In this edition of Marketer of the Week, Ignite Visibility spotlights Laura Grandi-Hill, event marketing manager at Airbase.
Ignite applauds Grandi-Hill for her commitment to engaging the internal and external Airbase community. She helps foster togetherness and leads pathways for Airbase clients and the greater professional finance community.
Laura Grandi-Hill
Laura Grandi-Hill is the Event Marketing Manager with Airbase, meaning she covers all things events, webinars and community for the spend management brand.
With a storied career behind her, Grandi-Hill’s expertise is built on a whole slew of experiences.
From 2009–2015, she served as the events manager for the OCVTS Performing Arts Academy. Here, she managed and directed theatrical productions, including budget management, artistic team creation, and venue coordination. It was here she grew the audience more than three-fold.
Grandi-Hill also spent time as an account and project manager at ProExhibits. She managed budgets over $200k for domestic and international events and shows. In fact, she ensured client expectations were met by earning a 95% customer satisfaction rating.
Laura Grandi-Hill also held the position of presentation trainer and event consultant at The Hill Group. She held highly individualized training for sales personnel, CEOs, and other presenters. The goal of these training sessions was to improve their speaking and presentation style.
Next, she took a position as an event marketing specialist and social media manager at Treasure Data. She managed all trade show events, webinars, event programs and customer experience events. She used her skills in event planning and management to pull off a few events each month!
She followed up as a campaign and event manager for data business at Arm, a British semiconductor and software design company. Here, she grew events to be the number one driver of pipeline in 2019 by partnering with the product, sales, and business development teams.
Throughout all of these, Grandi-Hill expanded her expertise in the event management space for all kinds of audiences.
“Laura is one of the best tactical marketers you’ll ever meet and I can’t count the number of times she single-handedly saved the day to ensure a complex, integrated campaign was executed on time and on budget.” – Erik Archer Smith, VP of Marketing at Scale Venture Partners
Laura Grandi-Hill’s Career Timeline
Laura Grandi-Hill at Airbase
Laura Grandi-Hill’s achievements at Airbase are plenty.
She owns the strategy and entire lifecycle of company events. This includes company offsites, customer advisory board meetings, lunch and learns, trade shows, VIP dinners, and user conferences. This engagement has helped the spend management company come into its own.
Grandi-Hill organized and launched a monthly “CFO Interview” series with finance leaders from major companies like Salesforce, Zendesk, Twitter, Robinhood, Okta, Slack, and more. Meanwhile, she has built Marketo programs and Salesforce campaigns for all events and webinars.
Here are a few other great initiatives Grandi-Hill has spearheaded at Airbase:
- Created all email outreach processes and owns the customer journey for all events.
- Managed all social media channels on a day-to-day basis and exceeded growth targets by 200%.
- Built and executed Airbase’s webinar program from planning through lead follow-up, averaging 6 webinars per month.
- Collaborated with sales and customer success to ensure internal buy-in for all live events and webinars and established efficient processes.
- Grew “Off the Ledger,” a private Slack group of finance professionals, to 1500+ members in 14 months.
- Owned all internal team building and events including SKOs and Hackathons.
- Created 3 monthly newsletters—one each for partners, prospects, and community members.
- Managed the G2 Crowd and Capterra initiatives, leading them to hit new review goals.
- Project managed client case studies from the initial ask through completion; she increased net new case studies by 80%.
As if that weren’t enough—with Grandi-Hill’s guidance, Airbase grew its events program from nothing to the top channel for closed business.
Laura’s Achievements at Airbase
Airbase
Airbase is the first all-in-one platform for spend management. Airbase gives companies unprecedented financial control and visibility. It brings three products into one system: all-inclusive accounts payable automation, software-enabled corporate cards, and simplified employee expense reimbursements. That innovation must be why it’s backed by Bain Capital Ventures and First Round Capital.
Originally founded in San Francisco, Airbase has a fully distributed team and employs 95 team members in 9 countries.
Laura Grandi-Hill created the incredible “Path to Becoming a CFO” series which serves as a networking event for finance professionals. It often serves an underserved community in the networking sphere. The series consists of monthly in-person events in San Francisco, with speakers including:
- Allen Shim, CFO at Slack
- Ned Segal, CFO at Twitter
- Robin Washington, Board Member of Alphabet (parent company of Google), Honeywell, and Salesforce
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Grandi-Hill moved the series online. It massively opened up attendance to 10x the number of finance professionals learning from industry leaders. It has now become a treasured monthly event that the majority of attendees show up for each time.
In early November, Airbase announced the most feature-rich and competitive free spend management product in the market. It includes a corporate card, bill payments, and expense reimbursement products in one platform. Another cool announcement from Airbase: They’re now offering the highest cashback on a corporate card in the market (and, to the best of their knowledge, the world) with a yield of 2.25% on a pre-funded model and 1.75% for charge cards.
Wrapping Up on Laura Grandi-Hill
Laura Grandi-Hill is more than her work at Airbase, but there’s no denying she shines in her event marketing manager position. As Ignite Visibility’s Marketer of the Week, we hope others recognize how impactful Grandi-Hill is, too.
