Our six-month search for a demand gen marketer (and the three boxes they had to check)

Six months. That's how long it took to find Kelly.

Month four of the search, and I was telling friends to mention me in their newsletters. Month five, I was only half-joking about standing outside coffee shops with a sign.

Suddenly, sixty applicants in 48 hours felt like the easy part.

The ask seemed simple enough. Run the ads. Talk to the customers. Build in public. Three boxes. Cue my rude awakening.

Most candidates checked two. Then they ghosted on the third.

In this episode of This Meeting Could've Been a Podcast, Josh and I get into the six-month search for a demand gen marketer. What made it so hard. What finally broke it open... and how Kelly had Vector on CTV in two weeks.

What you’ll learn 

• Why demand gen is one of the hardest roles to hire for
• The three boxes Jess needed every candidate to check
• How to use your budget and goals as an interview tool
• Why the surround sound play is changing how Vector thinks about nurture
• How Kelly built a Fathom-to-Claude integration that turns sales calls into ad copy
• Three hiring takeaways for anyone building a demand gen function from scratch

TOP THREE TAKEAWAYS

Takeaway 1: The surround sound play. Because 'go paid' alone doesn't cut it.

In a marketing mastermind I'm part of, someone asked the question everyone's been mulling over. Organic is getting weird. AI is eating search. The old nurture playbook isn't hitting like it used to. What now?

My answer was paid. Just not the version that gets laughed out of the room.

Kelly's first big move was what we now call the surround sound play. He used Vector to build a 180,000-person ICP audience and put the same people in front of CTV ads, LinkedIn ads, and thought leadership that had already proven it could stop a scroll.

This wasn't random top-of-funnel spend or retargeting everyone and hoping for the best. Audience, known. Messaging, tested.

If organic is shrinking, the answer isn't throwing more cash at it. It's knowing exactly who's worth following in the first place.

Takeaway 2: Pain points were hiding in our sales calls. Kelly built the AI to find them.

My first "oh my God" moment with Kelly wasn't the usual campaign result.

He took Vector's Fathom call recordings, wired them into Claude, and built a workflow that mines the five pain points our customers care about most. It listens across hundreds of sales calls and pulls out the exact language buyers use when they talk about them.

The actual words.

Those quotes become ads. Content themes. More importantly, messaging that doesn't sound like marketing came up with it… because it didn't.

I can sit in five sales calls and feel pretty smart. Or I can mine hundreds of them.

I walked away from the demo wondering why every demand gen team isn’t doing this. But Kelly's point? These aren't hard to build — people just aren't building them.

Takeaway 3: Hiring fast feels good. It rarely is.

Six months. Twenty-five interviews. At some point in the middle of it, I asked Josh if I should just hire someone.

His answer was no. Boy, was I glad.

Because if it had been yes, I would’ve hired someone — and it wouldn’t have been Kelly.

Kaylee Edmondson ran the role in her newsletter. Exit Five put it on their job board. At some point, I told Josh I was basically one Craigslist post away from: maybe I'll just find someone in Starbucks with Google Ads open. That was my level of desperate.

People could do parts of the job, just not all of it.

Then there was the pressure. Sales wanted pipeline. The Series A was coming. The role had already outlived its original timeline.

If you're in that kind of search, my advice isn't complicated:

Be specific about what you're looking for

This isn't about a title. I wasn't hiring "a demand gen marketer." Well, I was.

But I was looking for someone who could run ads like it was their product — because at Vector, it literally is. Someone who could be customer-facing on day one, get on sales calls, and show prospects what good looks like from the inside. And someone willing to build in public. Post on LinkedIn. Be the face of the user.

Most people don't fit that mix. Write your version of the three boxes down before you post the role.

Show the real numbers early

Budget. Targets. Expectations. Kelly saw all of it before he signed. There was no soft version. It told him what kind of company this was — and it told me what kind of operator he was.

Don’t collapse under pressure

Six months into the search, everything pushes you to settle. But settling is a dangerous reset — and it usually costs more than the wait did. This is the person running your budgets and controlling the trackable part of your pipeline. Take the time.

They’re out there somewhere, you just haven’t crossed paths yet.

Catch the full episode (and subscribe to This Meeting Could’ve Been a Podcast) on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform.