#255: How to Structure and Lead a Full-Funnel B2B Marketing Org with Kelly Hopping

#255 Leadership | In this episode, Dave is joined by Kelly Hopping, CMO of Demandbase, a B2B company known for pioneering account-based marketing. Kelly leads a 70+ person marketing org that spans brand, demand gen, product marketing, events, and SDRs, and she shares exactly how she structures and operates that team to drive results.

Dave and Kelly cover:

• How to design and run a full-funnel marketing team that includes SDRs, content, field, and brand, and keep them aligned on pipeline
• The annual planning strategy Kelly uses to balance short-term targets with long-term positioning (including what changes quarter to quarter)
• How her team is using AI right now and what she’s doing personally to stay sharp as the pace of change accelerates

Whether you're a first-time CMO or just trying to scale your B2B marketing engine, this one is packed with insights from someone who’s operating at a high level.

Timestamps

• (00:00) - – Intro
  
• (03:08) - – What Demandbase actually does
  
• (05:08) - – How the Demandbase marketing team is structured
  
• (07:38) - – Who owns what: brand, content, demand, SDRs
  
• (10:08) - – Account-based marketing + broad demand gen
  
• (12:38) - – What a CMO actually does at this stage
  
• (15:08) - – Kelly’s early CMO learning curve
  
• (18:08) - – Planning your first 90 days as a CMO
  
• (20:08) - – Balancing pipeline today vs. positioning for tomorrow
  
• (22:38) - – What changed between a bad Q4 and strong Q1
  
• (27:19) - – How Kelly thinks about yearly pipeline pacing
  
• (30:19) - – Staying relevant in a fast-moving MarTech world
  
• (32:49) - – Why marketers need to work like product teams
  
• (36:19) - – “I am the ICP”: Why product marketing works better
  
• (37:49) - – Kelly’s #1 job as CMO: Make sales love marketing
  
• (40:19) - – Becoming a peer to product and revenue leaders
  
• (42:49) - – Best-performing channel right now: in-person events
  
• (44:19) - – Brand, attribution, and pipeline are all connected
  
• (45:49) - – How Kelly’s team is using AI today
  
• (47:19) - – The future of marketing roles in an AI-powered world
  
• (49:49) - – Why she’s still learning new AI tools herself
  
• (52:19) - – Why AI is fun again for marketers
  
• (53:19) - – Closing thoughts

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Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt. All right. Hey, everybody. I'm excited for this episode. I got to go on Kelly's podcast and now she gets to hang out here with me, which is fun. When you're not the host, you can just hang out, have a seltzer, and do your thing. So my guest today is Kelly Hopping. She is CMO at Demand Base, where she leads a incredible team of marketers and SDRs focused on transforming go to market strategy with AI and account intelligence.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:43]:
She's had an amazing career in marketing. Started in CPG at Kraft Foods, then she pivoted to tech at Dell and amd and then rose through marketing leadership roles at Rackspace, Gartner. Haiku. Is that how you say that? Haiku? Yeah, haiku. Nice. And now demand base. And along the way, she's mastered brand building, pipeline acceleration, and team culture at every stage of company growth. She's also written a couple books.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:09]:
She's the author of Rising how to thrive as a corporate executive while staying true to yourself. Love that topic. And co author of yes, it's your fault from Blame to Gain, a blunt take on sales and marketing alignment. She's not afraid to challenge the norms and. And she once took a six month sabbatical to reset her career. She leads with empathy and strategy and believes performance branding is the real growth engine most B2B companies ignore. And outside of work, I think you live in Austin, Texas, right? Is that where you're at?

Kelly Hopping [00:01:38]:
Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:38]:
Okay. And she's a football mom, in case you haven't been following her on LinkedIn.

Kelly Hopping [00:01:43]:
Kelly Hopkins, the die hard football mom.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:46]:
Die hard football mom. Love that.

Kelly Hopping [00:01:48]:
I'm sort of obsessive about it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:50]:
Love that. I love that. Should we do a whole episode on like, the connection between football moms and B2B marketing leadership?

Kelly Hopping [00:01:57]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's all grounded in probably a sense of competitiveness and hard work pays off and pursuit of excellence and all the things.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:05]:
Nice. I love that. Well, anyways, good to have you on. I'm curious. There's so much happening right now in marketing and so maybe let's do a state of like, demand based marketing team, basically for outside of my description, for people who aren't familiar. Can you give me the overview of what demand base is? And then let's talk about your role overseeing marketing at this company. What is your job?

Kelly Hopping [00:02:28]:
Sure. So remind me if I forget about the second half of the question when I. Gotcha. Yeah. So demand base is in the Middle of this transformation, right like a lot of the B2B marketing world or go to market world is right now in that who we were and who we are becoming are kind of two different things. You know, we were founded as an account based platform and, and that was through both building our own, but also acquisitions of Inside View and Engage IO in the years past and kind of becoming this kind of end to end platform that took data and insights and converted those into action across advertising and marketing and sales. And that's kind of the traditional account based model. It's about bringing all of your data together to figure out intent signals so you have the highest likelihood of buying when you go after that account.

Kelly Hopping [00:03:16]:
And it's at the account based level, not at the individual level. So that's kind of what's happened in the past. That's this kind of monolithic platform that does that end to end. I think the future is going is to a much more open, flexible, connected, part of a much more integrated ecosystem. So today or in the future, I think data is sort of the resource that kind of connects everything together. The power and quality of that data is what decides how good this thing is going to be. But those data and insights need to be unified in the singular way and they need to power your whole go to market tech stack all the way from for sort of first touch, all the way through to close. And in the past you've had your marketing automation and you've had your ABM and you've had your CRM and you've had your forecasting tool and you've had your outreach type tool.

