Marketing in the CEO’s Language

   

Drew: Hello, renegade marketers. If this is your first time listening, welcome, and if you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6th and 7th in Palo Alto. We're excited to have amazing partners making it possible, including Boomerang and HG Insights. Last year, we brought together over 100 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness. And this year we're doing it again. Same venue, same energy, same ambition to challenge convention, with an added half-day strategy lab exclusive for marketing leaders. We're excited to have Webless.ai, Firebrick, and Webflow as additional founding sponsors. Tickets are now available at cmohuddles.com. You can also see a video that is sure to get you pumped up. As pumped up as I am, grab your ticket before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out, and it's gonna be fucking awesomer!

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Hello, renegade marketers. As CMOs, understanding your CEO's perspective unlocks alignment, credibility, and impact. While most guests on this podcast are CMOs, diving into the CEO mindset helps CMOs learn to speak the CEO's language, anticipate strategic shifts, and better advocate for marketing's role in revenue growth. That's why I'm thrilled to introduce you to Rohini Kasturi, CEO of HG Insights, a leader with a track record of driving growth and innovation in the martech and GTM space. Under his leadership, HG Insights has made two bold acquisitions in the last few months, TrustRadius and MadKudu, transforming its Revenue Growth Intelligence platform into a true end-to-end GTM solution. It's also worth noting that HG Insights is the official go-to-market partner of CMO Huddles, which we're extremely excited about. Anyway, hello, Rohini. How are you, and where are we catching you today?

Rohini: Wonderful. Thanks for having me, Drew, on this show. You're catching me from the Bay Area. I'm in Los Altos, Bay Area.

Drew: All right, okay. Well, we got East Coast, West Coast thing. We got CMO, CEO thing. One of the things we like to do on this show is recognize that folks are kind of deciding whether they want to keep going or not, and they're extremely time constrained. So let's pour on some insights right from the beginning. Perhaps you could offer three things B2B CMOs need to really rethink in terms of their go-to-market strategy. If you could sort of present them one at a time, and we'll discuss them one at a time.

Rohini: Wonderful. So from my perspective, the CMO job, or head of marketing job, is the most difficult job, given how many complexities they have to navigate. Three things that come to my mind are: one, revenue growth – how do you drive revenue growth, and what are the initiatives that you're undertaking to drive revenue growth? The second is customer retention – keeping the existing customers, driving retention from them, and driving expansion with them. And the third aspect is really to do with operational efficiency with agility, especially in the world of data and AI. All of these three become super important. The first two have always been important. The third has suddenly become super important in the world of data and AI.

Drew: And we'll get to the agility word, because it's funny – I have a potential rant on agility, because often it's a synonym for "hurry up, just change stuff," and not necessarily strategic thinking. But let's go to the first one. The first one and the second one are obviously really important for CMOs to understand and revenue growth, but it's often hard to connect revenue growth to marketing. So what's your thinking or advice? You brought up revenue growth – what do CMOs need to be thinking about or to get a better handle and participate in revenue growth?

Rohini: Yeah, so I will try to explain this, my perspective, in the marketing language. I mean, all the marketers know the funnel, right? You know, there is a top of the funnel, there's a middle of the funnel, and the bottom of the funnel. If I were to really make all the activities that a CMO does... For example, they do demand generation activities, whether it is running campaigns or getting inbound leads and really qualifying everything to do with the demand. That is one category of initiatives that they undertake. The second category of initiatives that they undertake are brand-related, PR-related, etc. Similarly, there are website initiatives, AR initiatives, and so on. So what any CMO can do is really map all these initiatives into the three categories. Because you can argue that brand leads to revenue growth, AR leads to revenue growth, website leads to revenue growth. Any aspect of marketing you take, you can map into revenue growth. But the way I look at it is the demand generation activities are often considered the most directly connected to revenue growth, because you're measuring how much demand do I have, or how much pipeline do I have, and most importantly, how much percentage I'm able to convert. It's not just sufficient that, hey, I have $10 million of demand, but I can only convert $10 of actual revenue, right? So how do you tie your activities or the actual programs that you have as a marketer to revenue growth becomes super critical, and that's where I map the demand generation activities. How do you become very, very targeted, or hyper-targeted, to driving revenue growth, and how do you map it is the first crucial thing.

Drew: And I get it. And I think every CMO listening to this will say, "Yes, I get it." Seems to be easier said than done.

