SaaS Scaling Secrets
The SaaS Scaling Secrets podcast reveals the strategies and insights behind scaling B2B SaaS companies to new heights. Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility, leads conversations with successful SaaS CEOs, exploring their challenges, triumphs, and the secrets that propelled their businesses to the next level.
SaaS Scaling Secrets
Why Most Companies Fumble Growth Plans with Rohini Kasturi, CEO of HG Insights
Dan Balcauski speaks with Rohini Kasturi, CEO of HG Insights, about using AI and data to drive revenue growth. Rohini stresses the importance of creating a detailed growth playbook grounded in real data and intelligence to scale businesses. They discuss the strategic decision to position HG Insights as a leader in 'revenue growth intelligence' and dive into the processes behind their recent acquisitions of TrustRadius and MadKudu. Rohini shares insights on post-merger integration, prioritizing internal efforts, and maintaining alignment with customer needs. The conversation also covers the importance of cultural fit, cross-functional collaboration, and continuous updates to growth strategies.
01:18 Meet Rohini Kasturi, CEO of HG Insights
03:42 Defining Revenue Growth Intelligence
06:18 The Positioning Process
12:56 Validating the New Category
20:03 Impact on Internal Operations
23:14 Operationalizing New Strategies
25:31 Acquisitions and Strategic Moves
31:50 Post-Merger Integration Approach
40:36 Leadership and Mentorship Insights
Guest Links
If a customer wants to grow their revenue, they need to create a growth playbook based on data and ai, so net net is, if you ask any of the C-level exec, what are your top priorities? The usual answer is, Hey, we want to grow revenue. We want to drive retention. We want to drive operational efficiency and bring agility into the organization. The timing for enterprises to use AI and data to make informed decisions is now, there is no shortcut to integration. There is no shortcut to execution or results. Nobody's going to produce it overnight. Magically, you have to do all the hard work. If there's one advice I can say, Hey, do you have a growth playbook? Let's say you are a five and million dollar company. You want to be a billion dollar company. Do you have a growth strategy that is based on real data and intelligence?
Dan Balcauski:Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that brings you the inside stories from the leaders of the best scale up, B2B SaaS companies. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today I'm excited to welcome Rohini Kasturi, CEO of HG Insights, a revenue growth intelligence platform serving 95% of the Fortune 500 before becoming CEO. Rohini was a customer. HG Insights during his tenure as Chief Product Officer at SolarWinds. With 20 plus patents and executive stints at Veritas, Cisco, and Juniper Networks, Rohini brings a breadth of knowledge about scaling technology companies. Rohini, welcome to the show.
Rohini Kasturi:Thank you for having me, Dan.
Dan Balcauski:Excited for our conversation today. Before we dive into your scaling journey, could you give us the elevator pitch? What does HG Insights do? Who do you serve?
Rohini Kasturi:So we mine a lot of third party intelligence. For example, resumes job postings, many types of proprietary data that we have accumulated over 15 years. Then from that intelligence from that data, we come up with intelligence that helps sales and marketing to be very precise in their targeting, in their outreach, in their planning. And that goes back to our positioning around revenue growth. If a customer wants to grow their revenue, they need to create a growth playbook based on data and ai, and we provide that intelligence.
Dan Balcauski:Excellent. These would be things like intent signals, readiness to buy type propensity scores, the, these type of data points that go to market leaders need.
Rohini Kasturi:Yeah, so you can go all the way from your tam. Every company has their ideal customer profile for a product. From your ideal customer profile, you can go from what's your TAM to, what's your serviceable addressable market to serviceable, obtainable market. All the way to the list of accounts, and when you go to each account, you can zoom into each of the accounts and understand what products do they use, what technologies do they use, how much do they spend, what intent do they have in buying a certain product. It's various types of intelligence. Dan.
Dan Balcauski:And in the intro I mentioned, you have this good coverage, 95% ish of the Fortune 500 is the Fortune 500. Your only customer base. Do you guys also serve mid-market s and b? Who are the customers for your product?
Rohini Kasturi:Great question. So we do serve in any customer above 50 million in ERR. We have customers all the way the biggest type of scalers of the world, uh, trillion dollar ERR customers as well. We have several hundred customers, of course, a few hundred, which are the Fortune 500, uh, type customers. Then several hundred, which are more mid-market, and uh, SMB as well.
Dan Balcauski:I want to zoom in on this positioning you make positioning category. I don't know how you particularly phrase it above revenue growth intelligence, because I believe this is a new positioning for you and NHG insights. And. a new category or position is often a fraught decision for leaders. So I'm curious, like how did you land on revenue growth intelligence as you're positioning? And then maybe just a little bit of like, what was the process that led to that?
