Manager, Customer Marketing

FranConnect; Virginia; On-site; USD 100,000 - 125,000; Full time

Job summary

FranConnect is seeking a Manager of Customer Marketing to own the post-sale demand motion for 1,500+ brands and a million locations. You will lead expansion campaigns, adoption communications, and a reference/advocacy engine—ensuring a steady flow of case studies and current customer proof.

Collaborate across Sales, Content, and Product Marketing to drive results. You will partner with Customer Success, Support, and Marketing Operations to measure expansion and ensure consistent messaging across

Qualifications

• 4+ years in customer marketing, lifecycle marketing, or demand generation.
• Built and ran a reference/advocacy program with real supply.
• End-to-end case study production experience.
• Hands-on campaign execution in Pardot or equivalent.
• Proven expansion pipeline/adoption outcomes.
• Strong cross-functional partnership with CS, Sales, Product.
• AI proficiency beyond writing (segmentation, mining signals).
• Maintain a weekly scorecard and run experiments.

Responsibilities

• Own post-sale campaigns: cross-sell, upsell, adoption, renewal support, and win-back.
• Segment installed base and tailor campaigns by product, industry, tenure, and health.
• Lead audience, copy, build, QA, deployment, and performance in campaigns.
• Surface expansion signals to Sales and CS with campaign engagement context.
• Own onboarding, activation sequences, product communications, and newsletters.
• Manage reference and case study pipelines and ensure timely publication of proof.

Skills

Customer marketing

Reference program

Case studies

Pardot

Campaign execution

AI proficiency

Cross-functional collaboration

Metrics & scorecards

Education

Marketing/related degree

Tools

Pardot

Job description

Description

FranConnect is the leading enterprise software provider for franchise and multi-location businesses. For 25+ years, the FranConnect AI-powered platform has served as the backbone for sales, operations, and marketing for over 1,500 brands and one million locations worldwide. Iconic brands such as Bojangles, Capriotti’s, Gold’s Gym, Neighborly, and Papa John’s rely on FranConnect to expand locations, streamline unit operations, enhance collaboration, and improve profitability. Backed by private equity investor Serent Capital, FranConnect is headquartered in Herndon, Virginia, with global offices in Australia, India, Colombia, and Canada. For more information on FranConnect, visit www.franconnect.com.

Who is FranConnect?

At FranConnect, we believe great companies are built on great cultures — and that future success belongs to organizations willing to take meaningful risks, innovate, and evolve.

We’re building a workplace where people are empowered to grow, contribute meaningfully, and embrace the future of work. As part of our AI-first mindset, we encourage employees to stay curious, explore emerging technologies, think creatively, and use AI to work smarter, move faster, and drive greater value.

Why Marketing, Why Now

FranConnect is repositioning: from the system of record franchisors have relied on for decades to the performance platform that makes every unit and every system stronger. Marketing is the driving force behind that shift. This team owns the story we tell the market, the demand we create against it, and the proof that the story is true. It is a small team by design, built around people who can each do the work of several, and it is the growth engine the company is counting on.

That is why we hire self-starters, go-getters, and genuine experts in their discipline. You will not be handed a playbook. You will build one, run it, measure it, and improve it, in close partnership with Sales, Product, and Customer Success. An understanding of the franchise world — how franchisors and franchisees make decisions, what a development pipeline looks like, why unit economics drive everything — is a real plus.

AI proficiency here means more than using it to write faster. We expect every member of this team to be forward-thinking about how AI is changing the demand generation funnel itself: buyers who research through AI answer engines before they ever visit a website, intent signals that arrive earlier and from more places, outreach and nurture that AI agents can run when they have been trained well, and a funnel where attribution, qualification, and follow-up look different from the playbooks of five years ago. You will use AI in your daily work, and you will also help design how this team’s AI agents are trained, prompted, and quality-checked so that the whole team’s capacity grows. We are looking for people who are already thinking about what marketing looks like when an AI-era buyer is on the other side of the funnel.

Overview Of The Role

FranConnect is looking for a Manager of Customer Marketing to own the post-sale demand motion. Our installed base is more than 1,500 brands and a million locations, and it is both our largest growth opportunity and the source of the proof the rest of go-to-market runs on. You will own expansion and upsell campaigns, adoption communications, and the reference and advocacy engine — and you will guarantee a steady, predictable supply of case studies and referenceable customers that Sales, Content, and Product Marketing depend on.

Those two halves belong in one seat on purpose. The campaigns that drive adoption and expansion are the same campaigns that surface the customers worth putting on a stage, in a case study, or on a reference call. A customer who is getting results is a customer who will say so. Your job is to find them earlier, more systematically, and in greater numbers than a request-by-request approach ever will.

You will partner closely with Customer Success and Support, who know which accounts are thriving, with Sales, who know which proof points a deal needs, and with Marketing Operations, so expansion pipeline is measured the same way new-business pipeline is.

Primary Responsibilities

Expansion and Upsell Demand

• Own the post-sale campaign calendar: cross-sell, upsell, module adoption, renewal support, and win-back, planned against an expansion pipeline target.
• Segment the installed base by product held, industry, unit count, tenure, and health, and build campaigns to the segment rather than to the whole list.
• Build and run the campaigns yourself: audience, copy, build, QA, deployment, and performance, in partnership with Customer Success and the account team.
• Surface expansion signals — product usage, support themes, growth in unit count — to Sales and Customer Success with the campaign engagement attached.