Rohini: 100%. Recently, we came up with this analogy called the cosmic journey of customers, right? Let me spend a couple of seconds, or a few seconds, talking through that. If you look at it, let's take vendors, right? Let's take a security vendor. The security vendor has some products that they're offering. Okay? They're probably not the only security vendor – there might be many security vendors, you know, in their own orbit, right? They're all targeting millions of customers that are out there, which they need to target. Okay? Within a customer, there is a specific buying group that you need to target, because the buying group is the one that is making the decisions. Within the buying group, there is a specific buyer who might be in market or who might not be in market. So it is not sufficient that a vendor who is in their own orbit is targeting these millions of customers who are out there, because that is really a spray-and-pray approach that a lot of times we are used to, right? But how do you precisely target the right customer at the right time using the right intelligence makes the highest... leads to highest conversion and leads to the most efficient dollars. And that's how I can map the demand generation activities, or anything that you do related to demand, tying to revenue growth in the most efficient way. Because you can say, "Hey, I have generated, you know, $10 million of demand, or $10 million of demand using so many dollars, but then I'm able to convert, you know, 60% of them within three months, and then 80% of them in four months." That is the most impactful work that you can be doing. In fact, every marketer wants to create... do the most impactful work, right? Nobody wants to do wasted efforts. That's kind of how I think of it.

Drew: And I mean, you know, first of all, three-to-four-month sales cycles – we'd better... we're probably talking about a low price point. We're not talking about enterprise where, you know, that is a world which would be wonderful if, in fact, everybody could show revenue in three months. This would be a lot smaller problem, right? Because you'd be able to test and see those results so quickly. It's often much longer. But I want to go back and make sure we cover the others. So we talked about revenue growth and connecting your activities to top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. All of that makes sense. I think we'll get into that more deeply. Let's talk about retention and what you think CMOs really need to be thinking about there.

Rohini: So if you take retention, two things matter in terms of retention. One is making sure you are figuring out the signals, first of all, about your competitor encroaching into your account, right? For example, let's say they're a customer of Cisco, and now let's say Cisco security product as an example. And suddenly, Palo Alto is encroaching that customer account. Now, is Cisco going to figure out that, "Hey, my competitor is encroaching my account"? What signals and information do I have? That's one part of it. The second part of it is when you are engaging with the customer, you already always have signals information from call recordings or feedback from customers. How are you mining that intelligence and mapping it to the other time series intelligence that you have about this customer trying competitors' products, and then leveraging the buyer information – like buyers that are actually... let's say the same buyer is in market for another security product – which, when you combine multiple types of signals, you know that this account is likely to go into churn. And how do you proactively understand those signals and manage the customer with the right targeted messaging? It could be related to education. It could be lack of feature set that they might not be aware of. It could be many things. Sometimes they're just unhappy with the product quality itself, right? It could be many of them, but understanding what is leading to churn and really applying the marketing in a very precise way drives retention and expansion.

Drew: Yeah, it's so interesting. I'm hearing... when you bought TrustRadius, you also along came Alison Havener, and I remember a conversation with her about the scoring system that they had and used. Fascinating that this came up there, and this conversation with her was way before you guys purchased us. So anyway, I'm laughing at how the world is converging, or admiring it, not laughing. Let's talk about the third point: operational efficiency and why CMOs really need to sort of get this right.

Rohini: Yeah, so the reason why the last point is super important is everyone knows that our sales marketing budget, at least in the technology space, is anywhere from 20% to 30%, and the marketing is roughly, you know, 10% to 15%, depending on the company. You know, sometimes more, sometimes less, etc. But a lot of times, what happens is when the company doesn't achieve the business results that they're looking for, it's easy to go back to divisions like marketing and say, "Hey, I need to cut marketing budget, because I don't know where these dollars are really going." So how do you map all the initiatives that you have on a daily basis to say, "Hey, you know what? These are the right tools and intelligence that I'm using to drive efficiency in organization." For example, I'm creating content for a campaign. How long does it take? Can I do it cheaper, faster, better, right? You know, I might be talking basics here, but again, mapping every activity into what is driving revenue growth, what is driving retention, what are the areas that will really drive operational efficiency and bringing agility into the organization? For example, creating a campaign is an effort needed, but that links to demand generation, but it's an activity needed. But when you measure that activity, and let's say it takes three weeks to create a campaign and the associated materials, can you do that in one week, as an example, right? That is operational efficiency with agility for me.

