Vertical Marketing Manager, Automotive & Emerging SMB Verticals

The Position

CallRail is looking for a lead engagement platform: we show businesses which marketing drives their calls, forms, and chats, and we help them answer, qualify, and route those leads around the clock. We're looking for a Vertical Marketing Manager to own a portfolio of our emerging markets, with automotive at the center. Think of the role as general manager for that portfolio: you set the strategy, you own the number, and you're the company's go-to on these markets.

You'll build the personas, positioning, and messaging for these verticals, verticalizing our go-to-market narrative for each audience. From there you'll partner with demand generation, customer marketing, and content on how it comes to life, and work closely with sales, product, and leadership on what we build and say. Expect roughly equal parts strategy and execution.

Automotive is the priority. It's one of our fastest-growing segments, and the aftermarket — repair and service businesses, tire and quick-service shops, collision centers, and the parts suppliers and retailers who serve them — is where you'll go deepest. Alongside it, you'll own a portfolio of our emerging small business verticals. They sit at different stages and require different levels of investment, and determining where to focus is a core part of the role. What connects them is the customer: small businesses that win or lose on the leads they capture.

 

What You'll Do 

• You act like an owner. These markets are your line of business. You know their performance, their risks, and their opportunities inside and out, and you carry the accountability that comes with it.
• You bring an informed point of view. You represent home services in cross-functional and leadership conversations, and your perspective carries weight because it's grounded in real expertise — what customers are telling you, what the data shows, what competitors are doing.
• You advocate for what your markets need. You don't wait for a door to open; you open it. When you see something we need in order to win, you build the case for it, bring the rationale and the numbers, and champion it until it gets a real decision.
• You go deep. You're genuinely curious about this industry, its buyers, and the forces shaping it. You want to keep learning, testing, and refining what works.

What You'll Own

Portfolio strategy and business performance

• Own the go-to-market strategy across your automotive & other SMB verticals: how we position and message to each audience, and the plan to hit our acquisition and revenue goals
• Decide where your time and our investment go. These markets won't all need the same thing, and setting that balance — then making the case for it — is yours to own
• Live in the numbers that define the health of the business: customers, new MRR, churn, ARPU, conversion rate, and product adoption. You'll spot emerging trends and issues early, work cross-functionally to understand what's driving them, and bring a plan when one is needed.
• Report on performance to leadership with the insight and executive presence to explain what's changing, what it means, and what you're doing about it

Automotive market and competitive expertise

• Be CallRail's subject matter expert on the automotive aftermarket: the buyers, the workflows, the operational realities, the vendor landscape, and the economics of how these businesses grow
• Own the automotive buyer personas and the value propositions, positioning, and messaging built on them — the work that differentiates CallRail in an increasingly crowded lead engagement and AI voice market
• Build the proof that makes our case credible: customer stories, benchmarks, and ROI framing grounded in how these businesses actually operate
• Track the competitive set continuously: who's winning, who's new, where they beat us, where we beat them, and what we should do about it. Feed that intelligence to product, sales, and leadership
• Regularly surface the headwinds and tailwinds shaping the market and translate them into implications for our strategy
• Validate market requirements through customer interviews, surveys, win/loss analysis, sales insight, and usage data
• Be the face of CallRail in the automotive market: trade shows, industry speaking engagements, webinars, panels, podcasts, etc.

Your broader vertical portfolio

• Own the positioning and messaging for the other emerging small business verticals, scaling the depth to the opportunity. 
• Keep a live read on each: where we're winning, where we're losing, and which ones are showing early signs of becoming a bigger bet
• Size and pressure-test opportunities, in these markets and in ones we haven't entered: how big, how winnable, what it would take, and what we would have to be right about
• Bring recommendations with a clear case for investing or passing. Knowing which markets to walk away from matters as much as knowing which to chase
• Run early, lightweight tests where the signal looks promising — positioning, messaging, and proof — and build a repeatable approach the team can use the next time we look at a new vertical

Cross-functional leadership

• Serve as the hub between sales, product marketing, customer marketing, demand generation, and product development, feeding market insight into each function and making sure everyone is marching in the same direction
• Serve as the messaging authority for your verticals: consulting across marketing for campaign and content development
• Pressure-test the work happening across teams against a simple bar: does it solve a real customer pain point, strengthen our competitive position, resonate with the segment we're targeting, and drive measurable results?
• Partner with product development teams as the voice of your customers, bringing market insight that shapes the roadmap
• Enable sales and support: train them on the problems we solve for these buyers, and work with sales enablement to build the internal tools and external collateral they need

 

What You'll Need

• BS/BA and 4–6 years of experience in a strategic marketing role focused on small business buyers, including direct experience marketing to automotive businesses
• A track record of owning a strategy end to end and being accountable for the results, not just executing someone else's plan
• Experience entering or evaluating a new market: sizing the opportunity, building the case, and standing up positioning where none existed
• Strong analytical instincts and genuine comfort with data — you can get to the story behind the metric and build a case around it
• Excellent written and verbal communication, and the confidence and presence to represent your point of view to senior leaders and to external audiences
• Demonstrated ability to influence and align cross-functional partners without formal authority
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving environment where you'll prioritize, make tradeoffs, and shift between strategic thinking and hands-on execution in the same day
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 If you do not meet all the requirements listed, we still encourage you to apply! No job description is perfect, and we may also have another opportunity that aligns with your skills and experience.

 

Additional Perks

• Healthcare (one option covered at 100% for employees), Dental & Vision Coverage
• Competitive HSA with company matchin