This is a YouTube video titled "How to Structure and Lead a Full-Funnel B2B Marketing Org with Kelly Hopping" featuring a conversation between Dave Gerhardt and Kelly Hopping, CMO at Demandbase. Recorded in mid-2025, the discussion covers Kelly's marketing leadership journey, the evolution of Demandbase's account-based marketing platform, and the future of integrated, data-driven B2B marketing strategies.
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 30 page ebook is not going to create shelfware and then it'll be launched once and done.
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, 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 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 sabbatical 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. Exit outside of work. I think you live in Austin, Texas, right? Is that where you're at?
Yeah.
Okay. And she's a football mom, in case you haven't been following her on LinkedIn.
The Die Hard football mom.
Yeah, Die hard football mom. Love that.
I'm sort of obsessive about it.
Love that. I love that. 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. 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 demand based marketing team for 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, your role overseeing marketing at this company. What is your, what is your job?
Yeah, I mean, I think so. Demandbase 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 a, as an account based platform, right? We were founded and that, that was for 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 you have the highest likelihood of buying when you go after that, that account. 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, the, 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 a singular way and they need to power your whole go to market tech stack. So whether in all the way from 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, you know, out, you know, outreach type 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. 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 it's a, it's a, it's, it's kind of, 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.
