Director, Global Strategic Events

The Director, Global Strategic Events owns a company's events function at a leadership level - accountable for the portfolio of events the company runs and shows up at, the operating model and ROI standard behind them, the team that delivers them, and the budget the whole thing runs on. The scope is the events discipline specifically: the global event portfolio and calendar (owned flagship and user conferences, the field and regional program, third-party trade shows and sponsorships, executive and hosted events, and virtual / webinar events), the events operating model (the lifecycle from strategy brief to post-event measurement, the event tiers and their playbooks, the experience and brand-at-event standard, the tooling and agency framework, and duty-of-care / contingency), the event ROI and measurement standard (how every event is scoped, measured, and defended - and the lead-capture-and-follow-up compact with demand gen and sales that turns attendance into pipeline), the total events budget within a delegated envelope and its allocation across the portfolio, and the team and headcount (the event managers, specialists, producers, and agencies, hired and developed and staffed to a peak-heavy calendar). Core ownership is the operating logic that makes events a marketing engine rather than a cost center: which events to own, attend, sponsor, or cut; the flagship and executive-event strategy; the tiering that puts the money where the return is; and the standard and the follow-up compact that make the return real and measurable. This is a director-level, leader-of-leaders seat reporting to a VP of Marketing or CMO, leading a team that runs from a couple of event managers to a global events organization, and partnering across demand gen, product marketing, sales, brand / comms, finance, and the executive team. It is deliberately not a hands-on production seat and not the whole-marketing seat. The Director is accountable for the portfolio and the outcomes but works through the event managers who run individual events, sets the operating model and ROI standard rather than building the run-of-show, and owns the events slice rather than the whole marketing org or its total budget. What separates great from average is turning a calendar of events into a governed portfolio that returns pipeline and brand the business can plan on: a portfolio tiered by contribution rather than tradition, a flagship strategy that earns its outsized spend, an ROI standard and a follow-up compact that prove the return instead of asserting it, a budget allocated where the pipeline is, and a team that runs a peak-heavy calendar to one bar without the Director in every event. A mediocre events director runs a busy calendar, measures success by attendee counts and stage photos, cannot say which events to cut, and lets leads die in the badge scanner; a great one runs a measurable events portfolio the business forecasts against, cuts and doubles down with evidence, and knows exactly which calls are the manager's, which are theirs, and which belong up the chain.