Drew: And this is the perfect moment for me to just talk about agility. I get that everybody in your seat as a CEO wants everybody to be more productive, to get more stuff done faster. What I'm struggling with right now, and I think the community is struggling with it, is faster is not the same as better. Yes, more efficient is not the same. It can be. It can be in the sense that, you know, your employees can use it in other ways. But what we've seen with faster is the opposite. It's more garbage, more, you know, AI slop in the marketplace, and the emphasis on agility is, "Let's get a lot of stuff done fast." It's taking a human cost on—I've seen it in our community, and so I get it and they, many of these folks, are trained in agile thinking and agile processes, and they understand that. But is there any concern at the CEO level that at some point in time the push for efficiency becomes counterproductive?

Rohini: Yeah, I know it's a fantastic question you're asking. Actually, maybe I'll give it a very different analogy that might help. So we consider ourselves as a very late-stage startup. Okay, I'm using the word "startup" for a reason. We are a private equity company. We have several hundred customers. We have most of Fortune 500 as our customers. We are—we have been in the business for a while, right? The reason "startup" is important is, given the world, given the way the market is transforming, the industry is transforming, we need to be agile. I'll use that word "agile," but I'll explain why. What I'm meaning by that is we need to operate like a startup. A lot of times, what it feels is, hey, startups—they can move faster. They can use the right tools in industry that are available. They can make decisions faster without having a lot of bureaucracy or red tape, having 10 people to sign off on every tool at the same time. They might not have the right experience, right? When I say we are a late-stage startup, how do we marry the experience that you have, the best practices that you have, to the agile practices that are needed in the industry? It's very important. For example, you know, you are a seasoned marketer, right? You know, let's say a campaign is developed. You're going to review it. Okay? This—just because you have to review it doesn't mean it has to be a three-month process. As an example, is there a tool that will facilitate you to still do the review, but be faster? For example, the way we are approaching this, Drew, is in our marketing organization, we have developed a demand strategy. We put a very thoughtful demand strategy on who are our target customers, where do we focus? What products map? How much demand we need to generate for each of the products? What is the real market opportunity? So what we did is we actually married the data that is out there available and the best practices that we need to have and the tools that are out there in the market that can help do things faster. We are bringing that together to drive agility to really address your question of "faster doesn't mean"—you know, how do you bring fastness along with the quality that is needed that way? What happens is the CMOs are not going to struggle with just, "Hey, I moved fast, but all the efforts are wasted," right? So it's important to marry your experience and the data and intelligence together with the tools that are going to give you agility. When you triangulate that, that's when you're really going to get the best-in-class value over a period of time.

Drew: I get it. I agree with you that that makes sense, and I think about marketing as an epic struggle for mindspace, that ultimately, if your brand isn't on the list, it's not on the list because you never got in that person's brain, right? That's the big picture marketing, and that is like water on a rock. Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, right? And so the emphasis on agility often means, "Oh, well, we're not hitting our short-term numbers. So we better get a new CMO. We better switch our messaging. We better change that. We better test it," and so forth. And I keep seeing over and over again that the story about the brand never gets established because it's changed so often. And again, that's to me the downside of agility is that it's the opposite of strategy, right?

Rohini: Totally, totally. No, I mean, that's why it's important to always understand what is your root cause, right? You know, if the root cause—for example, we worked on our positioning, "Revenue Growth Intelligence," for three months. I know there is—it might say, "Hey, why did it take three months?" No, that's because we considered a lot of alternatives, like "go-to-market intelligence," whatnot and whatnot, right, before we arrived at that, because that positioning was important, and let's say we realize that the positioning is not resonating. And everybody says, "What do you mean? Revenue Growth? What do you mean this? What do you mean that?" You've got to make a pivot, right? I call some of them as pivots. So it's important to take your data points as a pivot like you are—you're producing campaign and demands. Nothing is converting. What's wrong? Is your ICP wrong? Is your target customers wrong, or they're not liking the message, or is the product not working? Or when we talk to them, you know, we are pitching something outside what we are marketing, right? So it could be lot of reasons, and the data points, for me, are important in all of this.

Drew: So let's go right to Revenue Growth Intelligence platform. What does that mean? And what should marketers—talk a little bit about that positioning.