Kelly Hopping [00:04:08]:
You had all these little things working together and you're working hard to connect them. I think the future is everything is connected around the singular set of data. And so the question is for the future of demand based, what role do we play in that? And we feel really, really bullish around account based being an anchor in that. But it's not the only anchor because I think buying groups is kind of the future of account based. And it's like how do you find your buying groups across the entire ecosystem? How do you make sure that everything talks to each other? Because at the end of the day, if everything is getting automated through AI and through agents and these autonomous workflows, then they have to all be talking to each other, which means they all have to be running on the same pipe and they all need to be connected and they all need to be powering AI with the right quality data and trusted insights. And that's the Future of where we're at. And so what I do there at Demandbase, I'm the chief marketing officer there. I lead all of our marketing from sort of brand to demand.

Kelly Hopping [00:05:04]:
So that leads us all the way through to pipeline, which means I have the whole sort of brand product marketing, content growth engine and all the way through to the SDRs who actually create that, who convert those signals into opportunities and pipeline and then our sales team takes it from there.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:21]:
Can you give me just an overview of like just for setting context for this episode of just the demand base. If there's publicly shareable metrics around like revenue stage size and then like just what your marketing org looks like to support that company?

Kelly Hopping [00:05:37]:
Yeah, I mean I think it's not public or private company. We're mid market size. We are what you'd call a series H, I think if you were to look on Crunchbase and profitable. So we are not a company that's continuing to raise. We are a company that will most likely one day exit. We won't be standalone forever. I know the last thing we issued was we were well north of 200 million. There was a press release that went public.

Kelly Hopping [00:06:02]:
It's the reason I share that and profitable. And our core, which is the majority of our business is growing double digits year over year. We've been around, I don't know, 15, 18 years, something like that. Yeah, I think that's okay. Cool.

Dave Gerhardt [00:06:17]:
And what does the marketing org look like?

Kelly Hopping [00:06:19]:
So we have, I about, I don't even know. I think I have around 75 or 80, I don't know, something like that in the organization. We have a product marketing team who does all of our messaging, positioning, analyst relations, pricing, packaging. I've got a content and brand team that does all things related to content development, content, SEO, brand creative, video, podcasts, any of those kind of more corporate marketing type functions. I have a growth marketing team which has everything from campaigns and digital marketing to field marketing and account based to partner marketing and events. And then it's also got customer marketing community and then I have evangelists on the team, people whose job is to really advocate for us in the market, both amongst marketers and amongst sellers who are our primary Personas. Customer Personas that we go after. Yeah, I think those are the big.

Kelly Hopping [00:07:15]:
Oh and then we have our SDR team which is part of our growth team. But they're the ones who take marketing responses that come in and like I said, turn those into pipeline and is.

Dave Gerhardt [00:07:23]:
The go to market motion. You all are advocates of, you know, account Based Is that the go to market motion for the company as well?

Kelly Hopping [00:07:31]:
Yes, we certainly run demand based on demand based and so we run account based marketing through digital. We do account based selling in terms of the way that our SDRs and our sellers use the product. We use buying groups and all the things. So yes, we also do run sort of broad strokes demand gen that picks up audiences outside of our icp. So we do run like paid search which picks up a broader audience. We try to keep it as targeted as possible but we do do that. We do run you know, webinars and those obviously can get registered by anybody, shared by anybody. So we run a lot of broad strokes demand engine and then for the one to many and then we run account based and field type programming more at the one to few and one to one.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:16]:
How do you articulate your role at this stage of the company? 200 plus million in revenue 70 person marketing team. At one point Kelly was a marketer. Now Kelly is the CMO, the marketing leader. You can't be touching all of the, you know, brand demand, product marketing, creative video, podcasts, sdr. Like you can't possibly be in all of those places. But how do you from your seat, how do you think about your job as cmo and what is the job of cmo?

Kelly Hopping [00:08:45]:
It's a good question. I will say it evolves, it definitely changes over time. So I've been in seat almost two years. I would say the first year and even sometimes now still. But the first year was really about understanding my current org, understanding the objectives for the company, understanding what we're trying to accomplish, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of folks in place, understanding the gaps we had on the team. So a lot of the first year was rebuilding the marketing leadership team, whether that was current talent and changing or evolving their roles or whether it was bringing in talent from the outside or promoting from within. But it was about building the first line marketing leadership team, making sure that they were clear on how we work, how do we operate, how do we measure success, what are our key objectives, how do all these things work together. So there's a lot of like sort of that building stage that first year and now we have an incredibly talented marketing team and each of those leaders came in and they've done the same and built their organizations.

Kelly Hopping [00:09:43]:
So now kind of soup to nuts, we have a really, really strong marketing team which I'm proud of, which then allows me to not sit in every one of those meetings like you've talked about and instead kind of be that Driver and like contributor, but also influencer between where the company at, Gabe, our CEOs level, where he wants to take it, what his vision is for the company and then how do we, what role does marketing play in that? And some things aren't so clearly marketing. Right. There are things like positioning of the company. Yes. My team is going to help write that positioning. They're going to help draft that narrative, they're going to interview customers to inform it. We're going to use a lot of research and do those. So marketing is going to play a really heavy hand in driving that.

Kelly Hopping [00:10:26]:
But that's one of those things that is really critical for me to be involved in. But it's also very cross functional. So I work a lot with our sales team and our team and our product team and our and Gabe and all those leaders to say how do we make sure that we maintain relevance in the market? How do we make sure we're repositioned for the future and not just for today? So a lot of it is kind of that element of pushing that initiative through the company and like I said, my team does a lot of the heavy lifting of putting pen to paper on it. But it is a lesson in both managing up, managing down, managing side to side and, and making sure that we're all bought in on the direction the company goes. So that's where I out of my time today.