Rohini Kasturi:It's like a fantastic question. So many of my jobs, in my couple of last roles, we have always used the positioning that has been defined by. Either Gartner or IDC or some analyst that has, in a well-defined market, call it observability market, there's no point repositioning it as something else because observability is a well-known market. Same is true with security or zero trust or any of those markets. But what is unique with. Our market and that I had the same experience 15 years back when I did my startup was this market is evolving right now. There are a lot of startups that have, that provide intelligence. There are startups that provide some platforms and automation. Given that this space is evolving, it was very important for us to define. Our vision, our strategy, aligned to what customers are looking for and make sure we are solving the customer pain points and strategic challenges. So net net is, if you ask any of the C-level exec, whether it's C-R-O-C-M-O-C-E-O-C-P-O, any of the roles in many organizations, you ask them, what are your top priorities? The usual answer is, Hey, we want to grow revenue. We want to drive retention. We want to drive operational efficiency and bring agility into the organization. So these are the three things that we are constantly here. And if you look at what Hege has been doing over the last several years is, let's say you do white space analysis. You wanna understand what's your white space, how many accounts are going to be potentially new for you to growing revenue. It essentially tries to the first objective, which is revenue growth. Okay. Similarly, if you take our Time series intelligence that we provide, it essentially tells you that, Hey, this is a customer that's your existing customer, but they're trying your competitor's product. When we provide that intelligence that tries to strategic imperative to which is retention. So everything that we do at Heg ties to these three strategic imperatives that customers have, and that's the process we took in defining our positioning as revenue growth intelligence. I'm happy to elaborate as well, but that's the context.
Dan Balcauski:That, that makes sense. I'm curious so you made some good points there around, in previous markets, Gartner or Forrester, one of the analyst firms maybe already has a defined market category. If you're selling a CRM going up against Salesforce, everyone knows a CRM is, you don't need to create a new version of A CRM. And so, there's, there was this opportunity. I'm curious though, as you as a leader looking at this was how did you look at the risk trade off of just trying to slot into, maybe there was something that was. to what you were doing versus making this push to say, Hey, we are, we're gonna create this thing, revenue growth, intelligence, and we want to own this category. I'm curious what your risk calculation was there of tr of going maybe the path well traveled, although maybe not as, uh, you, you know, you can't be a leader versus this other thing. So I think this is often a crucial decision point. For leaders, maybe they read, there's a bunch of books that say like, you have to go create a category and if you do anything else, it's dumb. And then there's a bunch of people on the other side of the argument. So I'm curious what your perspective is as a leader looking at that decision.
Rohini Kasturi:no, it's another fantastic question. So always in my past, at least, my last few jobs I've argued against. Creating any product category. I was the biggest believer that, hey, the market is defined. Go use the category. Because if you name a dog, a cat, you have to explain to the everyone that hey, cat is actually a dog. Right. Which you don't want to do. So in our case, what happened is if you look at the categories that are defined already by analysts there is sales intelligence. There is market intelligence, there is, or market research. There are all these broad terms, but there is nothing connecting all these use cases to say, Hey, there is a revenue growth intelligence platform that's actually going to help you drive revenue growth, but then it can solve various use cases for sales, marketing, rev ops, et cetera. There is no such positioning already defined in the market, Right? So we went through all of that. Where, we tried to slot ourselves and said, Hey, are we sales intelligence then? We are only solving 25% of what we do because we do serve sales personas today with our sales copilot as an example. Then we talk about revenue data solutions as a category that is used by rev ops teams, and that's one of the categories Gartner has. We said, oh, do we fit there? Then we are only serving the rev ops specific persona. Then are we a market research kind of a company? So we went through elimination process and then we came up with two categories. Essentially we came up with go to market. Intelligence, then there is revenue, growth intelligence. And then we were thinking hard around go to market intelligence and revenue growth intelligence, and realized that what good is it? What good is go to market intelligence? Okay? You can have the best rev go to market intelligence, but if it doesn't help you grow revenue, if you're not creating that customer value. Then the go-to market intelligence has no meaning. Then we said we want to focus on the intelligence that provides customer value, and we said the customer value comes from revenue growth, intelligence. So we want to come up with insights and intelligence that is going to create customer value. And if you look at one of the first hedges value. That's customer centricity. So we said, how do we create that customer value and how do we make sure every intelligence, everything that we do at Hedgie, ties to revenue growth for customer, for customers. That way they see the value and then the revenue growth, intelligence, uh, category makes really sense. So that's the cont. And how does it bring various personas and enterprise into this common revenue growth intelligence story?'cause that way Rev Ops is thinking of revenue growth strategy. Teams are thinking of revenue growth. Sales is thinking of revenue growth, marketing is thinking of revenue growth, but they're all using the same intelligence, which is revenue growth, intelligence, to driving that outcome.
