(21) How to Structure and Lead a Full-Funnel B2B Marketing Org with Kelly Hopping - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL543qcko1E

Transcript: (00:00) confidence is king man like when people empower you to bring your voice to the table you are so much better all right hey everybody i'm excited for this episode my guest today is Kelly Hopping she is CMO at Demandbase where she leads a incredible team of marketers and SDRs focused on transforming go to market strategy with AI and account intelligence ai is awesome because it's going to accelerate my output throughput whatever right like I can take my writer who just wrote this beautiful 30page ebook is not going to create shelfware (00:33) and then it'll be launched once and done she's had an amazing career in marketing started in CPG at Craft Foods then she pivoted to tech at Dell and AMD and then rose through marketing leadership roles at Rackspace Gartner Haiku and now Demand base and along the way she's mastered brand building pipeline acceleration and team culture at every stage of company growth 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 i want to give them high quality pipeline she's also written a couple books she's the author of Rising: How to Thrive as a Corporate (01:05) Executive While Staying True to Yourself 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 she once took a six-month sbatical to reset her career she leads with empathy and strategy and believes performance branding is the real growth engine most B2B companies ignore 1 2 3 4 outside of work uh I think you live in Austin Texas right is that where you're at okay and she's a football mom in case you haven't been following her on Monday the diehard football mom yeah diehard (01:41) football mom love that i'm sort of obsessive about it love that i love that uh should we do a whole episode on like the connection between football moms and B2B marketing leadership 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 nice i love that well anyways good to have you on um it's I'm curious there's so much happening right now in in marketing and so maybe let's let's do a state of like uh demandbased marketing team for (02:14) basically for outside of my description for people who aren't familiar can you give me the overview of what demandbase is and then um let's talk about your your role overseeing marketing at this company what is your what is your job um yeah I mean I think uh so demand base is in the middle of this um 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 a as an account-based platform right we were (02:47) founded and that through that was for through both building our own but also acquisitions of Inside View and uh Engageio in the years past and kind of uh becoming this kind of end toend platform um that took data and uh and insights and converted those into action across advertising and marketing and sales um 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 that account um and it's at the accountbased level not at the individual level so that's kind of (03:21) 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 um part of a much more integrated ecosystem so today or in the future I think data is sort of the comm the uh the the resource that kind of connects everything together the power and quality of that data is what decides how how good this thing is going to be but those data and insights um need to be unified in the singular way and they need to power your whole go to market (03:59) tech stack so whether and all the way from you know for sort of first touch all the way through to close and in the past you've had your your marketing automation and you've had your EBM and you've had your your CRM and you've had your forecasting tool and you've had your you know uh uh out you know outreach type uh tool 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 um and so the question is for the (04:29) future of demandbased what role do we play in that and um and we feel really really bullish around accountbased being an anchor in that but it's not the only anchor because it's uh it's a it's kind of I think buying groups is kind of the future of accountbased 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 um and these autonomous workflows then they have to (05:00) 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 um be powering uh AI with the right quality data and trusted insights and that's the future of where we're at um and so what I do there at Demandbase uh I'm the chief marketing officer there i lead uh all of our marketing from sort of brand to demand so that leads us all the way through to pipeline which means I have um the whole sort of brand product marketing content growth engine uh and (05:32) all the way through to the SDRs who uh who actually create that um who convert those those um those signals into to opportunities and pipeline and then our sales team takes it from there can you give me just an overview of like just for setting context for this uh episode of just the uh demand based if there's publicly sharable metrics around like revenue stage size and then like just what your what your marketing or looks like to support the company yeah I mean I think it's not public or private company um I think the we're mid-market (06:07) size um we are what you'd call a series H I think if you were to look on Crunchb um and uh profitable um so we are not a company that's continuing to raise um we are a company that will most likely one day exit we won't be standalone forever um we are I know that the last thing we issued was we are well north of 200 million um that was there was a a press release that went public it's the reason I share that um and profitable and our our core which is the majority of our business is running is growing double digits year-over-year um we've been (06:44) around I don't know 15 18 years something like that um yeah okay cool and and what is the what does the marketing or look like oh uh so we have uh I have about I don't even know I think I have around 75 or 80 I don't know something like that in the organization um we have uh we have a product marketing team who does all of our messaging positioning analyst relations pricing packaging um I've got a content and brand team that does all things related to content development uh content SEO uh brand creative um video podcast any of those kind of (07:26) 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 um to partner marketing and events um and then it's also got customer marketing community um and then I have uh evangelists on the team people who job is to really advocate for us in the market both amongst marketers and amongst sellers who are our primary personas um customer personas that we go after Um yeah I