VP, Strategic Communications & Commercial Marketing

Smartly•New York, NY

5h•$195,000 - $275,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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. 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.

Requirements

10+ years of progressive leadership experience in Corporate Communications, PR, Brand Marketing, or Comms Operations.
Proven track record of scaling communications and branding departments in mid-sized B2B SaaS or digital media organizations (500–2,000 employees).
Extensive experience managing large global PR agency retainers, contract execution, and outsourced creative operations.
Successful experience establishing a Hub-and-Spoke Center of Excellence model or transitioning traditional communications teams into automated, Comms Ops frameworks.
Mastery of high-impact strategic storytelling, corporate positioning, executive communications and thought leadership, and translating complex product capabilities into compelling executive narratives.
Exceptional capability in large-scale event budget planning, real-time registration tracking, and automated ROI analytics.
Hands-on understanding of how to leverage API integrations, AI-augmented design tools, automated translation engines, and Comms Ops technologies to streamline content workflows.
Strong leadership backbone to implement and protect team boundaries, enforce briefs, and maintain operational discipline across cross-functional partners.
Proven commitment to workload balancing, capacity planning, and maintaining psychological safety standards to mitigate burnout and retain top-tier talent.
Bachelor’s degree in Communications, Journalism, Marketing, or an analytical business field.

Nice To Haves

MBA or advanced training in Agile process frameworks is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

Own and execute Smartly’s global corporate and brand communications strategy across earned media, executive communications, thought leadership, analyst engagement, awards & industry influence.
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.
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.
Reorient the Global Events team to scale event-influenced pipeline, align event goals around clean real-time registration data, strict daily budget tracking, and immediate post-event sales follow-up.
Transition all internal, non-marketing administrative event coordination out of the marketing department to Executive Assistants and Workplace Experience teams.
Implement a "buy over build" creative strategy for special events, outsourcing event creative ideation and experience design to specialized external agencies.
Introduce a specialized "Comms Ops" capability to run the underlying technology, automation engines, and predictive analytics that power communications.
Work alongside the creative and copy teams to build AI-augmented content workflows, automating repetitive asset repurposing, multi-market translations, and variation generation.
Actively in-house routine PR execution using advanced AI tools to reduce external PR agency retainer spend.
Overhaul the customer advocacy and case study lifecycle, replacing the manual process with an automated, standardized case study pipeline.
Establish automated consent workflows, streamlined brief development, and multi-market localization reviews for customer success stories.
Implement strict cross-functional SLAs, establishing a mandatory 12-week minimum lead time and a fully documented business brief for any joint partnership campaign.
Actively manage and rebalance team workloads to address employee engagement data, specifically targeting Workload Manageability and Mental Wellbeing.
Establish and model strict behavioral standards for managers to ensure teams are structurally supported, scopes are audited, and a culture of blame is eradicated.