CMO Chats with Kelly Hopping, CMO for DemandBase

Hi everyone. Welcome to CMO chats. My name is Kelly Hopping, and I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at DemandBase. 

 

Hi, Kelly. Tell us a little bit about you and your role at DemandBase.

I’ve been here for about 13 months, and I lead marketing. For us, that means everything from brand to demand all the way through our SDR team, which works inbound leads and hunts for new opportunities. 

 

Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into marketing.

I never intended to be a marketer. I actually was an engineer in college—industrial engineering. I was good at math and science. I didn’t actually want to be an engineer, but I was good at it. I did that degree, and then I took an internship my lot, my senior year, doing product development at Saber, which was the reservation system that’s inside American Airlines and all that. The day before I started, I got a phone call from my boss, my summer intern boss, and he said, “Hey, we had a re-organisation, and I’m no longer the VP of Product Development. I’m now the VP of Product Marketing. Do you want to do marketing with me for the summer instead?” And I was like, “Sure, and I’ve been in marketing ever since.” So that’s how we get up there. 

 

Wow, That’s fascinating. From engineering to marketing, totally different fields. What does DemandBase do? 

DemandBase is a leader in the account-based go-to-market for B2B enterprises. What that means is we are an account-based sales and marketing provider. We provide data insights and a platform to apply those in action through marketing, selling, and advertising motions for B2B companies, mostly mid-market and UPS and up-market, enterprise, and big strategic accounts.

 

What is your main marketing focus at the moment?

I hate to say it, but it’s always a pipeline. At some point, we need to give enough pipeline and generate enough for our sellers to be able to close and hit their quotas and targets, so that’s always the big focus. Part of that is making sure that you’re targeting the right account. It’s not just about the pipeline, but it’s a pipeline from our ICP and making sure that we’re hitting the right types of industries, the right types of decision-makers, and the right types of right-size companies, the right need states, the right complexities, their product lines, all that kind of stuff. That’s when the real pipeline comes through. We convert higher that way. They retain longer; they grow faster. So those are the ones we want to go after. That’s a big thing. 

The other big priority has been fixing our brand. Our old brand was out of touch with an enterprise and upmarket strategy. So we spent the last year reframing our whole brand, changing the look and feel, changing our messaging, our positioning, the way we talk about our products, and then all of that was sort of wrapping around a portfolio enhancement that made the product more powerful for both sellers and marketers. Those are kind of the big focus. 

Obviously, those two things grab everything else, right? It means product marketing is super important. It means the content we create is super important. It means the value is important. It means the value journey that we put our customers on when they sign on with us and the content we create through that journey is super important. It means that our whole digital strategy is important, and so it’s really important too, that we know and optimise how we use the product so that we can one be customer zero and feed it back to our product teams, but also that we can write really relevant messaging and copy for our customers because we know the pain points that they’re struggling with. 

 

How do you define success in marketing?

We have a few big KPIs. I think they’re aligned to those big focus areas like brand perception in the market. Are we being considered for RFPs? Do the analysts recognise this as a leader does? Does this make the media want to pick up stories on us? Do they see us as a thought leader? Do they trust our vision as the future of the category? Those are all brand elements, and brand perception is really important. Then, pipeline, and not just pipeline, but really pipeline growth, pipeline attainment amongst our target accounts. Then, of course, we need our conversion rates to make sure that we’re being as efficient as possible, from leads all the way through to close one. 

 

What would you say is the biggest challenge that marketers face today?

There are so many, and that’s why I think that’s the biggest challenge in marketing: marketing wears about 40 different hats, has lots of different audiences, and pulls on their capacity in their time. So I think the biggest challenge, though, is that the playbook gets reinvented every few years. Right now, the playbook of what’s working in marketing is not what worked two years ago, four years ago, or six years ago. There’s this constant need to reinvent. Our buyers get more savvy, and so they click on ads less. They want to be retargeted less. They don’t read emails. They are being hit up from every different channel. How do you get customers or prospects to hear you when we’re all kind of smarter than marketing these days? I think that’s the biggest challenge, which means we have to experiment a lot; for example, an event that worked a year ago may not work today. An experiential event may work, but the big, large trade show doesn’t anymore. The paid search used to work like crazy. You could just amp up the paid search if you need volume. Now, people don’t click on paid ads, or if they do, they tend to be SMBs, transactional, or just tyre kickers. They don’t have a high conversion to a closed one. Everything has changed, and so now we’re constantly re-testing, and I think that’s the hardest part. When you have talented staff, you have motivated people, all with good intent, all trying to hit their numbers, but all having to test and figure out what’s working. Now, it’s a different ball game.

