Head of Growth Email List
TL;DR
A head of growth email list is a set of contact records for the leader who owns acquisition, activation and conversion, almost always at a venture-backed company. The title is common in startups and rare in large enterprises, so it works as a company-stage filter at least as much as a role filter.
How to target heads of growth
| Filter | Set it to |
|---|---|
| Job title | Head of Growth, VP of Growth, Director of Growth, Growth Lead |
| Company size | 10 to 200 employees, the range where the title is actually used |
| Funding stage | Seed through Series B, the stage that creates the role |
| Business model | Self-serve product growth and sales-led growth built as separate lists |
What makes heads of growth different
Head of Growth is a stage signal before it is a job. It is common in venture-backed startups and largely absent from enterprises, where the same work is split across demand generation, product marketing and analytics under established titles. So a list of Heads of Growth is mostly a list of companies at a particular stage and funding position, which is useful information, but it means the company filter is doing most of the work and the title is a proxy for it. Treat it that way and the list gets better; treat it as a normal role filter and it silently excludes every larger company doing the same thing under another name.
The scope behind the title varies more than any other on this list. Some Heads of Growth own paid acquisition and nothing else. Some own onboarding and activation inside the product and sit closer to engineering than to marketing. Some own the entire funnel including sales development. Since the title does not tell you which, the honest way to segment is by what the company sells: self-serve product growth and sales-led growth are different jobs wearing the same label, and a message written for one is visibly irrelevant to the other.
They are measured on acquisition, activation, conversion and payback, and usually on how many experiments ship in a period. Experiment velocity is the tell that should shape the ask. This is a buyer who prefers a small test to a procurement process, will try a tool the same week they hear about it, and will drop it just as fast if the first test is flat. So the ask should be a trial with one measurable outcome rather than a scheduled evaluation, and pricing that allows a small start matters more than a discount at volume.
What is a head of growth measured on?
New user or account acquisition, activation of those users, conversion to paid, and payback on acquisition spend. Alongside those sits experiment throughput, because at this stage the number of tests run is treated as a leading indicator of everything else.
That combination means they buy speed of learning rather than capability. A tool that produces a readable result in a week beats a more complete one that needs a month of setup.
Why is the title a company-stage filter?
Because it emerged in venture-backed startups and stayed there. Larger organisations do the same work but call it demand generation, lifecycle marketing or product analytics, so filtering on Head of Growth quietly restricts the list to companies under a certain size and funding profile.
Use that on purpose. If you want the startup segment, the title is an efficient shortcut; if you want the work rather than the label, add the equivalent enterprise titles and drop the stage restriction.
How do you split self-serve from sales-led growth?
Look at whether the product can be bought without talking to anyone. In a self-serve company the Head of Growth is optimising onboarding, in-product conversion and pricing pages, and works with engineering. In a sales-led company they are feeding a sales team and the work looks like demand generation.
Those two want different tools and different proof. Building one list and one message for both is the most common way this segment gets wasted.
Frequently asked questions
It depends on the business model, and that is the point of segmenting on it. In self-serve companies the role sits between product and marketing and often reports to product; in sales-led companies it is a marketing role in everything but name.