Senior Acquisition Manager

📋 Description

• • This is a new role at Katana, and a foundational one.
• • As our Senior Acquisition Manager, you'll own the pipeline across three motions with three very different levels of maturity.
• • Free has some foundations and needs sharpening.
• • Core has a running paid engine with some inefficiencies to fix.
• • Advantage - our plan for companies with more complex manufacturing and inventory needs - is already closing deals, sourced without any dedicated marketing behind them.
• • What's missing is the engine: no ABM infrastructure, no target account list, no nurture sequence.
• • You're building that from a blank page, on top of a motion that's already proving it can work.
• • This is not a paid media role with a narrow remit, and it is not a role where you execute someone else's strategy.
• • You own the full funnel from awareness to SQL across all three segments - channel strategy, ABM programs, nurture, agency direction, and the handoff to sales.
• • You decide what to test, what to kill, and where the budget goes.
• • Building the ABM motion for Advantage is the priority, and it's the part of the role we'll weigh most heavily when evaluating candidates.
• • Paid channel strategy & growth
• • Own paid acquisition strategy across Google Ads, LinkedIn, Meta, and Reddit - where we invest, what we test, how we allocate budget
• • Identify new channel and audience opportunities before they're obvious
• • Design experiments with a clear hypothesis and success criteria, direct our performance agency on execution, and decide what scales or dies based on results
• • Look past CTR and CPM to what's actually driving pipeline - if something in the funnel clearly isn't converting, you flag it and work with the team to fix it
• • Lead the performance agency relationship: brief campaigns, review work, hold them accountable to pipeline outcomes
• • Make the call on entering or exiting a channel
• • ABM & the Advantage pipeline
• • Build the ABM motion for Advantage from scratch: define account selection criteria, build the target account list, and design the campaign structure
• • Design an ABM approach that fits how we actually sell - not a hyper-personalized list of 20 accounts, and not a mass, un-targeted list either.
• • Build nurture sequences suited to a longer B2B sales cycle - not a generic drip
• • Partner closely with our Account Executives and Solutions Engineers so acquisition programs align with sales priorities, handoffs are clean, and real pipeline intelligence feeds back into campaign strategy
• • Build the trust and working model between marketing and sales for Advantage from the ground up
• • Full funnel nurture
• • Own the nurture layer across segments: email sequences, retargeting, and content syndication that keep prospects engaged past the first click
• • Design nurture that matches the buying stage and sales cycle of each segment
• • Work with our content writer and designer so nurture content is grounded in what prospects actually need, not just what we want to say
• • Kill or rebuild what isn't moving pipeline
• • Analytics & insight
• • Own pipeline reporting across segments and connect acquisition activity to actual revenue, not proxy metrics
• • Connect low-level attribution events to SQL and closed-won data so you know which programs are real
• • Use AI tools daily to surface patterns and move faster than manual analysis allows - this is baseline, not a differentiator
• • Bring insight to marketing, sales, and product in a way that changes decisions, not just informs them
• • Content & creative direction
• • Brief the designer and content writer with direction that produces results - not micro-management, not vague requests.
• • Make sure paid and organic acquisition reinforce each other, including AEO
• • Feed performance data back into content strategy
• • What success looks like
• • First 30 days: You've audited the paid stack across all three motions and met the Account Executive and Solutions Engineering teams, but your real focus is Advantage - understanding the account landscape and how ABM needs to work here.
• • By 60 days: The first Advantage actions are live - whatever gets the fastest, highest-impact results into market, whether that's early account targeting, a first outreach sequence, or something else entirely.
• • By 120 days: Advantage pipeline is showing real, measurable movement, with target accounts in active nurture.
• • Core stays stable and efficient.
• • Free isn't a focus area for this role right now.
• • What we're looking for
• • What you can do
• • You have deep, proven ABM experience - you've either built a program from scratch yourself, or been close enough to the center of one across multiple companies that you've seen it succeed and seen it fail.
• • You know what a strong program actually looks like, you can spot what's going wrong in someone else's, and you know what to do about it.
• • You can name a program, the ICP, the channel mix, and the outcome - and explain why you built it that way and what you'd do differently
• • You can look at attribution data, identify what is and isn't actually correlated to revenue, and reallocate budget accordingly - not just report on CTR and CPM
• • You can look at a dashboard full of data and quickly spot what's off - what's a benchmark issue versus a real problem - and know exactly what to do about it on the spot.
• • You don't need to write the queries yourself - our RevOps team and AI tooling handle that - but you know precisely what numbers matter, what data to ask for in the first place, and what conclusion to draw once you have it
• • You can design a nurture sequence for a sales cycle measured in weeks or months, built around where the buyer actually is, not a generic drip
• • You can brief a designer and a content writer with direction specific enough that the output performs without you micromanaging it
• • You can direct and hold an external performance agency accountable to pipeline outcomes, not just campaign activity
• • You can build a working collaboration model with sales from scratch - what marketing hands off, what marketing needs back, and how the handoff actually works
• • You can explain a specific campaign or program you killed - and why
• • Bonus points
• • Familiarity with HubSpot, GA4, and customer data platforms (learnable if you're strong everywhere else)
• • Experience in the Free plan / PLG side of acquisition
• • Reddit or other emerging-channel experience
• • Background in inventory, supply chain, or manufacturing software
• • Mindset & ways of working
• • Full funnel owner - you think from awareness to closed deal, not from ad click to landing page
• • You connect the dots across domains, not just channels - you move fluidly between paid strategy, ABM, sales alignment, and agency management, and you understand enough of each to see how they affect one another.
• • Seeing yourself as siloed to one lane would be the wrong fit here
• • Obsessed with numbers and growth - if something is trending down, you find the lever, you don't wait to be told
• • High ownership - broad scope, real support, and the expectation that you close gaps without being asked
• • Comfortable holding two very different motions at once - optimization on one side, 0-to-1 building on the other - and knowing when to context-switch
• • Genuinely curious about the buyer, not just the audience segment
• • Open to occasional travel to Tallinn and Canada
• • What we offer
• • A competitive, market-aligned salary and employee stock options
• • Opportunity to have a real impact at a global growth company and own a domain that directly drives revenue
• • Work with a talented, highly committed, global team across marketing, product, sales, and beyond - distributed and hybrid, with one office in Tallinn, Estonia
• • Flexible, remote-first work (we are a results-driven team)
• • Time off that's genuinely encouraged: statutory annual leave aligned with local requirements, with a global minimum of 4 weeks, 3 paid health days annually, and your birthday off
• • Fully paid 1-month sabbatical + EUR 1,000 travel budget after every four years at Katana
• • Home office stipend
• • Health & wellness stipend
• • Modern tools and tech, including AI-enabled tools that help you work smarter and stay focused on high-impact work
• • Automated Screening & AI Disclosure: We use automated tools including AI to help review applications and filter candidates. Final decisions are always made by people. If you're in a place that requires it, we'll ask your consent. Ask us anytime about what this means.