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Salary: USD 195,000 - 275,000 / annual
Smartly.io, an AI-powered advertising technology platform, is seeking a VP of Marketing Strategy & Operational Excellence to report directly to the Chief Marketing Officer. This newly revamped leadership role replaces the former VP of Growth and represents a strategic shift from siloed lead-generation execution to integrated marketing strategy, systems, and operational excellence.
The VP will own the "machinery" of the marketing department, transforming it into a highly automated, data-literate, and operationally rigorous unit. This leader must be equally comfortable answering "what should marketing do and why" as "how do we execute it better."
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:
Marketing Strategy & Integrated Planning: Translate company strategy into marketing strategy by partnering with the CMO and leadership team. Drive annual and quarterly marketing planning across functions, turning priorities into integrated roadmaps with clear priorities.
Cross-Functional Governance: Standardize and enforce operating models between Product/Product Marketing, Partnerships, and Brand Marketing. Establish strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with a zero-tolerance policy for partner marketing requests without fully documented briefs and 12-week lead time. Lead operational and budgetary governance of external creative and execution agencies.
Systems Integration & Data Operations: Partner with Revenue Operations to bridge marketing and sales funnels and ensure single-source-of-truth reporting. Champion data literacy by transforming the department from a baseline 2/10 data-pulling capability to self-service. Drive data sanitization across Salesforce, Marketo, Greenhouse, and other systems.
AI Automation & Workflow Orchestration: Transition the department from manual execution to high-efficiency automated workflows. Direct the roadmap to build and deploy custom AI agents and establish a centralized Campaign Performance Knowledge Hub. Supervise technical resources, including an AI Integration Specialist role, to build robust API pipelines and always-on metrics dashboards.
Commercial Event Refocusing: Transform Global Events, Comms & Design teams into a commercial powerhouse. Transfer non-marketing administrative tasks to Workplace and Executive Assistant teams. Replace labor-intensive post-event reporting with automated Salesforce dashboards.
Workload Management & Employee Retention: Actively manage team capacity and convert employee engagement data into operational retention strategies. Conduct recurring "operational distraction audits" to eliminate low-value tasks. Establish behavioral expectations for managers to address blame culture and support overloaded staff.
18-MONTH STRATEGIC MANDATE:
- Scale Sales Accepted Leads (SALs) from 430–440 to 600 weighted SALs
- Drive 5% optimization in SAL acquisition costs
- Grow event-influenced pipeline from $10M to $12M–$13M with 98%+ customer retention
- Drive 10% year-on-year increase in accepted-to-qualified lead conversion
- Increase annual third-party validations from 15 to 20
- Elevate internal employee brand advocacy and mission/vision understanding to 8+/10
CORE COMPETENCIES:
- Operational Governance: Process design, structured operating models, change management, and strict enforcement of timelines and SLAs
- Data & Technical Literacy: Marketing technology architecture (Salesforce, Marketo, DemandBase, RevOps), multi-touch attribution, and unified dashboards
- AI & Automation Fluency: API integrations, custom LLM agents, and automated design-repurposing tools
- Empathy-Led People Leadership: Employee-first mindset, workload balancing, capacity planning, and psychological safety
- Financial & Agency Management: Budget management, agency negotiations, and outsourced creative operations
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years of progressive leadership experience in Marketing Operations, Revenue Operations, GTM Strategy, or Business Transformation
- Proven track record of scaling marketing departments in mid-sized B2B SaaS or digital media organizations (500–2,000 employees)
- Demonstrated success dismantling manual workflows, in-housing or out-housing agency retainers, and driving tech stack transformations (Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot)
- Bachelor's degree in Business, Marketing, Engineering, or highly analytical field
- MBA or advanced certifications in Agile/Six Sigma are a strong plus