 

Now, let’s talk about marketing’s relationship with sales. So, out of all marketing initiatives that you are in charge of, which one would you say your sales department traditionally has been more grateful for or excited about? 

We’re really, really big on sales and marketing alignment. It’s something we talk about a lot. One is because I’m in the account-based go-to-market space, which by definition is sales and marketing alignment. It’s about bringing marketers and sellers to surround the same accounts. And so, is there anything that we’re doing in lockstep with them on growing that account? They love it when we do field marketing events. We took 40 customers to a Justin Timberlake concert a couple of weeks ago, and sales love that they’re able to spend time building relationships at the concert carried into the pipeline. It goes beyond an email or a phone call. They love things like that. They love round tables like we’ve done with you guys in New York. They love it when we have big events where we have a big brand presence, and they feel super proud because then they get to represent a really incredible booth, a really incredible event. Last year, we had an amazing booth at Forrester. We were right by, like, main traffic, so we had a lot of volume. We had our own private kind of cafe and space that was packed all day long, and we had a big party there. Then we did a custom hat fitting event, and we got to invite top customers or top prospects to come in, and we did custom cowboy hats for all of them. And that was really cool. So I think any of those kinds of high-touch, very bespoke type events go a long way, especially as you move up markets and into the enterprise, and those big, you know, multibillion-dollar accounts,

 

Which marketing strategies have wielded the most success in terms of engagement and lead generation or opportunity generation? 

Competitive takeout campaigns work really, really well. I think it depends on the category that you’re in. Everybody sort of knows or has dabbled in account-based Marketing. I think the question now is whether it’s less of a category sell, like convincing someone that they need to be account-based and more on why you should choose DemandBase over competitors. I think those campaigns do really, really well because everybody’s confused. Everybody wants to know “Well, just tell me which one’s better. Just tell me what, like, oh yeah, I’ve had those frustrations with your competitor.” I’m so happy that y’all are answering it here. I think it feels more, just more grounded in what they’re really experiencing. So I think those have worked really well. 

Then I’ll say anything thought leader does really well, too, when we talk about things like that, are challenging for sales and marketing leaders, whether it’s alignment, whether it’s growth, whether it’s building a strategy, whether it’s anything around the future of ABM or how is AI going to affect my job or anything that’s kind of big themes like that. I think they really gravitate toward us because I think people are looking to learn. I think a lot of marketers are learners. And two, they’re looking for a partner who’s who’s thinking ahead and is going to be relevant in 5 to 10 years.

 

Who is your ICP at DemandBase?

Our ICP is companies over $100 million in revenue and all the way up, and those who tend to be in certain industries or certain industries speak more ABM than others. Financial services, healthcare, and, certainly, tech is big. Even software insurance is big. Some of these companies have big marketing focus areas where they really want to know who’s on their site, who’s in the market, and what they’re selling. Then I think, those who have a pretty decent investment in the tech stack; so, the ones who are using Salesforce, HubSpot, Workato, or Marketo, or whatever it is, they’re using these big Martech tools. 

Then, from a behaviour perspective, it’s typical customers who have a pretty complex sales cycle. There may be a long sales cycle. They probably have a pretty large average deal size. They have multiple product lines and multiple buying buyers in their profile, meaning their buying group is complex. It’s not just a one-and-done because of the price tag. It tends to be more robust than that. So I think that’s really who our customer is. We want to help those customers with really complex things get to their target customers faster. Because right now, when you have all those complexities, then it’s hard to find the right customer, and you can’t just spray and pray like you’ve done in the past. What we help them do is get to those right customers, the right message at the right time, based on the right intent signals. 

 

Let’s talk a bit about events. In terms of events, what’s the most successful event or engagement piece you’ve hosted, and why?

From a large event like the one that we attended, which was not hosted, we had the most at the Gartner for marketers event this past year. It was massive for us. We’d never done it before. It was a test. But I think in our move-up market to the higher enterprise, they just gravitate towards the Gartner event, and that turned out to be a really, really great investment for us. Forrester is always a big one, as well. So those two trade shows are sort of our big ones in terms of the ones that we’ve hosted. We’ve done a few. We run—I mean, we’ve tried all different sizes. We’re doing a big, and this is sort of like just news for you at the moment, but we’re planning to do a big user conference next year, which we are super excited about but haven’t done in the last couple of years. Instead, we’ve been doing more of these local and regional things. We just did a go-to-market eras tour around the US and had some great engagement on some of those. We’ve done some partner events. We’ve done, you know, we find when it’s targeted and there’s a shared interest, it’s really powerful. We have financial services targeted for us, so we had a really intimate, very fancy, nice dinner in New York recently with a bunch of banks, and we are the big names in the investment banking world. Those are powerful because you develop these relationships, they feel like you understand their market, and they feel heard, and there’s some shared understanding of the people at the table. Anything you can get that is as bespoke, targeted, and custom as possible is really powerful.

