Senior Acquisition Manager

About Katana

Katana is a remote-first, AI-first B2B SaaS company that builds powerful inventory and manufacturing software for 1,500+ businesses that make and sell physical products around the world.

We've just stepped into an exciting new phase of expansion - moving beyond small merchants into a larger market of modern, multi-channel, multi-location businesses. With that growth comes a second acquisition motion, a lot more complexity, and the chance to shape how we go after it. Our 100+ person team across 10+ countries is building what's next - together.

And that's where you come in.

If you're good at what you do, you've probably already seen it all. You've run the mature paid channels, optimized the inherited playbook, and know exactly what a well-oiled acquisition engine looks like from the inside. What you're looking for now is the chance to put your name on one, end to end.

This role is the opposite of that.

• Real ownership. At a bigger company, you optimize a machine someone else designed. Here, we're already closing Advantage deals - the product and the customers are real - but there's no ABM engine behind them yet. You design that engine.

• Budget authority from day one. You decide where the money goes, which channels we enter or exit, and when. That's not a privilege you earn after two years - it's the job from week one.

• Three motions, one seat. Free, Core, and Advantage each need something different from you. Few roles let you run product-led volume, self-serve paid, and enterprise ABM at once - most companies split these across three people or three teams.

• A credential that travels. "I built the ABM motion that took Katana upmarket" is a very different story from "I ran paid for the SMB segment at a company with an established playbook." That first-mover story counts for more with every year that passes.

This isn't a role for someone who wants a bigger budget to run the same playbook. It's for someone who wants to write the playbook - and is comfortable being judged on pipeline, not activity, from day one.

About the role

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.

To be clear about scope: 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.

What you'll do

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. Ours sits in between: a list that can run into the hundreds or low thousands, personalized enough to move people forward across multiple touchpoints

• 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. They know exactly what good looks like because you gave it to them clearly.

• 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. You present a clear diagnosis and a prioritized plan.

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. Core is running steadily - any wasted spend gets cut - but it's not where your time goes.

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.