Head of Marketing & Demand Gen

Who we are

AwardSpring is an established, growing SaaS company that partners with hundreds of colleges, universities, and foundations across the US and Canada to award scholarships and manage their donors. We complete the virtuous cycle of giving, getting, and giving again, on a mature, multi-tenant platform, with a small, focused team.

About this role

You run the top of the funnel at AwardSpring: marketing and the SDR team, as one function with one number. That number is pipeline dollars created. Demand is the single biggest constraint on the business, and this seat exists to remove it.

We sell scholarship and donor management software to colleges, universities and community foundations. After ten years we have about 300 of the 1,300 two-year colleges, and most of the rest run on older tools that haven't kept up. Two-year colleges do not search for this category. They ask a peer, read a publication, hear a podcast. Four-year universities buy through a committee of about five people. Foundations find us on their own, and the work there is speed and disqualification. Today most of our pipeline is outbound that our sellers source by hand.

You inherit a paid-media agency, marketing contractors, an SDR team that books first meetings for our Account Executives by phone, and an AI stack that removes most of the production and research work. The SDRs and the marketing contractors report to you. You coach the SDRs, build the inbound engine, and build the category for our Fund Platform. Attribution between marketing and sales does not matter here. The total going up does.

What you'll do

• Lead the SDR team directly: hiring, ramp, daily coaching, call review and the weekly scoreboard.
• Decide every week whether the next dollar or the next hour goes to a campaign or to a dial, and write down why.
• Feed the call list. The people who engaged with a campaign are who the SDRs call the next morning.
• Build demand plays by segment: publications and podcasts for two-year colleges, committee events and thought leadership for four-year universities, inbound speed and disqualification rules for foundations.
• Hear the buyer yourself. Listen to at least five SDR and Account Executive calls a week, work the booth at the conferences we attend, and talk to a customer before you write the message for their segment.
• Build the Fund Platform category: the message, the proof and the first buyers who can say it out loud.
• Run at least eight experiments a month, each with a written hypothesis, a read date and a kill rule set before it launches.
• Judge channels on incrementality, not on what the platform reports. A channel that cannot show lift you can defend does not get next quarter's budget.
• Own the tracking: UTMs, campaign records, conversion events and the queries that tell you whether a number is real.
• Hold the claim standard. Everything we publish is sourced, dated and retired when it stops holding.
• Work with the Go-to-Market Engineer on the lead engine that finds, verifies and enriches contacts and hands them to SDR queues. You say what the SDRs need; they build it.
• Each week, write the three lines under the dashboard: what moved, why, and what you are changing.

Who you are

• You have owned a pipeline number, missed it at least once, and can say what you changed afterward.
• You have run SDRs or BDRs and coached them on the phone, not on a spreadsheet. You can sit beside a new rep, listen to ten calls, and name the one thing to change tomorrow.
• You are a builder and a coach at once. You can ship a campaign yourself this week and hire the person who runs it next quarter.
• You have range across what an agency usually does: content, paid, events, email, web, analytics. You know which ones to do yourself and which to buy.
• You have built demand for a considered purchase with a committee buyer. Higher education, nonprofit technology or public sector is a plus. A degree is not a screen here.
• You write, and you can read a GA4 report and fix the UTM that broke it.
• You can tell a real effect from a coincidence, and you have killed something you liked because the read said to.

What we're not looking for

• A manager who reports activity without asking what it produced.
• Someone who counts MQLs as the goal.
• Someone whose best case study is a rebrand.

How we'll measure you

Three more numbers come up every week: speed to first touch on an inbound lead, paid spend with a read on lift, and inbound pipeline created per month.

1. Pipeline dollars created per month, for the whole company. Attribution between marketing and sales does not matter here; the total going up does.
2. First meetings held per week, for the whole company. SDR-booked and inbound-booked both count. It moves every week, and it is what fills an Account Executive's calendar.
3. New recurring revenue booked against plan, each quarter. Pipeline only matters if it closes.

On the AI part of this job

Agents research, draft and produce. You and your team decide what ships and what gets said on the phone. You should arrive having built campaign or prospecting systems with AI, not just written captions with it, and you will be expected to take work off the SDRs' plates by automating it rather than hiring for it. We check this at day 30 and in every quarterly review. If you don't instinctively reach for AI before doing things manually, this role will be a hard adjustment.

How you advance

• Chief Marketing Officer, with brand, product marketing and a larger demand team as the company grows.
• Chief Revenue Officer, over marketing, sales and customer success.

Benefits

• Health, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) match, unlimited PTO, and paid parental leave.

Our values

• Lead with humanity. Genuine empathy for our team, our customers, and the students and donors they serve. That includes candor, saying the hard thing because you respect the person enough to say it.
• Take smart risks. Urgency. Bold, informed bets before the picture is fully clear. Run the experiment instead of winning the debate.
• Take pride in the process. Fast is the standard and thoughtfulness is non-negotiable. Eyes on the work you control, not the scoreboard.
• Own the results. We measure everything. Accountability runs on data, not vibes, and we can tell the difference between an honest miss and a broken process.

Work location

Hybrid, based in our West Loop / Fulton Market office in Chicago, three days a week, with travel to the conferences we attend.

How we hire

1. A conversation with the hiring manager.
2. A short take-home based on the real work.
3. Interviews with the team you would work with.
4. A conversation with our CEO.
5. A final debrief and an offer.