Dave Gerhardt [00:11:05]:
No, it's good to hear you say it. And the reason that I asked it because a lot of people who listen to this are either CMOs or aspiring CMOs or maybe first time CMOs taking that job for the first time. And I think one of the challenges is understanding that there's kind of two organizations that you're responsible for. Like you have marketing, but really now your coworkers and peers are the head of product, the head of sales, all those departments. And I think I mean something I struggled with my first time as a marketing leader, but understanding how to navigate those two and there might be conversations, you know, you may have just gotten off a strategy session with the head of product and CEO which completely is going to disrupt what you're currently doing in the day to day marketing Org. But you still have goals to hit and understanding like how to balance those things, what you share with your team. And then really what you said about positioning, man, that is so important because I think at least from what I see on LinkedIn, I think so often it's like oh yeah, marketing just, you know, write the messaging. And it's like no, no, all these things are connected.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:07]:
We can't just say the things we want to do because we need a product to build. And I see a lot of content written on about the importance of like sales and marketing alignment. Sales and marketing alignment. You wrote a book about it, right? It is very important. But I think an underrated or something that should be of equal importance is like the relationship between the cmo, the CEO and the head of product. Because ultimately if you don't have the product to sell, like, you know, marketing wants to be involved in driving that vision, but you're not writing the code, you're not deciding necessarily what's on the roadmap. And so can you think back to like earlier in your career when you, before you really grew up into like the high powered exec Kelly that you are today. Was there a learning curve? I kind of want to try to just share some lessons to those that are coming up about when you really became like shifted from marketer Kelly to CMO Kelly and what the difference in that role is.

Kelly Hopping [00:12:59]:
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of different learnings and I think that's why we are multiple times CMOs. Because you approach each one differently, right? Your first time cmo, I approach very different than my second versus third versus fourth. My first time as a cmo, I felt a responsibility to know and be an expert in everything I was managing, which is a hard place to be. But what I realized when I came in, I had never managed paid media or SEO, which was a massive percentage of our revenue. My first CMO gig and I had never managed those directly. I had worked with agencies who managed them. So I'd sort of been responsible for the numbers, but I hadn't really been the day to day. We managed them all in house.

Kelly Hopping [00:13:42]:
So I got there and I thought, man, how do I become an expert in all the things that I need to be managing? So I spent a lot of time with each of our functional leaders and was like off the clock. Like, just teach me, like, what am I looking at when I look at these paid numbers? What should I care about? What is important? What are the roadblocks here? What are the questions I should be asking you to make you better at this? Like kind of all of those things. And I get really, really smart on paid and really, really smart on organic. Like what, what does this mean? What is a domain score? What does it mean to have good domain authority? Like, how is that going to change? Like, I just needed to like be a sponge. And the reality is like, yes, it was super important that I was a sponge, but it was also a learning that I don't have to be an expert in all the parts. I need to be able to lead all the parts. And so there is a level of understanding that you have to have in order to be able to be a good leader to those people. If I don't understand it, like, I don't have a good means of asking them where they need help.

Kelly Hopping [00:14:42]:
I don't know how to tell if they're doing a good job or not or if we need more resource or less resource. So I think that was a Learning from, say, CMO1 to CMO2 was like, I need to be a great marketer to wait. No, I need to be a good leader who understands the business to. Then I think in this one, I've learned much more of like, there is a season for every part of that. And so there is a season for I need to listen first, but there's a ticking clock on me that's like, yes, you need to listen, but you need to make impact fast. Okay, so I need to listen quickly. So those first 90 days are brutal because you are around the clock, just listening and absorbing and taking it all in and trying to deduce some sort of takeaways. Then there's implementing, like, a plan and actually figuring out what that plan is and putting a structure and team and KPIs and operating model in place.

Kelly Hopping [00:15:33]:
And then there's the stage of, okay, the talent is good or not, or you hope it is, is it kind of like gets up to speed and flowing. And then there's the stage of, okay, now I'm going to look forward for a minute. I've been looking backward. I've been looking straight down into the present for a long time. Now it's time to be like, where do I want us to be in six months, six years? You know, CEO may be looking two years out. CMO should probably be looking a year out. CRO is probably looking a quarter out. And so we each have a goal and product is looking at all of that.

Kelly Hopping [00:16:03]:
Right. They're saying, where do we want to be in those two years? But what do I need to do today to get there? And so you're right, that partnership between me and Product and CEO on how do we want to position this company for the long game is super important. But also obviously balancing. I got to hit my numbers every quarter, too. Yeah. I mean, like I said, I think you approach every role different. And now I'm really happy, like, but sometimes I look back and I'm like, gosh, could I build an integrated campaign anymore? I don't know if I could. Like, do I remember how to do that?

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:29]:
Oh, now you could. It's just vibe marketing. You just go to, you know, open chat, GBT and you're good.

Kelly Hopping [00:16:36]:
Now you just totally. I mean, Gen has changed all of those things. I have to relearn how to do it in AI.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:41]:
Absolutely. Everybody does. We're going to talk more about that. But you talked about balancing the short term and the long term stuff. And I think typically that's. If I had to pick one of our audience. One of the hardest challenges is like, I think you can be either really good at hitting the number now or you can be too strategic and too visionary and then we're missing the number today. Do you have any principles? Is there like a Kelly principle of investment? How do you think about placing your bets so you can do both? I think oftentimes we hear like, from an investment standpoint, it might be 70% on today, 30% on tomorrow, but more goes into it than that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:17]:
And I think the great marketing leaders that I've talked to have this unique ability to be able to make sure the team is focused and hitting our goals this quarter this year while also having a plan to get to the future. Whereas young Dave, in a first time marketing leadership role was so focused and let the pressure get to me so much of hit the number this quarter, hit the number this quarter. Then when it's November and I'm asked for the budget and targets for the following year, like I can't just drag the spreadsheet to scale these channels and you know, some of this stuff takes enough time. How do you think through some of that?

