Meet the Drive 2026 workshop speakers

9 Reasons to Join us in Vermont this September: Meet the Drive 2026 Workshop Speakers

So I sat down to write my newsletter and had this whole rant about Claude and AI, but then I remembered:

I have something better to share with you today!

We just unveiled a big part of the agenda for Drive 2026, our big event for Exit Five in Stowe, Vermont this September.

We want to make it a NO BRAINER for you to get your tickets this year, and I know many of you need to get this purchase approved through work. So while we're going to have plenty of fun "offline" in Vermont, I know that you need to actually learn something to get the ROI on the ticket. It's tough to get your boss to say OK to a company paid-trip to Vermont to hike and golf and swim with us.

So for this year, we did something different: we opened up Drive to the experts in our community. We asked marketers with experience across all of the core areas of marketing to lead workshops at Drive.

These are VPs and directors who are inside marketing orgs right now, doing the actual work, and coming to Stowe to teach one specific thing they've gotten really good at.

No panel discussions (I am retiring from those). No 10,000-foot strategy talks. Just two days of sitting in a room with someone who has done the thing you're trying to figure out, and walking out with a plan you can use Monday morning.

Here's the first round of speakers (and we have 15 more we'll share soon, but just wanted to give you a taste of the agenda today). Plus what I mentioned last week with Seth Godin, Kara Hardin, Ann Handley, and Louis Grenier.

1. Baby Got Brand: The New Early Stage Marketing Playbook (Jess Cook, VP of Marketing at Vector)

Brand isn't a logo or a color palette. It's the thing that makes every channel work harder. Jess spent years on brands like McDonald's and Kellogg learning how storytelling drives business, and she's bringing that lens to B2B. She'll walk through how Vector has built brand expression into everything from the podcast and mascot to sponsorship decisions, email, and events. For each channel, she'll pull out a universal takeaway you can use to find your own brand's version of that move. You'll leave with a clear way to think about brand not as a separate workstream, but as the thread running through everything you already do.

2. Stop Guessing, Start Sprinting: A 90-Day System for Finding Your Next Winning Channel (Spud Rule, VP of Growth Marketing at Lendio)

Most channel tests fail before they ever reach a real signal. Not because the channel was wrong, but because the experiment was designed badly. Spud is going to fix that. He'll walk through a five-part experiment design structure (hypothesis, budget, timeframe, success metric, kill criteria) and a 70-20-10 budget model that keeps your core channels funded while protecting room to test. He'll share real numbers from channels that worked, channels that surprised him, and channels that looked promising until the data killed them. You'll leave with a 90-day channel test roadmap that's scoped, budgeted, and ready to hand to your team.

3. How to Launch a B2B Influencer Pilot in 90 Days (Brianna Doe, Founder of Verbatim)

Influencer marketing in B2B is still early enough that most companies haven't figured it out yet, which means there's real opportunity for the ones who move. Brianna is going to make the case and then build the plan with you in the room. You'll map your goals to KPIs, define your ideal creator archetype, and draft the bones of a campaign brief. You leave with a mini strategy doc you can actually hand to someone.

4. Escaping Checkbox Marketing: Build a Content Strategy You'll Never Have to Redo (Brendan Hufford, Head of Marketing at Growth Sprints)

Brendan coined the term "checkbox marketing" and it hit a nerve in this community because everyone recognized it immediately. Running every playbook, checking every box, and still missing numbers. This workshop is the antidote. He'll walk through his framework applied to real companies like Sendoso and UserEvidence, and you'll leave with a named Content IP concept and a plan to execute it. The goal is a content strategy built around problems you own, not tactics someone else told you to run.

5. Hand-Crafted Marketing at Scale Through Agentic ABM (Casey Patterson, Director of North America ABM at Snowflake)

ABM has always been about relevance at the account level. What changes with AI is the ceiling on how personal you can get. Casey is going to show you how Snowflake is using agentic AI to craft account narratives with sales and deliver messaging that's unique to individual buyers, not just accounts. She'll share the goals, tech stack, org design, and how they got started, so you can take the first step at your company.

6. Stop Losing to Competitors You Should Beat: A Buyer Interview Playbook from 1,000+ Interviews (Drew Giovannoli, Founder and CEO of Buried Wins)

Drew has done over a thousand buyer interviews and he's built a repeatable system around it. The insight behind this workshop is simple: your Gong recordings and web data can't tell you how buyers actually perceive you versus the competition. Only the buyer can. He'll cover the three reasons buyers agree to participate (and how to use them to drive response), a 20-day recruitment playbook, and five questions to ask in every win-loss interview. He'll also share three real stories where a single interview changed the direction of a client's GTM motion entirely.

7. One Team, Two Motions: How Running PLG and Enterprise Together Becomes Your Biggest Efficiency Advantage (Hailey McDonald, VP of Revenue Marketing at Sprout Social)

Most marketing teams are built for one motion. Adding a second feels like it could break everything. Hailey is going to show you how to run both without blowing up what's already working. She'll cover five frameworks including a "separate P&Ls, shared infrastructure" model, a PLG lifecycle blueprint built on product usage signals instead of form fills, and a budget allocation model that protects your core motion while funding the new one. You leave with a 90-day sequenced plan for introducing the second motion.

8. Built for What's Next: A Practical Framework for the AI-First Marketing Org (Tara Robertson, CMO at Bitly)

This one is for the CMOs and VPs in the room who are trying to figure out what their org actually needs to look like now. AI is reshaping search, content, and brand faster than most org charts can keep up with. Tara has been through the transformation at Bitly and she's going to share the real playbook: org design, role evolution, team training, content strategy. A concrete framework for building a marketing org that's not just adapting to what's changing, but built for what's next.

9. Building a B2B Social Engine That Doesn't Feel Like B2B (Christina Le, Head of Marketing at Slate)

Christina has done this at OpenPhone, Plot, and now Slate. She's put brands on the map through social before most people figured out it was a real channel. This workshop is for the people who are done playing it safe on social and want to understand what it actually takes to build an engine that works. She'll cut through the mistakes most B2B companies make and show you what good looks like from the inside.

That's the first nine. We have 15 more to announce.

If you've been on the fence about Drive, this is the part that usually tips people over. The keynotes give you the big ideas. The workshops give you the plan. And the time between sessions, the meals, the hikes, the conversations you don't plan on having...that's the stuff that sticks six months later.

Tickets are on sale now. September 8-10, Stowe, Vermont.

Save $100: Use code NEWSLETTER at checkout (Valid for the first 25 people).

exitfive.com/drive

- Dave

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