The short version:

Early-stage venture-backed startup (Techstars Chicago ‘17) looking for a talented head of marketing to join our fast-growing team. This is a unique opportunity to work directly with the CEO to lead our marketing efforts, and have an integral role in creating a category-defining business with a meaningful impact on top-line revenue growth.

Who we are:

We’re a fast­-moving startup with a vision to empower all professionals by helping them build better relationships. To do this, we’re combining the best practices of the world’s top relationship builders with artificial intelligence.
We’re building a mission­-driven team that strives to live out our values every day:

• Customer­-centricity
• Diversity of perspective
• Authenticity
• Growth (individual and collective)
• Impact

We’re an ambitious, diverse, driven team and we push ourselves to accomplish a lot quickly. Since founding, we’ve been accepted to and graduated from one of the world’s top accelerators, raised multiple rounds of venture financing from world-class investors, rapidly grown our customer base, and architected a robust set of machine learning models as a core source of competitive advantage. In the process, we’ve been named one of Chicago’s top 50 startups to watch, one of Chicago Inno’s 50 on Fire, a part of the highly selective Google for Startups Black Founders Accelerator and Black Founders Fund. And we’re just getting started!

The opportunity:

4Degrees is at an inflection point - we’ve built a product that’s pioneering a new category of software (relationship intelligence), and are rapidly growing. We’ve created a marketing foundation that’s showing early signs of success across multiple channels (SEO, PPC, partnerships).

We’ve done this with a scrappy, early-stage team. Now, we’re looking for a talented lead marketer to help us continue to rapidly scale. Your core objective will be to drive and iterate on our demand generation strategy - with the goal of rapidly growing qualified lead volume. To do this, you’ll:

• Help us better position and tell our story in a way that helps prospects understand the benefits of working with us.
• Grow our public presence and help scale that story through the creation and execution of content marketing strategies
• Experiment with and assess growth channels for top-of-funnel volume and leads, and work to scale the successful ones.

By joining us, you will play a highly impactful role in re-inventing the way professional relationships are managed and building a rapidly growing category. Along the way, you’ll have an opportunity to get unrivaled exposure to all facets of building a go-to-market engine of a business, and directly shape the outcomes of 4Degrees and its customers.

The impact you’ll make by joining us:

Within 1 month you’ll:

• Complete our onboarding process - which will help you ramp up on our company, vision, product, key objectives, and how your role will contribute to all of those!
• Dive deep into our existing marketing channels and performance - and come out with an assessment of what’s working, and where to focus your efforts
• Create your action plan and objectives for the quarter, in collaboration with the CEO, to guide your execution path forward (which will be iterated on over time)
• Review our library of customer conversation notes and external resources to build familiarity with our target customers, their priorities, and their language.
• Assume ownership of our content production and distribution process - including publishing your first content piece

Within 3 months you’ll:

• Revise our existing messaging and positioning on our website and across channels to ensure alignment with customer personas
• Build out our email marketing program, including nurture tracks for potential prospects and product education for existing customers
• Grow organic website traffic by 20% through content and other awareness tactics
• Have a tangible, noticeable impact on lead generation - increasing the number of leads we’ve received through your work by >20%
• Track and report against KPIs and progress: qualified leads, web traffic, email captures, and key initiatives you are driving

Within 6 months you’ll:

• Lead product education efforts and decrease time / effort to adoption for new customers and new features
• Work closely with sales to help win new customers and shorten sales cycles by creating top of funnel through mid-funnel materials
• Independently drive our content strategy that aligns well with our target customer - including both content creation and distribution
• Drive continued growth in lead generation and traffic
• Enable upmarket growth for the company, with substantial progress towards larger deals closed or in pipeline.

Within 1-2 years, you’ll:

• Build out a marketing team to support you as the company grows, and as we determine which skillsets to double down on
• Become an internal expert on our market, competition, and our key differentiators - and guide us on how that landscape is evolving
• Help identify which additional verticals to target, and how our value proposition maps to the needs of those potential customers

Skills we’re looking for:

• Articulate storytelling and communication - across channels and mediums, including email, ad copy, landing pages, and in-product.

• Content creation and distribution - skilled in creating compelling content in different lengths and formats, and driving distribution to get in front of the right audiences.

• Strong B2B SaaS demand generation toolkit - able to own and drive lead volume through email, content, and other traction channels.

Qualities we value:

• Excited about 4Degrees. You believe in our mission and live our core values.

• Ambitious. You’re excited about building something new, thrive in a fast-paced environment, and are comfortable with experimentation and risk-taking.

• Data-driven - you are fluent with marketing analytics and use data to inform your decision making.

• Effective lead generator. You have a track record of rapidly and cost-effectively growing B2B lead volume via a variety of channels, and have successfully executed marketing strategies that have met or exceeded planned objectives

• Results-oriented. You are driven by creating impact and winning, and take full ownership of achieving personal and team objectives.

• Strong work ethic. You take pride in working harder and smarter than your competition.

• Curious. You work to deeply understand customers, their workflows, and their objectives to speak their language and translate product value to customer value. You enjoy learning about new industries and roles, and quickly move up the learning curve.

• Collaborative. You work closely with product, design and sales to ensure strong execution, and do things outside of your job description to help the team.

Why this role might not be a fit:

• You’re more focused on brand or communications than demand generation. Given our stage, we are focused on driving growth. While we value the impact that brand-focused or PR-focused marketers can bring, those skills aren’t what we’re currently hiring for.

• You’ll be a marketing department of one (at least initially). Our team is passionate about marketing and excited to collaborate to make you successful (through helping with content, design, etc.) - but you’ll be driving the marketing effort as the primary contributor. We plan to grow the marketing function as the business scales (which you’ll help accomplish!), but you’ll want to be comfortable executing without having a number of peers in the function.

• You’re uncomfortable with change and ambiguity. If we all do our jobs well, the company will continue to grow rapidly. This means your role will likely shift in scope to accommodate that growth and that new challenges will emerge that we don’t yet have the answers to. Depending on what you’re looking for, that dynamism may not be a fit (which is OK)!

• You don’t enjoy writing. Our messaging and positioning will largely be in your hands, as will our content efforts. Our team will be able to provide guidance, context, and some writing support - but you will find this role challenging if you don’t like writing (or don’t see it as a strength of yours).