Dan Balcauski:That makes sense. So there's, there was sales intelligence, market intelligence that they don't full, they encapsulate some of what you do, but not all go to market fits, but it really doesn't. Define the value that you're aligning to customers. I guess take me into the room. I'm shooting a documentary, I'm following you around as you're going through this. You're like, yeah, it doesn't fit. We've got a couple of these options, is this RITI walks into the exec offsite, just fully formed revenue growth, intelligence, the way to go, and everyone jumps up and applauds and say, yes, that's all. What? What does that process look like? In getting that decision aligned internally, instantiated in the company. What is, what did that process look like? I mean, even was this something that you guys had a topic of a three day exec offsite is like dedicated workshops. Just help me understand that process a
Rohini Kasturi:Yeah. Yeah. No. Fantastic. Dan, again, no, this is, was a series of workshops and discussions because we have many people in our organization who have deep domain expertise. They're used to selling sales intelligence use case or rev ops intelligence use case. We've been selling different use cases and solutions, and they all had viewpoint. And then we took a step back in the process to say, okay, what is a real customer problem we solve? Why do customers resonate with us? Why do we have 95% of fortune funded as our customers? We do white space analysis. We are doing competitive analysis. We do, uh, many things that help the customer, and we put a. Whole list of use cases that we solve and this, and we said, okay, at the end of it, what does it really solve at a high level? At a C-suite level? And it boiled down to those three things, revenue, growth, retention, and operational efficiency. And then we said, okay, how do we now position what we do, the value proposition we have, and what we want to create in the future? To what customers are looking for. And then of course a lot of these ideas came around like, Hey, revenue intelligence as an example. Then of course go to market Intelligence. There are many ideas that came around from the team. We debated the pros and cons. For example, revenue intelligence is used by companies like Clarity that are doing more revenue forecasting. We said, okay, we don't. Do that. Right? That's not the category we belong to.'cause somebody's already defining it and it's all about forecasting and predicting revenue properly. Right? One is really then, so that's the process we went through eliminating and we said, Hey, you know what? We got this. So, positioning sorted out and this aligns with where we are heading. This aligns with what the customer value is. So it was a multi-dimensional analysis and elimination that happened before we came up with two or three final ideas. And then before the leaders voted for it and we ended up saying, okay, let's go for this. And let's educate our customers and market around this.
Dan Balcauski:So I'm curious okay, so you go through this series of workshops. You're involving different functional groups different leaders in the organization into this elaboration process. And. There's, I imagine that's a significant amount of work and effort. On the flip side of that, I've seen a lot of companies I'm not saying this is HG Insights, but I've seen a lot of companies come out with this thing and they're like, that doesn't make any sense. And kind of the market is just has confused, look on their face. So I'm curious, what was your process? To either, maybe this is validation prior to sort of, a launch or, once you have it in market, what were you looking for from customers from the market to understand signals that, that, okay, like we, we've hit on something. This is not just a clever whiteboard thing that we've discovered.
Rohini Kasturi:Yeah, so there was definitely, like you said, the biggest validation that we did was what are the three strategic priorities. That a customer has, typical customers that we go to, market leaders have right when they wake up. When A CRO wakes up, when A CMO wakes up, when a chief customer officer wakes up, when a chief product officer wakes up, right? You know, when all of our CFO wakes up, what are they thinking about? Right. When you have a conversation, let's say at an enterprise level or a mid-market level, what do they start with? And we actually went and interviewed these questions, and sometimes we even asked this as a first question in our customer presentation, especially if it's a new customer, we ask it. What's important to you? And the answer is, Hey, when I wake up as a gm, when I'm waking up as a CRO or a CEO, et cetera, I'm really thinking about how do we drive revenue growth for the company? What is my strategy for driving revenue growth for the company? How do I use my ai? How do I use AI or data to drive revenue growth? Oh, I have a big retention problem. How do I use AI and data to driving retention? Am I focusing on. The right areas to driving revenue growth. Because if I'm just going all over the place, I might not get the revenue growth that I'm looking for, right? So those are the questions and inputs that we got and that led to like, Hey, what are the three priorities? Okay, those are the priorities. Are we, do