Christopher Grouchy
Founder of Convictional
Christopher Grouchy
Founder of Convictional
Canada
Overview
Work Experience
President & Co-founder
2018 - 2024
Convictional is rebuilding B2B trade for suppliers and buyers, starting with retailers, marketplaces, and distributors. Historically, these aggregators have tied up working capital by purchasing inventory and absorbing risk from their suppliers. With Convictional, enterprise retailers, marketplaces, and distributors can eliminate the need to procure inventory while growing revenue opportunities. We do this by making it seamless for aggregators to onboard and integrate with any third-party brand and manufacturer — historically a manual process requiring a large team of people and a seven-figure IT budget. Every vendor onboarded represents a vendor that's added to Convictional's Seller Network. Enterprise aggregators can connect once and start onboarding existing and new vendors. We're backed by Y Combinator and other leading Silicon Valley investors.
Guest Lecturer, Ecommerce
2016 - 2021
COMM 339 - Digital Marketing and eCommerce. Lecture on high tech entrepreneurship and ecommerce. Conceptualized and implemented a Shopify student entrepreneurship project across the entire course. As part of the project, students were assembled into small teams and created their own startups on Shopify's commerce platform with a micro digital marketing budget. The learning outcomes of the project are to develop an ecommerce brand, go-to-market strategy, and create a store with the highest return on investment and conversion rates. Students were encouraged to leverage Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, and other growth channels to drive traffic to their sites. Due to its success in its first year, the ecommerce project returned as the capstone assignment for the course in 2017.
New Markets, Shopify Capital
2017 - 2018
Worked with a small special projects team to find product market fit for various Shopify products. My specific focus was on figuring out the distribution playbook for Shopify Capital.
Enterprise Account Executive
2016 - 2018
Contributions: Outbound selling, net new business, consistent quota attainment, pipeline management, product marketing/positioning, hiring, CRM management, deal strategy, new market exploration. Highlights: 1) Achieved 106% of FY17 full-year sales quota within three quarters. 2) Individually contributed +$1MM in ARR in less than 12 months. 3) Fastest ramp across outbound team of ~30 reps. 4) Delivered consistent quota attainment (monthly and quarterly). 5) Operated full-cycle sales cadence (opening and closing) with technology executives from Fortune 500s, scale ups, and startups. Notable closed clients include Visa (F500), Sealed Air (F500), Zendaya (launch featured in Vogue), Keen Home (Shark Tank), Pavlok (Shark Tank), Jennifer Adams (home products), BRIKA (marketplace), and many more. 6) Identified and validated new market opportunity in Shopify Capital (growth capital), and expanded sales playbook across the team. Led merchant financing of +700k in the process. Explored other upmarket opportunities for Shopify Plus in the Private Equity and Venture Capital industry. Shopify Plus powers the world's fastest growing brands. Built on the back of the Shopify platform which is powering over 500,000 merchants worldwide, Shopify Plus is helping power the commerce dreams of legendary companies/brands like Google, Tesla, Fashion Nova, MVMT, Tony Robbins, RedBull, GE, L'Oreal, Kanye West, Wikipedia, The LA Lakers, and UPS.
Enterprise Account Executive
2016 - 2018
See description above.
Product Marketing (EPM Cloud)
2015 - 2016
Joined Oracle as the company launched a series of new applications built exclusively for the cloud. In my role, I worked with the Enterprise Performance Management product marketing team and managed two internal products. Projects I worked on included: - Maintaining an email content roundup platform that circulates information on Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) products to over 6000 Oracle sales representatives on a weekly basis. - Supplementing the content roundup platform with a weekly direct-to-email "Echo Chamber" content report, which provides social content on Oracle products to thousands of Oracle employees. - Gathered primary customer feedback data through an in-person focus group which included 10 IT executives from Canadian enterprises
Sales & Business Development (Collaboration Products)
2015 - 2016
Cisco is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate, and collaborate. Cisco's network-centric platform is changing the way we work, live, play and learn. Supported the sales pipeline of key mid-market and enterprise accounts by helping business partners meet their strategic objectives by leveraging products and services from Cisco's collaboration architecture. Specifically focused on delivering customer value through VoIP, telepresence and endpoint access, mobile collaboration, and enterprise-grade instant messaging solutions. Key accomplishments include proposing an Internet of Things strategy valued at +$2M in new product revenue to an international enterprise customer, independently closing deals in collaboration/SaaS technology to Canadian mid-market firms, and pitching Cisco's architectures to the CIO of a leading Canadian law firm. Created digitization strategies for key customers across multiple industries (transportation, real estate, health care, banking, and government). Notable accounts: - Bombardier - Cadillac Fairview - Brookfield Office Properties - Anthem and Cigna - Santander
Head Teaching Assistant (Strategy & Marketing)
2014 - 2015
Assisted second year undergraduate commerce students in developing their business case analysis and strategic thinking skills. Coordinated 12 Teaching Assistants, assessed student presentations, and provided frequent written and verbal feedback to students. Course: COMM 132 (Marketing Strategy)
Chief Executive Officer
2012 - 2013
Directed an executive team of 12 elected officials and budgeted $70,000 to student-run programs. Regularly advised Ontario's Ministry of Education on policy topics, including the expansion of the use of technology in classrooms.
President, Public School Boards
2011 - 2012
Served as an external consultant to the Ontario Ministry of Education and to the Ontario Public School Boards Association. Co-managed the allocation of the organization's budget of over $60,000 in public funds and managed OSTA-AECO's subsidiary organization, the Public Board Council. Increased school board membership by 20% from the previous year, and coordinated provincial projects among a team of over 30 students. Prepared frequent reports on educational trends and analysis and presented them to the Minister of Education and various stakeholder groups.
Student Trustee
2010 - 2012
Youngest elected (and subsequently re-elected) student trustee with a mandate to represent the insights of over 35,000 students. Founded a forum for elementary students to discuss macro policy issues at a high-level and presented recommendations to the Board of Trustees and Superintendents.
Founder
2011 - 2013
First startup. A print magazine. Distributed to over 70 schools.