 

How do you measure an event’s ROI?

We track marketing contributions. We use a multitouch model on our side across the board. This isn’t just an event, but what we look at is how much the pipeline was influenced by this event. For instance, if someone participates in our event, that obviously gets logged in to demand-based Salesforce and tracked through. Then we can see that it may be one of many touch points, but that event will get some percentage. So, if we close that deal for, say, $300,000 and that event was one of 10 things, it gets the 30,000 credit, or whatever of influence to that. So we run events that way. So we constantly track, and we track, contribution to the pipeline. Contribution to the pipeline, and then also track contribution to close one. That’s how we do. I think any of our events, paid content programs, or anything we do is tied to a multitouch attribution model.

 

What are the most significant challenges you face when hosting events?

Probably just finding the right audience and getting people to come out. I think it’s different now that we’re all remote. Getting people out of their houses at night to go downtown to dinner or to go to a concert, or to leave their desk and go to breakfast for a couple of hours, I think, can be kind of difficult. It’s not about getting people to register. It’s getting people to show up. So, I think most people today would be interested to hear what industry averages are on registration versus show-up rates. I feel like it used to be 75%, but now it’s 50. And so you expect, even with digital things, virtual things, you still get people to sign up to get the content later, but they’re hoping there’s a recording and they get it sent to them, but they have no intention of actually coming to the event and participating—and that’s really, really prevalent. It’s just figuring out how you balance the numbers. As we’re hoping, we had a big event in New York yesterday, and we wanted to have between 150 and 200 people in the room, so we registered 300 with the hope that about 200 would show up. So I think that’s probably the biggest challenge right now—just the planning for show-up rates. 

 

What career advice would you give to anyone starting in the marketing industry? 

That’s a good question. For marketing, I think one is to be eyes wide open. Marketing has both an art and a science to it, and there are different roles that are both, that are one or the other. Some of the roles get both, but there are a lot of roles that are pure art some that are pure science. You’re just recognising that there’s something for sort of everyone in marketing. But I think depending on what you want to ultimately be one day, if your goal is to be a CMO or a senior marketing leader, my advice is to do as many laterals around the various marketing functions before you get to, say, the director level. I think once you get to Director, you sort of get typecast as something if you’ve been like a copywriter and then a content writer and then a content marketer, and now that you’re the director of content, you’re kind of on a content path, whereas you’ve been a content marketer and you ran campaigns, and you did paid media for a while, and you worked on field marketing events. Then, when you come up to the director level, you’re so well-rounded that you have a path all the way to CMO or as high as you want because you’ve touched so many different parts of marketing. So I just encourage. 

I know people want to do this like straight-to-the-top promotion, but I think as much as you can move laterally around and get some diversity of experience, you’ll be such a better leader when you go further in the organisation—and don’t rush that. That’s my other advice. I think when you rush it because you can master hard skills pretty fast in marketing, soft skills can’t be rushed. So take that time while you’re making lateral moves to develop situational awareness, and once you know your leadership profile and figure out who you are, the way you want to run, how you want to behave, and how you operate under stress, and like, get all your leadership stuff worked out during those lateral moves, so that when you come into that role, you’re actually ready, both art and soft skill-wise.

 

What do you believe is the biggest opportunity for CMOs today that might not have been available in the past?

There’s a lot of debate right now about CROs, or whatever this is, chief go-to-market officers—these concepts of marketing and sales sitting together under one roof. I’m not necessarily a believer in that. I’m not opposed to it. I’ve just never really worked in that environment. I’ve always had equal seating at the table with marketing and sales. But it’ll be interesting to see if that becomes a path because I think sales make every marketer better. So if you ever have experience in selling, I think it would be helpful because it could open doors if that’s the way the market moves. But as long as it stays separate, even just understanding what sales are going through is a big thing. I think the other thing we’re trying to talk about as a team right now is how to prioritise innovation because what’s small today, I think, is going to be really big. For instance, everything AI is doing in the marketing world. I think we, by default, go to Gen AI and be “Okay. How can this help me write things faster?” But the reality is that it can learn brand voice and tone. It can learn your messaging, augment your data for your SDRs to reach, automate a lot of your processes, and autodial your phone. There are so many things to think about that. What that allows you, as a CMO, to build an organisation that can focus on innovation and not always automate some of the repeatable things, maybe operating a lot more efficiently.  I’m not talking about cost savings of, like, fewer people because you can replace them with robots. I don’t think that’s the future, but I think the future is that marketers are so bogged down in repeat, repeatable processes that if you could automate those things, you could actually do better creative, better content, better campaigns, more compelling product marketing, more compelling breakthrough thought leadership. So I think that’s really where the future of CMOS can go if we can figure out a way to tap into all that power.