we solve those priorities today? And do we have real examples like how do we solve those priorities? Like I said, identifying your ideal customer profile to Tam Sam Som at an account level is basically creating a revenue growth playbook. Saying, Hey, you can grow you know, revenue from a hundred million to 200 million. But here are all the list of accounts that you can grow. This is, and within that mention that this is wide space for you. This is competition for you. By the way, this one is partner driven. And this is if your strategy is more direct selling, then this is the wide space for you, right? Imagine you can guiding guide a customer in creating a proper revenue growth playbook, right? Then they really can see the value, and that's what led to this process of. This revenue growth story. I'll go a tangent here a little bit and I'll explain one more thing. So I have been at multiple places, even prior and one of the things that always happens is, what's your growth? Playbook, right? Or what's your growth strategy? You hear the word chief growth officer. There are a lot of these discussions. Sometimes the chief growth officer is embedded into Chief Product Officer or sometimes the CEO and the CFO together are combining and doing, they're all creating a growth playbook. And if you look at. Go to any public website out there and search for what's their five year plan. Go to any public company, the greatest of the company and say, what's your five year growth plan? Everybody has a plan that says I can go from 1 billion to 2 billion in five years. And the way that growth playbook is made up is it's made up of very high level TAM assumptions that you get from all these analysts. Very high level.$30 billion tan,$20 billion tan. And if you take 1% of the share, you know you are going to get 300 million or 3 billion. Like it's that assumptions, right? And then what you do is you take your bottoms of financial results that you had for far last five years, and you put some puts and takes, then you apply your product plans, right? It's all based off of experiences and some past data. Then very high level assumptions, right? That is why if you take any company's growth playbook, it's never in reality or in data. There is data for sure, okay? There are definitely some financial projections, right? But it is not really based on what is your market opportunity? What is that a wide space? Is that the, how much is your SOM that you can obtain this year? How much can you obtain? Like really applying a AI and data lens doesn't exist. That is where what happens is sometimes a lot of, even at my prior jobs, you go hire these expensive consultants who come in, they end up using some intelligence from companies like Heg Insights and then put it, put that Growth Playbook. But net Net is you have a lot of inside out thinking on this growth playbook as opposed to real data and insights, right? So with Heg, you can create that Grow Revenue growth Playbook used on based on AI and data. So that's that, that hopefully nails down our positioning on why LG and why Revenue Growth Playbook.
Dan Balcauski:anybody wants to see good examples of what s talking about, go grab. The latest s ones from the hottest IPO companies, they all have that exact tam Tam Samsung Logic in their S one. And it's. Some straight line compound annual growth curve saying that they're gonna be a trillion dollar company in 10 years or whatever it is. And I've lived on the other side. I think, uh, I didn't come up with this, uh, cliche, but I love it. It says more fiction has been written in Excel than in all the worlds and nonfiction books, or fiction books combined. Because yeah, oftentimes those growth plans are like, well, we have this data, let's make it look scientific and projected to the future. And yeah. Often that's not grounded in the customer and it's grounded usually in financials, which is like, you know, trying to understand. I dunno, anything by just looking at the rear view mirror, right? It's just telling you what happened in the past,
Rohini Kasturi:Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:of forward looking opportunity.
Rohini Kasturi:Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:so so you get so you, I don't wanna glaze past it.'cause you said earlier as well, a lot of that idea of revenue growth, intelligence was literally coming from the mo of customers. And what they're sort of worried about day in, day out reinforcing, it's like, go to market. Yeah I'm interested in go to market, but like, I'm not waking up in the morning being like, oh, I gotta improve my go to market. I gotta improve my revenue growth. So I love that you know, kind of grounded in, in what is the main pain part of the customer. I'm curious now, like, you've been on the product side in your past roles as well. So we, we share that heritage and I'm curious, so this sort of marketing category is birthed. How does that affect things for you in your operations? I don't know if you're, I mean, I went towards product, but feel free to, to go to another domain, like, does that create a lens internal to she insights now that you evaluate feature roadmaps and initiatives against this revenue growth, intelligence Like how does it affect sort of the internal day-to-day of the leaders within the company?