Adoption Communications

• Own customer communications: onboarding and activation sequences, release and product communications, the customer newsletter, customer webinars, and lifecycle email.
• Hold adoption communications to adoption outcomes — feature activation, usage depth, event attendance — rather than to sends and opens.
• Keep what customers hear consistent with what the market hears: one set of facts, one voice, one visual system, in partnership with Content and Digital Marketing.

The Reference and Advocacy Engine

• Own reference supply against sales-cycle demand: a qualified, permissioned, and current reference roster, a reference desk with a published response standard, and rotation that protects customers from fatigue.
• Own the case study pipeline at the supply end: source and nominate candidates, secure legal and brand approvals, gather the outcome data, and hand a complete, verified package to Content Marketing for writing and publication.
• Run the review program on the sites buyers and AI answer engines read (G2, Capterra, TrustRadius): generation, rating, and response, against volume and rating targets.
• Build advocacy beyond the case study: the customer advisory board, customer speakers for events and industry stages, award submissions, user groups, and peer-to-peer connections.

Customer Proof

• Partner with Customer Success, Support, and Product to turn usage and outcome data into named, verifiable customer results, not platform totals.
• Maintain the proof inventory mapped to the narrative pillars, the industries we sell into, and the sales plays, and report where the gaps are before Sales finds them.
• Supply the proof that lowers a buyer’s risk at the point in the cycle where indecision actually costs us deals.

Scaling Customer Marketing with AI

• Train, prompt, and quality-control the customer marketing agents: segmentation and audience building, lifecycle and adoption drafting, review mining, and reference matching against an inbound request.
• Use AI to mine support tickets, Customer Success notes, and call recordings for proof candidates and advocacy signals, with a human review standard you own.
• Own the acceptance standard for anything agent-produced that reaches a customer, and document the prompts so the team can reuse them.

Operating Rhythm and Partnership

• Update your section of the marketing scorecard by Friday and arrive at the weekly knowing what is red and what you propose to do about it.
• Run one deliberate experiment a week with a hypothesis, a metric, a duration, and a decision rule stated in advance.
• Bring measurement needs to Marketing Operations before a program is built, so expansion pipeline and customer engagement are reportable from day one.

What You Are Accountable For

North Star: Expansion pipeline from the current customer base, with referenceable customer supply as the paired commitment

Primary Measures

• Expansion and cross-sell pipeline sourced from post-sale campaigns, against target
• Referenceable customers available against sales-cycle demand: roster size, fill rate on reference requests, and time to fill
• New case studies and named customer outcomes delivered per quarter, against target
• Review volume and rating on the priority review sites, against target

Diagnostic measures

• Installed-base engagement by segment: open, click, registration, and attendance
• Adoption lift on the features and modules a campaign was built to drive
• Advocacy participation: advisory board, customer speakers, awards, and user groups
• Proof coverage: the share of narrative pillars, industries, and sales plays with at least one current, named customer result
• Agent-assisted share of output and acceptance rate

Requirements

What we are looking for (minimum qualifications)

• 4+ years in customer marketing, lifecycle marketing, or demand generation with direct ownership of an installed-base number.
• You have built and run a reference or advocacy program with a real supply commitment, and can speak to how you kept it stocked and current rather than reactive.
• Case study production experience end to end: sourcing candidates, securing legal and brand approvals, gathering outcome data, and getting it published.
• Hands-on campaign execution in Pardot or equivalent, with segmentation built off CRM and product usage data.
• A track record held to expansion pipeline or adoption outcomes, not to sends, and the evidence to back it.
• The relationship skill this work takes: you are comfortable asking customers for something, and you earn the right first by making their results visible.
• Strong cross-functional partnership with Customer Success, Support, Sales, and Product, where you are a trusted partner rather than an inbound request.
• AI proficiency beyond writing, and in this role it is the point: you have directed AI agents to do real work (segmentation, drafting, mining customer data for signal) under a human quality bar, and you are already thinking about how customer proof has to change when buyers and AI answer engines decide a shortlist before anyone talks to us.
• The discipline an operating rhythm asks for: a scorecard updated before the meeting, one experiment a week, one owner and one date, and problems raised the day they appear.

Preferred

• Experience marketing to franchise, multi-unit, or multi-location businesses, and an understanding of franchisee economics and how operators make decisions.
• Experience running a review program on G2, Capterra, or TrustRadius and moving a rating, not just a review count.
• Experience standing up a customer advisory board, a user group program, or the customer track of a user conference.
• Experience inside a private-equity-backed company during a repositioning or brand relaunch.
• Experience building benchmark or original research from customer data.
• Undergraduate degree in Marketing, Communications, Business, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Compensation Overview

Target Base Salary Range: $100k - $125k USD

Variable Bonus: 10%

The compensation details listed represents a good-faith target range for this role. Actual pay at time of offer may vary based on a combination of factors including business needs, experience, skills, education, or location.