Director of Demand Generation

Job description

Ask any employee to explain their benefits, and you'll likely get a confused shrug. Ask any HR leader if their benefits investment is working, and you'll get an honest "I don't know." For employees, benefits are confusing and overwhelming. For HR and finance leaders, benefits are the second-largest expense, but they lack the visibility to know what's working and what's wasted. At Avante, we're changing that. We're an AI-native benefits intelligence platform built to help companies and HR leaders run benefits more effectively with AI. For employees, our agent Carly provides personalized, always-on benefits guidance. For benefits leaders, our agent Ava serves as the extension of the Benefits team, handling operational workload and giving them better insights, sooner. . We're based in Seattle and work 4 days a week in the office (one day remote). We sell to Fortune 2000 employers, with customers like Samsung, Zscaler, and News Corp, and we're looking for a Director of Demand Generation to answer the question that matters most at our stage: who are the changemakers ready to move first, and how do we win them? ### The Role The benefits industry is at an inflection point. A wave of forward-thinking HR and benefits leaders at Fortune 2000 employers are adopting AI and transforming how their organizations deliver benefits, and they will lead the rest of the market. Your job is to find more of those early changemakers, convert them, and then capture the wave of accounts that follows. As Director of Demand Generation, you'll own the target account strategy and the direct pipeline generated against it. You'll define the profile of these early adopters, assemble and pressure-test the shortlist, and design the account-level plays that turn cold logos into open opportunities. Then you'll run those plays: personalized messaging built for specific accounts and buying committees, orchestrated sales and SDR activation sequences, 1:few content for clusters of lookalike accounts, field moments built around priority accounts, and the LinkedIn ABM that surrounds it all. You're hands-on across every layer, with creative support and agency budget where it makes sense. Account-based pipeline is the core of the role, though with a small team it isn't the whole of it. Some of our buyers are already searching for what we do, and we need to be there when they are. You'll own the paid search and capture strategy that intercepts them. Our executive dinners, roundtables, trade shows, and webinars only matter if the right buyers show up and convert, and that demand engine is yours to build too. You'll operate within a team of specialist peers: a field and experiential marketer who runs trade shows and customer events and collaborates with you on account-based plays, a partner marketing lead who owns broker ecosystem activation, and a senior RevOps leader who owns systems and data. You sit at the center of that group as the account strategist and the direct demand lead. Pipeline within named accounts is the primary scoreboard, and you'll work daily with sales leadership on selection, engagement, and progression. ### What You'll Do **Own the target account shortlist.** Define what a strong prospective account looks like, using firmographic, intent, and other signals alongside the markers of AI readiness we've seen in customers like Samsung, Zscaler, and News Corp. Assemble the named account list, make the case for it, prune it, and re-rank it as evidence arrives. Know every account on it well enough to explain why it's there and what it will take to earn it. **Design account-level strategies.** For priority accounts, map multi-touch plays that identify the buying committee, sequence the right content and channels, and create genuine reasons for benefits leaders to engage. A play for Goldman Sachs looks nothing like a play for a regional health system, and you'll treat them that way. **Run account-based plays end to end.** Assemble and execute the full stack: 1:1 messaging for priority accounts, 1:few content for lookalike clusters, intent-triggered sales and SDR activation sequences, and the surround-sound LinkedIn layer that keeps Avante present while the committee deliberates. LinkedIn Campaign Manager should feel like home, though the design of the play is what opens the account. **Work closely with field and experiential marketing.** Our field and experiential marketer owns events start to finish: designing the experience, filling the room, and converting the leads those events generate into pipeline. You're their closest collaborator, so your job is the account lens and the demand layer around the work. You decide which named accounts deserve a field moment and what it has to accomplish, and you keep the LinkedIn air cover warming those accounts before and after one. Where the two of you overlap, and on named accounts you will, you align on priorities and sequencing so the events and your plays move the same accounts forward. **Coordinate with partner marketing on shared accounts.** Our partner marketing lead owns broker ecosystem activation. Where a target account's path runs through a broker relationship, you'll align plays and sequencing with them, while keeping clear ownership of direct demand. **Support sales on selection and progression.** Align with sales leadership on account tiers, engagement plans, and handoffs. Equip SDRs and AEs with the messaging and triggers that make their outbound land. Sit in pipeline reviews, and when an account stalls, own the diagnosis and the next move. **Measure what matters.** Define the account-based scoreboard: engagement, penetration, velocity, and pipeline within named accounts rather than raw lead volume, plus the contribution our field and webinar programs make to that pipeline. Partner with our RevOps leader, who owns the systems, to make sure the data behind that scoreboard is instrumented and honest. **Design the agents that scale this function.** Account research, continuous signal monitoring, buying committee mapping, message variant generation, campaign QA. Anything that would otherwise cap our account list at what one person can track is yours to automate. The goal is depth and volume at once: committee-specific messaging at a scale manual work can't reach. You'll write the spec and make the case, and GTM engineering will help you build it. **Own what ships.** Everything that goes out with your name on it is yours to review, refine, and stand behind, no matter who or what helped produce it. We'll ask where you disagreed with the model and how you checked. When you build something that works, bring it to the rest of the GTM team so the advantage compounds. **Adapt as we grow.** The shortlist, the plays, and the toolset will all evolve as Avante scales. You should expect your scope to shift and expand, and you should welcome that. ### What We're Looking For - 8+ years in B2B demand generation, with at least 3 years running account-based programs against enterprise targets - Demonstrated experience building custom agents or automations that you designed and shipped yourself, with specifics you can walk us through: what the agent did, what it replaced, what broke, and what you rebuilt - Judgment about where AI belongs in a demand engine and where it does not, including the personalization and quality thresholds you hold before something reaches a Fortune 2000 buyer - A track record of building and converting named account lists, with results you can speak to in pipeline and revenue terms, not MQLs - Experience running integrated demand programs end to end, including the audience-building, promotion, and follow-up engine behind events, executive dinners, and webinars, not only 1:1 and 1:few ABM - Experience selling into large, complex buying committees (Fortune 2000 or equivalent), ideally with long sales cycles - Hands-on fluency running LinkedIn ABM campaigns yourself (matched audiences, account list targeting, budget management), plus HubSpot and ABM/intent platforms (6sense, Demandbase, Clay, or similar). You direct creative; you don't outsource execution. - Strength as both strategist and operator: comfortable setting account strategy in the morning and building the campaign that executes it in the afternoon - A collaborative operating style suited to a team of specialist peers, where influence and clear ownership lines matter more than direct authority - A tight working relationship with sales as your operating default, including shared account plans and shared accountability - Early-stage startup experience, with comfort building the system while running it #### **Nice to Have** - Experience operating alongside partner-led or channel-influenced GTM motions - Familiarity with benefits, healthcare, or HR tech buyers - Experience marketing AI products to enterprise buyers - A history of standing up account scoring or intent-signal programs from scratch ### How We Work Our four values aren't aspirational. They translate into concrete operating tenets that shape how we make decisions every day. **Beat Yesterday.** We re-evaluate our own toolkit every quarter, because the workflows that made you effective three months ago may already be outdated. We act on 70% of the information rather than waiting for certainty. We timebox, execute, and iterate, getting work in front of real people quickly instead of polishing in isolation. And we own our output regardless of how we produced it. AI can get you 80% of the way there. Everything that goes out with your name on it is your responsibility to review, refine, and stand behind. **Embrace Type 2 Fun.** We take on hard problems and find meaning in the work, even when it's uncomfortable. We assume good intent and follow up directly rather than venting in side channels. We celebrate wins loudly and specifically, naming the actual behavior so the whole team learns what great looks like. We are on by default, because we owe it to each other and to our customers to be available beyond what a regular corporate job would demand. And we do unscalable things today that build scalable advantages tomorrow: every hand-built account play and late-night proposal turnaround earns us the right to scale later. **Stay Hungry, Stay Curious.** We expect everyone to be the expert on AI in their function before anyone asks them to be. The landscape changes weekly. When you learn something, teach it. Learn enough about adjacent functions to ask good questions. Ask the question you think is too basic, because in complex domains like benefits, the cost of a wrong assumption can be a lost account. And remember: curiosity without urgency is a hobby. Learning has to translate into action on a timeline that matches the opportunity. **Act Like an Owner.** We say the uncomfortable thing early, raising missed commitments or quality gaps directly with the person within 48 hours. We surface problems when they're small, not the week they become a crisis. Customer-facing work gets priority, always. And we close the loop every time, because over-communication is a feature at our stage, not a bug.