Dave Gerhardt

Hey I'm Dave Gerhardt. I created Exit Five, which has turned into the top community for B2B marketing professionals. Before starting Exit Five I had a 10 year career in marketing and grew from PR intern to CMO. I even once had hair! My wife says I'm more handsome now though, and she's quite pretty so that means a lot -- but the internet just boxes me in as the typical bald guy tech bro. So oh look, another bald tech guy writing on LinkedIn! whoopty freaking do.

Anyway. Where was I... OH. Receipts! I wanted to talk about receipts, because in a world of fluff and online influencers, I actually have some receipts and I want to tell you about them here because it signals power, credibility, and makes it seem like I'm super rich, so: I used to be pretty good at marketing, and my work as a marketer played a key role (at least I think so) in helping two software companies to successful exits: Drift for $1B+ and Privy for $100M+. I certainly helped the founders make a bunch of money, and I was able to comfortably purchase a brand new Toyota Sienna minivan for my family in 2021.

Today I spend my time working on Exit Five, and it's actually been super fun and given me a bunch of purpose. We're a team of six full-time team members now, and we have a private online community and host in-person events around the world. Plus there's a popular podcast and newsletter for marketers. We reach something like 20 MILLION marketers with our content every year, and we've got a pretty special thing going on. I hope to keep it going. You can learn more about it all at exitfive.com.

I spent most of my life in the Boston area but now live in the woods in Vermont with my wife, two kids, two cats, and one dog.

You can reach me at dave@exitfive.com if you want, but TBD if I reply. Depends on the message. But please don't send me any more swag or books. But if for whatever reason you do want to send me something, I play the ProV1x golf ball and like the low numbers.

PS. Find my podcast “The Dave Gerhardt Show” on Spotify

Founder & CEO

Exit Five is a media company focused on B2B marketing. We help B2B marketers build successful careers through our content and community. Learn more at exitfive.com

Content marketers run modern marketing.

Because almost all marketing today is shaped online.

And online marketing shows up as:

- Ads
- Videos
- Articles
- Podcasts and clips like this with Jess Cook
- Social posts
- Newsletters
- Communities
- Influencers

Different formats. But none of it works without a clear content strategy and strong content marketing.

Jess is a great example of this: she started her career as a copywriter for big CPG brands. She cut her teeth writing 200+ variations of a recipe for Rice Krispie Treats.

Then built a career in content marketing: content market manager, director, VP brand and content.

Then turned that into a Head of Marketing role at a startup and was recently promoted to VP on the heels of her success using - wait for it - content to drive revenue.

Not because Vector's content gets a lot of impressions and their podcast is unique or because their little mascot is cute.

But because it's working! Those things are driving revenue. 

I had a conversation with Jess last week (now out on my podcast) and she shared three key marketing plays that she's run over the past year:

1. Influencer Marketing - how does it work in B2B, how did she find influencers, what did it cost, how much pipeline was generated, how did they measure it

2. Podcasting - why they started a podcast, how their podcast stands out, how they record, when/where, how they prep, how they know it's working

3. LinkedIn - we talk a bit about what content types (and strategy) is working well here today

4. Career Path - her path from content to VP Marketing

Erin on my team messaged me last night and said this was the best interview we've done recently - please go listen if you need some tactical inspiration.

Founder: Exit Five | Community Builder | Former CMO

What events are you going to in Q1? We're hosting the first annual Exit Five Marketing Leadership Retreat in Arizona March 18-20.

This event is exclusively for in-house B2B marketing leaders.

It's all about who's in the room and we've pulled together a great group for this event. 

