VP, Strategic Communications & Commercial Marketing

VP, Strategic Communications & Commercial Marketing

Role Overview

Smartly is seeking a highly strategic, commercially-driven Vice President (VP) of Strategic Communications & Commercial Marketing who combines deep communications expertise with commercial acumen and operational rigor. This revamped leadership role directly replaces our former "VP of Global Communications and Programs". At Smartly, we believe that brand messaging, public relations, and corporate events must not operate in isolation—they must serve as a high-performance, measurable commercial engine.

Reporting directly to the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), this VP will lead our global communications, brand PR, analyst relations, corporate events and customer and field marketing teams. This leader will transition the department from traditional "vanity-focused" communications into a modern, Comms Ops and Center of Excellence (CoE) model. At Smartly, communications is both a reputation and growth lever. This leader will connect brand narrative, earned media, industry & customer influence, and events to deliver on the company's GTM priorities. Just as important, this role will modernize how the function operates. By leveraging automated content pipelines, strict process governance, and deep revenue-funnel integration, this executive will scale Smartly's global brand presence while directly driving pipeline and supporting go-to-market execution.

18-Month Strategic Mandate

This leader will own the communication strategy, brand narrative, and event operations to achieve the following departmental objectives:

Commercial Event Impact: Reorient the events team to scale event-influenced pipeline from the current $10M baseline to 12M–13M, while achieving a 98%+ customer retention rate for event and certificate program participants.

Strategic Industry Validation: Build a proactive earned media, thought leadership, and executive visibility strategy that positions Smartly and its leaders at the center of the industry conversations shaping advertising, AI, creative, and intelligence to accelerate brand validation by increasing annual third-party milestones (top-tier business publications, analyst Wave commentary, G2 reviews) from 10 to 15 quarterly validations.

Pipeline Scaling: Support the broader marketing organization in scaling from 430–440 Sales Accepted Leads (SALs) to 600 weighted SALs within 18 months, while optimizing SAL acquisition costs by 5%.

Funnel Conversion: Drive a 10% year-on-year increase in the conversion of sales accepted leads (SALs) to sales qualified leads (SQLs), sharing this muscle closely with the sales enablement and commercial teams.

Brand Framework & Internal Alignment: Drive an 8+ point score in our internal understanding of Smartly's company mission, vision, and revamped brand principles.

Brand Advocacy & Awareness: Propel overall global brand awareness and familiarity by 5%, while establishing structured employee advocacy programs to scale our social presence.

Customer & Partner Academy: Collaboratively launch and scale our customer/agency partner academy—a shared OKR with Ed's client enablement and agency teams.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Communications, PR & Executive Visibility

Global Communications Strategy: Own and execute Smartly’s global corporate and brand communications strategy across earned media, executive communications, thought leadership, analyst engagement, awards & industry influence.

Speaking & Thought Leadership: Build and manage a strategic speaking program for Smartly executives, identifying and securing high-value opportunities across major industry events, conferences, podcasts, and other programs. Prepare executives for those moments through speechwriting, briefing materials, message development, rehearsal and media/speaker preparation.

Narrative Development: Maintain a clear, differentiated corporate narrative and messaging architecture that connects Smartly’s company strategy, product innovation, customer impact and market POV across PR, events, executive communications & GTM programs.

Reoriented Event Operations & Administrative Offloading

Revenue-Driven Event Strategy: Reorient the Global Events team (led by Stephanie Karlas) from administrative logistics coordinators into commercial powerhouses. Align event goals around clean real-time registration data, strict daily budget tracking, and immediate post-event sales follow-up.

Administrative Offloading: Ruthlessly protect the capacity of the event planning team. Transition all internal, non-marketing administrative event coordination (including Board of Directors meetings, executive dinners, internal SLT off-sites, and company All-Hands) completely out of the marketing department to Executive Assistants (REAs) and Workplace Experience teams.

Creative Outsourcing: Implement a "buy over build" creative strategy for special events. Outsource event creative ideation and experience design to specialized external agencies, freeing internal events headcount to focus solely on operations, budget execution, and pipeline generation.

Comms Ops, AI-Augmented Workflows & Agency In-Housing

Establish a Comms Ops Hub: Introduce a specialized "Comms Ops" capability to run the underlying technology, automation engines, and predictive analytics that power communications.

AI-Augmented Content Pipelines: Work alongside the creative and copy teams to build AI-augmented content workflows. Automate repetitive asset repurposing, multi-market translations, and variation generation—aiming to reduce manual content-updating burdens by 50% to 75% while maintaining strict human-in-the-loop oversight to protect brand integrity.

Optimize PR Retainer Spend: Actively in-house routine PR execution—such as media list building, first-draft pitches, and coverage clip tracking—using advanced AI tools. Reduce external PR agency retainer spend by 20% to 35%, reserving agency budget strictly for high-tier media pitching and crisis counsel.

Case Study Automation & Customer Advocacy

End the "Chasing" Model: Overhaul the customer advocacy and case study lifecycle. Replace the highly manual, slow process of chasing Customer Success (CS) and clients with an automated, standardized case study pipeline.

Advocacy Governance: Establish automated consent workflows, streamlined brief development, and multi-market localization reviews. This will allow the team to rapidly deploy authoritative, localized customer success stories to the sales team, reducing the cycle from weeks to days.

Cross-Functional SLA Governance

Implement Strict Team Protection: Address the severe cross-functional bottlenecks where the Partnerships or Product teams sign GTM agreements without marketing’s advance knowledge (such as the Google Creative Readiness Fund, Roku, and LinkedIn initiatives).

Enforce Zero-Tolerance SLAs: Act as a rigid gatekeeper. Establish a mandatory 12-week minimum lead time and a fully documented business brief for any joint partnership campaign. Protect the team from budget-depleting, reactive, and high-stress "bombs" that compromise work quality.

Workload Sustainability & Psychological Safety

Mitigate Employee Burnout: Actively manage and rebalance team workloads to directly address our Workday Peakon Employee Engagement data—specifically targeting our critical focus areas of Workload Manageability (scoring 4.7/10) and Mental Wellbeing (scoring 6.2/10).

Eliminate "Blame Culture": Establish and model strict behavioral standards for managers. Ensure that teams executing high-stakes campaigns are structurally supported, scopes are audited recurringly, and a culture of blame and managers "throwing staff under the bus" is eradicated.

Core Competencies & Skills

Commercial Brand Narrative: Mastery of high-impact strategic storytelling, corporate positioning, executive communications and thought leadership, and