Kelly Hopping [00:17:49]:
Yeah, I mean, like I said, it's probably varied by role. But yeah, you have to look at both, especially these days. Because the crazy part is that like today and future are almost. They're not synonymous. But today is changing so fast every single day. That future is almost like you almost are underestimating what the future is going to look like because the pace of change right now is so fast and so it's a little bit hard. But what I will say is that in terms of what I will call, I don't know about today and future, but I will say like pipeline and positioning almost is sort of the. How do I position for the future while driving pipeline Today when you have good leaders in place, it's probably 30, 70, so it's probably 30% I'm worried about Pipeline because I've got a great leader who's going to run that, and it's probably 70% of kind of looking forward.

Kelly Hopping [00:18:41]:
How do we position? How's the team ready? Do we have the product infrastructure for this? Do we have the right roadmap for this? Is Gabe bought in on this? Like, a lot of those kind of conversations, But I think in general, it's probably. It should be a little bit more balanced than that, especially while we're building. It was. It used to be to me, like, 80% pipeline. I was like, I just have to hit the number. And I tell you have one bad quarter, and you're right back to, like, 99% working on pipeline. And so that's the challenge, too, right. Is that it kind of changes.

Kelly Hopping [00:19:08]:
So, for instance, we just reported out last week at our board meeting, and it was lovely because we had hit all of our numbers versus the quarter before, and it felt great because then it was like, oh, this is awesome. Like, yes, I got to keep my foot on the gas. But the team now is rolling over there. It's like the micromanaging of the last quarter can step off a little bit. They're running, and now I can pivot and focus on something else. And now I'm gonna go micromanage positioning instead. And you.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:33]:
Which is like, yeah, there's fewer questions. Or as a football mom, when the team is winning, fewer people are questioning the coach's strategy and which plays they're calling, Right?

Kelly Hopping [00:19:43]:
Yeah, for sure.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:44]:
How did you get out of that hole? And obviously, this is a natural progression. At some point, you will miss a quarter, you will miss a year. It is gonna happen.

Kelly Hopping [00:19:52]:
Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:53]:
Just tactically, what was the state of things? And then, like, how did you make changes to come back and hit the number this quarter?

Kelly Hopping [00:19:59]:
Yeah, I mean, I think the narrative stayed fairly consistent. If we think about, like, where we were a quarter ago versus the past quarter, the main thing was, is that a quarter ago, we knew that the future was coming, but we weren't there yet. And we were in a sea of change. It's just like, sometimes you just get lucky on time. Right. So that timing of our last one was Thanksgiving to Christmas, which is always a fun time for generating business and vacation schedules and everything else. We were down an SDR leader. We were down a field marketing leader.

Kelly Hopping [00:20:31]:
We were down field marketers. We were down a few things. We had some turnover in pockets of sales, so we had, like, a few things that were going. We weren't launching any Products. Our big event season didn't start until like the day after board meeting. So we said this window of like, RKO happens. Everybody came off the floor for a week. Like, we had all that happen first month of the year.

Kelly Hopping [00:20:54]:
We're still trying to nail like target account list and territories and sales assignments and all of that. So the window was Thanksgiving, Christmas, uncertainty of January, while we get resettled RKO and then board meeting. And you're like, hey, I'm here to tell you that nothing great happened because all these other things were happening.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:10]:
Timing.

Kelly Hopping [00:21:11]:
Yes, timing. And then the next time you go like, hey, since we met last, we've had 47 events. We hosted our big thing, we tripled our pipeline, our SDRs are at full capacity, leaders are all in place, the strategy's running. And so it's nice to have a before and after on that. But there's always, like you said, there's going to be down cycles. Some of them are really organic. Like, you've got all the things in place and the market's just soft. Other times you have sellers or SDRs who take their foot off the gas because they get tired.

Kelly Hopping [00:21:38]:
And, you know, it's a lot other times you're not feeding them good quality things because there's no good events or no good programming or it's a vacation schedule. Like, we're about to go into June and July, which is when, you know, it's harder to generate business in the summer as folks go off.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:52]:
And I have a CMO friend of mine who he will text me like clockwork, every year around July 10th, you will text me a screenshot from the CEO asking why pipeline is slow.

Kelly Hopping [00:22:09]:
You're like, because it's July 10th, right? People aren't working. Everybody's on vacation right now.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:14]:
And it's just like, I think that the more people I've talked to and the longer I've done things myself, I just realized, like, those are just some questions. You know, it must be like, me being annoying as heck to my kids when I'm like, they're rushing out the door to go to school and I'm like, did you brush your teeth? You know, it's just like, you just gotta ask the question and move on.

Kelly Hopping [00:22:32]:
Yep. Well, and it's why, like, say, February through May is so critical. Right. You've got front load as much as possible.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:40]:
Gotta go get it.

Kelly Hopping [00:22:41]:
Yeah, you gotta, like, build up your reserves like a bear, right. To prepare for the long summer.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:45]:
So, okay, you're getting at something that I think is really Important, and I don't think we talk about it a lot is the orchestration of the year really matters. Right. Like before we talk about the tactics and the offers and everything, like we need to like literally lay out the calendar and like stack the year. Like I've made mistakes of basically stacking things in the wrong time. And it's like, well, we gotta over index for like events in February through May because we know the lag of the pipeline and that stuff really matters. And then that's the fun part, you know when you're kind of moving the pieces around and seeing when you're going to execute. Right?