Rohini Kasturi:A hundred percent. So I think every time you know, you do a vision strategy, positioning, any of these exercises, it has an impact on every function. It has impact on marketing, it has impact on sales and enablement, you name it, right? Everybody has to have the, has the, has an implication. And what we do did is last at the beginning of this year, I'm already in 2026. Somehow at the beginning of this year, we introduced this revenue growth intelligence positioning in all the functions. We went through it trade workshops with many functions. After we agreed on, uh, the positioning and vision, strategy, alignment, et cetera, and also our three year vision, and then three phase vision, I would call it, because the market is moving fast, we define that, and then even when we do internal planning today. Always we are taking those three vectors. Is this driving revenue growth? Is it driving retention? Is it driving operational efficiency? Let's say we are prioritizing internal efforts in rev ops. Okay. Our internal efforts in cs, internal efforts in sales. My question or Right? Like even for the product. Let's say that developing new features, Hey, are you doing these new features because it's driving revenue growth. Or is this feature driving retention or is it driving operational efficiency? Usually we are bucketing into three themes. And the other part is more importantly, how do these features impact customer's revenue growth? Because that's our promise, right? Hey, we are enhancing our wide space analysis that impacts revenue growth. So one of the discussions that we are doing right now is we are, we're in the process of evangelizing, I would call it the next gen fabric revenue growth fabric. We do have a version of the revenue growth fabric in the market today that provides coverage for 20 billion, 20 million companies, intelligence around 20 million companies. But we are in the process of re-imagining what it would look like for a zillion companies as an example. Now as we are thinking about it, there are a lot of ideas, right? You know, Hey, we could solve this problem, we could solve that problem. Again, we are using the same framework like. What would drive Revenue Inc. Revenue growth? What would drive retention? What would drive operational efficiency for us first? Second is what would we do for the customer, right? Hey, does this drive revenue growth for the customer or does this drive retention for the customer? So in fact, if you're able to start with the customer first and define it, the prioritization is always done in the context of the customer. And then the product management, uh, is, or in an internal lens, is applied to triangulate it. Then we can come up saying, okay, you know what? This has most customer value, this has internal value as well. Then let's solve this together. It helps our growth. It helps customers revenue growth, right? Similarly, it helps customers retention. This helps our retention. Great. So then it can help you in a prioritization exercise as well. And that's one of the things that we've been actively, dog footing ourselves as well.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. Yeah. That, that makes sense. So, is this going to help sort of customer revenue growth? I'm curious,'cause given your previous answer where you said, other, in other companies, you've been the, Hey, let's not create a new category. Let's use what's existing in the market.'cause we don't wanna teach everyone
Rohini Kasturi:Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:as a cat. I love that example. I'm curious on the as you've. maybe it's still early days as you've tried to operationalize this, in that decision making process any sort of surprises or learnings from your end as you've sort of instituted that? I mean, people always, it's like, the ever ending curse of, you're a product leader or a, any type of leader, right? Is like you're constantly having to repeat the strategy. You're like, I already said it three
Rohini Kasturi:Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:yep, we'll go, say it again.'cause everyone forgot.
Rohini Kasturi:Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:for you, as you've tried to institutionalize this new muscle has there been any learnings for you, like, areas where maybe you thought it'd be easier and it has, it's been harder than you expected? Just,
Rohini Kasturi:so it was definitely harder in my prior jobs than this job, let me put it this way, because the prior organizations that I had were much LA larger It makes in and much more geographically dispersed. That makes it difficult to explain to. Know for different cultures, different regions, different maturity models and whatnot. At least here, HG is a few hundred people company, much more, smaller. And we have people dis disputed in five, six countries right now. Not a whole lot geographically Dispu dispersed. So from that sense, it's fairly, it has been straightforward. Not only that. Team that has come in that has been here at HG before my prior, even me coming on board or new people coming on board is, and even the new people that are coming on board are mainly joining because they believe that hey, the mark, the timing for enterprises to use AI and data to make informed decisions is now, and especially if we can solve revenue growth and help customers drive revenue growth using AI and data. There's no better use case than that. There is a lot of that inherent belief system in the company around the intelligence that we gather because we are a data and AI company, right? So that from that way, from that perspective, explaining our vision strategy the next year strategy it's very straightforward for us. Right? And I don't struggle with though we repeat it 10 times, right? We have to explain to different audience. Our questions are really related to the prioritization. Like, which one goes first? Does the chicken go first? Or, uh, you know, the egg goes first. You know, because sometimes you have those conversations like, Hey, do you focus on agents or do you focus on this? Like, you know, all of those things happen, but, uh, it's a good place to be in uh, Dan.
Dan Balcauski:Well, well, glad it's been a easier road for you at HG Insights. I wanna pivot a little bit because you know, I don't wanna give the impression that making this new category is the only thing you've been doing. You've been quite active in your short tenure, CEO You recently completed two acquisitions, trust Radius a, a fine Austin company, if I may say so. And mad Kudu within three months of each other. So an acquisition's pretty. strategic move. So I wanted to dive a bit into your thought process about m and a. I guess just broadly and, feel free to use, either, either one of them as an example, just talk. I guess in general, I'm curious, like when you're deciding whether to build, buy, or partner for, either new capability or customers I guess how you're thinking about those trade offs. And I'm not asking, if you don't wanna disclose anything about the specific acquisitions, just like how you're sort of thinking about that process as a senior leader.
