Katy Hiller Chief Marketing Officer, Unily

Company

Unily is the leading employee experience platform used by the world’s most iconic brands to connect, engage and inspire employees everywhere.  Unily has recently been positioned as a market leader across the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Intranet Packaged Solutions, the 2022 Forrester Wave™: Intranet Platforms and the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Experience-Centric Intelligent Digital Workspaces 2024, making it the industry’s only triple leader. Their customers include Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 & 250 companies, such as Shell and Estée Lauder. In 2021, Unily was acquired by CVC Capital Partners and in 2023, a new CEO, Chris Ciauri was brought in; Chris brings significant leadership experience as the former President EMEA for Salesforce, and Google Cloud.

Search Background

Chris and his leadership team recognised the need for added experience in the GTM organisation to fuel the next phase of growth, and a world-class CMO was identified as a priority hire. This person would be the architect of a new global marketing strategy, working hand-in-hand with Sales, Customer Success, and Product. Striking a balance between strategic and operational excellence would be crucial as the marketing team itself was scaling rapidly and internationally.

Requirements

The leadership team were seeking a global CMO to spearhead the marketing function, reporting directly into the CEO. The candidate would need to be comfortable in high-growth environments and be able to leverage their strong track-record of scaling SaaS companies within an enterprise B2B environment. As the leader for the full breadth of the marketing function, the CMO would ideally have a strong experience in demand generation and product marketing. As Unily seeks to extend its presence across both Europe and the US, candidates should have strong experience across both regions.

Result

After a successful search, Unily hired Katy Hiller as CMO. Katy brings 18 years of enterprise marketing experience, mostly recently as CMO of Sonatype, where she spent 7 years, rising through the ranks. She joined them with an initial scope of building out EMEA and was subsequently promoted into the global C-level role given her success. As CMO, Katy led a team of over 30 marketeers across Europe and the US and was a key contributor to their international growth in recent years. Prior to Sonatype, Katy was typically first on the ground, launching EMEA for US HQ’s businesses, namely Puppet and Xuber.

In addition to having the technical capability, upon meeting Unily, there was an immediate cultural fit with Chris, the broader executive team, and the Board. We look forward to seeing the impact that Katy will have as Unily’s new CMO.