Associate Director, Growth & AI Enabled Marketing

About the company

_This isn't a traditional MarCom leadership role._ B2B marketing is changing. Search and discovery are being reshaped by AI. Paid media has to prove more than impressions, clicks, and CTR. Content and creative production are becoming increasingly agentic. And marketing teams need to move from manual execution toward orchestration, experimentation, strategy, and judgment.

At Sprout, we're rebuilding our marketing operating model around that reality.

Your tasks

We're looking for an Associate Director, Growth & AI-Enabled Marketing to lead our Marketing Communications organization—and own the business outcome that matters most: turning inbound demand into qualified opportunities and pipeline.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN The inbound growth engine.

You'll be accountable for how marketing-generated demand progresses from inbound lead → MQL → SQL → pipeline. That means understanding where demand comes from, where we're losing it, what converts, what doesn't, and what we should stop, fix, test, or scale next.

You'll directly own paid media strategy and performance across paid search, paid social, retargeting, and other relevant acquisition channels. This is a hands-on leadership role: you'll be expected to understand and challenge campaign structure, audiences, keywords, creative, offers, bidding, landing pages, conversion, and spend allocation.

We will still care about impressions, clicks, CTR, and CPC—but as diagnostic metrics, not the finish line. Success is ultimately measured through qualified demand, MQLs, SQLs, pipeline contribution, conversion, and acquisition efficiency.

You'll also lead integrated demand generation across paid media, SEO/AEO, web, content, social, events, and other relevant channels, working closely with Product Marketing to turn ICPs, positioning, messaging, product priorities, and GTM strategy into programs that create qualified demand. WHAT YOU'LL BUILD A more AI-enabled marketing organization.

You'll lead MarCom's part of Sprout's next marketing operating model—using AI agents, automation, reusable workflows, and modern marketing technology to scale:

• Paid media execution and optimization
• SEO/AEO and search execution
• Content creation, repurposing, and distribution
• Creative asset production
• Web and landing-page production and optimization
• Reporting, analysis, and insight generation

You'll own and continuously improve MarCom's combination of AI agents, automation workflows, and subscription tools. You'll help decide what should be handled by an agent, what needs specialized SaaS, what should be automated, and where human expertise and judgment matter most.

The goal isn't automation for automation's sake. It's greater speed, scale, quality, experimentation, and commercial impact.

And as execution becomes increasingly agentic, you'll help evolve the team's roles—from people primarily doing the work manually to marketers who can orchestrate systems, formulate strategy, run experiments, make decisions, and apply judgment.

HOW YOU'LL OPERATE You'll build a culture of continuous experimentation across paid media, landing pages, website journeys, SEO/AEO, offers, content, and campaign distribution.

You'll work closely with LDU (our Lead Development Unit) and Sales to understand why leads progress—or don't—and use those insights to improve targeting, messaging, offers, lead capture, routing, follow-up, and conversion.

You'll manage the MarCom budget and continuously reallocate investment toward the channels, audiences, programs, and technologies producing the strongest qualified-demand and pipeline outcomes.

And you'll lead and develop a multidisciplinary team spanning Demand Generation, SEO/AEO, Web, Content, Social, Creative, and Events—building a culture of commercial accountability, AI fluency, experimentation, collaboration, and continuous learning.

Requirements

We're not looking for someone who has simply used generative AI to write copy or speed up individual tasks. We want someone excited about redesigning how marketing gets done because AI now exists.

We're looking for a B2B marketing leader who is commercially minded, analytically strong, comfortable getting close to the work, and genuinely fluent in how AI is changing marketing execution.

You should bring

• 8–12+ years in B2B growth, demand generation, performance marketing, or integrated marketing, preferably in SaaS or technology, including 4–5+ years leading multidisciplinary marketing teams
• Strong, hands-on command of paid search and paid social, with the ability to challenge agencies and specialists on targeting, campaign architecture, creative, landing pages, spend, and optimization
• A deep understanding of inbound lead → 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—not simply use generative AI
• The ability to think architecturally about a marketing technology + agent stack and make sound build, buy, and automate decisions
• Strong commercial judgment and the ability to translate marketing performance into investment decisions and executive recommendations
• A track record of developing people and helping specialists become more strategic, commercially accountable, and AI-enabled

If you've built demand engines, understand the economics behind paid acquisition and conversion, and want to help redesign how a B2B marketing organization works in the AI era, we'd like to meet you.

Other

WHY THIS ROLE IS DIFFERENT This role sits at the intersection of two challenges.

First, build a stronger inbound growth engine now—one that converts more of the demand we create into qualified conversations, pipeline, and revenue.

Second, help build the marketing organization we'll need next—one where AI dramatically expands execution capacity and people increasingly focus on the work humans are best positioned to do: strategy, orchestration, experimentation, creativity, relationships, and judgment.