VP, Marketing Strategy & Operational Excellence

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: Par