Rohini Kasturi:Another fantastic question. I know you're touching up on the core of Build by Partner strategy and we'll get into m and a strategy. So the way we put together our build by partner strategy is everything that is core to our business where ip, where we have IP and we want to generate more IP is all built'cause we want to own that ip. We wanna retain that ip. Anything that is on the roadmap. To do in the next 18 months, 36 months is automatically buy because hey, we are going to do that irrespective, right? And hey, can we, we are able to acquire a company. We are able to accelerate that journey and let that will accelerate our product roadmap and that will accelerate our customer journey, et cetera, et cetera. Right? And the partnering itself is basically, hey, this is. To our core, we still need that value addition in the product or offerings that we provide to customers because customers might say, Hey, I need an Instacart bag along with apples. Don't bring me an empty bag. Red bar, bring some bananas together. Okay. Our core could be just the bag and the apples, but then the apples are adjacent, right? Or bananas are adjacent. In this example, then what we do is we partner, that's where partnering comes to the picture. So there are certain areas where we don't plan to, uh, invest or do it in the next three years, and that's not core to our IP then, but the customer wants to see the end-to-end value because there is an integration challenge. There is time to market challenge. There could be a pricing challenge, et cetera. Then we partner it and then we say, Hey, we are bringing that together as an end-to-end offering. That's our partner strategy. So that's how we thought through it as a build by partner strategy. And then when it comes to m and a, the lens we have applied is say everything that we wanna buy. For example, let me pick, Matt could do as an example, Matt could do, went and built a sales copilot, which is an essentially set of agents on top of he's data. Agents are wrapped around an experience. We call it an A, we co call it a copilot. It's essentially an agent app. It's a sales agent app. They created that on top of edge's intelligence. Okay, so this is something that customers want. Like for example, while we have a lot of intelligence, a lot of CROs, sales leaders want to get daily account intelligence for every account, right? Based on first party data, second party data, and third party data. So they went and created it. That was on our roadmap. It's very strategic for us, and customers are looking for it. We found the company, they said, Hey, there is a strategic fit. It's on our roadmap. It's a buy. There's no point building that we could, if we build it, it'll take us 18 months to get there. There is an acceleration point, right? That's so strategic fit is the first part. The second part is really financial fit because we are a pe, private equity owned company, right? So we, we don't have unlimited capital to throw and, uh, get companies at any valuation that they're available at. Hey can this fit into the model where it's valuable for us, valuable for the new company together? Is there one plus one, three so that their investors get value, our investors get value, our employees get value. Everything. Right? So it's to do with the financial fit. And the last element, which is always a difficult element, which is implicit is a cultural fit. Cultural fit is, hey, you know, great, there's a great strategic fit, there's a great financial fit. Everything is great, hunky dory. But when you really bring the teams together, can they interrupt work together? Can they gel together? Can we really do an integration together in the first six months that can lead to success commercially. So we took those three and that's how we evaluated the companies and, the timing was just we didn't time it, it just happened that, we had two companies almost going parallel to a point where they both were complimentary to each other. What TrustRadius does is bringing first bottom of the funnel buyer intent, which is very different shading from a fabric. And what's trust Matt could do brings is very different and they were very complimentary. One, enhancing our intelligence. One, bringing value realization for the customer through co-pilots and agents. So we said, Hey, let's do these two companies to accelerate our roadmap. Right? So that's what happened there. Then.
Dan Balcauski:That'll make sense. So, um, so complimentary products. I think so it, it sounds like there was a nice alignment even with the architecture of Mad Kudu. They were already built on your data platform. There was a need. Sort of turnkey, uh, enablement of those capabilities trust radius a little bit different, adding some more data to your already elaborate data system. So, but so you're digesting, I guess, two acquisitions in pretty short order. And I, like I say digest'cause some companies end up like not digesting. So hopefully everything's going well. I'm curious about your, like, how you view the timeline, because I think it's one thing to be like, Hey, pop the champagne, the deal signed, we've now acquired them. But then there is a window of. Time to integrate. So I'm curious what is urgent from your perspective when making an acquisition what needs to happen sort of day one, what could wait till month one? What has, what could wait till the end of year one? Because I've seen companies on the flip side of this. Almost do nothing for a long time until problems arise. Some people have a mindset of, well, we don't wanna break anything. We just paid a lot of money for this thing. We don't know all the ins and outs. So, we don't how to break this thing we just paid a lot of money For. Other people are like, well, we better make all these changes, whether they're personnel or technology or other, leadership or strategy changes, like right off the bat. So. So just walk me through like what, how you view that.
Rohini Kasturi:Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:post merger integration.
