Description

Join Salesforce's Customer Insights team, a core function within the marketing organization responsible for delivering objective, actionable insights that inform our marketing strategy, positioning, and messaging.

As Senior Research Lead, you will own research projects and workstreams for stakeholders across marketing. You will manage studies from initial scoping through delivery, apply judgment on methodology, contribute to AI-assisted workflows, and help build repeatable processes that raise the quality floor across the team. Your first project in summer 2026: keynote message testing ahead of Dreamforce.

This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who operates with meaningful autonomy, handles complex and concurrent work, and consistently delivers at a high bar before findings reach senior marketing leaders.

What You'll Do

• Lead and Execute Primary Research: Own research projects and workstreams for marketing stakeholders. Translate ambiguous business questions into well-designed studies with a clear point of view on what the research will answer and why it matters. Maintain full accountability for quality throughout.
• Apply the Right Methods: Apply judgment on methodology across complex, high-visibility studies. Know when quantitative, qualitative, or mixed approaches are right, and why. Decisions often need to be made quickly, defended to senior stakeholders, and adapted as briefs evolve. Work is a mix of supplier-led and in-house execution; you need to be comfortable with both.
• Synthesize Across Studies: Connect findings across projects to surface integrated conclusions. You deliver strong data storytelling, choose the right visualization, and frame the right narrative — landing with senior stakeholders and driving decisions.
• Drive Stakeholder Alignment: Build trusted relationships with senior stakeholders. Scope studies with a clear point of view on what they will answer and why the investment is worth it. Communicate findings in terms of decisions and actions, not research outputs.
• Build AI-Assisted Team Practices: Use AI tools to accelerate and sharpen research work. Help establish team practices around where AI adds genuine value and where it needs to be checked carefully. Set a high bar for what AI output looks like before it reaches a stakeholder.
• Manage Concurrent Workstreams: Handle multiple concurrent projects without losing track of quality or timelines. Anticipate what's coming and stay ahead of it.
• Manage Suppliers and Research Partners: Own relationships with external research agencies and vendors across your projects. Set expectations, maintain quality standards, and keep concurrent workstreams on track.
• Build Processes That Scale: Introduce repeatable approaches that make the team's work more consistent and efficient: frameworks for study design, synthesis templates, QA checkpoints, delivery standards.

What We're Looking For

• Research Depth: A strong foundation in both quantitative and qualitative primary research, with experience running complex, high-visibility studies. Equally important: you know when you need to bring in outside expertise to close gaps in your skillset.
• Organizational Fluency: You understand how research operates inside a complex organization: navigating ambiguous direction, competing stakeholder priorities, and audiences who did not commission the research. Client-side experience is the most common path to this, but what matters is whether you have genuinely operated in that environment.
• Execution at Scale: You are comfortable managing more than one project at a time without dropping quality. You stay organized, anticipate blockers, and keep work moving.
• Process Orientation: You notice when something is being done the hard way and fix it in a way that scales. You document, standardize, and share.
• Stakeholder Credibility: You operate comfortably at a senior level, communicate in business terms, and build the kind of trust that gets you in the room before a study is scoped.
• Communication and Presence: You present recommendations, not just findings, to senior leadership, secure buy-in on direction, and field hard questions with credibility. Strong written and verbal communication are both essential.
• Influence Without Authority: You make the people around you more effective. You share what you know, raise the bar through example, and bring others along without needing a management title to do it.
• Openness to AI: You are curious about how AI can make research faster and sharper. Prior experience building AI-assisted workflows is a strong plus, but the aptitude and desire to learn matters more than a long track record.

Nice to Have

• Background in enterprise software, B2B technology, or CRM
• Familiarity with Salesforce products or the broader ecosystem