments right now. Marissa is here.