Rohini Kasturi:Yeah, no, I think this is a difficult question, but I'll tell you the approach we have taken based on our historical experience and learnings and so on. The first thing we wanted to make sure was because the strategic alignment was done even prior to the acquisition, even few months before, and making sure it's part of our roadmap and we have a view on how it creates customer value, the validation with customers. We did a lot of the pre-work even. Day minus 90, I would call it. Okay. But so day zero was really, how do we integrate all the teams? So that the team, the new companies are not sitting in their own silos with their own roadmaps. So we wanted to be, were we deliberately integrated the sales team into one sales organization by the segmentation we had like, Hey, enterprise segmentation sales team, focus on this growth segment sales team, focus on this. We did the same on the product and engineering side, marketing side, et cetera. So the teams were all integrated on day one, right into one organization structure. And what we did in the first one month was we developed call it integrated roadmaps. For each of the functions, revised plans, basically. For example, product had a plan before acquisition, but then they did a series of workshops the first month to say, you know what, let's get into the details. Let's understand what is working, not working. And they came up with an integrated roadmap that, for that organization. So it is not a siloed roadmap, it's an, it's a roadmap for the organization. Aligned to the strategic goals that we had as a company. So we did a lot of that in month one. And then the outcome of that was really when will the products be integrated? When will each of these functions be fairly integrated and can we get that to, in a 90 days window, can we get all of them integrated? So we are working towards that milestone of, another set of announcements and launches, which hopefully you will hear in the next few weeks, where we are integrating, for example, everything into one common platform. There is one platform experience that provides different types of agent caps. There is a sales agent cap, there is a market analyzer, agent cap, rev ops agent cap, all on one platform and experience that is combining Edge's platform and Matt Kudos platform as an example. So it's one team integrated, one leadership, one roadmap. Right one. Streamlined pricing, announcing it. Similarly, we have one revenue growth intelligence fabric, which includes all the trusted buyer intent into the fabric as well, so that all the enterprise customers can realize value. So that's being done as well. So we have done these integration plans. Now we are getting deeper and deeper into like a functional level, integration plans and execution. Our goal really is by end of this year. Which is really the five six month window. Wanna make sure all the integrations are done. It's one offering, one pricing or one set of offerings, one set of pricing, one team, in a refined culture and values. We are doing those sessions as well internally to bring all the people along. And then to a point when we launched the new year or the new sales kickoff that we are gonna have in 2026. We have a fast stack to, hey, there are, the teams are integrated. There is no Hedgie team versus a Matt could do team versus tedious team. It's all one team, one roadmap, one plan, one set of strategic competitives, et cetera. So that's the approach we've taken then. Okay.
Dan Balcauski:that's fantastic. So, merger sales teams are off the bat end of month one. You've run through a bunch of workshops to align the product roadmaps, technology integration. I'm gonna ask you a really hard question. So you and I both had spent time at SolarWinds when I was, we didn't overlap in tenure, but you led the product organization while you were there. I was just a low league ic. But when I was there, I, which I don't know if it differed during your tenure. We were acquiring four or five companies a year. Uh, so, I, I saw two different approaches. One was the kind of leadership gets their Brinks trucks, Brinks truck of cash, the sales office of the sunset on their new yacht. And then, the product strategy gets handed to myself or another member of the product team. It's like, okay, hey, we own this IP now. Like, go make it. Fit into the model and go on. I've also seen other approaches, which is like, Hey, we wanna keep that leadership team around and they know the strategy for their product. And that has implications as well. I guess, where do you fall on those two approaches? Do you rip the bandaid off, say like, Hey, you were a separate company or along a separate company, we're putting we're putting you into our model or, you know, hey, like you guys had some magic go in there and, you know, you continue to lead and run that product strategy. Like, how do you think about it?
Rohini Kasturi:Yeah. So given that, we have all gone through this movie several times, I think we, we have all, we have started off with an end result. What is the best outcome we are looking for through these acquisitions. We want to drive growth for customers, create investor value, but more importantly, that means there is value for everyone that is part of the company. All our employees. He G Mad could do trust radius, all of it, right? Includes leaders everywhere. But this means we come up with integrated offerings, cove offerings, everything, right? Which means we have to start that integration today because just postponing the problem by six months is only postponing the problem by six months.
Dan Balcauski:Mm.
Rohini Kasturi:Right? Nobody solves it for us just because you wake up six months later on Jan first, the products don't magically get integrated or the sales teams magically talk to each other, right? So we started with what is the end result and outcome we want and what is that happening in every company? Why do after two years, companies don't integrate? They sit there on the silos, like I said. And then, we have had that problem as well at Heg too, right? We have acquired companies and they were sitting in silos and so on. So the key is. How do we get to that place faster and sooner? And in the process, how do we make sure this is a successful outcome and gratifying place for the founders, for the CEOs, or for the other people who have come in through this acquisition and so on, right? So that's why we are going through that in day one. Like, so for us, we put more of a thoughtful plan to integration because there is no shortcut to integration. There is no shortcut to execution or results. Nobody's going to produce it overnight. Magically, you have to do all the hard work. So let's start the hard work right now. If you're not ready to doing that work better not acquire the company, because it's a lot of effort to integrate company. It's a lot of effort, right? Cultural integration, product integration, sales is like a big undertaking. Like you said, at the beginning of, you know this question,
Dan Balcauski:Yeah.
