Rohini Kasturi: Partners, Platforms, and the New GTM Stack

Rohini Khasturi Raw
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Chip Rodgers: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Inside Partnering. I'm Chip Rogers and we are here at the El Prado Hotel this morning, Friday morning with the CMO Huddles, the Super Huddle. It's all about to get started here behind us. It was just great event and a lot of fun yesterday.

Rohini Khasturi: Totally. A lot of people excitement, fun times here.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah, it's fantastic. So I'm so excited to be joined by Rohini Khasturi. Rohini is CEO of HG Insights and so Rohini, you have been with HG Insights for about a year and a half, maybe two years, something like that now, and CEO and prior, gosh, you have a long history in technology companies, SolarWinds and Veritas and Juniper.

I'm sure I'm missing some, but on always in product roles, which is really interesting. Let's love to get in, get into it.

Rohini Khasturi: Yeah, no, thanks for talking to me today. Yeah.

Chip Rodgers: So Rohini let's start with HG Insights. [00:01:00] Let's start there. I'd love to talk about sort of other parts of your background as well, but HG Insights right now.

You guys have been. It's been on a tear buying up companies left and right. So tell us about where you guys are today.

Rohini Khasturi: Yeah. So prior to joining Heg, I was a customer of Heg. So we were a customer from SolarWinds. So our vision really is how do we make the revenue growth intelligence real?

If you look at companies, they want to grow revenue and you ask them for their growth playbook, a lot of times it's based off of historical data. Not based on data and intelligence that helps them to drive revenue growth. So our vision really is how do we help customers drive revenue, growth, retention, and operational efficiency?

And all the acquisitions that we are doing are in this context of revenue, growth, intelligence.

Chip Rodgers: You, so you bought trust Radius earlier this year. Mad Kudo. I'm sure there's some others in there as well. Tell me about what's the strategy for bringing all those players together?

Rohini Khasturi: Yeah, so if you take revenue growth [00:02:00] intelligence, historically we've been known as a leader in technographics, like about the technology installs of a company. But we curate our own firmographics. But then we also have spend intelligence about companies very unique to us. Nobody has in industry.

We do have other types of intelligence as well, like partner intelligence, contract intelligence, and so on. What we were really missing is this. Bottom of the funnel buyer intent and which is what we got through trust radius. Because buyers are actively in the market. We know who is in the market. We have a lot of intelligence about the buyers.

We verify it and we know whether they're intent in the market to buy something right now or not. So we are integrating that into our fabric revenue, growth, intelligence, fabric. That way at an account level, you have all these types of intelligence and we now have intelligence for 20 million companies.

Wow. All at an account level. Yeah. That helps customers develop agents or do their own go-to market automation solutions. Yeah.

Chip Rodgers: So the, the concept is a 360 view [00:03:00] of customers and what is their technology, how are they. How are their customers engaging with them and every, all of those aspects of it.

Rohini Khasturi: Totally. Essentially, if you are a marketer trying to understand your wide space, understand your tan, understand your competitive competition, understand how much do the customer spend, what's my angle to do competitive displacement or competitive takeout. We have pretty much all the intelligence at an account level, and let's say the sales team is talking to a customer.

SAP is a customer, as an example, it could be a prospect. You're talking, which group should I talk to, which is my buying group, which person in that buying group? But when I talk to that buying group or that person, what products do they have? What technologies do they have? How much do they spend? If you have all that intelligence prior to the meeting, then what happens is you are very precise and targeted both from a marketing, both from a sales, so that that's the expectation of marketing nowadays.

And,

Chip Rodgers: that's fantastic. I think there's so much so many challenges. I think, today with, you're talking about, a BM, right? [00:04:00] Account based marketing and account based, whatever, selling you that, those are the thing, the kinds of things that you need to know. It's because it's a buying group, right?

It's not an individual decision. So you like who, who are the right people in the product, organization, the sales organization, the. The finance and security and all those.

Rohini Khasturi: Totally. You need to understand, you need to have a complete, call it the AI data view of a company.

Before you talk to them, you need to know fully, what are they up to? Let's say they just bought a product, a security product. Let's say they just bought a firewall. And if somebody is trying to sell a firewall, you know that sale is not gonna happen. Or it might take nine months, 12 months to happen because they just entered into a contract with somebody.