think those are the big Oh and then we have our SDR team um which is part of our growth team but they um (08:05) they're the ones who take uh marketing responses that come in and like I said turn those into pipeline and is the is the go-to market motion you you all are advocates of you know account-based is that the is that the go to market motion for the company as well uh yes we certainly run demandbased on demandbased um and so we run um account-based marketing through our through digital we do um account-based selling in terms of the way that our our SDRs and our sellers use the product um we use uh you know buying groups and all the things so uh yes u we also do run sort of (08:43) broadstrokes demand genen um that gets um that picks up audiences outside of our ICP so we do run um 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 um a lot of broadstrokes demand and then um for the one to many and then we run accountbased and uh and field type programming more at the one to few and one to one how do you how do you articulate your role at this stage (09:15) of the company 200 plus million in revenue 70 person marketing team at at one point Kelly was a marketer now Kelly is the CMO the marketing leader you can't be in you know you can't be touching all of the you know brand demand product marketing creative video podcast SDR like you can't possibly be in all of those places but how do you from your seat h how do you think about your job as as CMO and what is the what is the job of of CMO it's a good question um 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 (09:55) now still but the first year was really about understanding my current org understanding the um 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 uh the marketing leadership team um whether that was uh 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 uh marketing leadership team um making sure that they were clear (10:29) on how we work you know how do we operate how do we uh you know how do we measure success what are our key objectives how do all these things work together so it's a lot of like sort of that building stage that first year um and now we have an incredibly talented uh marketing team and each of those leaders came in and they've done the same and built their organizations so now kind of soup to nuts we have a really really strong marketing team um 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 um that driver (11:03) and like contributor but also influencer between um where the company at you know Gabe our CEO's 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 um yes my team is going to help write that positioning they're going to help draft that narrative they're going to work they're going to interview customers to inform it we're going to use a lot of research and and do those (11:33) so marketing is going to play a really heavy hand in driving that but that's one of those things that is really critical for me to be involved in um but it's also very crossunctional so I work a lot with our sales team and our CX team and our product team and our um and Gabe uh and all those leaders to say how do we 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 um that element of of of pushing that initiative through the company and like I said my team does a (12:08) lot of the heavy lifting of putting pen to paper on it um but it is such a it's a it's a lesson in both managing up managing down managing side to side 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 no it's good to hear you say it and the reason that I asked it because I think a a lot of people who listen to this are either CMOs or aspiring CMOs or maybe firsttime CMOs taking that job for the first time and I think one of the challenges is understanding that there's kind of two (12:38) organizations that you're responsible for like you have marketing but really now your your co-workers 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 might 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 or you still have goals to hit and (13:09) 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 you know marketing just you know write the messaging and it's like no no all these things are connected we can't just we can't just say the things we want to do because we need a 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 you you wrote a book about it right it is a it's very (13:39) 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 road map and so do you have any can you think back to like earlier in your career when you before you really grew up into like the you know highpowered exec that you are today was there was there a a learning (14:11) curve I kind of want to try to just you know share some lessons to those that that are coming up about when you really became like shifted from you know marketer Kelly to CMO Kelly and what the difference in that role is yeah i mean I think there's there's a lot of different learnings and I feel like every one of 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 se my first time as a CMO I felt a (14:44) responsibility to know and be an expert in everything I was managing um which is a hard place to be and so but what I realized when I came in I had never managed paid paid media or SEO which was a massive percentage of our revenue um my first CMO gig and I had never managed those directly i had worked with agencies who managed them so I had sort of been responsible for the numbers but I hadn't really been the day-to-day we manage them all in house so I got there and I thought man how do I become an expert in all the things that I need to (15:15) be managing so I spent a lot of time with each of our um 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 got really really smart on paid and really really smart on organic like what does this mean what is a domain score like what what does it mean to have good domain authority like (15:46) 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 need to be 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 i don't know how to tell if they're doing a good job or not or if we need more resource or (16:18) less resource so I think that was a learning from say CMO one to CMO 2 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 t a season for every part of that and so there is a season for I need to I need to listen first but there's a 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're round the clock just listing and absorbing and taking it all in and trying to deduce (16:55) 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 and then there's the stage of okay the talent is good or not or you hope it is is it kind of like uh 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 year you know CEO may be