Exit Five

💫 Are you going to be joining the Exit Five live session on October 23? Come listen to me unpack the Pipeline-First SEO Playbook I've built over the years of working with different sizes of SaaS companies. You'll walk away with frameworks, checklists, and templates you can immediately apply to your own inbound strategy. We'll talk about why #CAC is one of the key metrics for scaling #SaaS and how you can successfully do it with #inbound. If you are still not a member of ExitFive, don't miss an opportunity to join a tight-knit community of innovative and supportive marketers.

How do you make a happy hour memorable? Incentive the crowd to talk about memorable things...let me explain. Dave Gerhardt and the Exit Five team hosted a happy hour with 125 marketers and leaders. The quality level was high. But then Dave did something I hadn't seen before. He got on the mic and said, "We have 3 prizes to give away tonight. A Nintendo Switch, Airpods, and a $200 gift certificate to a nice restaurant. In an hour, we're going to ask people to come up and share the most interesting fact they learned about someone else. The people with the most interesting facts will get a prize." Immediately after that, conversations started with "So what's an interesting fact about you?" The room was buzzing and what was supposed to be a networking event, turned into a storytelling event. There were still plenty of business convos, but everyone left learning some pretty interesting things about their new friends. Way better than a typical happy hour. And way more memorable.

Most events? Too corporate. Too polished. Too… beige. We didn’t want that. We wanted a place people actually want to go, somewhere to hang out, swap ideas, and learn a few things along the way. That’s what Drive turned into. After an 88 NPS score in year one and “don’t change a thing” feedback, we doubled down on what people loved most and made Drive 2025 even stronger. Dave, Anna, and Allison sat down this week to unpack how it all came together, how we design it, what worked (and what surprised us), and how we’re already thinking about 2026. The takeaway? When you build something people genuinely enjoy, it stops feeling like an event and starts feeling like a community.

Marketers love to move fast. Try every tool. Test every prompt. Marketers love to move fast. Try every tool. Test every prompt. But Sara Ajemian, VP of Brand & Comms at SOCi, Inc., made a good point during a recent live session: most people aren’t moving that fast. Some teams are still figuring out how AI fits into their day-to-day. And that’s fine. You don’t have to master every new thing overnight. Start small. Pick one tool. Get really good at a few use cases. Better to be great at one thing than average at five.

When you’re planning events, don’t just think about attendance. Think about revenue in the room. 💰 How much potential pipeline is sitting in those seats? 💰 How much existing revenue showed up because they’re still engaged? That’s what Sydney Sloan, CMO at G2, calls “revenue in the room.” It’s the mix of prospects and customers that turns an event from a cost center into a growth channel. Happy customers sell your prospects better than any deck ever could. When you design for both, community happens, deals happen, retention happens. The best events don’t just build hype. They build pipeline. Real impact comes from who’s in the room and what happens after they leave.

Everyone wants the big, flashy AI build. But that’s not how you actually get better. In a recent Exit Five live session, Eoin Clancy, Head of Growth at AirOps, said to start small. Like, painfully small. Pick one workflow that actually matters and build around it. You don’t need a custom-trained model or a PhD-level prompt library. Just stack small wins. And as Dan Guenet, GTM Engineering Lead at Compound Growth Marketing, put it, your first output might suck. That’s fine. Keep tweaking. Learn what works. The first build is always the hardest, but it’s also the one that teaches you the most. AI’s not magic. It’s iteration.

What’s a time Exit Five helped you level up or get unstuck as a marketer? For Jeff, it started with a product marketing checklist he found in the community. That one resource helped his team launch two new products this year. He uses the AI search and resource library to find what he needs in seconds: templates, ideas, tools, all from other marketers who’ve been there. That’s what Exit Five’s about. It’s where marketers go to figure it out together.

Hey Exit Five Community: you don’t want to miss this one. 🤖

AI isn’t just changing how we do marketing. It’s changing how marketing teams are built. Sydney Sloan, CMO at G2, sat down with us to talk about leading through that shift, where the fundamentals still matter, but everything else is up for debate. They covered: ▪️ How G2 is rethinking its org around outcomes and pods instead of titles ▪️ Why customer, product, and brand now sit at the center of every decision ▪️ How AI is transforming the buyer journey and redefining what skills modern marketers need to stay relevant ▪️ The framework behind G2’s event strategy It’s a conversation about reimagining the role of marketing in an AI-driven world, without losing sight of what’s always mattered. Full convo below 👇