Head of Marketing - Bolingbrook, IL

Who we are: Formic is on a mission to reshape American manufacturing by making automation accessible to every factory. As labor constraints rise, costs increase, and global competition intensifies, automation is no longer optional for manufacturers that want to stay competitive. We deliver automation through a Robotics-as-a-Service model that combines industrial robotics, proprietary software, and full-service support into a single, integrated solution. By removing the traditional barriers of cost, complexity, and risk, we enable manufacturers to deploy automation quickly and realize measurable gains in throughput, safety, and operational efficiency without large upfront capital investment. Backed by leading investors including Lux Capital, Initialized Capital, Blackhorn Ventures, and Mitsubishi HC Capital North America, Formic is scaling rapidly and building the foundation for a new era of high-performance, Made in America production. About the team: Formic's Marketing Team is the growth engine behind our commercial expansion. We move fast, experiment boldly, and build systems that scale. We work in close lockstep with Sales, RevOps, and Leadership to generate pipeline, sharpen our message, and get in front of the right manufacturers at the right time. This team is small, high-impact, and driven - and we're looking for someone who can match that energy. About this role: As our Head of Marketing, you will build, optimize, and lead a scalable engine for creating demand and qualified pipeline. You will own how Formic shows up in the market, how we identify and reach the manufacturers we can help, and how we turn that engagement into high quality opportunities for Sales. This is a broad, hands-on role spanning Marketing, lead generation, Sales Development, and GTM Engineering and managing a team to deliver across those areas. You'll bring those capabilities together around a common goal: creating qualified pipeline and quantifying through data and insights what's driving it. As Formic grows, you'll help determine how the team and these capabilities evolve. We're looking for someone who combines creativity with operating rigor. You'll set strategy, but you'll stay close enough to the work to understand what's actually happening. You'll establish clear priorities, ownership, and metrics, and make decisions based on results. When something works, you'll scale it. When it doesn't, you'll change it or stop doing it. You'll also build and develop the team around you. That means setting clear expectations, delegating real ownership, coaching people to get better, and holding the team accountable for results. We want a leader who welcomes challenge, seeks out evidence that their assumptions may be wrong, and changes course when the data or the team tells them something different. This is a builder role. One day you might be sharpening Formic's positioning; the next, reviewing pipeline performance with Sales, coaching an SDR, digging into why a campaign isn't converting, or working with a GTM Engineer to test a completely different way of reaching manufacturers. You should be equally comfortable asking "What should we try?" and "Did it work?" We're not looking for someone to bring us a standard B2B marketing playbook or generate activity for activity's sake. We want someone who creates focus from ambiguity, turns experiments into learning, turns learning into repeatable systems, and can clearly connect the work of their organization to business results. You will own the engine that feeds our sales and deployments. In this role you will: Own Brand & Marketing - Own Formic's marketing strategy and how we show up in the market. - Develop and continually sharpen our positioning, messaging, and story. - Translate Formic's technology, business model, and customer value proposition into messaging that resonates with manufacturers and their economic buyers. - Own content, creative, video, website, customer stories, events, campaigns, thought leadership, PR, product marketing, and other channels that build awareness and demand. - Develop differentiated messaging across industries, use cases, personas, and stages of the buying journey. - Turn customer outcomes, deployments, product capabilities, and what we're learning in the field into compelling content. - Build Formic's brand within manufacturing while ensuring our marketing investments support clear commercial objectives. Own Demand & Pipeline Generation - Own the creation of qualified pipeline across Marketing, lead generation, SDR/outbound, ABM, events, paid, organic, partnerships, and emerging channels. - Establish clear pipeline goals and build repeatable systems to identify, engage, and qualify manufacturers that fit Formic's ideal customer profile, optimizing channel mix, conversion, and resources. - Lead and develop our Sales Development function, including targeting, prospecting strategy, messaging, sequencing, coaching, productivity, and performance. - Establish clear funnel definitions, ownership, lead routing, and follow-up processes to ensure every source of inbound and outbound interest is captured, acted upon, and effectively handed off to Sales. - Partner closely with Sales and RevOps on territory priorities, pipeline needs, lead quality, conversion, and feedback from the market. - Measure pipeline contribution, progression, conversion, and cost by source and channel, connecting marketing investments to closed-won revenue and informing where to invest, optimize, or stop. Build Our GTM Innovation Capability - Lead our GTM Engineering capability, using AI, automation, data, enrichment, personalization, and emerging technologies to improve how we