How to Scale a Lifecycle Marketing Team From 2 to 25 People

Lifecycle marketing teams are chronically under-resourced — until they learn to speak the language that gets them funded. Julie Foley Long, Senior Director of Lifecycle Marketing, Operations, and Growth Systems at Grammarly, built her team from 2 to 25 people over seven years. The single biggest unlock wasn't hiring or tooling. It was changing the vocabulary her team used to talk about results: replacing opens and clicks with incrementality, LTV, and CAPEX ROI. This session is a practical guide to earning executive trust, securing headcount, and building a lifecycle function that compounds over time. What you'll learn: - Why shifting your reporting language from opens/clicks to incrementality and LTV is what actually gets lifecycle teams funded - How holdout testing is more defensible than attribution models when making the case for investment - Why applying a 50% haircut to your own results builds more executive credibility than presenting full numbers - How to structure a lifecycle team around specialist-strategist pairs, with junior high-potential staff as force multipliers - What "invite people into your lane" means in practice, and how cross-functional collaboration builds lasting organizational authority - How to lead a performance review conversation with incremental ROI calculations instead of engagement metrics