To Invest or Not to Invest: Headcount

Jul 22, 2025

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This episode features an interview with Kevin Cochrane, an experienced CMO who is currently CMO at Vultr, a company on a mission to make high-performance cloud computing easy to use, affordable, and locally accessible.

Kevin dives into the art of being discoverable, the monetary value of brand equity and the importance of using all data available to build a real model of your marketing efforts. He also discusses headcount, and how he is thinking about investing in it.

Key Takeaways:

Avoid focusing too much on tactics to get customer attention, like tweaking the subject line or the format of the email. Focus on the art of being discoverable, on making it easy for customers to find and fall in love with you.
Don’t be simplistic about data analysis. Simple metrics can you lead you astray, you need to leverage all the data available to you to build a holistic model.
Brand equity directly impacts the value of a business, take a company like Nvidia or Apple. Marketers who investing in their brand well, will see the productivity of their demand gen dollars skyrocket.

Quote:

“ I would not invest heavily in headcount. I have seen too many marketing organizations rapidly scale headcount. And you can have a company that's 200 million in revenue and there'll be 80 people in marketing, right? You can have an organization that's 50 million in revenue and they'll have 40 people in marketing and they'll hire field marketers in this region and that region. They'll build out their whole PR team. They'll build the whole AR team. We operate super, super lean here at Vultr. Number one is we empower everyone with a lot of, you know, AI tools and a lot of ability to make decisions, and they all have access to a massive treasure trove of data in our data warehouse, right? We just drive employee productivity as much as possible. Secondly, we leverage as much as possible external third parties that have specific expertise.”

Episode Timestamps:

*(06:59) The Trust Tree: Fostering an open ecosystem, the antithesis to a walled garden

*(25:22) The Playbook: Brand experience drives demand gen productivity

*(43:42) The Dust Up: Tension over events

*(46:05) Quick Hits: Kevin’s quick hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

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