identify, reach, engage, and qualify potential customers. - Own the effectiveness and evolution of our marketing technology ecosystem, including CRM integrations, outbound platforms, lead routing, data quality, attribution, and reporting, in partnership with Sales and RevOps. - Build and optimize scalable systems for account identification, segmentation, prospecting, personalization, campaign execution, and lead management. - Evaluate existing tools and workflows, identifying opportunities to simplify, automate, integrate, consolidate, or eliminate work rather than defaulting to additional tools or headcount. - Drive disciplined experimentation across channels, technologies, data sources, and approaches, establishing clear hypotheses, measurable outcomes, and decisions about what to scale, change, or stop. - Ensure our GTM infrastructure is reliable, documented, and maintainable, with clear ownership, appropriate data governance, and minimal dependency on any single person or external partner. Own the Funnel and the Numbers - Establish clear visibility into the entire funnel, from target account through qualified opportunity, pipeline progression, and revenue. - Define and own a focused set of metrics that measure pipeline creation, conversion, velocity, cost, channel effectiveness, and commercial impact. - Partner with Sales and RevOps to ensure reliable data, consistent reporting, and a shared understanding of performance. - Establish a disciplined operating cadence that translates performance insights into decisions about strategy, priorities, budget, and resources, holding the organization accountable for outcomes rather than activity. Create Focus and Accountability - Translate broad company objectives into clear priorities, ownership, expectations, and measurable outcomes that connect the team's work to business goals. - Make disciplined decisions about priorities and resources, challenging assumptions, stopping initiatives that aren't delivering results, and adapting as we learn. - Stay close enough to the work to identify problems early, remove obstacles, and hold people accountable without becoming a bottleneck to execution. - Foster a culture of transparency, constructive challenge, and open communication about performance, priorities, tradeoffs, and lessons learned. - Establish accountability for external agencies, contractors, and technology partners, including deliverables, performance, costs, documentation, and continuity, while building sustainable processes that preserve institutional knowledge and support organizational change. Build and Lead the Team - Lead and align a multidisciplinary organization spanning Marketing, content and creative, lead generation, Sales Development, and GTM Engineering around shared commercial goals. - Build a high-performing team by establishing clear expectations, delegating meaningful ownership, coaching and developing talent, and addressing performance gaps directly. - Assess existing capabilities, recognize and develop the strengths of the people already here, and determine what additional skills and resources we'll need as we grow. - Hire thoughtfully and build organizational capabilities that create leverage, rather than adding unnecessary layers or headcount. - Foster a culture of creativity, curiosity, accountability, experimentation, and continuous improvement, where people feel empowered to challenge assumptions and solve problems. What Makes You a Great Fit: - Experience building and leading Marketing, Growth, Demand Generation, or similarly broad functions in high-growth B2B companies, with measurable commercial results. - A track record of building, improving, and scaling marketing and pipeline-generation systems, not simply inheriting and managing established operations. - Deep understanding of B2B demand generation, funnel economics, segmentation, conversion, attribution, and how Marketing, SDR, and Sales work together to create and convert pipeline. - Experience developing differentiated positioning and messaging for complex products, markets, and buying decisions. - Strong technical fluency and demonstrated experience evaluating, integrating, and optimizing marketing technology, data, automation, and AI-enabled GTM systems, with the ability to diagnose problems and make informed architectural decisions. - An AI-native mindset, with demonstrated ability to apply emerging technologies, experiment rigorously, evaluate results, and turn successful approaches into scalable capabilities. - Strong people leadership, including building and developing teams, delegating meaningful ownership, addressing performance gaps, and leading effectively through growth and organizational change. - An operating style that combines creativity, analytical rigor, intellectual flexibility, and accountability, with the judgment to challenge assumptions, make difficult tradeoffs, and change course when evidence warrants it. - The ability to operate strategically and tactically, creating clarity from ambiguity, communicating effectively across functions, and staying close enough to execution to understand and solve problems. Bonus points if you have: - Experience in manufacturing, industrial automation, robotics, industrial technology, or similarly complex B2B markets with long sales cycles and multiple decision-makers. - Experience directly building or leading SDR organizations, including account-based and territory-based outbound strategies. - Experience building or leading GTM Engineering, Growth Engineering, or similar technical growth capabilities. What Success Looks Like Within your first year, Formic has a marketing and pipeline-generation engine that we understand, measure, and know how to scale. We