Senior Research Lead, Customer Insights

Salesforce•Atlanta, GA

About The Position

Salesforce is seeking a Senior Research Lead for their Customer Insights team, a key part of the marketing organization. This role is responsible for delivering objective, actionable insights to inform marketing strategy, positioning, and messaging. The Senior Research Lead will own research projects and workstreams for marketing stakeholders, managing studies from scoping to delivery. Responsibilities include applying judgment on methodology, contributing to AI-assisted workflows, and building repeatable processes to enhance team quality. A significant initial project will involve keynote message testing for Dreamforce in summer 2026. This is a senior individual contributor role requiring autonomy, the ability to handle complex and concurrent work, and consistent high-level delivery before findings reach senior marketing leaders.

Requirements

Strong foundation in both quantitative and qualitative primary research, with experience running complex, high-visibility studies.
Ability to bring in outside expertise to close gaps in skillset.
Understanding of how research operates inside a complex organization: navigating ambiguous direction, competing stakeholder priorities, and audiences who did not commission the research.
Client-side experience or genuine operation in that environment.
Comfort managing more than one project at a time without dropping quality.
Ability to stay organized, anticipate blockers, and keep work moving.
Ability to notice when something is being done the hard way and fix it in a way that scales.
Ability to document, standardize, and share processes.
Comfort operating at a senior level.
Ability to communicate in business terms.
Ability to build trust that gets you in the room before a study is scoped.
Ability to present recommendations, not just findings, to senior leadership.
Ability to secure buy-in on direction.
Ability to field hard questions with credibility.
Strong written and verbal communication skills.
Ability to influence without authority: make people around you more effective, share knowledge, raise the bar through example, and bring others along without a management title.
Curiosity about how AI can make research faster and sharper.
Aptitude and desire to learn AI tools.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience building AI-assisted workflows.
Background in enterprise software, B2B technology, or CRM.
Familiarity with Salesforce products or the broader ecosystem.

Responsibilities

Lead and Execute Primary Research: Own research projects and workstreams for marketing stakeholders.
Translate ambiguous business questions into well-designed studies with a clear point of view on what the research will answer and why it matters.
Maintain full accountability for quality throughout.
Apply the Right Methods: Apply judgment on methodology across complex, high-visibility studies.
Know when quantitative, qualitative, or mixed approaches are right, and why.
Decisions often need to be made quickly, defended to senior stakeholders, and adapted as briefs evolve.
Work is a mix of supplier-led and in-house execution; be comfortable with both.
Synthesize Across Studies: Connect findings across projects to surface integrated conclusions.
Deliver strong data storytelling, choose the right visualization, and frame the right narrative — landing with senior stakeholders and driving decisions.
Drive Stakeholder Alignment: Build trusted relationships with senior stakeholders.
Scope studies with a clear point of view on what they will answer and why the investment is worth it.
Communicate findings in terms of decisions and actions, not research outputs.
Build AI-Assisted Team Practices: Use AI tools to accelerate and sharpen research work.
Help establish team practices around where AI adds genuine value and where it needs to be checked carefully.
Set a high bar for what AI output looks like before it reaches a stakeholder.
Manage Concurrent Workstreams: Handle multiple concurrent projects without losing track of quality or timelines.
Anticipate what's coming and stay ahead of it.
Manage Suppliers and Research Partners: Own relationships with external research agencies and vendors across your projects.
Set expectations, maintain quality standards, and keep concurrent workstreams on track.
Build Processes That Scale: Introduce repeatable approaches that make the team's work more consistent and efficient: frameworks for study design, synthesis templates, QA checkpoints, delivery standards.