looking two years out cmo should probably be looking (17:29) a year out cro is probably looking a quarter out and so we each have a goal and and product is looking at all of that 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 um for the long game is super important um but also obviously balancing I got to hit my numbers every quarter too um yeah I mean like I said I think you approach every role different and um and now I'm really happy like but sometimes I look back and (18:00) 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 oh now you could you just vibe it's just vibe marketing you just go to you know open chatbt and you're good there now you just totally I mean Jedi has changed all of those things i have to relearn how to do it in a absolutely everybody does we're we're we're going to talk we're going to talk more about that but um you you talked about balancing the the short-term and the long-term stuff and I think typically that's if I had to pick one of our you (18:30) know our audience one of the hardest challenges is like I think you can be either really good at hitting the number now uh or you can be too strategic and too visionary and then we're we're missing the number today do you have any principles is there like a you know a Kelly principle of of of investment how do you think about placing your bets so you can so you can do both i think often times we hear like from an investment standpoint it might be 70% on today 30% on tomorrow but more more goes into it (18:59) than that and I think you know the 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 you know this year while also having a plan to get to the future whereas young 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 to scale these (19:30) channels and and you know some of this stuff takes enough time how do you how do you how do you think through some of that yeah I mean you know like I said it's probably varied by role but um I definitely uh yeah you have to look at both um 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 um is almost like you almost are un underestimating what the future's 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 (20:11) 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 um when you have good leaders in place it's probably 3070 so it's probably 30% I'm worried about pipeline because I've got a great leader who's going to run that um and it's probably 70% uh of kind of looking forward 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 (20:44) conversations um but I think in general it's probably it should be a little bit more balanced than that um 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 so for instance we just reported out last week at our board meeting um and it was 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 (21:16) this is awesome." Like yes I got to keep my foot on the gas but the team now is rolling over there on that because 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 going to go micromanage positioning instead which which is like yeah there's there's fewer questions or as a as a football mom when the team is winning fewer people are questioning the coach's strategy and and which plays they're calling right yeah for sure how did you get out of that how (21:44) did 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 it is going to happen just tactically like what was the state of things and then like how did you how did you make changes to to come in come back and hit the number this quarter 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 um the main thing was is that a quarter ago we knew that the future was (22:15) 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 that timing of our last one was uh Thanksgiving to Christmas um 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 we were down field marketers we were down um uh a few things we had some 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 (22:51) event season didn't start until like the day after board meeting so we just had this window of like RKO happened so everybody came off the floor for a week like we had all that happen first month of the year 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 the 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." Timing yes timing and then the next time (23:21) 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 uh 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 got all the things in place and the market's just soft other times you have uh you know sellers or SDRs who take their foot off the gas because they get tired and you know it's a But other times you (23:51) don't 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 um which is when you know it's harder to generate business in the summer as folks go off and I I have a a CMO friend of mine who uh he will text me like clockwork every year around July 10th uhhuh and he will text me a screenshot from the CEO asking why you know pipeline is slow and you're like uh because it's July 10th right people aren't working everybody's on vacation right now (24:30) and it's just like that is I think that the more people I've talked to and the longer I've done things myself I just realize like those are just some questions you know it it 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 got to ask the question and move on yep well and it's why like say February through May is so critical right you've got to frontload as much as possible got to go get it yeah you got to like build up your (24:59) reserves like a bear right to prepare for the long win like the long summer okay you're you're you're hinting you're getting at something that I think is really important and I don't think we talk about it a lot is um the count like the 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 you know stack the year like I've I've made mistakes of basically stacking things in the wrong time and it's like well we got to overindex for (25:30) like events in February and March because we you know or February through May because we know the lag of the pipeline and that that stuff really matters and then that that's the fun part you know when you're kind of moving the pieces around and seeing when you're when you're going to execute right yeah i mean it means that you probably have Well there's also a lag between pipeline and bookings right so then it's like okay we're going to frontload Q1 we'll frontload 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 (26:02) into October and you're going to have a great October but you're going to you know 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 you know in some organizations is 30 days some days it's 90 days 120 days depending on the business um 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 (26:33) 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 um so we call those create and close opportunities and um you know sometimes they're they're really common in a expansion business like when you already have a customer they're there and you're trying to sell them more stuff you can usually um open those (27:01) opportunities and close them all in the same quarter um 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 so so Demandbase was started in 2006 going on 20 almost 20 years of the company existing right obviously there's (27:34) lots of software companies that have existed for a long time so pardon my naive naivveness in asking this but I'm just curious as to like in in a world where especially when you're selling um in in Martekch right like there's kind of always this game of like who's the hot new everybody wants to use the hot new tool the hot new app the hot new thing how do you how have you continued to make demand base relevant right in in a world where like you can do 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 what is the (28:08) reason how do how do you pitch demand base today and and and it's just going to I'm sure even in your two years it it's going to continue to evolve um I'm I'm close with Kip who's the CMO at HubSpot and you know something that we talked about too and I think about you know so whether you're 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 yeah i mean I think there's a couple things there one I hope I think one that's why (28:39) keeping up with pace of innovation is so important right it's why companies why we do you know 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 right and when when you say pace of innovation you mean from like a demandbased R&D product what are we building strategy piece yeah are we building the things that are keeping up with trends behaviors you know buyer (29:05) expectations all that kind 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 product should be keeping up leading the charge driving you know like we should be the company positioning should be trying to catch up with the product does marketing play a role in that certainly all the positioning work I would say the um the main things so product marketing reports into marketing and works very closely with um the product team based on win- loss data based on competitive (29:35) intelligence and market intelligence based on trends we're seeing based on you know kind of just the pace of innovation trying to like play that um that sort of conduit between what engineering is working on and what the market is asking for um trying to get feedback from sales sitting in on customer meetings to hear what they're they're struggling with so that's that's a big one um in terms of uh the other part that stays relevant is um it's a really hard one right it's it's a thing that we are pushing like crazy on right now um so I think the the reality is (30:07) like the right the companies with the right product market fit will survive and I think it's if they and it's not just the the product market fit the day they are there but keeping up with those changing market conditions and so um 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 um you know these are my target market sellers (30:44) are um are creatures of habit they don't necessarily want to change what tools they use every day what decks they use every day what um how they're going and finding contacts um they so all these things like if you know that your persona has those kind of behaviors then you're like "Okay now I got to marry that up with what's happening in the market. (31:07) " 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 demandbased for all these reasons but it's an inhibitor because it's uh complex and cumbersome and sometimes hard to use 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 and and driving outcomes and not building manual processes let's automate that stuff um we know that (31:37) sellers um struggle to use the product because it's uh because they have to leave their Salesforce interface that they sit in all day and go over to Demandbase 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 painpoint 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 got to make sure that we kind of keep leading that (32:07) charge and not being left behind on that well I mean this is the stuff that I love about marketing it's like throw out the martekch 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 and so it's like all right well what a sales and marketing people that would buy demand base 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 (32:30) do they have that we don't have um I wrote something the other week about just like you know there's so much change happening in AI but I think marketing ultimately is about these kind of timeless principles in 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 you know time is the one thing nobody has enough of can you give me time back remove friction how can you make me money um how can you help me avoid pain how can you help me grow and so then if you kind of like (33:00) overlap those things with the ICP that Demandbase is selling to those are those are going to be timeless and it's like hey can we how do we how do we innovate let's let's you know look at Salesforce right i think Mark Beni off is one of the greatest marketers ever because he kind of had this has this way of always pushing you know what's next and the vision and somehow tying Salesforce's you know old story into like the new way that the world is going whether it was buying Slack or being early to talk about you know agents and AI so it's good to hear you talk about it's not (33:33) 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 well it's also what makes being um Yes 100% and it's what makes being a marketer at a place like Demandbase so fun because um 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 (34:04) you just hit me exactly where I want like this is what I'm struggling with y'all nailed it um 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 um demand base or to our you know to our our VP of our of growth and let's talk with them and kind of say hey where how does this resonate with you?" because it's different by persona but it's so helpful to be like "Yeah I understand that painoint i live it i (34:32) breathe it every single day." Yeah okay this is I This is not where I was going to go but I take notes you may you made me want to go here next let's a demand base aside just like you as CMO Kelly what what are your pain points then today like this be a dream for anybody who wants to sell something to you later to listen to this episode but you know Q Q2 2023 uh 2025 Q2 2025 what