Rohini: I was a customer of HG before joining HG, okay, and one thing I realized as a C-suite executive was what a lot of C-suite executives care is, they have few things, right? They want to drive revenue growth, they want to drive retention, they want to drive operational efficiency, right? That's what is on top of their mind. And everything that they are looking to do is driving connecting to these revenue growth. For example, a lot of the work that we have done historically in the company—for example, you can do white space analysis using HG intelligence. Okay, the white space leads to you getting, let's say, a customer getting 1,000 white space accounts. And if they're able to convert 10 of them, they get revenue growth, right? And then what matters is not the white space accounts. What matters is the revenue growth. So how do you link everything that we do to the revenue growth was very critical for me, for us, right? So this is where we eliminated even the concept of "go-to-market intelligence," because go-to-market intelligence is great, okay, but how does it at the end translate to revenue growth for a CRO, for a CMO, for a CFO, is very important. So that's why we picked our "revenue growth intelligence." So for us, it means a few things. One is, hey, revenue growth means customers want to identify white space accounts like opportunities, right? First of all, if they know their ICP, or if they want to even define their ICP and based on the ICP, they want to know their TAM, SAM, SOM—like really addressable market that they can go after. That gives a very focused market that they can go after. So you need that intelligence which focused market I'm going after. Second is, once you have your focused market, you need to have clear understanding of what's your white space, what's your competing space, clearly, then you need to have intelligence about the buyers and the personas that are out there, like, who is in market, who is not in market, et cetera. When you take all these bits of intelligence and bring it together, you can really pinpoint the vendor who is trying to sell a product to the buyer who is trying to buy a product. Right now, if you can do that matchmaking in real time, that's our vision, right? You know? Then what happens is that immediately leads to revenue growth, right? Imagine, you know, you wake up and you are a marketer. You want to sell a product or market to somebody, but if you can market to the buyer who is looking for, let's say, a firewall this morning, and you send them that email today, then that's the perfect matchmaking you can do as the head of marketing, and you need to have the sales leader show up, because the moment customer says, "Yeah, this is interesting. I'm evaluating a firewall," then the sales leader shows up. That's your fastest path to revenue, right? So everything that we do, we have kept in mind that, hey, we need to tie to customer revenue growth, retention or operational efficiency, and that's how we are approaching our vision and strategy.

Drew: Knowing that every PE firm and every CEO and CFO is looking for revenue growth, you know that certainly, and that many have a problem with revenue growth. It's a big, bold promise, and the intelligence—so talk about then. And the intelligent part of this is critical, right? It's that we're going to help you, because we're going to give you better information. And I think for a lot of people, better information the last three years has been like "intent signals" as a generalized concept. Is this just "intent signals" on steroids or is there—is it a broader notion?

Rohini: Yeah, yeah, no. Great question. So what we bring is a combination of firmographics, technographics. Technographics is basically telling which products customers have, which technologies the customers are using, spend intelligence, how much is the customer spending, and then marrying it with three types of intent, top-of-the-funnel intent, middle-of-the-funnel intent, which we call it contextual intent, and then the bottom-of-the-funnel intent, which is really the buyers who are in market. When you marry all of this at an account level, you get very precise intelligence. So it's not just about intent, but when you have intent, when the customer is showing intent—let's say SAP Palo Alto group is looking for a firewall. And you know that buying group, okay? That is intent for you. That is bottom-of-the-funnel intent, good, right? But when you show up to that customer, what is your messaging? What should you tell them? What is the state of the SAP? That's where you need technographics. You need firmographics. You need the real-time intelligence like 10-K. You need intelligence like, who are the leaders who are making decisions, when did they last get into the job? You need lots of intelligence, both from your first party and third party, married together and really guiding the sales teams on a precise journey. So that is where it becomes very interesting, because you're not only just making that connection, but then when your sales team is showing up, you're giving them a very guided journey on what to say, what to do, et cetera.

Drew: It's so interesting. In my mind, I'm sort of seeing a three-dimensional Venn diagram with firmographic, technographic, spending, and in this middle it's like jumping. I'm ready to buy. I'm ready to buy. So thank you for that.

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Drew: I mentioned at the top that you acquired Trust Radius, and then MadKudu. How does that fit into this story? Let's start with Trust Radius.

Rohini: Yeah, no, excellent question. So the reason we did Trust Radius was because we have always been a best-in-class intelligence vendor, right? Initially, the company started as a technographics vendor, best in class. Then we built firmographics. Then we acquired a company called Intricately, which was spend intelligence. Then we developed our own buying center, buying group intelligence. We did a lot of things. We also take intent from intent providers that are out there, and we have contextualized it at an account level, which we call middle-of-the-funnel intent. What we realized was the buyer information, the intelligence, is very important for us to guide a sales team and marketing team on their journey. So two things that were very important. One is this buyer intent and the intent-driven leads that Trust Radius provides. Basically, it's about telling, "Hey, who is the buyer who is in market right now for a product?" Like I said, "Hey, I'm a Director of Information Security. I'm looking for a firewall," as an example. That's right now. So they are going to make decisions within 90 days. So this is where the sales cycle can be shortened. You know, in the security space, the sales cycle is nine months. But when you know who is the buyer in market and what are the firewalls they're evaluating, you can reduce the sales cycle. So one is that buyer intent and intelligence was very important for this Revenue Growth Intelligence story.

