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.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Vultr
• Learn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Rebecca Stone, SVP of Revenue Marketing at Cisco, the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era.

Rebecca shares how she stays agile inside a Fortune 500 giant and why she approaches AI with thoughtful skepticism. She also reveals her evolving take on content strategy – arguing that soon how you present your content could matter more than the content itself.

Key Takeaways:

• You can prioritize agility to drastically reduce time to market, even at a large Fortune 500.
• Always think critically about answers from AI, and ask the models where they pulled their data from. Otherwise, risk sharing misinformation.
• The way your content is distributed and presented is just as important as the content itself.

Quote:

•  I think it's a matter of meeting the market and meeting the moment, as well as just the sheer breadth of things that we have to do from an internal perspective. As with most organizations, there's not an unlimited amount of headcount and budget to go around. And so when you start to think about how do I approach things in a way that allows us to make progress. In a way that we were super slow, to your point, historically, that agile methodology is really helping us. And I think as an example of that, if you look over the course of the last six months, as we've moved more and more into the team operating fully agilely, we've cut down time to market for some of our most successful tactics from months, even potentially a quarter or more, to weeks.

Episode Timestamps:

*(03:42) The Trust Tree: Serving mom-and-pops up to the world’s largest governments

*(10:22) The Playbook: Agile operations in very large marketing team

*(37:50) The Dust Up: Marketing and sales, and marketing and product

*(40:27) Quick Hits: Rebecca’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.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Rebecca on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Cisco
• Learn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Suzanne Behrens, CMO at Granicus, a software company that helps better engage governments and the people they serve.

Suzanne discusses how Granicus is transforming engagement through AI-driven marketing, investing in digital channels over booths, and ensuring tight sales alignment.

Key Takeaways:

• While procurement processes differ, public sector buyers still seek personalized, digital-first experiences. Meeting them with the right message at the right time is just as critical as in traditional B2B marketing.
• New tools allow a new level of precision, and marketers needs to stop with mass marketing effort and focus on higher prospects.
• While events are crucial for many CMOs we speak to, they can also be high cost and it may make more sense to overinvest in digital channels to meet customers where they are.

Quote:

• “  We've got a tech stack with some tools that are AI-enabled, that we've adopted and hosted, that have really helped us more effectively understand buyer's behavior and intent to help us target opportunities more effectively, versus in the past, it used to be mass marketing. You'd sort of throw it out there and hope someone will, you know, call you. It's really now about looking at their behavior and intent to help us target more effectively and personalize the experience and customize from a super ABM perspective of reaching prospects and customers. So, leveraging different tools to help us do that. We're reaching them when they're ready. They're much higher prospect than just sort of casting a wide net.”

Episode Timestamps:

*(02:36) The Trust Tree: Selling globally to many personas

*(05:04) The Playbook: Overinvesting in digital and web

*(21:37) The Dust Up: Meeting in the middle

*(22:47) Quick Hits: Suzanne’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.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Granicus
• Learn more about Caspian Studios