The Head of Marketing resume,
and the pipeline behind it.
A Head of Marketing usually owns the whole function and none of the commercial plan. The page collects launches, campaigns and a rebrand, the work that visibly finished. The person reading it, often a chief executive with no marketer above you to translate, wants two figures: what the function cost, and what came back.
One marketer in the room
The seat exists in two shapes. In one you are the senior-most marketer, reporting to a chief executive or a founder, with every discipline beneath you and nobody above to argue the budget on your behalf. In the other you sit under a CMO or a group function and own execution for a market, a product line or a territory. The first is accountable for what marketing is worth. The second is accountable for what it ships. A page that settles neither will be read as the second.
After that the reading is disciplines and money. Which parts of marketing were yours by name, and which sat elsewhere. A Head of Marketing without product marketing briefs work against positioning somebody else wrote; one without the website is renting the only asset that runs all year. Those constraints belong on the page, not in the third interview.
Which seat you held: senior-most marketer reporting to a chief executive, or a functional lead executing a plan set above you.
The disciplines you owned, named, and the ones you did not. Demand, brand, content, product marketing, events, web and marketing operations rarely sit in one place.
Annual budget with the working-media share, and whether you set the split between brand and demand or received it.
The buying route you fed: a quota-carrying sales force, an unassisted checkout, a reseller network, or a procurement team at a very large customer. Each changes what marketing is for.
What the budget returned
Every figure below is one the finance team could pull without asking marketing for help. That is the standard. A number that exists only inside a marketing dashboard will be treated as the function's opinion of itself, however carefully it was built.
Marketing-sourced pipeline as a share of the sales plan, with the attribution rule in one clause. A share says how much of the number depended on you; an absolute figure never does.
Acquisition cost by channel rather than blended, including the worst channel. The blend conceals the line that should have been closed, and closing it is the decision being tested for.
Budget in currency and as a percentage of revenue, with the brand and demand split at the start and end of tenure. That movement is the clearest record of what you chose to fund.
Team by discipline with headcount, plus what you brought in-house or handed to an agency. Fourteen people with no analyst is a different operation from eight with one.
Sales acceptance rate on what marketing handed over, and the reasons for rejection. It is the only demand figure sales scores rather than marketing, which is why it survives an interview.
The programmes you stopped and where the money went instead. Reallocation is the part of this job that requires authority, and almost nobody writes it down.
Three lines that report motion
The sentences below appear on nearly every Head of Marketing page. Each records work that took place. None records what it cost or what came back, which is what the budget was approved against.
“Delivered 2.4 million impressions and 38% growth in engagement.” Impressions are inventory bought, not demand created. State what the same money produced further down: enquiries, accepted opportunities, closed revenue.
“Owned the marketing technology stack: automation platform, CRM integration and a customer data platform.” Tooling is a cost line. Name what the stack changed — enquiries handled per person, hours from form to first call, records that were finally usable.
“Supported the sales organisation with collateral, events and enablement.” Support is a posture, not a contribution. Give the share of accepted opportunities the function created on its own, and what happened to them afterwards.
Three lines, rewritten.
The same fact, made checkable. Every figure is illustrative of the shape an evidenced line takes — nothing here is invented on your behalf.
The claim on the left is not wrong. It is simply unreadable as evidence: nothing in it can be checked, compared or priced. The version on the right makes the same statement in a form a search partner can act on.
Executed multi-channel marketing campaigns that increased brand visibility and lead volume.
Owned $3.6M of spend against a $40M sales plan. Contribution reached $14M, 35% of that plan, under one rule signed with the sales VP: first qualifying touch, 90-day window. Cost per won customer ran from $410 through paid search to $2,900 at events.
Managed a team of 12 across content, design, digital and events.
Grew the function from 4 to 12: five in demand, three in content, two in product marketing, one designer, one analyst. Brought paid media in-house and cut agency fees from 34% to 11% of budget, moving $780k into working media without raising the total.
Owned the marketing calendar and delivered all campaigns on schedule.
Stopped three of nine recurring programmes in two quarters — a print title, a sponsorship and an outbound email vendor — and moved $640k into the two channels returning opportunities under $700. Total spend flat; opportunities per quarter from 120 to 190.