what is uh what what are the what are the big pain points for 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 (35:09) all of them but like your one or two burning things yeah I mean I I I joke that or I not really joke but I say at the end of the day like my number one goal is to make sales love me um and I say me meaning marketing um 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 like to put on their their outbound marketing or on their their outreach or their you know that they're super proud to stand at our (35:41) booth at an event that they are 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 sales that a marketer can can understand so at the end of the day those are the things I I need because I want I want sales to love what marketing is doing so it's um it's are we they're our primary audience yes they're (36:13) internal yes external matters um but if it's working external it makes our sales people super happy so those are the big ones um 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 STRs are getting paid at 100% at least right because they hit their quotas which helps me um feel better i want a team that feels engaged uh and loving what they do every day i want my turnover to be low um because they are uh because (36:46) they're constantly feeling challenged and they're feeling the wins and they're feeling motivated um 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 I will do the the thing uh which means I have to earn the trust right um so those are some of the things I think I want my peers to see me as a peer and not as the marketing person who is a secondass citizen because it's marketing um but instead to be like hey like we've got another like you know strategist and business athlete at the table between (37:20) 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 um have equal footing because we all have a different perspective on the market um and that's respected so those are you know we all want to be part of a winning team on a inspiring mission and driving big results i love that i So so two things i love the framing of like I wrote this down to make a clip of it later but um my number one goal is to make sales love me that is the most like (37:52) simplified fundamental like that that that will quite literally solve every other problem within within the company and usually the reason sales loves you is because you are giving them things and helping them close more deals yeah yeah exactly we're making them more money they are going to be very happy with what marketing is giving absolutely absolutely and then the other thing is just from a like a CMO journey standpoint like I love the framing of I want the other leaders and execs around the company to basically be like let's (38:23) we we want we hold on hold on we can't have this discussion without Kelly like we want Kelly in here hey we want this guy like um 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 I guess which one was more fun and which company did better it was the the product when the product the product team you know one company was like don't share anything with marketing hide the road map don't tell them anything the other company was like I could see the product leader list when we were in the (38:53) office he would come running down the hallway and I'd be like "Oh no Craig just 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 and that was the best team chem like we truly felt like we were building this thing together. (39:11) " And so I love I love those as as as guard rails well and you brought your best self to work in that second environment because confidence is king man like when people when people empower you to bring your voice to the table you are so much better uh I look at my daughter's uh 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 uh you know much different 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 (39:47) when she felt empowered to to to go as hard as she wanted 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 like I I if I can inspire confidence in everybody we we work with you get the best results for sure i love that that's great before we talk about the future let's talk about now are you feeling I'm going to ask you this question but also answer it because I've been asking everybody and it's kind (40:14) of the same are are you feeling that uh I ask CMOs like best best channels right now what's working and everyone's like events in person events you feel that uh yeah yeah certainly from a I would say volume would still be coming through paid to some extent um so you're still seeing that kind but in terms of quality upmarket conversion 100% in-person events whether those are big large scale events even the large scale events that's one thing it's the uh it's the side parts of that right it's the it's the executive dinner the (40:52) night before it's the lunch with the women leaders from your customer base it's the um you know the like we took um we took a a group at Forester to a speak easy and did this like whole plane experience it was amazing like that kind of thing like it's these very very interesting experiments um and experiences uh across events yeah 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 yeah but but I also feel like and I I meant you know the the prep doc that our team gave me i was supposed (41:26) to ask you about brand brand performance that that that con that concept that you that you like to talk about but I feel like you just like anything in marketing all these things are are connected right you could host a great dinner and doesn't mean that someone's going to buy demand based that night right but now they're like "Wow that was great i met Kelly i met the team you know that was super great dinner it might be 6 months from now that then they see an ad oh yeah now's the time to evaluate that thing and so it's it's it's not you know events are not events are a great (41:56) channel but they're also not a direct response channel at the same time right yeah it's one of the reasons I have sort of a lovehate 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 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 and you're like okay so that that gift card was worth whatever but the reality is the whole thing right and as much as I hate kind (42:24) 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 um is super valid and uh and yeah so ultimately you see the the cumulative contribution to pipeline especially in the up market being so much higher a lot with uh with events and that kind of thing okay maybe let let's wrap up with your honest opinion about what's happening with AI and in in in marketing right now where are we going there are some days when I think maybe