"Losing tens of thousands of dollars on sales and marketing."
1. Do you mean that you had a negative ROI from this branding/acquisition spend, or it failed to meet your expectations? In other words, you didn't see the sales return you expected. ie. you thought you'd see a CTR of 3.5% and it was only 1.75%.
2. Did you spend this money on consultants or other things like technology, lead databases, etc. and they clearly didn't deliver (meaning it was more clear fraud/failing to fulfill the contact then just not seeing the expected ROI)?
Every company who has ever invested >$100K has "lost" tens of thousands of dollars as described in #1. It’s inevitable that some areas of your spend will be lower than others, but this “loss” perception can be due to faulty marketing spend attribution. (Attribution is way beyond this response).
>>>>>First, I’d be happy to talk to you about filling this role.
Alternately, this is what I'd do if you just wanted a demand generation person:
1. Research your target markets at the buyer level. What other services/technologies does this cohort purchase or has purchased in the last 1-5 years. (Purchase can mean subscribe if you're talking SaaS).
2. What are the top 4-5 vendors of these services?
3. Identify the ones that started their traction rise 4-5 years ago.
4. Go to LinkedIn and do a keyword search for those companies. Within the company results, use keywords like acquisition marketing, go to market, and demand generation to find former employees.
5. Create a list of those individuals. Eliminate those with titles below Manager.
6. See where they are now. If they're out freelancing, that's whom I'd contact first.
What you're trying to do is find someone with recent domain experience who made a meaningful contribution (lead velocity from among your target audience) to his/her former employer.
As I said, I’d be happy to talk with you about the bigger picture because demand gen is a subset of an integrated marketing and sales strategy. In particular, I would emphasize getting really granular with your awareness-conversion funnel, from confirming benefit-centric messaging and reviewing your landing page and site metrics, to your product trial experience and retention activities.
I'm happy to talk with you about specifics.
