Most marketing teams are built around tactics. Kelly Hopping builds hers like a business.

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, 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 sense. 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.