How to Stand Out in B2B Marketing (with Louis Grenier, Author of Stand the F*ck Out)

**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 Agendic 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. My team at Optimizely is super smart in this area. 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 for how 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. And they just launched their MCP server that lets you connect AI, like Claude 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. Please. See ya.
You're listening to The Dave Gerhardt Show.
Hey, it's Dave, we just dropped the speaker line up for Drive 2026, I can't believe it, it's already summer. And Louis Grenier, my friend right here, is one of them. We're revisiting this episode ahead of what's gonna be a great workshop. Basically, after this podcast, I decided to invite him to come speak at Drive because I really got a great vibe from him. And he wrote this book, Stand the Fuck Out, and every time I talk to him, it reminds me why I got into marketing in the first place, about the craft of marketing, and I think this is a little break from a lot of the AI stuff. So enjoy my conversation with Louis.

**Louis Grenier** (3:27)
Okay.

**Dave Gerhardt** (3:27)
All right. This is exciting because I asked Louis to come on the pod in November, and then I booked it foolishly the same day that I was having my hip surgery, which man, fucking this guy making me tear up. I'm watching your talk from the marketing meetup this morning, like having my coffee, trying to get my mind right for you. And I got to sit through your cancer story. And I'm like, Jesus, I was not prepared for that.

**Louis Grenier** (3:51)
Oh, I'm sorry to make you feel sad. Do you feel okay?

**Dave Gerhardt** (3:55)
I'm good, I should be okay. I'll see if I can find the strength to do this.

**Louis Grenier** (3:59)
And then you have your hip surgery. Oh my God, poor you.

**Dave Gerhardt** (4:04)