Head of Client Demand & Strategy

Everything here happened in the last quarter.

• A client asks you to review one trade-show outreach sequence. A day later two reusable components exist at account level that carry to every event they run, and the one they wrote is untouched.
• While reviewing it you notice their 1,100-contact senior-title pool has no grade filter and walks straight past the gate they built. You flag it and ship the fix in the same message.
• You build the diagnostic from their CRM and attach a move to every finding. In one client's HubSpot, 34,425 of 58,294 contacts created in a year (59.1%) had no first-engagement timestamp. The finding is worthless without the move: put the SLA clock on the lead, not on the deal.
• A sales director tells you one large account takes two hours to research. You answer with a number, ten minutes or we have failed, then run the first reps yourself before handing it over.

Pipeline, not activity. When a client asks you to review one campaign, you hear a question about where their next hundred conversations come from, and you answer that one.

Ship first. The recommendation ships this week as built work, not as a meeting about the work. You run the first ten reps yourself, so the number you gave them is one you have hit.

Build the missing step. You will get a client, an outcome, and an environment missing pieces. Nobody hands you the middle steps, because mostly they do not exist yet. You hold what has to be true, build the gap when you hit one, and keep moving.

Compound. The first time you grind it. The second time it is 80% automated. The third time, 95%. That instinct is the difference between a seat that tops out at six clients and one that carries twenty, and it sits with you because the person doing the manual work is the only one who knows what actually needs building.

• You came up through demand generation and were held to a pipeline or revenue number, not a channel metric. Cost per click and MQL volume are not the story.
• You have run the full mix, paid and social and events and email, at the strategic level. Deep skill in one is a bonus; knowing which lever to pull is the requirement.
• You have carried a portfolio rather than one company: agency client-strategy lead, fractional CMO or CRO with three or more concurrent clients, or a demand gen VP who has lived inside four or five different growth problems. Tell us how many you ran at once and what broke when you added the next one.
• You have owned an SDR or BDR team. Not required, and if it is true we want to talk to you first.
• You understand how a lead becomes a meeting, a meeting becomes pipeline, and pipeline becomes revenue, and you can work at both altitudes: the field-level mechanics of one account and the quarter-level shape of a whole motion.

You are expected to move any part of this forward yourself. Not to be the best at all of it, which nobody is, but to get it started, get it in front of the client, and hand it to whoever goes deeper faster. A first draft from you plus a specialist second pass beats a perfect thing that waited three days for the right person to be free. Engineering decides method; you set the requirement, the number, and the verification. Pricing and terms stay with the founder.

The judgment the seat exists for runs both directions. You push when a client's growth warrants it: you name the next motion before they ask, scope it, and say plainly what it will and will not generate. You hold the width when they ask for four workstreams at once: one lane at a time at their tier, a temporary second lane as a scoped project that starts and stops, and you lead with the arithmetic of time before you lead with price. You step back when the honest read says so. Maintenance means maintain, not change.

How we know it is working: new pipeline generated per client, measured against their own previous period. On one client's first 90 days that meant 72 deals, more than double the prior 90 days, and a little under $145,000 in pipeline, counting only what the system touched. The second measure is how fast a client sees something live in their own Slack, because internal progress is not progress.

• Every client hears from you at least every 48 hours, whether or not they asked.
• Every client message is acknowledged inside 24 hours, and the acknowledgment does not wait for the answer.
• You build in the open. Tests run in the client's channel where they can watch, including the ones that fail.
• Fluency in Claude and Swan inside 30 days. AI-native working style is teachable and we surround you with what you need, which is why it is not a filter.
• Most early-engagement panic is a client not yet knowing what the system does. It lands on you, and you absorb it, say plainly what they will and will not get, and stay the adult in the room.

Based in Denver, ten clients today, from founder-led to a hundred million in revenue, across security, e-commerce, industrial, and professional services. Small by design, and small enough that nobody is managing the work instead of doing it. That stays true while the client count grows.

The method has a name, Never Call a Cold Lead. We identify the companies already on a client's website, route outreach from that signal, and wrap accounts in awareness so every touch lands warm. No purchased lists, no cold TAM.

Swan is the AI go-to-market platform underneath the work. We are a certified Swan partner with a strong commercial relationship. You report to the founder and work daily alongside the client strategy and go-to-market engineering lanes.

Contract to start. Competitive base with a performance component tied to client outcomes. Remote, live from 8am to noon Mountain, because that is when our clients are in their CRMs and in their Slack.

One paragraph, no cover letter: the pipeline or revenue number you were held to, where it started, where it ended, over what period, and the two or three things you did that moved it. Use the form below, or send it to kevin@nicl.ai with the subject line "Head of Client Demand & Strategy, Your Name".