EMEA Demand Gen Manager

Overview

You run demand generation programs for Customer.io's EMEA region, focusing on field events, partner co-marketing, and account-based tactics. You're both the strategist and the executor—planning campaigns, negotiating with vendors, coordinating with sales, and tracking pipeline. You're selling a customer engagement platform (email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging) to mid-market B2B and B2C companies who need to send event-triggered messages to their users.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Series A (raised $29.9M from Spectrum Equity in 2022)

Size: 505 employees

Growth: Just crossed $100M ARR milestone with 8,000+ customers. Actively investing in AI features and EMEA expansion. Recent product launches include Data Pipelines and AI-powered insights.

Market Position: Strong challenger in a crowded space. Competing against Braze (enterprise focus), Klaviyo (e-commerce), Iterable, HubSpot, and ActiveCampaign. Differentiator is event-driven automation with first-party data focus and developer-friendly APIs.

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 40% Inbound - Mix of website demos, free trial signups (they have a product-led element), and content downloads. Quality varies; many are too early or too small.
• 30% Outbound - Sales team doing targeted prospecting into high-fit accounts. You support this with ABM plays.
• 30% Partners/Events - Co-marketing with data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery), analytics tools, and agencies. Field events generate conversations but long follow-up cycles.

SDR/AE Structure: Dedicated SDR team supports AEs. You work closely with them to align on target accounts for ABM campaigns.

SE Support: Sales Engineers help with technical demos and POCs for larger deals.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Braze (enterprise-focused, expensive), Klaviyo (e-commerce specialists), Iterable, HubSpot (all-in-one but less powerful automation), ActiveCampaign (SMB-focused)

How They Differentiate: Event-driven automation, developer-friendly APIs, warehouse integrations, better for companies with complex data needs. Not the cheapest, not the most enterprise-y—they sit in the middle.

Common Objections: "We're already using HubSpot/ActiveCampaign," "Too technical for our marketing team," "Braze is the enterprise standard," "Klaviyo handles our e-commerce needs."

Win Themes: Flexibility for technical teams, better handling of real-time behavioral data, more control than all-in-one platforms, cleaner data model than legacy tools.

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Event Planning/Execution (40%) | Partner Co-Marketing (30%) | ABM Campaigns (20%) | Reporting/Optimization (10%)

Key Activities

• Plan and Execute Field Events: You're booking venues for dinners, workshops, or conference sponsorships in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, etc. This includes negotiating vendor contracts, coordinating with the sales team on invite lists, managing logistics, and following up on attendees afterward. Budget management is on you.

• Partner Co-Marketing Campaigns: You work with data warehouse partners (Snowflake, Segment, Fivetran), analytics tools (Mixpanel, Amplitude), and agencies to create joint webinars, content, or events. You're coordinating calendars, splitting lead lists, and trying to get partners to actually promote things.

• Account-Based Campaigns: You identify 50-100 high-value target accounts in EMEA with the sales team, then build campaigns around them—direct mail, LinkedIn ads, personalized landing pages, executive dinners. You're working with sales to coordinate outreach timing and messaging.

• Measure Pipeline Impact: You track every event, webinar, and campaign in Salesforce (or their CRM). You're pulling reports on MQLs, SQLs, pipeline influenced, and cost per opportunity. You present this to leadership monthly and adjust tactics based on what's working.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're a team of one (likely): You're doing everything—strategy, execution, vendor negotiations, post-event follow-up. There's no events coordinator or campaign manager to delegate to. If the webinar platform breaks, you're troubleshooting it.

• Long attribution cycles: You run an event in Q1, leads enter nurture, sales follows up, deals close in Q3 or Q4. Proving ROI takes patience, and leadership will ask "what pipeline did we generate?" before deals are closed.

• Partner coordination is slow: Partners have their own priorities. Getting them to co-promote a webinar or show up to an event takes weeks of back-and-forth. Sometimes they commit and then don't deliver.

• EMEA is multiple markets: You're not just doing "Europe"—you're navigating UK, DACH, Nordics, France, maybe Southern Europe. Different languages, different buying behaviors, different event preferences. You'll have to pick your battles on where to focus.

What Success Looks Like

• You generate $3-5M in influenced pipeline annually, with a 3-4x ROI on event/campaign spend.
• Field events consistently deliver 15-25 qualified leads per event, with 20-30% converting to sales opportunities.
• Partner campaigns contribute 20-30% of EMEA pipeline, with clear attribution to joint activities.

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• Marketing Operations / Growth Managers (technical marketers at mid-market B2B/SaaS or e-commerce companies)
• VPs of Marketing or Product (at companies outgrowing Mailchimp/HubSpot or needing more automation)
• CTOs / Engineering Leaders (at companies who want developer control over messaging)

What They Care About:

• Data flexibility: Can they use behavioral data from their product, not just email clicks?
• Technical control: Can their engineers customize workflows via API?
• Scalability: Will this work as they grow from 100K to 1M+ customers?
• Ease of migration: How hard is it to move from their current tool?
• Cost: Mid-market budgets are tight—pricing needs to make sense vs. Braze or Klaviyo.

Requirements

• 3-5 years in B2B demand generation, ideally at a SaaS company selling to marketers or technical buyers
• Experience running field events and partner co-marketing programs (not just coordinating—actually owning the execution)
• Comfortable with marketing automation platforms (HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot) and CRM reporting (Salesforce)
• Based in EMEA (UK, DACH, or Nordics likely) and willing to travel 30-40% for events
• Scrappy mindset—you're doing strategy and execution, not managing a team
• Familiarity with the martech/customer engagement space helpful but not required