Head of Sales Marketing | Northern England | Hybrid
A board-level commercial leadership role at a profitable, founder-led UK technology business at a defining commercial moment.
Important: this role requires a marketing leadership background with genuine hands-on marketing experience. Sales leaders without direct marketing execution experience will not be considered.
About the company
A UK-based, AI-led data and technology business serving the public sector. Founder-led, profitable, scaling, and backed by an institutional growth investor. The business has spent several years building a proprietary product set and is now entering a category-defining phase, with its methodology recently adopted as a national standard.
The customer base is a finite, named market of government and local authority buyers across the UK and the Republic of Ireland, plus selected international projects. The business is in the early stages of transitioning to an annual subscription model, layered onto an established recurring survey revenue base.
The role
A board-level commercial leadership role with full ownership of sales and marketing. You'll report directly to the founder CEO, work closely with the Executive Chair, and lead a small, tight commercial team through a defining commercial chapter.
You'll own:
- Marketing strategy and hands-on campaign execution
- Marketing-sourced pipeline against agreed revenue targets
- Account-based marketing into a finite, named buyer base
- Day-to-day leadership of a six-person sales team
- Customer marketing for retention, expansion and the transition to subscription
- Brand and category leadership through the next phase of growth
- Marketing operations, attribution and board-level reporting
Who we're looking for
A marketing leader who is comfortable owning a sales team day-to-day alongside the marketing function. Marketing depth is the starting point. This role is not suited to sales-first leaders who view marketing as a delivery function.
Likely current title: Marketing Director, Head of Marketing, Head of Demand Generation, Head of Growth, CMO at a smaller business, or Sales and Marketing Director already operating in a dual scope role with proven hands-on marketing experience.
Essential marketing experience:
- Personal ownership of marketing-sourced pipeline against agreed revenue targets
- Hands-on account-based marketing campaign design and execution into a finite, named target market
- Direct experience writing campaign briefs, building dashboards and running campaigns yourself
- Marketing operations fluency across CRM, automation, attribution and conversion analytics
- A demonstrable track record of building or transforming a marketing function
Essential commercial experience:
- Direct experience leading or managing a sales team, not just aligning with one
- Public sector, B2G or local authority commercial experience
- Familiarity with framework procurement (G-Cloud, ESPO, YPO, KCS or comparable)
- Comfort reporting at board and investor standard
Desirable:
- Background in a B2B SaaS, technology or data scale-up
- Experience of subscription transitions in B2B technology businesses
- Background in a PE or growth-equity backed scale-up environment
- Sales commission plan design and operation
This role is not suited to:
- Sales-first leaders with limited or no hands-on marketing execution experience
- Strategic-only marketing leaders who require a marketing team layer beneath them to function
- Pure brand or comms CMOs without pipeline accountability
- Career corporate marketers from FTSE or large enterprise environments
What you'll get
- A board-level commercial role at a profitable, scaling business at a once-in-a-decade commercial moment
- Direct working relationship with the founder CEO and a hands-on Executive Chair with multiple successful exits behind them
- Performance-related bonus and meaningful equity through the EMI scheme
- Genuine ownership and the autonomy to build the commercial function properly
- A small, tight team operating with the pace and clarity of a founder-led business
- Hybrid working with regular in-person collaboration at the Northern England head office
Suited to a candidate based in Northern England within commutable distance of the head office.