So it's very important to have. All the types of intelligence. And the other part that's attractive from the trust radius acquisition is, let's say there is a buyer in the market today for a firewall as an example.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah.

Rohini Khasturi: It's very important for the sales teams and the marketing teams to know that right now, because they're gonna do a purchase in the next three months.

So if the [00:05:00] vendors don't show up in that window, they're going to, they're out annual cycle because the sales cycle in some of the infrastructure products are already long.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Thank.

Rohini Khasturi: Whereas on the Mat du side, Matt Du is a different acquisition. Matt Du brings in a platform with agents on top of our data.

And so it has a bunch of agents delivers value for sales teams. For example, sales teams get complete account research at an account level. All the intelligence that we're talking about embedded into a script along with the first party data, the second party data embedded. That way it becomes easy for a sales team to have a full script.

To talk to, any prospects or customers. So we are now integrating all our platforms together so that we launch all these agentic app applications. We are ready to announce that next week, actually. Oh,

Chip Rodgers: exciting. All right. So pre, pre-announcement here,

Rohini Khasturi: it's totally, yes.

In essence, launching a growth platform that has three agent mesh applications. One is called the Market Analyzer agent mesh application. It [00:06:00] has an agent for Tam. It has an agent for Sam, agent for an obtainable market and ICP analysis all integrated with a co-pilot experience added on it. Similarly, we have an agent in mesh application for rev ops, one for sales.

So those three we are releasing into the market, but that's all powered with this 20 million accounts intelligence. So we have the mode of the data now. We are also giving agent applications that are already made for customers too.

Chip Rodgers: That's fantastic. Yeah, it's terrific. Congrats on that. You've made a lot of progress over the last, year and a half, Rohe.

We were talking earlier, a lot of our audiences are partner partner folks and you were talking about your experience at SolarWinds. You were EVP of chief Product Officer for at SolarWinds. And you talked about working with partners and like how you.

You went on a partner, listening tour, talking to hundreds of partners but as a product person for, product leader for a company as, significant as SolarWinds. You worked with a lot of partners on, [00:07:00] joint solutions and putting things together. So tell me a little bit about that process and how that all works.

Rohini Khasturi: Yeah, no, that's a fantastic question. Yeah, no, I have had the fortunate process or been very fortunate to actually go. Visit hundreds of partners. So in fact my head of sales and I went on a partner tour for close to two months across the globe visiting three, 400 partners and focused on security observability, et cetera.

A lot of times the partners are all have the same goals as the sales teams, right? Because the partners are fulfilling a part of the revenue that the sales leaders are fulfilling. So they're also trying to target the customers, trying to understand what are the customer problems. But some of them are value added resellers or solution providers.

They want to take what the product company has to offer, bundle their secret sauce, do that. Some are implementation partners. Some are just resellers. Some are distributors. But then again, there are some which are much more strategic, like joint solutions. Hey, you know what? One plus one is three.

Because you could [00:08:00] combine a monitoring product with a security actionable product. Put a joint solution together that could lead to a joint marketing, joint solutioning for both the companies. So yeah, I've been in the journey to actually talk to a lot of these customers and understand, hey, is this a product problem?

Is this a pricing problem? Is there a marketing problem? And how do we solve it? Come back and we came back from the tour, define like a very structured playbook because not, there's not one solution for all these three, 400 partners. Some we had to solve through pricing and discounting. Some we had to give them.

Additional marketing funds to do it. Some, we had to engage product team much more closely to solve the challenges that the product had. It's a combination of all the above, but we also work with hyperscalers on some joint solutions with, companies like Microsoft and AWS to do, co-selling, co building, et cetera as well.

So that's

Chip Rodgers: a whole other ball of wax.

Rohini Khasturi: Totally.

Chip Rodgers: I'm curious about again, as a product leader how did you think about where, what's your product strategy? Where is some [00:09:00] white space where the, like how did you navigate that? Because you always can end up in sort of contention or maybe do you have a a company that's a, has complimentary solutions, but maybe they also have competitive, so how do you think about that process?

