Cathy Hill

Cathy Hill is a member of the APQC Executive team that oversees the strategic vision and planning process. She focuses on new products, new markets and expanding the current footprint inside member organizations. Her overarching goal is to ensure that the products and services offered, the markets served, and the outreach conducted, continues to fulfill APQC’s mission for decades to come. In her role, Cathy has direct oversight of APQC's membership, Open Standards Benchmarking and Advisory Services departments. 

She most recently served as senior executive director for sales and membership where she led the strategic vision and planning process for membership and professional services offerings, acted as client director for the professional service members and led APQC’s sales, membership and research teams. Under her stewardship, professional services has grown to become APQC’s largest membership segment, and APQC’s membership base has grown more than 44 percent, spanning more than 40 major industry segments with global representation.

Cathy joined APQC in 1993 as an account manager and was later promoted to director of business development, leading the sales team for APQC. She left APQC in 2000 to work as a senior business development manager at Gartner for five years, returning during APQC’s launch of Open Standards Research® to develop the offering for Professional Services clients.

She played a key role in establishing many of the initial partnerships and alliances for data collection to create the robust database needed to begin APQC’s Benchmarks on Demand service. She then grew the Benchmark on Demand business into one of APQC’s key offerings. Cathy has developed and executed a series of benchmarking studies focused on Professional Services firms and how they can gain a competitive advantage by managing their use of benchmarks and best practices.

Cathy was the executive sponsor of APQC’s strategic initiative to develop Process Classification Framework® offerings for APQC members, leading the team through a detailed product development process that included participation in APQC’s own stage-gate process.

In her spare time, she’s occasionally tapped as a subject matter expert to support APQC research efforts as it relates to sales or marketing. For example, a few years back she joined the project team to look at what companies were seeking from their consulting firms, What Will Your Clients Invest in Next? And What Can You Do To Capture That Demand?

A graduate of Houston Baptist University, she received a bachelor’s degree with a double major in marketing and international business. She enjoys practicing Pilates and aerial silks.