Kelly Hopping [00:23:19]:
Yeah. I mean it means that you probably have when there's also a lag between pipeline and bookings. Right. So then it's like, okay, we're going to front load Q1 will front load Q3 and Q3 won't be like July and half of August, but the second half of August and September is like peak season. So read those. And then you go into October and you're going to have a great October, but you're going to train your team to expect a huge Q4 when you're going to have a great October and then pipeline's going to drop off a little bit. November, December. But what you hope is that then the pacing of conversion to bookings, which might be in some organizations, is 30 days.

Kelly Hopping [00:23:54]:
Some days it's 90 days, 120 days, depending on the business. But then being able to watch that and say, okay, if I load up in May, I should be able to close this revenue and hit a strong Q3 even if July is soft. So there's some of that Q4 should be a huge revenue quarter. It's probably not a great pipeline quarter, but it should be a great revenue quarter because Q3 was a great pipeline quarter. And then it's hopefully trickles out by the time you get to Q4. The Open and close in the same quarter is the part that's a little bit tricky. So we call those create and close opportunities. And sometimes they're really common in an expansion business.

Kelly Hopping [00:24:27]:
Like when you already have a customer, they're there and you're trying to sell them more stuff, you can usually open those opportunities and close them all in the same quarter. New business a little bit harder to do unless you're like an SMB shop that can make those decisions very quickly. So it's just a matter of kind of that balance. And we do our forecasting for the year. It's yes, plan for the pacing plan for the seasonality, it's going to be different by segment, it's going to be different by quarter. It's not just a straight line. Here's your annual forecast. Divide by four and move on.

Kelly Hopping [00:24:55]:
So.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:56]:
So Demand Base was started in 2006, going on 20, almost 20 years of the company existing. Right. Obviously there's lots of software companies that have existed for a long time. So pardon my naiveness in asking this, but I'm just curious as to like in a world where especially when you're selling in Martech, right, like there's kind of always this game of like everybody wants to use the hot new tool, the hot new app, the hot new thing. How have you continued to make Demand Base relevant? Right, In a world where like you can put on a great event, but at the end of the day it's going to be like, well, why you? Why now? What is the reason? Yeah, how do you pitch Demand Base today? And I'm sure even in your two years it's going to continue to evolve close with Kip, who's the CMO at HubSpot. And you know something that we talked about too, and I think about, you know, whether you're a Salesforce or IBM or Cisco or any of these companies as they grow over time, most people know you exist at some point and so it becomes this act of like, why you? Why now?

Kelly Hopping [00:25:59]:
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple things there. One, I think one, that's why keeping up with pace of innovation is so important, right? It's why companies, why we do account reviews with our key accounts to actually say, hey, this is what's coming on the roadmap. These are the great things. We want them to feel like they invested in a company that's continuing.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:16]:
Right. When you say pace of innovation, you mean from like a demand based R and D product, what are we building? Strategy piece.

Kelly Hopping [00:26:23]:
Yeah. Are we building the things that are keeping up with trends? Behaviors, you know, buyer expectations, all that kind of stuff. So I think that's a big one. That to me is super critical. It's also should be table stakes, right. Products should be keeping up, leading the charge, driving, you know, like the company positioning should be trying to catch up with the product that the product is.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:44]:
And does marketing play a role in that?

Kelly Hopping [00:26:46]:
Certainly all the positioning work. I would say the main thing is the product marketing reports into marketing and works very closely with the product team based on win loss data based on competitive intelligence and market intelligence based on trends we're seeing based on kind of just the pace of innovation, Trying to like, play that sort of conduit between what engineering is working on and what the market is asking for. Trying to get feedback from sales, sitting in on customer meetings to hear what they're struggling with. So that's a big one. The other part that stays relevant is it's a really hard one. Right. It's a thing that we are pushing like crazy on right now. So I think the reality is like, the companies with the right product market fit fit will survive.

Kelly Hopping [00:27:28]:
And it's not just the product market fit the day they are there, but keeping up with those changing market conditions. And so what that means is that because I don't know that pain points have changed all that much. Yes, the way we're asking for them have. But people still don't want to waste marketing dollars on buyers who aren't in the market to buy their product. Marketers still have limited budgets. They always will. They won't have enough to do what they want to do. These are my target market.

Kelly Hopping [00:27:55]:
Sellers are creatures of habit. They don't necessarily want to change what tools they use every day, what decks they use every day, how they're going and finding contacts. So all these things, like, if you know that your Persona has those kind of behaviors, then you're like, okay, now I gotta marry that up with what's happening in the market. Well, now they expect automation. Like, they expect that process to be automated. That workflow feels tedious. So, okay, so now we need to automate that piece. Hey, we know that people love demand base for all these reasons, but it's an inhibitor because it's complex and cumbersome and sometimes hard to use.

Kelly Hopping [00:28:31]:
So let's put agents in place to streamline all the hard parts, the parts that they don't want to do, so that they can just focus on building the strategy and driving outcomes and not building manual processes. Let's automate that stuff. We know that sellers struggle to use the product because they have to leave their salesforce interface, that they sit in all day and go over to demand base to use it. So you know what? Let's build demand base integrated into the iframe of salesforce so that we can meet salespeople where they are. Same product, same pain point. We want to get to the right customers, but let's build it into their workflow. So I think those are the ways that customers stay relevant is that pain points are there, but the way they work evolves. And so that'll make sure that we kind of keep Leading that charge and not being left behind on that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:14]:
I mean, this is the stuff that I love about marketing. It's like, throw out the martech, throw out the sales tech. Ultimately, great marketing at the end of the day and great company strategy is about having a deep understanding of your customer.

