The podcast begins with host Arun Gopal Swami welcoming guest Priyanka Das Gupta, a Senior Field Marketing Manager at Kindle, a spin-off from IBM. Priyanka’s background includes over six years at IBM, focusing on the automotive vertical, and now at Kindle, she shares insights on her marketing approach and industry experience.

Priyanka discusses her career transition from a software engineer with a computer science degree to marketing. After working in software engineering and process support for banking customers, she pursued an MBA and moved into IBM’s leadership development program. She gained experience in various roles before shifting focus to marketing, managing product solutions and campaigns.

She explains how she transitioned into marketing and product management roles, supporting HR and talent solutions. Recognizing her knowledge as a consumer of the products, she stepped into marketing roles that aligned with her technical background, working on campaigns primarily in energy and utility sectors.

Priyanka elaborates on the spin-off from IBM to Kindle and how the new company took a fresh approach. The spin-off inherited several large accounts from IBM but aimed to grow by working with multiple hyperscalers beyond IBM’s ecosystem. Kindle’s marketing strategy focuses on surrounding customer accounts with strong partnerships and positioning.

The conversation shifts to marketing challenges and the skills needed. Priyanka highlights the importance of marketers understanding the product and solutions deeply, especially in service-based businesses like Kindle, where there are no physical products but service offerings. Her engineering background gave her an edge in grasping technical details and customer challenges.

Priyanka discusses the automotive industry’s transformation, including the impacts of mergers, acquisitions, and spin-offs. She reflects on the post-COVID pressures such as chip shortages and the shift toward electric vehicles. The industry is moving from traditional manufacturing to mobility solutions, requiring marketers to adapt their messaging accordingly.

This section covers the detailed structure of account-based marketing (ABM) at Kindle. Priyanka explains a matrixed, multi-geography, and multi-vertical marketing organization aligned closely with sales. The ABM Center of Excellence (COE) supports field marketers, helping scale campaigns, personalize outreach, and measure success. The COE operates globally but ensures localized, account-specific engagement.

Priyanka describes how technology and AI, including generative AI and tools like Microsoft Copilot, are being integrated into marketing workflows. AI helps with content creation, account planning, and customer engagement by pulling data and providing insights quickly. The company experiments with AI to enhance efficiency and scalability in campaigns.

The focus shifts to sustainability initiatives and how marketing targets roles like Chief Sustainability Officers with tailored messaging. Campaigns emphasize sustainable solutions, aligning with customer priorities. Marketing’s role is to build relationships and credibility by delivering relevant, personalized content that resonates with customers’ sustainability goals.

Priyanka shares specific AI use cases, such as embedding car manuals into conversational AI assistants for better customer service in automotive. On the enterprise side, AI supports infrastructure management, clean data implementation, and employee-level applications like Copilot. Adoption is expected to accelerate, and demonstrating AI’s potential through pilot projects is key.

The podcast concludes with Arun thanking Priyanka for sharing her extensive experience. Priyanka reflects on the exciting journey of transitioning to a new company, embracing new technologies, and driving customer-centric marketing. She emphasizes continuous learning and innovation as vital for future success in the evolving marketing and automotive landscape.

The host Arun Gopal Swami welcomes Jolie Shapiro, a growth marketing leader at Caspian Studios, to the ABM Voice podcast. Jolie shares her diverse career journey spanning nearly a decade, starting as a songwriter at age 11, transitioning through music industry roles at Warner and EMI, and eventually moving into content strategy and marketing. She describes her evolution into demand generation marketing within B2B SaaS companies, highlighting her experience with viral influencer campaigns and extensive certifications in digital marketing. Currently, Jolie is deeply involved in growth marketing for Caspian Studios, which provides B2B podcasting services for major tech clients like IBM and Dell.

Jolie reflects on her writing process, contrasting songwriting’s emotional creativity with the logical and customer-focused approach required for ad copywriting. She discusses the impact of AI tools like ChatGPT, acknowledging how these tools can aid but sometimes stifle creativity. Her foundation in writing lends itself well to content marketing and demand generation efforts.

Jolie traces the evolution of demand generation from early SEO, blogging, and social media tactics to more nuanced approaches today. She critiques past “batch and blast” methods and emphasizes the shift to persona-based targeting, particularly in ABM (Account-Based Marketing). Jolie introduces the concept of demand creation, which focuses on engaging the 95% of prospects not actively in market by building brand awareness through channels like podcasting, webinars, newsletters, and dark social communities.

The discussion clarifies the distinction between demand generation (focused on generating MQLs and capturing intent) and demand creation (focused on brand awareness and engaging prospects early). Jolie explains how Caspian Studios uses demand creation through personalized podcasting and content to nurture leads over time. She shares examples of how their newsletter and co-marketing webinars serve as nurturing tools without overt sales pitches.

Jolie explains how Caspian integrates ABM with demand creation by inviting targeted personas to participate in branded podcasts, resulting in high engagement and conversion rates (10-20%). She also discusses nurturing tactics such as personalized gifts, CEO social media engagement, newsletters, webinars, and retargeting ads with customer testimonials. These channels collectively feed the pipeline and help move prospects down the funnel.

The conversation covers how inbound leads are qualified based on ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), categorized by account size (gold, silver, bronze), and then handed off to sales through sequences. Jolie stresses the importance of building marketing infrastructure (like Salesforce) to track engagement and optimize conversions. She highlights that sales involvement usually begins after marketing qualification and sequences are executed.

Jolie discusses the complexities of measuring multi-channel marketing efforts and how her dashboards track revenue, deal velocity, engagement, and campaign influence. She shares her balanced perspective on ABM technology—advocating a mix of scrappy manual tactics and automation tools. She praises platforms like 6sense for providing sales alerts to pinpoint when prospects are ready to buy and mentions plans to adopt Bombora for outbound ABM content targeting.

Toward the end, Jolie shares her thoughts on future trends for demand marketing, emphasizing inspiration from B2C strategies like Netflix’s predictive profiling and Amazon’s recommendation engines. She hopes B2B marketing will adopt similar AI-driven personalized content delivery and contextual website experiences, improving buyer journeys with smarter content recommendations based on past engagement. The host thanks Jolie for her insights and the rich tactical discussion. Jolie expresses appreciation for the opportunity and encourages marketers to experiment with new channels and personalized engagement strategies in the coming year.