The second part was, how do you make the buyer's journey very differentiated? For example, when the buyers are researching the products, how do we take the technographics, the firmographics, the spend intelligence that HG has, and give at least enough portion of it for free to the buyer, so that when the buyer is making decisions, they have a view of what do typical customers spend? How much do they spend? Hey, what is the typical profile of this company? What are the products they have? Having all of that information will also help the buyer make very, very informed decisions. So it's basically bringing the buyer and the vendor much closer with information. Both sides we're able to address. It's not only just the sales team or the go-to-market providing the right intelligence, but it's also helping the buyer, saying, "Hey, do you know that this firewall fares better than this firewall? By the way, this is the information about their spend," etc., etc. That will help the buyer make informed decisions. So those are the two primary reasons that drove the acquisition. But of course, when you bring these companies together, what happens is you have complete funnel intelligence. You can go from strategy all the way to execution. So there are a lot of other benefits that come out for the end customers through this acquisition.

Drew: So I know Trust Radius well. Obviously they were a partner of ours before the acquisition, so I'm less familiar with MadKudu. So just help a little bit with what that brought to the table.

Rohini: Yeah. So MadKudu—one of the areas where we struggled as a company, and so is true with a lot of the data intelligence companies—to one of your points that you mentioned just a few minutes back, right? "Hey, how do I really use the right intelligence?" So what we struggled with was to operationalize the intelligence that we had. Like, for example, when we go to large customers, we have two cohorts of customers: the large customers, like the Microsofts and the Googles, who use our intelligence. They know how to use our intelligence. They have a full data science analytics team. They activate it very actively. But when you take the rest of the customers, less than a billion dollars in revenue, especially they don't have huge data science teams, or the marketing teams want to get demand out faster—they have a lot of those initiatives. When we provide all this intelligence, even though it's high quality, it takes time to operationalize it.

So what MadKudu does is MadKudu has actually built copilots on top of HG's intelligence, because what they found out from the market four years back was HG is the best-in-class vendor in the market, in the industry. And they validated with a lot of the hyperscalers and large enterprise customers. And they figured out the problem is operationalizing this data. They went and built copilots. For example, they launched a sales copilot, basically telling the sales team all the third-party intelligence that HG has. They created a copilot on top of it. Then they also built a lot of connectors and integrations into LinkedIn, Salesforce, HubSpot, CRMs, all sorts of things to bring that first-party intelligence and marry it so that the sales team can have complete intelligence about their accounts. That's one thing they did.

The second thing they did was for the DevOps team, who actually take all the HG intelligence and create propensity modeling, and they even help marketing teams to say, "Hey, these customers have high propensity. These customers have low propensity." They have built a Data Studio wherein you go to the Data Studio and build these models, and you can, in a few minutes, produce a model. You can build, for example, a white space model or a customer fit model or a win-loss analysis model. You can build a lot of models that help the DevOps teams or data analytics teams. And the third is we have created our own copilot called the Market Analyzer copilot. Just a few months back, we launched it around the same time we were doing the acquisition of MadKudu, right? When we look at all of these copilots, what happens is they help you operationalize the data right away. They get—like customers can operationalize the data today. They don't have to worry about all this intelligence. So MadKudu brings our intelligence to life, right? And they have created a very advanced agentic platform, and that becomes the foundation for our copilots and agentic solutions. So that's why it was very attractive. Now we are bringing all these three copilots into one platform and one streamlined pricing, and you will see another big announcement from us in a month or two.

Drew: So I love it. And just for the listeners, when Rohini mentions "HG," he's talking about HG Insights, just to make sure that folks weren't thinking, "Oh, there's another company involved." No, no, "HG" is HG Insights.

Rohini: Thanks for correcting that.

Drew: I'm thinking about, you know, there's been lots of obviously in martech, there's been a lot of acquisitions, there's a lot of consolidation going on, and it takes time to integrate these tools into one platform. What's interesting about 6sense—one of the big complaints is it's a hard platform to use. Even though they provide support, it takes time. You need someone dedicated to using this. And I'm curious, from your standpoint, as you look at your new platform, how are you going to work with marketers to make sure that they can actually use this platform? Marketers and sales?