Kelly Hopping [00:29:25]:
Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:26]:
And so it's like, all right, well, what if sales and marketing people that would buy demand based right now, what do they care about? Where are they getting stuck? Where are we losing deals? Who are we losing deals to? What features do they have that we don't have? I wrote something the other week about just like, there's so much change happening in AI But I think marketing ultimately is about these kind of timeless principles in, like, human behavior and psychology. It's like, how can you make me look good? Make me look good to my boss or to my team? How can you save me time? Time is the one thing nobody has enough of. Can you give me time back? Remove friction? How can you make me money? How can you help me avoid pain? How can you help me grow? And so then if you kind of like, overlap those things with the ICP that Demandbase is selling to, those are going to be timeless. And it's like, hey, can we. How do we innovate? Look at Salesforce, right? I think Marc Benioff is one of the greatest marketers ever because he kind of has this way of always pushing what's next in the vision and somehow tying Salesforce's old story into, like, the new way that the world is going, whether it was buying slack or being early to talk about agents and AI. So it's good to hear you talk about. It's not necessarily a feature. It's about this true, deep product marketing understanding of who we're selling to and who we want to buy our product, Right?

Kelly Hopping [00:30:40]:
Yes, a hundred percent. And it's what makes being a marketer at a place like demand based so fun because I'm marketing to myself. I mean, at the end of the day, like, I am my buyer and so I understand what those pain points are. I understand, like, sometimes I'll look at messaging and I'm like, guys, I would never buy this. Like, and hey, guys, this is super relevant. Like, you just hit me exactly where I want. Like, this is what I'm struggling with. Y' all nailed it.

Kelly Hopping [00:31:04]:
Or sometimes it's like, hey, this wouldn't resonate with me, but it would resonate with the practitioners on my team. Like, let's talk to the actual digital marketer who's running demand Base or to our VP of growth. And let's talk with them and kind of say, hey, how does this resonate with you? Because it's different by Persona. But it's so helpful to be like, yeah, I understand that pain point. I live it, I breathe it every single day.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:25]:
Yeah, okay, this is not where I was going to go, but I take notes. You made me want to go here next. A demand base aside, just like you as CMO Kelly, what are your pain points then today, like to be a dream for anybody who wants to sell something to you later to listen to this episode. But Q2, 20, 25, what are the big pain points for you as the CMO of a, you know, 70 person marketing.org Series H company? And give me one or two. We don't have to go into all of them, but like one or two burning things.

Kelly Hopping [00:31:57]:
I joke that or not really joke, but I say at the end of the day, like, my number one goal is to make sales love me. And I say me meaning marketing. And that doesn't mean that I'm giving them all the best pipeline. Yes, that's important. I want to give them high quality pipeline, but I also want to give them a brand that they are super proud to put on their outbound marketing or on their outreach or their, you know, they're super proud to stand at our booth at an event that they're seeing air cover in the market. That when they call their prospect and mention demand base, that that prospect knows who we are and what we do. I want them to feel like they are empowered in a sales conversation because I've given them the right objection handling or the right positioning or the right pricing model that a marketer can understand. So at the end of the day, those are the things I need because I want sales to love what marketing is, is doing.

Kelly Hopping [00:32:46]:
So it's. Are we. They're our primary audience? Yes. They're internal. Yes. External matters. But if it's working external, it makes our salespeople super happy. So those are the big ones.

Kelly Hopping [00:32:56]:
But at the end of the day, I mean, my most tangible things is I need to drive pipeline and I need to hit my pipeline numbers. If I hit my pipeline numbers, it means that all my SDRs are getting paid at 100% at least. Right? Because they hit their quotas, which helps me feel better. I want a team that feels engaged and loving what they do every day. I want my turnover to be low because they're constantly feeling challenged and they're feeling the wins and they're feeling Motivated. I want my boss to trust me enough that he says, go do it and doesn't micromanage the outcome because he trusts that I will do the thing, which means I have to earn the trust. Right. So those are some of the things I think.

Kelly Hopping [00:33:33]:
I want my peers to see me as a peer and not as the marketing person who is a second class citizen because it's marketing, but instead to be like, hey, like, we've got another strategist and business athlete at the table between the chief product officer and the chief marketing officer and the chief revenue officer and the chief customer officer. That we all sit at a table and have equal footing because we all have a different perspective on the market and that's respected. So those are, you know, we all want to be part of a winning team on an inspiring mission and driving big results.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:07]:
I love that. Two things. I love the framing of, like, my number one goal is to make sales love me. That is the most simplified, fundamental. Like, that will quite literally solve every other problem within the company. And usually the reason sales loves you is because you are giving them things and helping them close more deals.

Kelly Hopping [00:34:27]:
Exactly. For making them more money. They are going to be very happy with what marketing is giving.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:32]:
Absolutely. And then the other thing is, just from a CMO journey standpoint, like, I love the framing of, I want the other leaders and execs around the company to basically be like, hold on, hold on. We can't have this discussion without Kelly. Like, we want Kelly in here. Hey, we want this K. Like, I was a marketing leader at two companies. One of them, the product leader, did not like me at all. One of them, the product leader, loved me and guess which one was more fun and which company did better.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:00]:
I know one company was like, don't share anything with marketing. Hide the roadmap. Don't tell them anything. The other company was like, I could see the product leader. This one. We were in the office, he would come running down the hallway and I'd be like, oh, no, they just had a crazy product meeting. And Craig wants. And like, you know, the rest of my day would be blown up because he would want to bring me into the room with the engineers, with the product managers.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:20]:
And that was the best team. Like, we truly felt like we were building this thing together. And I love those as guardrails.

