In this episode, Dave sits down with Mychelle Mollot, CMO at Knak, a platform for creating, designing, and optimizing email and landing page content. Mychelle shares her wealth of experience, having led marketing efforts at IBM and various startups. She discusses her approach to leading marketing teams, scaling brands, and embracing AI in B2B marketing.

Dave and Mychelle cover:

• How Knak built a brand and captured demand in a space without a known category
• The balance between meeting short-term goals and dedicating some marketing budget to high-risk, high-reward experiments
• How AI is evolving from a standalone tool to being embedded in the core functionalities of marketing platforms

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - Intro to Mychelle
• (05:39) - - Embracing Diverse Career Paths to Become a CMO
• (10:23) - - Leveraging Big Company Skills in Startups
• (11:14) - - Influencing Resources Without Ownership in Large Organizations
• (15:36) - - Weekly Team Meeting Tips
• (18:37) - - Mychelle’s OKR Framework
• (23:23) - - How Knak Creates and Captures Demand
• (24:55) - - How To Understand and Target Buyers
• (30:32) - - Having AI Discussions With Your Team
• (34:06) - - AI is Shifting from Core Component to Creative Assistant
• (35:28) - - Integrating AI into Core Tools
• (41:10) - - Sales and Marketing Alignment
• (44:32) - - Navigating Relationships as a CMO

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Today's episode is brought to you by Knak.

Email (in my humble opinion) is the still the greatest marketing channel of all-time.

It’s the only way you can truly “own” your audience.

But when it comes to building the emails - if you’ve ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know how painful it can be. Templates are too rigid, editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever. 

That’s why we love Knak here at Exit Five. Knak a no-code email platform that makes it easy to create on-brand, high-performing emails - without the bottlenecks.

• Frustrated by clunky email builders? You need Knak.
• Tired of ‘hoping’ the email you sent looks good across all devices? Just test in Knak first.
• Big team making it hard to collaborate and get approvals? Definitely Knak.

And the best part? Everything takes a fraction of the time.

See Knak in action at knak.com/exit-five. Or just let them know you heard about Knak on Exit Five.

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Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.

• They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.
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