naively I think AI is uh is awesome (43:04) 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 work harder and so every so it really becomes um an like a a marketing accelerator a revenue accelerator um because you can use everything you create in a much more intentional way um I'm not in the spirit (43:41) of use AI to create all of your stuff original but for uh uh 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 I'm just going to like it's just going to help our team operate more efficiently long game I mean I'll be honest I sit at conversations sometimes and think cuz I've got a kid going into college in a year and I think what is what's not going to be replaced what's the job to get or the 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 (44:18) 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 is it you know is it the thinking part is the thinking going to be needed is that not it is it the the strategy elements is it storytelling no i mean there's a lot of outsourcing so there's a whole bunch of (44:49) 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 i think in general though it's going to be um 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 agents to talk to each other every single thing in the world is going to get automated so what what's the human role in all of this is uh is the (45:21) 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 good Instagram ad um I buy some random things I don't need off Instagram but I happen to buy uh 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 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 (45:53) chat GPT as a search engine that's his Google like I use Google still and 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 uh I'm intrigued to see where it goes man that's some deep that's how I feel too some days I'm like this is great and then some days I'm like oh man my my uh 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 (46:22) electrician like that's what I told my kids like maybe you should go to trade school because they're not outsourcing carpentry they're not outsourcing like like somebody's still got to change the like the electrical the plumbing someone's always got to do those things what are those humans physical training my kids are really into to working out exercising training and I'm like no one's outsourcing that like that's that's a human job yeah well yes but yeah there's even nuance to all that like I use I have a chat GBT project that is essentially like my workout (46:52) assistant and I log and track everything and instead of having a personal trainer like I hey are are you super sore you did Murf yesterday here's what you should do today like did you do the Murf challenge yesterday yeah yeah I did Murf yesterday yeah i wreck today and I did it with a I did it with a vest and it took me 54 minutes and I'm I'm in a bad place today the vest that's bold i mean especially if it's warm outside and things i know it wasn't it wasn't so bad i did in the morning it was probably 50° (47:19) out it It was But But I've I've been I've been sitting in this position for like 4 hours today and I got to go pick up my kid at school after i'm like I'm I'm going to just make him chill out because I need to do like an hour of stretch of stretching at some point 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 Murf challenge and they do that i mean here's the issue though i I had a 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 (47:50) did the prep notes with ChachiBT and completely it completely made up something and I'm asking this guy i'm like "Ah so tell me about the you know tell me about so so in your book you this is a you have the score framework you know sc." And I start rambling and the guy goes "What?" Yikes that's good thing he pre-records you can edit that right out no no no it was It actually It actually I'm not embarrassed about it it turned into this great his book was about AI and it it turned into this great moment of like oh yeah like this (48:21) is stuff does make up answers and like there is some role of human involvement and it actually ended up being like an amazing part of the episode but I've even found myself you know like yeah I'm blindly I'm blindly like trusting what these models are telling me and I'm worried about I don't know where things are going either but I'm I'm concerned about my own chat GPT usage and like making sure like my brain doesn't atrophy because like you know I'm I'm weird i I think 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 (48:58) video of it was like kids in 2040 and and it's just a like a meme video and the kid couldn't even write like a simple email to say thank you like after an interview because it had always been done for him via chat yeah isn't it crazy it is however yes as marketers though like I'm I'm excited mainly because like this is super fun it it's fun to like I was burnt out on market like man 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 but it was in like 1998 when (49:36) 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 i'm trying to learn this stuff like you know that that's the exciting part so yeah I totally agree i think it's going to be 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 like stuff i think this this allows us to do a lot more strategic thinking understand more of our buyer understand more of their pain points or persona actually building things that (50:07) that meet them where they are like it just makes it forces us to use a different part of our brain because you can outsource the the the monotonous stuff look do you know I mean you you you're a CMO but like I was always the ghost writer on the team like product marketer make the I was the guy that like you know CEO speaking you know at some event in Amsterdam and like Dave's got to make the deck like 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 it's in my head it's just (50:41) that you know I can write it all down it's the act of like taking it from my notes to like I got to make I got to spend my whole Sunday making you know 20 slides for the for the management meeting on Monday not anymore not anymore well that's Yeah okay Kelly Hopping thank you for hanging out with me i hope I I hope I got something out of you we You know your brain is sharp you're good you were great uh go go go find go find Kelly on on on LinkedIn connect with her follow her send her a message be like I heard you on Dave's (51:11) podcast because then she'll be like oh my god Dave you have a lot of listeners to that podcast that's pretty cool um always great to see you i hope you enjoy the rest of your day thanks for coming and hanging out with me on the podcast awesome thanks for having me i appreciate it [Music]