MAIN AREA OF RESPONSIBILITY

The Associate Director, Growth & AI-Enabled Marketing leads Sprout's Marketing Communications organization and is first and foremost accountable for generating qualified inbound demand and improving its conversion into sales opportunities and pipeline.

The role owns the performance of the marketing inbound funnel—from TOFIL to MQL to SQL—and is responsible for identifying and addressing leakage across channels, campaigns, landing pages, forms, content, events, and other conversion points.

This leader directly owns Sprout's paid media strategy and performance, with hands-on oversight of audience targeting, creative, offers, landing pages, conversion, and spend optimization. Paid media is managed toward MQLs, SQLs, pipeline contribution, and acquisition efficiency—not impressions, clicks, or CTR as end outcomes.

The role also leads the transformation of MarCom as part of IMD 2.0, building an AI-enabled marketing operating system that scales paid media, SEO/AEO, content production and distribution, creative production, web optimization, and campaign execution through AI agents, automation, and subscription tools.

The goal is not simply to automate existing work. It is to progressively move MarCom from manual execution toward orchestration, strategy, experimentation, and human judgment, while increasing the volume, speed, and quality of marketing execution.

The role works closely with Product Marketing, LDU, Sales, RevOps, and Customer Success to connect positioning, campaigns, and channels to qualified conversations, pipeline, and revenue.

ESSENTIAL TASKS

• Own Marketing's inbound demand funnel. Own MarCom's contribution from TOFIL → MQL → SQL → Pipeline, with clear targets for volume, quality, conversion, and velocity. Diagnose leakage by channel, campaign, audience, offer, and conversion point, and mobilize the team around the highest-impact opportunities.

• Directly own paid media strategy and performance. Lead strategy, budget allocation, and performance across paid search, paid social, retargeting, and other relevant acquisition channels. Provide hands-on supervision of campaign structure, targeting, keyword strategy, creative, offers, bidding, landing pages, and conversion. Optimize toward MQLs, SQLs, pipeline, and acquisition efficiency, not impressions, reach, clicks, or CTR as end outcomes.

• Lead integrated demand generation. Partner with Product Marketing to translate ICPs, positioning, messaging, product priorities, and GTM strategy into integrated programs across paid media, SEO/AEO, web, content, social, events, and other relevant channels.

• Build MarCom's component of IMD 2.0. Redesign MarCom into an AI-enabled, higher-leverage organization. Identify work across paid media, SEO/AEO, content, social, creative, web, and campaign execution that can be scaled through agents, automation, reusable workflows, and self-service capabilities.

• Scale and democratize execution capabilities. Build systems that scale paid media and SEO/AEO execution, content creation and distribution, creative asset production, web/landing-page production, and reporting/insight generation so sophisticated execution is not concentrated in individual specialists.

• Own the MarCom technology and agent stack. Own the architecture, integration, adoption, governance, and continuous improvement of MarCom's AI agents, automation workflows, and subscription marketing technologies. Determine what should be handled by agents, SaaS tools, workflow automation, or human expertise and judgment.

• Measure technology by business impact. Ensure tools and agents improve speed, scale, quality, conversion, or cost efficiency—not simply technology usage. Establish standards for agent quality, governance, adoption, and performance.

• Evolve team roles from execution to orchestration. Redesign work so AI increasingly handles repetitive production, research, analysis, adaptation, and execution while team members move toward orchestration, strategy, experimentation, and decision-making.

• Build a culture of experimentation and optimization. Establish an always-on experimentation system across paid media, landing pages, website journeys, SEO/AEO, offers, content, and campaign distribution. Use VWO, channel data, CRM funnel data, and AI-assisted analysis to identify opportunities, formulate hypotheses, run experiments, and scale what works.

• Partner closely with LDU and Sales. Understand why leads do or do not progress and use those learnings to improve targeting, messaging, offers, lead capture, and conversion. Align on lead management, scoring, routing, follow-up, and funnel performance.

• Own performance management and investment decisions. Manage the MarCom budget and continually reallocate resources toward channels, audiences, programs, and technologies producing the strongest qualified-demand and pipeline outcomes.

• Establish a rigorous performance rhythm. Ensure the organization can consistently answer: Where is demand coming from? Where are we losing it? What is converting? What is not? Why? What should we stop, fix, test, or scale next? Report insights and recommended actions to the CMO and Executive Leadership.

• Lead and develop the MarCom organization. Lead, coach, and develop Demand Generation, SEO/AEO, Web, Content, Social, Creative, and Events capabilities. Build a culture of commercial accountability, experimentation, AI fluency, collaboration, and continuous learning.

• Hold functions accountable for commercial contribution. Evaluate teams not only on activity and output, but also on contribution to qualified demand, conversion, pipeline, execution quality, and organizational leverage.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 8–12+ years in B2B growth, demand generation, performance marketing, or integrated marketing, preferably in SaaS or technology, with at least 4–5 years leading multidisciplinary marketing teams.

• Strong, hands-on command of paid search and paid social, able to challenge agencies and specialists on targeting, campaign architecture, creative, landing pages, spend, and optimization.

• Deep understanding of TOFIL/inbound → MQL → SQL → pipeline economics, conversion, funnel velocity, and acquisition efficiency.

• Strong working knowledge of CRO, landing-page optimization, experimentation, and marketing analytics.

• Experience managing SEO/search, content, web, social, and/or events as components of an integrated demand system.

• Demonstrated ability to use AI agents, automation, and modern marketing technology to materially scale execution, rather than simply using generative AI.

• Ability to architect and manage a marketing technology + agent stack and make sound build/buy/automate decisions.

• Strong commercial judgment and ability to translate marketing performance into investment decisions and executive recommendations.

• Proven people leader capable of developing specialists into AI-enabled, commercially accountable marketers.