Kelly Hopping [00:35:25]:
Well, and you brought your best self to work in that second environment because confidence is king, man. Like, when people empower you to bring your voice to the table, you are so much better. I look at my daughter's plays club volleyball and I look at her like on a really on like she's been on the top team and she's been on the second team and on one team she felt and she worked for a coach who was two different coaching styles but one brought out full confidence and one she played in fear. And I will tell you like she was a thousand times better player when she felt empowered to go as hard as she wanted to. To fail, sure. Fail fast, fail forward, move on. But be okay failing and then just pick yourself up and keep going. Versus one where you feel like it's perfection and you're tiptoeing whatever.

Kelly Hopping [00:36:08]:
Like if I can inspire confidence in everybody we we work with, you get the best results for sure.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:13]:
I love that. That's great. Before we talk about the future, let's talk about now. I'm gonna ask you this question, but also answer it because I've been asking everybody and it's kind of the same. Are you feeling that I ask CMOs like Best Channels right now what's working and everyone's like events in person events. You feel that?

Kelly Hopping [00:36:28]:
Yeah. Certainly from a. I would say volume would still be coming through. Paid to some extent.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:35]:
Okay.

Kelly Hopping [00:36:35]:
So you're still seeing that kind but in terms of quality up market conversion 100% in person events, whether those are big, large scale events, even the large scale events, that's one thing. It's the side parts of that. Right. It's the executive dinner the night before. It's the lunch with the women leaders from your customer base. It's the we took a group at Forrester to a speakeasy and did this like whole plane experience. It was amazing. Like that kind of thing.

Kelly Hopping [00:37:05]:
Like it's these very, very interesting experiments and experiences across events. Yeah. That face to face touch can't be beat. But obviously the volume is still going to be needed through big bulk webinars. Big bulk page.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:17]:
Yeah. But I also feel like, and I meant that in the prep doc that our team gave me, I was supposed to ask you about Brandon brand performance, that concept that you like to talk about. But I feel like just like anything in marketing, all these things are connected. Right. You could host a great dinner and doesn't mean that someone's going to buy demand base that night. Right. But now they're like, wow, that was great. I met Kelly, I met the team.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:37]:
You know, that was super great dinner. It might be six months from now that then they see an ad. Oh yeah. Now's the time to evaluate that thing. And so it's not. Events are a great channel, but they're also not a direct response channel at the same time. Right?

Kelly Hopping [00:37:51]:
Yeah. It's one of the reasons I have sort of a love hate relationship with like multi touch attribution which we do over long time periods because yeah, you look at that like that first touch might have been that dinner that we had. And then by the time it converts, yeah, it's converting like it finally converts on a gift card from an sdr. That gift card was worth whatever. But the reality is the whole thing, right? And as much as I hate kind of the attribution models in general, I think the spirit of them in recognizing that There can be 25 touch points before it turns to revenue and is super valid. And yeah. So ultimately you see the cumulative contribution to pipeline, especially in the UP market, being so much higher a lot with events and that kind of thing.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:32]:
Let's wrap up with your honest opinion about what's happening with AI and in marketing right now. Where are we going?

Kelly Hopping [00:38:42]:
There are some days when I think, maybe naively, I think AI is awesome because it's going to accelerate my output throughput, whatever. Right. Like I can take like my writer who just wrote this beautiful 30 page ebook is not going to create shelfware and then it'll be launched once and done. That ebook now because of AI is going to become 45 pieces of snackable content and it's going to be incredible and we're going to run it through every single channel and it's going to work harder. And so it really becomes like a marketing accelerator, a revenue accelerator. And because you can use everything you create in a much more intentional way, I'm not in the spirit of use AI to create all of your stuff original, but for derivatives of absolutely. I think it can do a lot of great work. So there's that part of it where if I think very close to home, it's just going to help our team operate more efficiently.

Kelly Hopping [00:39:34]:
Long game. I mean, I'll be honest, I sit at conversations sometimes and think because I've got a kid going into college in a year and I think what's not going to be replaced? What's the job to get or the degree to get that's not going to be replaced. And it's one of those exercises, it's almost that exercise of like, if I win the lottery, what would I do with it? Like, it's a little bit of like kind of a fun but also fairly daunting of like, oh man, I don't know. What I would do, like, what is the thing? Like I'd be like, well, maybe I'll go into consulting one day. And then you think, man, knowledge is the main thing that's getting replaced by AI. Okay, so it's not knowledge that people need to. Is it the thinking part? Is the thinking going to be needed? Is that not it? Is it the strategy elements? Is it storytelling? No, I mean there's a lot of AL sources, so there's a whole bunch of things. When I kind of get wrapped up in like my head, I can go down a long, long rabbit hole of where AI is going.

Kelly Hopping [00:40:27]:
I think in general though, as long as it stays clean, meaning that the data stays clean, that's feeding the models, that the models aren't feeding other models to where it becomes a problem. But as long as like the future of where MCPs are going and connecting all these agencies to talk to each other, every single thing in the world is going to get automated. So what's the human role in all of this? Is the part that's really, really interesting. And what do I need to do today? Like even today? You know what I did yesterday? I downloaded some app. I'm a sucker for a good Instagram ad. I buy some random things I don't need off Instagram. But I happened to buy this like 28 day AI training. It was like, learn a different AI application every single day so that I can learn how to create images with very specific prompts.

Kelly Hopping [00:41:10]:
I can learn how to do canva with very specific inputs, like all the different things that are AI powered. Because I don't want to be behind on that. Right? I mean my kid uses Chat GPT as a search engine. That's his Google. I use Google still. And sometimes I catch myself like, okay, there's a balance. And so now I've started making that pivot. It's just a different world and I'm intrigued to see where it goes.