Rohini: 100%. It's a fantastic question. So for us, one of the big things in the acquisition was, one, it has to be a strategic fit, which both of these companies were. The second is, can we do the integration in less than four months so that we have an integrated story? Built in—for example, MadKudu, what happened was they have close to 100 customers, and they built it on top of HG's intelligence, so there is integration done on day one, even as we did the acquisition. And when we were evaluating Trust Radius, intent and buyer intent leads and so on, we realized that it takes close to 60 days to integrate that into the fabric. So we did all that to bring so that we can bring that value to life quickly, because otherwise what happens is a lot of times you do these acquisitions, the energy fades out, or some other things happen, and then you're not able to fully realize the value for customers. So that was very, very important for us.

And the other part is this: look at us as a modern version of any vendor out there, right? Whether you want to call—pick any name who is trying to provide integrated solutions in this market, in the go-to-market landscape—we want to be the latest, greatest vendor providing both the intelligence as well as this integrated platform in a modern way with all these copilots and agentic experiences. So it's very, very nicely done from an experience perspective. So we want to be number one in the industry starting 2026. We'll be—you know, we have announced some agentic solutions, but we'll be doing more getting into January. So we want to make it super easy for marketing, for RevOps, for sales teams, for strategy teams to use it to operationalize intelligence very quickly, but most importantly, connect it to their systems that they use, whether they want to use it in another platform, or whether they want to use it in a CRM, or whether—so we deal with two cohorts of customers: customers like the Microsofts and the Googles, who are saying, "Hey, give me this best-in-class intelligence, highly curated, highly qualified, you know, make sure the degree of the data is very high." And they want to build their own agents, but they want to take some agents from us, create like an agentic mesh on their own. That's one cohort that we're dealing with, where we sell fabric and also some agents.

The second cohort, which is going to be the majority, is they want a completely integrated platform where there are ready-made agents and copilot experiences built, but that's solving a specific use case and a pain point that can give value to them instantly, right? So that's the promise from us, which is value realization, your time to market, the ROI is super critical for us, and that's what drove these acquisitions, and that's the journey we are on.

Drew: It's a big promise, right? And which is great, it's also one that, you know, certainly sales will be skeptical on their side, and marketers are always skeptical because they've been over-promised in martech forever. And so how will you help sort of marketers over the hump of saying, "Oh, wow, okay, this is different," because I used to have this as a separate intent over here, and I had this over here, and now it's, you know, a single source with a lot of stuff. How are you going to sort of help them? You know, this is a bigger purchase now. There's a bigger thought, right, when it was components, but now it's the whole stereo system. So tell me a little bit about how your plan is to help overcome the history of martech over-promising.

Rohini: Yeah. So I think the good news here is we got complete third-party data fully integrated as a fabric that powers this platform. That's one. The second is we developed first-party integrations. We have 30-odd integrations, whether it is to CRM vendors or even to tools like Gong, Outreach, and so on, all fully integrated. So we take the intelligence from all the first-party systems customers have, and the third-party intelligence we have, and we can give them the intelligence that they're looking for. But most importantly, activate. But when you activate, what's more important is your conversion rates, your revenue growth—like we said, Revenue Growth Intelligence. The customers must realize revenue growth and retention, right? That's how we are measuring it.

And what you will see in some of our dashboards is, "Hey, we said there are 100 white space accounts, right? Hey, over a period of three months, you are able to close 10 accounts." We'll show it as closed-won in your CRM system, if that's where you are measuring it. That way, what happens is we can start clearly tying the intelligence and the work and the activity that marketers do and the sales teams do to the actual closed-won, because we have that integration into the first-party systems like CRM systems. We can measure it and start showing them the impact. Imagine they can convert 10 leads in the 100 accounts intelligence that we provide—they are going to get 10x ROI. So our promise really is huge, which is, "Hey, you can get significant ROI from the intelligence in the most efficient way." Again, tying back to the ROI in terms of closed-won, closed-lost, etc.

There is only one nuance here. One is, let's say we are providing all this intelligence, and this customer has a lot of closed-lost as an example. One thing we can't ensure is whether the customer is willing to buy your product or not, right? That is something we—there is no way for us to measure. But what is important for the end customer to realize at that time is, "Hey, is this a product problem, or is this an intelligence problem?" Right? If the intelligence is right, but the product is not selling, then you got a different problem to solve. But the moment we are able to narrow it down to ROI and business impact, it will help customers understand, "Okay, I won so many accounts, I lost so many accounts. Let me dig deeper into lost accounts." So that's kind of how I see it.

