Director, Performance Marketing

Who we are Help Scout started in 2011 with a simple premise: support software should treat customers like people, not tickets. 3+ billion conversations later, more than 10,000 companies use Help Scout to grow relationships with customers of all types, from clients to patients and beyond. Now we’re in a new chapter: not only building AI that gives teams more space to focus on the customer experience, but also reimagining how we operate in an AI-native world. That means shipping and learning faster, without compromising on craft. Great work here carries a strong opinion and sweats the details, regardless of the tools we use to drive it. We’ve been a fully remote team since day one, with 120+ teammates now all over the world. It’s a culture where you’ll be trusted to take ownership, stay curious, and raise the quality of work around you. It comes with clear expectations and a team that will push you to do some of the best work of your career. If that kind of challenge gives you energy, we’d love to meet you. Please note: For this role, we are only able to hire in the United States. About the role As the search landscape shifts and our market gets more crowded, Help Scout is investing more than ever in paid and performance marketing to accelerate signups, expand brand awareness, and diversify how we reach customers. It's an exciting time to be here. We've got a best-in-market product story, strong creative assets, and stellar copywriting. What we need now is a strategic owner to take our performance marketing motion from early-stage to a durable growth engine that fuels our self-serve, product-led, and sales-assisted growth. You'll report to the VP of Marketing, setting and executing the strategy for how Help Scout invests in paid channels while building deep partnerships across Marketing, Sales, Product, Support, and company leadership. In this role, you will: • Own performance marketing strategy. Set the quarterly and long-term strategy for how paid, lifecycle, and conversion work together to hit the signups number, defining what's needed from each channel and building the plan B when something's off. You'll be the person leadership turns to for the full picture of paid performance. • Move Help Scout upmarket. Own iteration of ad copy, creative, bidding strategy, and budget allocation across paid search and display, and set the bar for how we drive both our horizontal motion for volume and our vertical motion for larger deals. • Build the business case for new channels. Identify and evaluate new channel investments, paid social, affiliate, direct mail, OOH, and drive alignment with leadership on where to place new bets and how to measure them. • Partner on pipeline outcomes. Work closely with Sales and RevOps to connect paid spend to pipeline and revenue, not just top-of-funnel volume, and make sure channel investment decisions reflect what's actually converting downstream. • Partner to grow organic and paid in harmony. Work with content, social, SEO, and AEO to make sure paid and organic acquisition reinforce each other rather than compete for the same ground. • Represent Help Scout's performance marketing point of view. Bring an informed perspective on where the paid landscape is heading, and use that expertise to keep Help Scout ahead of a crowded, competitive market. • Own our presence in AI-driven discovery. As search shifts toward AI overviews and LLM-based answers, you'll define how Help Scout shows up in that landscape alongside traditional paid and organic search. • Shape the future of the function. This is currently an individual contributor role with agency support. You'll build the roadmap for what performance marketing needs to look like over the next 12-18 months, including where headcount should come