Dave Gerhardt [00:41:33]:
Man, that's some deep. That's how I feel too. Some days I'm like, this is great. And then some days are like, oh man. Yeah, my father in law is a carpenter. And I'm like, man, you better pass on all these skills before you go because that's the highest demand. Job is the plumbers electrician.

Kelly Hopping [00:41:48]:
Like I told my kids, like, maybe you should go to trade school because they're not outsourcing. Carpentry, they're not outsourcing. Like somebody's still got to change the electrical, the plumbing. Someone's always got to do those things. What are those humans? Physical training. My kids are really into working out, exercising training. And I'm like, no one's outsourcing that. Like, that's a human job.

Dave Gerhardt [00:42:07]:
Yeah. There's even nuance to all that. Like, I have a chat GBT project that is essentially like my workout assistant, and I log and track everything. And instead, instead of having a personal trainer, like, I can't. Hey, all right. Are you super sore? You did Murph yesterday. All right, here's what you should do today.

Kelly Hopping [00:42:20]:
Like, did you do the Murphy Challenge yesterday?

Dave Gerhardt [00:42:22]:
Yeah, yeah, I did Murph yesterday. Yeah, I wrecked today, and I did it with a vest, and it took me 54 minutes, and I'm in a bad place today.

Kelly Hopping [00:42:30]:
The vest, that's bold. I mean, especially warm outside and things.

Dave Gerhardt [00:42:33]:
I know it wasn't so bad. I did in the morning. It was probably 50 degrees out. It was. But I've been sitting in this position for, like, four hours today, and I got to go pick up my kid at school after. I'm like, I'm going to just make him chill out because I need to do, like an hour of stretch of stretching at some point.

Kelly Hopping [00:42:47]:
It is. Yeah. And you're right. You now you have a workout assistant, AI powered, that is going to walk you through how to recover from that Murph challenge. And they do that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:42:54]:
I mean, here's the issue, though. I. I had an author on the podcast and I. I didn't read his book. I just like, you know, I can't read everybody's book. It's insane. And so I. I did the prep notes with chat GPT and it completely made up something.

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:10]:
And I'm asking this guy, I'm like, ah, so in your book, you. This is a. You have the score framework, you know, S C O R E. And I start rambling and the guy goes, what?

Kelly Hopping [00:43:20]:
Yikes. That's good thing. He pre records. You can edit that right out.

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:23]:
No, no, no. It actually, I'm not embarrassed about it. It turned into this great. His book is about AI and it. It turned into this great moment of like, oh, yeah, like, this is stuff does make up answers and like, there is some role of human involvement, and it actually ended up being like, a part of the episode. But I've even found myself, you know, like, yeah, I'm blindly trusting what these models are telling me, and I don't know where things are going either, but I'm concerned about my own ChatGPT usage and, like, making sure, like, my brain doesn't atrophy because, like, you know, I'm weird and I'm funny in my own quirky ways. Like, I want that to be embedded in, you know, I don't just want to outsource. I saw this Instagram video if it was like, kids in 2040, and it's just like, a meme video and the kid couldn't even write, like, a simple email to say thank you, like, after.

Kelly Hopping [00:44:12]:
An interview, because it had always been done for him. Be a chat. Isn't it crazy?

Dave Gerhardt [00:44:17]:
It is. However, yes. As marketers, though, like, I'm excited mainly because, like, this is super fun. It's fun to, like, I was burnt out on market. Like, I mean, I've been doing the same B2B marketing for 15 years. Like, it's the same stuff. I feel a renewed sense of energy because I'm like, wait a second. This is like, if I got to do this all over again.

Dave Gerhardt [00:44:37]:
But it was in, like, 1998 when, like, the Internet was coming and I got to be early. And so even to hear you, you're like, yeah, I'm taking courses and trying to learn this stuff. Like, that's the exciting part.

Kelly Hopping [00:44:47]:
So, yeah, I totally agree. I think it's going to be fun. And I think it allows our marketers. Marketers spend a lot of time just doing, like, project management stuff. I think this allows us to do a lot more strategic thinking, understand more of our buyer, more of their pain points or Persona, actually building things that meet them where they are. Like, it forces us to use a different part of our brain because you can outsource the monotonous stuff.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:13]:
Look, I was always the ghost writer on the team, like, product marketer. I was the guy that, like, you know, CEO, speaking at some event in Amsterdam. And, like, Dave's got to make the deck.

Kelly Hopping [00:45:25]:
Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:25]:
I'm using Canva and Gamma, and I'm never making my own deck ever again. Like, tools like that are, like, a positive. Like, how many freaking decks have you made in your life that, like, so many. It's in my head. I can write it all down. It's the act of, like, taking it from my notes to, like, oh, I gotta spend my whole Sunday making, you know, 20 slides for the management meeting on Monday.

Kelly Hopping [00:45:46]:
Not anymore.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:47]:
Yeah, anymore. Kelly hopping. Thank you for hanging out with me. I hope I got something out of you. Your brain is sharp. You're good. You were great. Go find Kelly on LinkedIn.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:56]:
Connect with her, follow her, send her a message. Be like, I heard you on Dave's podcast. Because then she'll be like, oh my God. God, Dave, you have a lot of listeners to that podcast. It's pretty cool. Always great to see you. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks for coming and hanging out with me on the pod.

Kelly Hopping [00:46:08]:
Awesome. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:46:14]:
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for BD B2B marketers at Exit Five. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exitfive.com our mission at Exit Five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit Five. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community.

Dave Gerhardt [00:46:46]:
People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exitfive.com and I will see you over there in the community.

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