Chicago business software review startup G2 Crowd just hired a top marketing executive away from HubSpot to be its next CMO.
G2 Crowd announced Tuesday that Ryan Bonnici was joining the company as chief marketing officer. Bonnici was previously the senior director of global marketing at Boston-based HubSpot. Bonnici has also held marketing leadership roles at Salesforce, Microsoft and ExactTarget.
Bonnici will be in charge of leading G2 Crowd's marketing programs, with an added focus on growing G2 Crowd’s brand, the company said.
“Ryan brings expertise in leading some of the world’s preeminent technology companies to deliver clear, consistent and successful brand awareness as they’ve scaled," Tim Handorf, CEO and co-founder of G2 Crowd, said in a statement. "We believe he has what it takes to do the same for G2 Crowd, which is why we’re excited to have him onboard as we prepare for the future.”
G2 Crowd's previous CMO, Adrienne Weissman, is moving to a new role within the company as chief crowd officer and EVP of partnerships.
G2 Crowd, known as the "Yelp for business reviews," launched in 2013 and provides a platform for users to rate and review business software. The company has amassed more than 250,000 reviews to date. It has raised more than $45 million in venture funding, including a $30 million Series B round from Accel and LinkedIn.
G2 Crowd was co-founded by Godard Abel, a serial entrepreneur who founded BigMachines (acquired by Oracle) and SteelBrick (acquired by Salesforce). Abel, who was working full-time at Salesforce following the SteelBrick acquisition, returned to G2 Crowd earlier this year.
“Having served in sales and marketing leadership roles for many years, I’ve seen first-hand the need for real-time user reviews to help businesses make better buying decisions,” Bonnici said in a statement. “Now, I have an opportunity to help spread the message that companies shouldn’t have to sit through demo after demo or review outdated reports from analysts to discover which business products or services are going to meet their needs."
