Francois-Olivier Grisel

Francois-Olivier Grisel

Marketing Leader in Sunnyvale, California, he/him

About

I'm a growth leader with a passion for building rockstar teams and driving hyper growth in B2B tech, from series A startups to large players. As an engineer by training, a marketer by profession, and a data geek at heart, I thrive working cross-functionally with product, engineering and marketing/sales teams to develop data-driven growth strategies.

My experience covers a broad range of marketing disciplines and channels including acquisition, engagement/retention, product-led growth, product marketing, co-marketing, channel marketing, and international expansion.

Contact

LinkedIn

Work Experience

2023 — Now
Remote

I lead the growth marketing team at Responsive. Our main responsibilities include:

  1. Delivering $XXM new business pipeline each quarter across inbound and outbound channels (web, SEO, SEM, ABM)

  2. Driving user activation and habit formation on the Responsive platform with lifecycle marketing programs, including in-product notifications and automated emails.

My team's key accomplishments include improving our SERP rankings from position 10+ to the top 3 in core keyword categories (rfp software, proposal management...), reducing our paid marketing CAC payback from 20+ months to sub 12 months, and doubling our number of positive reviews on G2 from 500 to 1,000+.

2021 — 2023
San Francisco

I led growth at Waitwhile, a leading customer flow management platform with 1,300+ customers including IKEA, LVMH, Staples, Costco...

In this role I had the opportunity to build a full stack growth team from scratch, including marketers, analysts, PMs, and designers. Some of our achievements include:

  • Reinventing Waitwhile's self-serve onboarding experience and introducing triggered comms which tripled our activation rates
  • Rebuilding our pricing & packaging strategy, resulting in a 2x increase in paid subscriptions
  • Growing upmarket by establishing a successful PLG motion in partnership with Sales, doubling the size of our Enterprise business in 18 months.
2020 — 2021
San Francisco, California

I joined Figma at the beginning of the pandemic to build their demand gen function, scaling it from zero paid marketing investment to a highly profitable ABM program generating 200 MQLs and $XM pipeline / mo.

2018 — 2020
Sunnyvale, California

I joined the G Suite team to build an SMB-focused product marketing group focused on defining the global GTM strategy for G Suite in the SMB segment, including narrative, pricing & packaging, promotions, and sales/partners enablement. I initiated a cross-functional collaborative group with the Ads and Geo team which resulted in an SMB-focused company OKR for 2020.

I also led the entire G Suite Product Marketing team (a group of 20 marketers) for 6 months ahead of a VP leadership hire, reorganizing the team in partnership with PM leadership, initiating the rebranding strategy into Google Workspace, and launching Google Meet in the early days of the pandemic.

2014 — 2018
Mountain View, California

Initially brought to the US to scale the Google Partners program across the Americas, I made my way up inside the Google Ads SMB team, ultimately leading a team of 30 marketers in charge of our SMB acquisition and same-store growth marketing programs in the Americas, across SMB segments (mid-market, agencies, longtail) and products (Google Ads, Google My Business).
My team consistently delivered >25% Y/Y growth on a $XB business.

2011 — 2014
Toronto, Canada

I was asked to move to Canada to build the AdWords acquisition marketing team there. I built a rockstar team of 4 marketers (including the future Country Marketing Manager), doubled the revenue impact from our AdWords acquisition marketing campaigns, invested a lot of time building co-marketing initiatives with various local brands (from the early Shopify team to RBC), and eventually launched Google's first ever channel marketing program - Google Partners - which ended up being my ticket to the US after 3+ years in Canada.

2008 — 2011
Paris, France

I was one of Google's first marketers in France, initially hired to develop partnership marketing efforts with institutions like La Poste/Coliposte, Century 21 or SFR to accelerate AdWords acquisition efforts in France, launching, and ended up launching one of Google's first SMB-focused telesales teams.

2004 — 2008
Paris, France

I worked on various B2B marketing projects for clients in the telecom industry across Europe and North Africa: Orange France, Orange UK, Vodafone UK, Tunisie Telecom...

Projects

2022

I re-designed Waitwhile's pricing & packaging strategy from the ground up, by analyzing our revenue retention cohorts, identifying our value metrics by segment, and project managing the entire launch leading to 2x conversion rate from freemium to paid.

2021

We established and scaled Figma's Enterprise ABM program from 0 to 200+ Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) per month, while keeping the cost/MQL constant. We established a performance marketing infrastructure including target account identification and enrichment, lead scoring and nurturing, conversion tracking, optimization, and reporting.

2020

We organized the consumer launch of Google Meet in 2 months after covid started, unbundling what was previously known as Hangouts Meet from G Suite.

2019

We partnered with other Google SMB teams (Ads, Geo, consumer Gmail...) to generate $XXXM cross-selling opportunities for G Suite. We established a company OKR to structure and encourage such collaboration across SMB-focused teams.

2018

We launched the new global marketing website for Google Ads, as part of the rebranding of AdWords into Ads. Through user testing and iterative experiments, we delivered a 20% increase in signup rate from the previous version of the website.

2017

My team contributed to deliver $XB in new business revenue in the Americas, growing +25% over a period of 16 months.

Education

2000 — 2003
Gif-sur-Yvette, France

French Engineer diploma, consistently ranked in the top #2 engineering degrees in France (GPA: 3.7)
Major in Digital Signal Processing: Algorithms, Programming Methods, Use of Specialized Processors (DSP), Design and Development of Digital Processing Systems

2002 — 2003
Atlanta, Georgia

Major in Telecommunications: Coding Theory and Applications, Digital Communications, Secure Communications, Electro-Optics
Minor in Mathematical Finance: Stochastic Processes, Numerical Methods in Finance, Finance and Investments, Macroeconomics

Certifications

2022

Long time fan of the Reforge growth learning community. Completed 4 programs myself (Marketing Strategy, Advanced Growth Strategy, Retention + Engagement, Marketing Leadership) and enrolled my entire team as a job benefit.

2022

Upleveling my analytics skills by working towards the Data Analyst certification on Datacamp, including SQL, Python, and data science courses.