Hello and welcome to the Exit Five Weekly Newsletter — read by 42,000 B2B marketing professionals around the world. Exit Five is a membership site designed to help you build a successful career in B2B marketing. Join 5,700 other members at exitfive.com.

By the way — this email was designed in Knak, which helps you create email and landing pages in minutes without having to write code. Learn more about Knak here.

TOGETHER WITH KNAK

📧 Here’s How to Write a Great Email

Follow CHEETAH, the 7 Key Elements to High-Performing Emails.

I don’t need to cite a laundry list of statistics to convince you email is one of the most important channels in B2B Marketing.

I know it and you know it – so let’s help you get better at it.

Pierce Ujjainwalla (co-founder & CEO at Knak) is an email expert… and after writing and studying thousands of emails, he’s identified the seven things that create emails that aren’t just read, they’re acted on.

It’s called the CHEETAH framework, and it breaks down how to:

• Captivate attention before the email is even opened
• Make your email feel like it’s coming from a real person, not a faceless company
• Increase conversions by matching email to landing page

If you’re planning to send more than one email this year, check out the free (and ungated!) guide to the CHEETAH framework here.

🤖 Custom GPTs For Validating Events, Personalizing Emails & Managing LinkedIn Content (Built By Other B2B Marketers)

Out of all the B2B marketers we talk to at Exit Five and all the tools and processes people are using with AI, CustomGPTs still seem to be one of the most practical use cases for AI right now.

So we asked Exit Five members to share their best Custom GPTs. Dozens of submissions later, here are the three that actually solve real problems instead of just playing with shiny AI toys.

Oh and they save these marketers HOURS every single week. I’m sure at least one of them can help you do the same. So keep reading and we’ll explain exactly how they work.

Is That Event Worth Going To?

If events are a major part of your marketing strategy like they are for Caroline Ang (Senior Director of Marketing & Communications at AidKit), you’re probably spending a ton of time manually researching every conference to decide: attend, sponsor, speak, or skip. One event? Easy. Fifteen events per quarter? It adds up fast.

Executive Summary: Quick bullets with fit score, recommendation, and key deadlines

Detailed Analysis: Audience breakdown, costs, themes, competitors, logistics

Machine-Readable Output: JSON data for dashboards and future analysis

Notion-Ready Export: Clean tab-separated format for their event tracking database

The GPT knows AidKit's ICP, budget constraints, and strategic priorities. Instead of spending 3 hours researching each event, Caroline gets a complete analysis in 5 minutes.

Personalized Welcome Emails That Doubled Click Rates

AI has made personalization so much easier. Brendon Boren at ClickBank built a system that turns generic welcome emails into personalized business cases.

The setup: Make.com + ChatGPT + HubSpot integration that takes first-party data from lead forms and creates custom email copy.

Instead of: "Thanks for signing up! Here's what we do..."

Now: "You told us you want to '[AI-generated summary of their specific goal]' with our tool. And we can help you do it. Click here to get started."

Results: Email clicks doubled. Sales are following.

The key insight: Use the data prospects already gave you instead of treating every lead the same. AI makes personalization scalable.

LinkedIn Posts That Actually Sound Like You

So much of LinkedIn right now is AI slop. But Valtteri Taube from OstraconAI cracked the code on AI content that actually sounds like you sat down to write it.

His system: Claude Project + Airtable MCP + Make.com automation

How it works: Claude analyzes his last 100 LinkedIn posts, identifies patterns in his voice, then creates new content that matches his tone. The posts get written directly to his content calendar and published automatically.

The results: 80–90% time savings while maintaining lead generation performance.

Why this matters: Most AI-generated social content is obviously AI-generated. Valtteri's system studies his actual writing patterns first, then mimics them. The posts still generate leads because they sound like him, not like a robot.

What Actually Makes These Work

Looking at all three Custom GPTs, there's a pattern:

They solve specific, measurable problems. Not "help me be creative" or "make me smarter." They tackle concrete tasks that eat up real time.

They use first-party data. Conference research, lead form responses, previous social posts. They work with information you already have.

They produce actionable outputs. Decision frameworks, personalized emails, content calendars. Not just insights or ideas.

They integrate with existing workflows. Notion databases, HubSpot sequences, social media schedulers. They fit into how you already work.

The Custom GPT Opportunity Most Marketers Miss

Everyone's building GPTs to help with creative tasks. "Help me brainstorm campaign ideas." "Write better ad copy." "Generate blog topics."

But the real opportunity is operational. What manual, repetitive work do you do that requires some thinking but follows predictable patterns?

Conference research. Lead qualification. Content analysis. Competitive intelligence. Customer feedback categorization.

These are perfect Custom GPT use cases because they combine pattern recognition (what AI is good at) with domain knowledge (what you bring to the table).

Your Next 30 Minutes

Pick one repetitive task you do weekly that takes 2+ hours. Something where you:

• Gather information from multiple sources
• Apply consistent criteria to make decisions
• Create standardized outputs

Build a Custom GPT that automates the information gathering and applies your decision framework.

Don't aim for perfect. Aim for "saves me 90 minutes per week."

The marketers winning with AI aren't the ones with the fanciest prompts. They're the ones building systems that handle the boring stuff so they can focus on strategy.

What's your biggest time sink that follows a predictable pattern? That's your next Custom GPT.

‑Dave

P.S. One of my favorite Custom GPTs we’ve built is the Exit Five Post Coach. It takes our top-performing community posts, reverse‑engineers what makes them work, then walks new members through prompts to help them write a high‑quality post that actually gets replies. We built it to fix onboarding and help members get value ASAP.

So tell me. What’s the best Custom GPT you’ve built? Or what’re you gonna build next?

📺 UPCOMING EVENTS

Open to all

• September 23rd: Marketing in the Age of AI: CMOs Separating the Hype from What’s Real (Live Discussion) (exitfive.com/live)
• October 16th: Exit Five New York City Community Meetup (exitfive.com/nyc)

Exit Five Pro Members Only

• September 30th: The Best Industry Events for HR & HR Tech Marketers

Not a member yet? Learn more about an Exit Five Membership here.

If you are an Exit Five member, click here to RSVP to these events.

📚 LATEST CONTENT

Here's the latest from the Exit Five content library:

• 🎧 Why Cookie Cutter Marketing Doesn’t Work with Gurdeep Dhillon, CMO at ContentStack
• 🎧 The Unfiltered Truth About Video Marketing and AI with Holly Xiao and Dave Gerhardt
• 🎧 How B2B Marketers Are Actually Using AI for Content
• 📰 How to Lead a High Functioning Marketing Org
• 📰 Marketing Is Broken: Why You’re So Busy and Still Not Getting Anything Done
• 📰 How to Put On a Virtual Event People Actually Want to Attend

🪪 NEW INSIDE THE EXIT FIVE COMMUNITY

New Inside Exit Five: DaveBot aka E5 AI

Check this out. We trained an AI model on 20 million words on B2B marketing, including 250 hours of podcast interviews, every LinkedIn posts I've ever written, every newsletter we've sent, and 40,000 comments from our community and we've built an incredible B2B Marketing Intern to help you out - now available exclusively to community members.