Rohini Khasturi: Yeah, so it's not a simple answer as you can imagine, like understanding where is the market heading where are the competitors and where do we stand in the market today? That's very important to understand and what's your mode that is sustainable to differentiate. Yeah. Then you layer in your product strategy, then your pricing strategy or your business model strategy.

Yeah. Then your go to market strategy. Hey, do I have the sales teams to present? Yeah. And what is my easy way to expand the market share? For example, we went into regions where partnering was the only strategy. There's no direct sales team involved at all, or so they

Chip Rodgers: gave you regional reach into that

Rohini Khasturi: reach.

Yeah. So partners give a lot of. Huge regional reach because especially if you take EMEA and APAC regions, very partnered centric, very distributed centric businesses, there are a lot of value added resellers. How [00:10:00] do we maximize it? But while retaining the MO of the product, right? So again, it goes back to tying in the product strategy, the business model strategy, the go to market strategy.

Of course the go to market strategy involves, hey, which ones are partners going to focus on to avoid the conflict? Otherwise, you constantly have a conflict between the. The direct sales team and the partner team, which is what you wanna minimize so that you get the best economies of scale.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah.

There'll be no co-selling if it's, if they're competitive.

Rohini Khasturi: Totally. Always. Totally.

Chip Rodgers: And actually at hg you mentioned that you also have some partners some co solutions joint solutions that you're working with partners. Tell us a little bit about that.

Rohini Khasturi: So today we have classified into few categories.

Like we have call it 30, 40 integrations into various go-to-market platforms where, for example, we have integration into Salesforce, integration into HubSpot and LinkedIn and whatnot, where people take out intelligence and want to augment it or activated it somewhere else. That's one cohort. The second cohort is actual [00:11:00] joint solutions.

We do have a joint solution with Gong as an example where Gong and Hege are very complimentary from the platforms. So the Matt Klu platform that we acquired, they already were, they developed a joint solution with Gong so that, the customers benefit from the joint value proposition. So we have several joint solutions like that.

And the other ones are ecosystems, right? Like for example, there are evolving AI ecosystems, data ecosystems, and GTM platform ecosystems. How do we participate in those ecosystems effectively for scale? Is another big factor for us, right? So we are again, hyper-focused on what's going to be our sweet spot.

For example, if you take the CRM ecosystems, which are AI ecosystems, which need the data, gonna be very sweet spot for us. So we're triangulating all those dimensions so that we can participate in ecosystems as well.

Chip Rodgers: That's fantastic. So it's a big Rubik's cube puzzle.

Rohini Khasturi: Totally.

It is a big Rubik's cube of puzzle. And the other thing [00:12:00] that we are also doing very interesting thing for partners is, for example, we work with, we serve today 95% of Fortune 500 B2B Tech companies, like all Hyperscalers are our customers today, all Major B2B Tech customers. We have been serving them for more than seven years now.

We are very sticky. We are the foundational data fabric for a lot of these hyperscalers. Now, what we are hearing from them is how do the partners also get the same int intelligence? And how do they can create value quickly. Because like we discussed, like in some regions you're relying on partners to generate revenue, but how do we provide intelligence to those partners is another growth vector that we are uncovering.

Yeah. So we have one major customer right now large, of top fortune hundred customer that's saying, Hey, let's roll out Heiss intelligence to a hundred plus partner. Yeah. So that's exciting as well. Yeah,

Chip Rodgers: that is exciting. Yeah. 'cause partners have the same challenges that that any customer would have, right?

They're trying to understand the market, understand their customers, and how they all how they [00:13:00] fit and how they penetrate.

Rohini Khasturi: Totally. Totally. A hundred percent.

Chip Rodgers: Rohini, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for taking some time and sharing your thoughts this morning. And I think we're about to get started here in a second.

Rohini Khasturi: Sounds like an exciting day. And the weather looks beautiful. We are in Sunny Palo Alto. Looking forward to a fantastic event and thanks again for chatting Chip.

Chip Rodgers: It's fantastic. Rohini, thank you for joining and thank you all for joining another episode of Inside Partnering and make sure to subscribe and follow if you're looking for more kinds of content like this and hearing from senior leaders in the technology industry is the place to be.

Thanks everybody.

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