VP, Marketing Strategy & Operational Excellence

Role Overview

Smartly is seeking a visionary and execution-focused Vice President (VP) of Marketing Strategy & Operational Excellence. This represents a newly revamped leadership role replacing our former "VP of Growth." At Smartly, we believe growth is a shared responsibility across the entire marketing department. Therefore, this role shifts the focus from siloed lead-generation execution connecting company strategy to marketing strategy and building the underlying systems, cross-functional operating models, data-driven capabilities, and automation frameworks required to scale our entire global marketing organization. 

Reporting directly to the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), the VP of Marketing Strategy & Operational Excellence will run the "machinery" of the department. This leader will be tasked with transforming Smartly’s marketing into a highly automated, data-literate, and operationally rigorous unit capable of delivering on ambitious commercial objectives while building a healthy, sustainable, and high-performing team. This leader doesn’t just make marketing run better… They help determine what marketing should prioritize, why, and how the pieces fit together. Then build the operating rigor to execute it. /// ALT: This leader must be equally comfortable answering the question “what should marketing do and why” as “how do we execute it better?”

18-Month Strategic Mandate

This leader will own the operational strategy, planning process, and enablement pipelines to achieve the following departmental objectives:

• Pipeline Scaling: Enable the team to scale from the current 430–440 Sales Accepted Leads (SALs) to 600 weighted SALs within 18 months.
• Budget Optimization: Drive a 5% optimization in SAL acquisition costs.
• Commercial Event Impact: Standardize execution and pipeline analytics to grow event-influenced pipeline from $10M to 12M–13M, ensuring a 98%+ customer retention rate for event and certificate participants.
• Marketing Conversion: Drive a 10% year-on-year increase in the conversion of accepted leads to qualified leads.
• Brand Health & Validation: Increase annual third-party validations (reviews, analyst mentions, G2) from 15 to 20.
• Internal Alignment: Enhance employee brand advocacy and elevate internal understanding of company mission/vision to an 8+ out of 10 score.

Key Responsibilities

   Marketing Strategy & Integrated Planning 

• Establish a disciplined process for translating company strategy into marketing strategy. Partner with the CMO and marketing leadership team to translate Smartly’s company goals, growth priorities and market opportunities into marketing objectives and OKRs. 
• Drive integrated marketing planning. Lead annual and quarterly marketing planning across functions, turning priorities into an integrated roadmap with clear priorities and lead upstream marketing briefing process for global and tentpole marketing initiatives.

   Cross-Functional Governance & the "Three-Legged Stool" Model

• Rebuild Cross-Functional Handoffs: Standardize and enforce the operating model between Product/Product Marketing, Partnerships, and Brand Marketing. Solve the current "reactive" work cycle by acting as the ultimate gatekeeper for resource planning.
• Establish SLA Governance: Author and enforce strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Implement a zero-tolerance policy for partner marketing requests arriving without a fully documented brief and a mandatory 12-week lead time (such as joint campaigns with key platforms like Meta, Roku, Google, and LinkedIn).
• Lead Strategic Agency Partnerships: Lead the operational and budgetary governance of external creative and execution agencies. Direct the strategy to shift creative ideation for events to external partners, allowing the internal team to focus on budget management and commercial execution.

   Systems Integration, Data Operations & Enablement

• Unify Marketing & Sales Funnels: Partner closely with the Revenue Operations (RevOps) team—specifically collaborating with our newly transitioned Revenue Operations Lead—to bridge marketing and sales funnels and ensure single-source-of-truth reporting.
• Champion Data Literacy: Turn the department's data literacy from a baseline score of 2/10 for data-pulling into a model of self-service. Design and implement mandatory data onboarding, continuous training, and self-service protocols.
• De-silo Systems & Hygiene: Drive data sanitization across Salesforce, Marketo, Greenhouse, and other marketing systems to align algorithms, ensure data hygiene, and restore absolute executive confidence in reporting.

   AI Automation & Workflow Orchestration

• Own the Marketing Tech Stack: Transition the department from manual, repetitive execution (e.g., chasing case studies, manual reporting, and repetitive copywriting) to high-efficiency automated workflows.
• Lead AI Agent Deployment: Direct the roadmap to build and deploy custom AI agents, establishing a centralized Campaign Performance Knowledge Hub to synthesize historical creatives, benchmarks, and campaign strategies in minutes.
• Manage Automation Headcount: Supervise and guide technical resources, including the newly created AI Integration Specialist role, to build robust, automated API pipelines and always-on metrics dashboards.

   Commercial Event Refocusing & Operational Efficiency

• Refocus Headcount on Revenue: Partner with the CMO to transform the Global Events, Comms &Design teams from an internal administrative coordinator into a commercial powerhouse. Own the operational strategy to transfer all non-marketing administrative tasks (such as board meetings, executive off-sites, and company All-Hands) to Workplace and Executive Assistant teams.
• Streamline Post-Event Analytics: Replace the current, labor-intensive post-event reporting pipeline (currently requiring six cross-functional representatives) with automated Salesforce dashboards that track daily registrations, real-time budgets, and post-event pipeline performance.

   Workload Management & Employee Retention Strategy

• Mitigate Burnout: Actively manage and rebalance team capacity. Convert Workday Peakon Employee Engagement data (specifically addressing our current baseline scores of 4.7/10 in Workload Manageability and 6.2/10 in Mental Wellbeing) into active, operational retention strategies.
• Lead Distraction Audits: Conduct recurring "operational distraction audits" to log and eliminate low-value tasks, unnecessary meeting overhead, and administrative bottlenecks.
• Model Behavioral Standards: Establish concrete behavioral expectations for managers to address and eliminate "blame culture," ensuring overloaded staff are supported rather than penalized during high-stakes campaigns.

Core Competencies & Skills

• Operational Governance: Exceptional capability in process design, structured operating models, and change management. High discipline in enforcing project timelines, SLAs, and briefs.
• Data & Technical Literacy: High competency in marketing technology architecture (Salesforce, Marketo, DemandBase, RevOps systems). Strong ability to build, analyze, and interpret multi-touch attribution reports and unified dashboards.
• AI & Automation Fluency: Strong understanding of how to leverage API integrations, custom LLM agents, and automated design-repurposing tools (e.g., Smartly platform capabilities) to scale content creation.
• Empathy-Led People Leadership: A proven ability to lead through times of high-growth change with an employee-first mindset. Mastery of workload balancing, capacity planning, and psychological safety standards.
• Financial & Agency Management: Strong budget management and negotiation skills. Extensive experience managing large agency retainers, contract execution, and outsourced creative operations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience: 10+ years of progressive leadership experience in Marketing Operations, Revenue Operations, GTM Strategy, or Business Transformation.
• Scale: Proven track record of scaling marketing departments in mid-sized B2B SaaS or digital media organizations (500–2,000 employees).
• Transformation Track Record: Demonstrated success in dismantling manual operational workflows, in-housing or out-housing agency retainers, and driving department-wide tech stack transformations (Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot).
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Business, Marketing, Engineering, or a highly analytical field. MBA or advanced certifications in Agile/Six Sigma are a strong plus.

What We Offer You...

• Five weeks paid time off (PTO), 11 company paid holidays, unlimited sick days
• Generous healthcare packages & mental health benefits
• 401K plus matching & equity grants for all new Smartlies
• Wellness benefit & learning reimbursement opportunities
• Volunteer time off days & company donation matching opportunities
• And so much more…