Rohini Kasturi:we took the approach of let's integrate it. Let's make sure they're successful. Let's rip any bandaid off, but very thoughtful approach to planning and execution.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah, I, and I don't know why I like your response very very politically correct, but but I think generally aligned with my philosophy. But the, the, so many companies just they do, they just think like, oh, like. Things will happen naturally over time. And what I've seen, now consulting for a bunch of companies have acquired companies I'll you'll have a interview with a sales person who works for the acquired subsidiary. They'll be like, oh they'll be like a sales person from macu saying, I don't sell HG Insights products like two years later. Right. Or they'll be like, they'll refer to like, maybe you're talking to HG Insights salesperson. Or they'll be like, oh, mad Kudu our sister company. You'd be like no, no, we're all one, we're all one team. Like, what's this sister? It's not like you're PAG and you're talking about like Tide versus
Rohini Kasturi:exactly.
Dan Balcauski:You're like, no, this is not a house of brands. Like we're all one, one technology firm. And it just that, that dysfunction festers. So, you, I just, but I guess hope springs eternal, that those things will just magically sort of work themselves out. And I think that's why I wanted to focus on sort of that critical window. I can talk to you all day, but we are running up on time, so I wanna take us to a couple of rapid fire closeout questions you up for it?
Rohini Kasturi:Yes, sir. Let's go for it.
Dan Balcauski:Awesome. What's a book or podcast you've recommended most often in the past year?
Rohini Kasturi:Book or podcast I recommended, so I got some nice books here. Let me bring the, let me bring my favorite book right here. It's called The Lead and Disrupt. Okay.
Dan Balcauski:Okay,
Rohini Kasturi:Yeah. So it's a fantastic book that was written by one of the Stanford Harvard professors Michael Tushman. So it's all about how do you drive innovation and transformation in organizations, because that's the era we are in. We are in this AI driven transformation world. Again we have to co keep our core business, but we also have to innovate for the new. How do you transform your business? How do you do it in a way where you are amid stress and approaching it as a forward looking leader?
Dan Balcauski:Very important as we are all being disrupted. Hopefully not to the permanent unemployment line, but hope springs a eternal. I let's see. So, in, in, in the idea of keeping us sharp on top of our game. How do you personally stay sharp as a leader? Do you focus on, surrounding yourself with mentors? You try to learn from your peers, you just dive into podcasts, like what's your go-to?
Rohini Kasturi:Honestly, the answer is all the above because you get to meet, uh, your mentors and advisors and others who have, you know, different perspectives. You meet your co-CEOs or co-founders, you know, who have different perspectives. Then I'm also a mentoring bunch of, uh. Stanford, Harvard MBAs, you know, as an unofficial, or a official mentor as well. So you get to hear their perspectives, who are more, much more modern and next generation leaders. So when you gather all this along with, you know, the podcast or the books you read, you know, it makes you you're always alert, right? You're always thoughtful thinking through what's right for the business and so on.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. I applaud your mentorship efforts. Those folks from the safety schools really do need an extra leg up in the world. When you think about all the spectacular people that you've had the chance to work with is there anyone that just pops to mind that's had a disproportionate effect on the way that you think about building leading companies now?
Rohini Kasturi:See, I have had multiple mentors, but one thing that I'll say is for me, the blessing and support has been my team. There are a lot of the team members that have, supported overwhelmingly or mentally over many years. Because when you are trying to do transformations, you need the team support. And that has been for me, the game changing one. One is, you can have all the energy you want, but you know your team has to support you, Your leadership has to support you, and that has been the key for me Then.
Dan Balcauski:If I give you a billboard, you could put any advice on there. For other B2B Sass CEOs trying to scale their companies, what would it say?
Rohini Kasturi:So I know we spoke about revenue growth and growth playbook and all that. If there's one advice I can say, Hey, do you have a growth playbook? Let's say you are a five and million dollar company. You want to be a billion dollar company. Do you have a growth strategy that is defined on, based on real data and intelligence? That can get you there and that you can use as a strategy and a playbook to say, okay, you know what? I moved from 500 to five 50, let me revise it with updated data and let me go from five 50 to 600. Do you have such a playbook based on data and intelligence? If you have then fantastic rate, you are definitely a forward looking leader. If not, that's a, that's an advice I have for you to see how you can build that out.
Dan Balcauski:Do you have a growth playbook you could rely on? Radi, this has been great. If our listeners want to connect with you and learn more about HG Insights, how could they do that?
Rohini Kasturi:Just go to our website, he insights.com, or even my email address, my first name do last name rohini dot cast he insights.com. Please reach out to us. Happy to help in any way we can either sharing the best practices that we learn from lot of the C hyperscalers on how to drive revenue growth or. Sharing any inputs that we might be aware of and, it's always mutual learning process with customers and prospects. So thank you again. Dan.
Dan Balcauski:Awesome. Well, thank you Rohini. That wraps up this episode of Sask Scaling Secrets. Thank you Rohini for sharing his journey and insights. For our listeners, found Rah Haiti's Insights valuable. Please leave a review and share This episode with your network. Really helps the podcast grow. I.