Drew: I love it. So how—I mean, you are probably customer zero, I'm thinking, for your own platform. How is that going in terms of your ability to use your own toolset?

Rohini: Yeah, so fantastic question. So one thing we did was, before we actually even did acquisition of MadKudu, I'll pick one example. We had our sales team start using their sales copilot. We got some feedback whether we should even do this acquisition or not, whether our sales team would adopt or not. And we got like a bunch of thumbs up saying, "Hey, you know, I would pay for this subscription and let me go get this." And so when we got this acquisition, right now we have fully enabled our sales team and also the customer success team completely on the sales copilot as an example, because they know, like, for example, every CS person, every salesperson, has a list of accounts. What MadKudu does is it sends you an update on your list of accounts called "Daily Dose of Deals." Hey, here are your 30 accounts that you're focused on, but by the way, changes have happened on these 10 accounts. This is the new information I have, or these are the actions that you're supposed to take from your last call that you did last week. So it prioritizes the list of accounts so that the sales team and CS team can be hyper-focused. So that is something that we are doing. Similarly, the rev ops team—so we have used our own intelligence for building our own TAM, SAM, SOM—like, where do we focus? What are our target accounts? We did that last year as I came into the company. So our Q4 planning for 2025 is based on our intelligence. Now we are using our Rev Ops Studio for our next quarter and the next year planning. We are building our own propensity model so that our DevOps team is saying, "Hey, what is the most efficient set of accounts we should go after?" And the intent-driven leads, which are again coming from TrustRadius—we said, "Hey, the intent-driven leads will be the first set of leads which are bottom of the funnel. We want to hand it off to the sales team, right?" So we are—call it using, drinking our own champagne internally heavily, and that's a big part of what we're doing to be very data and AI-driven.

Drew: Well, we'll be watching this carefully, and since we are an official partner, I look forward to seeing your success story and case history on yourself, because that is so important, right? If you are customer zero, you really can make sure that everything is working, and you find out faster that way. So that's really great to hear. There's so much more I want to cover, but we're running out of time. So let's go here. How long—so it feels like, you know, if you have a big—if you're a big company and you have a rev ops team plugging into your platform, your revenue growth intelligence platform, right?

Rohini: Yeah, there's a platform. There's also a fabric. Fabric is purely the data intelligence for customers who want to do everything on their own. Got it. Platform is for customers who want solutions today, right?

Drew: Okay, so the fabric is sort of this "Here's the data, it's out there," right? I got it. And platform is "use our tools, our system, to access all of this wonderful information on a daily basis." And wouldn't everybody like a daily dose of deals? By the way, I want that in my inbox, so I guess we should—it feels like it's almost redundant to ask where AI fits in, because it feels like it's integrated into everything at this point in time. But Gen AI is evolving so quickly. What kind of thoughts do you have for CMOs in terms of using it, I guess, responsibly, effectively, behind the hype?

Rohini: Yeah, so I think the key is—you know, just to give a little background about HG Insights—we mine close to 40 to 50 petabytes of data today, petabytes of data that we have accumulated over 15 years, and we were able to, with the help of AI—we've been doing machine learning for a while, even before we got mainstream with AI. Now we are applying a lot of AI intelligence on the data to mine more and more. That's how we got to 20 million accounts of intelligence, and we want to get to 30 million in the next six months. So this is going fast for us. So there is a lot of proprietary data that we have that's differentiating. So the key for all of our customers who are leveraging AI tools is, "Hey, what's the value it's providing to you?" At the end of the day, is it helping you drive top-line growth? Is it a tool that is helping you drive retention, or is it a tool that is helping you drive just purely efficiency? So in fact, we have created our own AI strategy in the company to make sure all our teams are equipped with the right tools, and we have categorized our AI story into the same way: revenue growth, retention, and operational efficiency, because that will help you with the prioritization of when you're picking tools and when you have so many AI tools. Which tools should I pick when I have limited budget? What should I do? It will help you with the framework. And again, what is the unique value proposition of this tool? Is this tool going to stick the next year or two or three? Because let's say you take a tool and you drive adoption in your organization, and let's say you have an organization of 300 people as an example. Now, if the tool is going to get disrupted in a year's timeframe, then what happens is you've got an adoption problem. Like, hey, you stand up as a leader in front of your team and say, "Hey, now we got a new tool. Let's throw out what we got, and let's drive adoption of a new tool." And that poses another consideration, like, "Hey, does this tool have a unique value proposition that is going to stay at least two, three years?" Because I know the market will change, right? You know, we all have that growth mindset, but the key is, is there a unique value proposition, right? So those are the things that are going into our consideration when we are evaluating AI tools. And again, we are also trying to make it flexible among our own teams to say, "Hey, you can make your decision faster without having a lot of red tape and centralization," but at the same time, we are providing them a framework on how to make these decisions.