Here are the sessions we have planned:

1. How to Become the CMO Everyone Wants to Work With (with Dave Kellogg, EIR at Balderton Capital)

2. Building and Leading a High-Performing Marketing Team (led by Hillary Carpio, VP Growth at Snowflake)

3. Managing Your CFO and Board Relationship (led by Pranav Piyush, Founder at Paramark)

4. Personal Branding for B2B Marketing Leaders (led by Jane Serra, Head of Marketing at MemoryBlue)

5. Ecosystem Marketing as the Next Big Growth Lever (led by Emily Kramer, Founder of MKT1)

6. How Are You Really Using AI? At Work and Personally (led by Katie Miserany, CCO and Head of Marketing at SurveyMonkey) 

And I'm interviewing Kim Storin (CMO at Zoom) about how she does things and what's changing this year.
 
PLUS since it's a "retreat" - we have time for activities like golf, a workout, pool hang, or in-room massage; get lunch, dinner, drinks.
 
Will you join us?

Pass this on to your VP / CMO friends in B2B.

Full details here:

bit.ly/3Lxj75e

Open article: Marketing Leadership Retreat | March 18-20, 2026 by exitfive.com

Marketing Leadership Retreat | March 18-20, 2026

Tom Wentworth

High growth SaaS executive with expertise in both enterprise product-led and enterprise GTM models. I infrequently post advice on tech marketing at https://tomwentworth.com and used to host a podcast called Scaleup Marketing.

Chief Marketing Officer

I’m on the marketing team at Recorded Future, a $300m+ ARR, high growth cyber security company focused on securing our world with intelligence. 

We're in the fast fashion era of SaaS. Competitors with a dream (and a ton of Claude tokens) can copy almost anything, often in just days and weeks. 

There are two types of companies that are going to thrive in the upcoming SaaS reckoning:

1) Companies with taste. No amount of endless prompting is going to replace a team who really understand the customer and sweat all the details. Fast fashion is fine and viable, but the world needs Ralph Lauren and Coco Chanel to push the industry forward.   I work with a team like that at incident.io. 

2) Companies with a data moat like Sumble and my friends at Recorded Future. Good luck vibe coding a 100+ terabyte scale data corpus 🤣

What other types of companies are going to kill it in the fast fashion SaaS era?

CMO @ incident.io 🔥 | board member | vibe coder

Coded up a nice little agent in Claude Code to manage LinkedIn ad campaigns. Anything you can do in the LinkedIn Campaign Manager UI can be done by a prompt 

"Turn off all low performing campaigns"
"Setup a new ABM campaign for Nike"
"Find any targeting gaps for our ICP"

Q4 is the most important quarter of the year for Sales. 

Q1 is the most important quarter of the year for Marketing. 

Time to get after it. 

Thanks Patrick Shea for reminding me of this oldie but goodie.

We've been experimenting with a homegrown (in Clay) AI BDR at incident.io

Tag Accounts or Contacts in Salesforce and the AI BDR will find the right prospects, do a ton of research on the person and company, and write a pretty great multi-step email sequence entirely from scratch. 

It works... okay... we use it mostly for email-only cold outbound so the results are similar to human email-only cold outbound.

But the AI BDR can do fun stuff like automatically generate a personalized superhero comic for each prospect (Sean Gouldson and David Vella congrats, I tested it on you).

Think we should work these into one of the emails Cameron Nagel? :)

Some day LLMs will punish companies who try and influence citations by spamming content. That day is not today. Spam away, it's the wild west like SEO in the early 2000s!

(I've got the data from my Profound instance to back this up)

From Rho

"If you're still using legacy tools and manual processes, you're living in the Stone Age. incident.io isn't just better, it's what incident management should have been all along."

Yup.

I learned how to use computers via terminals. First DOS then later in college, a bunch of different flavors of UNIX. 

The past ~30 years or so has been all about abstracting the user away from "the terminal" via desktop apps and then later, browsers and mobile apps. That's where we are today. Marketers spend all their time in beautiful apps like HubSpot. 

But here comes Claude Code taking us back to computing like it's 1991 all over again. And I'm here for it 😍😍😍. 

Just need to find my Nirvana t-shirt and some jean shorts to complete the regression.

taplio

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Tom Wentworth

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Dave Gerhardt's LinkedIn Performance

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