Kelly Hopping is currently the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for Demandbase where she is responsible for differentiating the go to market platform, increasing brand presence, and accelerating acquisition and conversion of potential customers.
Prior to joining Demandbase, Kelly honed her start-up skills as the first CMO at HYCU, a series B, venture capital-backed data protection SaaS company. She now continues at HYCU as an Advisor. Before HYCU, Kelly served as the Chief Marketing Officer for the Digital Markets division of Gartner where she managed a portfolio of brands – Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice – to grow awareness and demand in the market. In this role, Kelly and her marketing team drove 100% of the revenue acquisition for the $300M+ organization. Prior to Gartner, Kelly led at Rackspace and AMD.
She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University. Kelly serves on the board of Empowering Women as Leaders Austin, and she has spoken at various leadership conferences. She is the author of the book Rising: How to Thrive as a Corporate Executive while Staying True to Yourself, which launched in 2023. Kelly resides in Austin, Texas, with her husband and three children.
Discussed in this Episode:
- The three pillars of a modern go-to-market strategy that every revenue leader should know.
- How to create alignment and shared metrics between sales and marketing teams.
- Establishing a cohesive customer journey from initial interest to closed-won and beyond.
- Lessons learned from driving 100% of revenue acquisition at a $300M Gartner division.
- Insights on brand building, customer-centric marketing, and the power of organic search.
Highlights:
03:50 – How Kelly’s marketing team drove 100% of revenue at a $300M Gartner division.
13:20 – The three pillars of a modern go-to-market strategy.
18:41 – Pillar 1: How to make sales love you as a marketer.
30:15 – Pillar 2: Creating shared metrics for sales and marketing alignment.
40:30 – Pillar 3: Establishing one cohesive customer journey.
45:13 – Differences and similarities between B2C and B2B marketing.
50:46 – One thing revenue leaders believe to be true that Kelly thinks is bull$***.
54:32 – One thing that is working for Kelly in go-to-market right now.
Guest Speaker Links (Kelly Hopping):
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellyhopping/
Host Speaker Links (Scott Barker):
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/
Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.sub
The GTM Podcast
Features conversations with well-known tech executive, VC, and founders – the expert operators in the trenches who have ‘been there, done that’ to build some of the fastest-growing software companies. Every week, a guest joins Scott Barker to dissect their stories, revealing expert insights around what worked, what didn’t, and how things actually went down.
This podcast is produced by GTMnow, the media brand of GTMfund – sharing insight on go-to-market from working with hundreds of portfolio companies backed by over 350 of the best go-to-market executives. GTMfund is an early-stage VC fund focused on investing in the most exciting, up-and-coming B2B SaaS companies across the world. The LP network consists of VP and C-level Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success leaders from companies like DocuSign, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Snowflake, Okta, Zoom, and many more.