Drew: Yeah, and what's so interesting about this adoption—because we look at, we have a lot of conversations in CMO Huddles about martech, we have at least one or two months dedicated to that every year, and we talk a lot about weeding out the tools that folks aren't using, and that's often the biggest problem. It's not that the tool that they bought was wrong; it's that there wasn't enough staff to dedicate to it. The thing that I have observed over the years is that PE and VC don't like service on their P&L, but it feels like the companies that can deliver really good service, whether it's within the platform or on top of it, are going to succeed because, you know, there's learning curves, even with AI and all this, right?

Rohini: 100%. You know, at the end, it's value creation. And is there a unique value proposition? It all comes back to the same basics.

Drew: Yep. All right, well, we've run out of time, finally. But let's give—as a CEO, what's the message that you would like most to impart to CMOs to help them sort of be more successful?

Rohini: Yeah, so I think one message or one learning I have is the CMO job is the most difficult job out there, right? Because it is, like I said, it's a square peg that sits around in a round hole. It's very difficult to find a CMO that fits everything. But at the same time, the key is because there are many initiatives going on, and every initiative has a certain amount of impact. Take analyst relationships. Analyst relationships have a certain amount of impact. Website has an impact. Your campaigns have an impact. Everything has a different level of impact. How do you prioritize it, and how do you measure it impactfully? So that when it comes to budgets and measurement, you are very proactive in explaining to your CEO, your CFO, to say, "You know what? Okay, I got $60 million of marketing budget. By the way, you know, X percent is going to this, but specifically, this is the outcome that I'm generating. This is the part that is strategic that will take 18 months to generate revenue," because it's helping the CEOs and the CFOs guide through the strategic decision part as well. Otherwise, what happens is it's easy to cut all the strategic programs and say, "Okay, you know what? Let me focus on what's generating revenue right now." Yeah, and you're going to create a debt for the company 18 months from now—big hole, right? So a lot of the thought leadership, a lot of things that happen are strategic. But again, how do you craft that story in an impactful way that is business impacting and measurable? And showing it on a consistent basis is what makes the CMO job difficult. But again, it can be easy if you position it that way.

Drew: I love the way you said that. I want to sort of—I'm going to take it and we're going to put it, turn it into words and share it. I think there's—you know, it's funny. It reminds me of one thing I like to say all the time. All marketing drives revenue; it's just a question of timeframe and whether or not you can actually show it and track it. And I think CMOs really struggle with sometimes, because those longer-term things, as you were describing, often, you know, it takes time to show them. So anyway, I took a lot out of this thing. I'm going to attempt to summarize this conversation, and I think I can do it with your three key points. Look, as a CMO, whether you like it or not, revenue is the thing you're going to be measured by—revenue growth. So accept it, partner with your sales folks, and share that responsibility. That doesn't mean that you're just thinking quarter to quarter, but you're sharing the responsibility. Two: customer retention. If we get into a downturn, that is going to move to your number one priority, and it's always a good thing for CMOs to have their hand in. And right now, and something we're talking about in Huddles a lot, obviously, operational efficiencies—there will always be pressure on CMOs to do more with less. That's not a new thought. You could have had that question 100 years ago; it's the same thought. It's just a little bit tighter right now. So finding your ability to show impact is the best way to sort of protect your budget. All right. Rohini Kasturi, thank you so much for joining us.

Rohini: Thank you so much, Drew. Thanks for having me. It's such a wonderful, lively conversation.

Drew: I appreciate what you guys are doing. To learn more about CMO Huddles' partnership with HG Insights, please visit cmohuddles.com and hginsights.com. And if you're a B2B marketing leader, be sure to reserve your seat at the CMO Super Huddle. You may actually see Rohini and me in another one-on-one there in November 6th and 7th in Palo Alto. It's going to be freaking awesome. That's a wrap. Until next time, keep those renegade thinking caps on and strong. For more interviews with innovative marketers, visit renegademarketing.com/podcast  and hit the subscribe button.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!