know who we should target, how to reach them, which messages resonate, which channels create qualified opportunities, what those opportunities cost, and where we should invest next. There is clear ownership across the funnel. Marketing, lead generation, Sales Development, and GTM Engineering operate as one connected organization, with a tight feedback loop into Sales. The team knows what matters and what it's accountable for. Experiments have hypotheses and measurable outcomes. Successful ideas become repeatable systems. Unsuccessful ones produce learning and stop consuming resources. Decisions about priorities, budget, and headcount are grounded in results. Our marketing and GTM infrastructure is reliable, integrated, and well understood. We have confidence in our data, clear accountability for lead management, and systems that the team can operate and improve independently. Technology and vendor decisions are deliberate, economically justified, and aligned with our commercial priorities. Most importantly, Sales has a consistent and growing flow of qualified opportunities, and we can explain what is creating them. That's the engine you'll own. Our Total Rewards: At Formic, we believe people do their best work when they feel supported both professionally and personally. That’s why we offer a comprehensive benefits and perks package for full-time, U.S.-based team members, including: - Equity in Formic: Participate in our stock option program and share in the success of a fast-growing start-up backed by leading global investors - Competitive & Uncapped Commission Structure: Designed to reward performance and impact in commission-eligible roles - Comprehensive Healthcare Coverage: Medical, dental, and vision insurance through Blue Cross Blue Shield and Unum, with 99% of employee premiums covered and 75% coverage for dependents, with optional buy-up plans available - Additional Insurance Benefits: FSA and DCFSA, life insurance, short-term disability, and long-term disability through Unum, all 100% employer-paid - Employee Assistance Program (EAP): Fully funded by Formic, offering support when you need it most - Paid Parental Leave Program: Up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave - Company-sponsored 401(k): Invest in your future with our company-facilitated retirement savings plan - Home Office Stipend: A one-time allowance for fully remote and hybrid employees to support an at-home or on-the-road work setup - Monthly Cell Phone Reimbursement: Monthly stipend toward personal phone and internet expenses - Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need, when you need it, supported by our flexible PTO policy Compensation Philosophy Formic’s pay and equity packages are thoughtfully benchmarked against peer companies at a similar growth stage. Equity represents a meaningful part of our mutual investment: when Formic succeeds, so do you. Final offers are customized based on experience, geographic location, market considerations, and a candidate’s preferred balance of cash and equity. Our goal is to attract and reward top talent who will have significant impact, and we are open to thoughtful discussions to align on the right structure. Compensation Range: $145,000—$220,000 USD What we look for: We’re building this company from the ground up, and every person we hire has an outsized impact on our culture, performance, and trajectory. While each team member brings unique strengths and perspectives, we look for people who align with our Operating Principles and embody them in action. If this sounds like you, Formic may be the right place for you! - Fearless Optimism: You make bold bets and default optimistic. You believe in the mission, aren’t paralyzed by risk, and fear inaction more than failure. You see ambiguity as opportunity and bring energy to building what doesn’t yet exist. - Create the Magic: You absorb complexity so customers don’t have to. Whether your customer is external or internal, you focus on delivering experiences that are clear, fast, value-added, and outcome-driven. You don’t say “not my job.” You make things work. - Today, Not Tomorrow: You have a bias to action. You close the loop. You take extreme ownership. You understand that speed compounds, and you don’t confuse activity with results. - Seek Truth: You think from first principles. You value data over ego and strong opinions loosely held. You’re willing to challenge assumptions, including your own, in pursuit of the best answer. - Made of Rubber: You are resolute and adaptable. When things break or priorities shift, you rebound stronger. You treat setbacks as learning moments and move forward with grit. - One Formic: You operate without silos. You practice radical helpfulness, document clearly, and make clean handoffs. You assume positive intent and prioritize team success over individual credit. Equal Opportunity Employment: Formic is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion or religious creed, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, marital status, family or parental status, disability, military or veteran status, or any other basis protected by law. All employment decisions are based on a person’s merit, business needs, and role requirements. If you require further accommodations or have questions regarding accessibility of our roles, please reach out to [email protected]. AI Use: At Formic, fairness and transparency are at the heart of our hiring process. We use AI-powered tools in some interviews to help our teams evaluate candidate responses, but all final hiring decisions are made by humans. You can learn more about how AI is used in our recruitment process by reviewing our AI Hiring Disclosure linked here.