From the Exit Five community

One marketer.
One play.
One number.

Each issue is a specific, replicable B2B marketing tactic — sourced from a real conversation with the marketer who ran it — with the actual results.

Not inspiration. Not benchmarks. A play you can run.

Browse the plays → What's in a play? ↓

What a play looks like

Paid Ads Lemlist · Bootstrapped, $40M ARR
ep332
$31M
in new ARR from $1.2M in paid ad spend — in one year

How Lemlist turned paid ads into their highest-ROI acquisition channel after years of relying on organic only

How they ran it

1 Tested paid on one channel with a small budget before scaling
2 Hired a dedicated paid specialist rather than spreading across the team
+ 3 more steps in the full play
"We went all-in on paid because we knew our product could convert. The channel wasn't the bet — the offer was."
— Domitille de Saint-Exupéry, CMO at Lemlist

Every play in the library is structured exactly like this.

The anatomy of a play

Everything you need to run it yourself

Who

The marketer and company — so you can weight it against your own stage and context.

What

The specific tactic, in plain language — not a vague category like "content marketing."

How

Step-by-step — what they actually did, in the order they did it, with what tools.

Result

One number. Revenue, pipeline, conversion rate, cost — whatever moved after they ran it.

Where plays come from

Sourced from real conversations

Not recycled blog posts or hypothetical frameworks. Every play is extracted from an actual conversation with the marketer who ran it.

300+
Podcast episodes
The Dave Gerhardt Show — 6 years of conversations with the best B2B marketers
100+
Webinars and events
Deep dives from the Exit Five community — channel-specific, role-specific, stage-specific
45k+
Community members
Real B2B marketers sharing what's actually working — not what they want to be known for

Who reads The Play

Built for the marketer who has to figure it out

You're a B2B marketer trying to build pipeline, grow a brand, or hit a number with a team and a budget that's never quite enough. You don't need more inspiration. You need to know what someone else actually did, what it cost, and whether it worked.

That's what every issue of The Play delivers.

Start with the library.

Browse every play that's been extracted and published — indexed by channel, company stage, and result.

Browse the play library →