 

What’s a piece of traditional leadership advice that you believe does not apply to modern CMOs?

I have struggled with where to play, especially as a female leader, where I play on the likeable, badass scale. Especially as a female leader sitting at the executive table, you want to be seen as effective, commanding, decisive, all the things that you want, intelligent. As women, maybe men have the same thing, but as women, we also like to be liked in the job, and sometimes there’s some tension there. I don’t know if it’s great advice; I just try to think about things like how to be, how to be tough and commanding and yield all that: women’s power, leadership, and power, and balance it with being really approachable and authentic. And I think that’s a battle these days because the pipeline is under more pressure than ever before, especially in the last two or three years. There’s a lot of pressure from the top because so many companies are struggling to hit their numbers, and so taking that sort of stress and anxiety. Going on at the top and figuring out how to push that urgency down to your team, but still, be a helpful servant leader in the process while driving a sense of urgency. I don’t know exactly what the advice is there, except that that’s where I’m struggling with how to be or not struggling. But that’s one thing that I’m just conscious of. I want to be a leader that they respect and enjoy working with, but I also want to be impactful and hit the numbers and drive deliverables. And it’s a challenge, and I don’t know how to do one, one versus the other, because I think either one of them alone is not sustainable.

 

In your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like? 

I think that the needs are not going to be all that different. You’re still supporting an organisation. You’re still supporting sales. You’re still having a need to kind of make sales love you, which is sort of my general feeling of what marketing should be doing. And that doesn’t mean that I’m giving them just bottom-of-the-funnel leads every time. That means that I’m giving them a brand they’re proud of. I’m giving them messaging that they can repeat, learn, and know. I’m giving them relevant product positioning. I’m giving them events that they’re proud to be at. I’m giving them enough high-quality pipeline that they can hit their targets. I give them simple pricing and packaging that they can use. So all those things, I think, are the same. The difference is that the shift is going to be different. I think content marketing will continue to become a bigger and bigger need. It is a shared service on the brand side, thought leadership side, product side, and demand generation side. And so I think there’s going to be so the organisations may not look that different, then I think more and more SDR teams, or BDR teams, are going to be pulling into marketing to have that end-to-end ownership because more and more CMOs are going to be held to the pipeline, not to leads. Leads are dead now, and so they’re like, “Okay, so I need to hold the pipeline. I need to be responsible for all the people that get to pipe, which is all the SDR teams, which have traditionally sat more in sales.” I think we’ll see more of that so that we get full empowerment all the way through the pipeline. 

Then, like I said, I think content is going to scale up. I think brand, depending on what kind of business you’re in, plays various roles. I think growth is going to be really important. But I think it’s going to be more account-based, more field marketing, more intimate event-driven, less sort of blanket paid media, less like, you know, it’d be a lot of SEO, and of course, to get that kind of traffic, but less of the transactional paid work that we’ve done in the past. So I think it’ll be more video. I think it’ll be more content. I think content is king, and it makes such a difference. I say content not just in the written form but in the video, and it’s post-sales, too. Content becomes so much more important when you sign on a customer. How do we get them on board? How do we get them up to speed? How do we get them to use our product? How do we make them sticky? Because they’re so integrated with the product, and marketing covers all of that.

 

And now, for my last question: how would you describe the role of the CMO in one word, and why?

Alignment. I was in a CMO panel yesterday, or a CXO chit chat, actually, and we were talking about, really, the hardest thing and the main thing that we do is drive alignment. You’re the centrepiece between what products are coming out, what sales are selling, and what the CX team is upgrading or upselling, and you’re the one who’s then making sure that you are prioritising the right products with the right message to the right audience, enabling sales with the right content, building campaigns that grab the right leads and the right pipeline for the sellers to close, and making sure that there’s the right content for your CX team to grow your customers. And so I think all of that, if you do it in a way, is where marketing gets in trouble: when they sort of close the doors of transparency and just start operating in their world. I think people want to know what marketing is working on because they’re supporting so many different teams. So, making sure that that cross-functional alignment is in lockstep is critical. And so I feel like even more so than what beautiful creativity, great words, great campaigns, or anything else is really about. Are we driving the things that matter most to the rest of our company? I think that alignment is really, really critical.