HG Insights
Michael Levy
Marketing & Competitive Research Analyst focused on Sales Intelligence, Sales Engagement, ABM, and B2B DaaS.
Over the past decade, HG Insights matured from a technographics vendor into a technology marketing intelligence company.? While technographics are a desired dataset, NLP has made the acquisition of technographics a commodity, causing many of its competitors (e.g., Datanyze, Slintel) to be acquired.? However, Santa Barbara-based HG Insights is going strong and positions itself as a full-breadth data and market analytics provider for technology companies.
Alex Boden at Asymmetric Advantage Group, LLC recently estimated HG Insights’ revenue to be $60 million and its enterprise value to be $180 million.? Boden explained HG Insights differentiation versus Technology Analysis and B2B data firms.? HG (“Holy Grail”) Insights performs a bottom-up analysis of technology segments, distinguishing it from Gartner and Forrester.
Concerning data vendors, “they are not providing generic Company Data & Analytics for Marketing purposes,” argued Boden. ?“They focus on providing proprietary, metadata-rich Technology Intelligence.”
Several years ago, the firm rebranded from HG Data, expanding its vision beyond technographic data to market insights and analytics.? While they continue to collect vendor and product data, they also collect IT budgets, contract information, intent data, and broader company intelligence.
“Before HG, Harte Hanks were getting data on companies and technology by picking up the phone and smiling and dialing. ?And the founders of HG decided that there has to be a better way than that - it’s not scalable and it’s also not accurate. ?And they got together to work out how to mine from freeform documents the kind of content we have today,” explained CEO Dr. Elizabeth Cholawsky in 2022.? “Now we’re the leader in the market. ?We’ve grown over 6x in employees and revenues in [the] previous five years.? Our vision is to be the number one authority in technology intelligence.”
HG Insights has followed a “buy and build” strategy that combined acquisitions (Pivotal IQ in 2018 and Intricately in 2022), expanded natural language processing, platform development, and connectors.
HG Insights also developed Contextual Intent, which provides a richer intent data set that qualifies the nature of the intent beyond “in market.”
“Every customer has two or three feeds of intent data. ?But the problem wasn’t the quantity of data, it was the usability of data,” stated Cholawsky.? “We could put the context around the intent signals - they are in a buying mode, they are in a research mode, they are in a replacement mode, there is a competitive takeout opportunity. ?And we can know that because we have all of the trending information in the technologies that we have got and we have got the intent signals, and we have got the categories that we can slice and dice.”
Another example of staking out market whitespace: HG Insights launched Partner Intelligence in Q4.? Partner Intelligence “enables customers to accurately identify partners — for everything from resellers to system integrators and managed service providers — that have a proven track record of success.”
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Partner Intelligence helps vendors optimize their partner ecosystem expansion by identifying where else to build out their network and how much to support current partners.? Business Development can also deploy Partner Intelligence to prioritize partnerships, discover new opportunities, and identify their competitors’ most active partners.
Vendors identify vendors, products, or product categories that align with their partnership strategy.? Partner Intelligence analysis uses those product categories to identify partners with a strong “product-to-company” signal aligned with the user’s products.? Partner Intelligence provides users additional insights into their partner ecosystem and reveals new opportunities.
Thus, HG Insights delivers an Ideal Partner Profile from its Partner Database with a detailed view of partner firmographics and rankings.? Each month, a partner summary is delivered that includes ranked partner opportunities and product data.
Additional Resources
Founding a Data & Analytics business, consulting on Data & Analytics and Sales Strategy
12 个月Thanks, Michael. I should add that the financial estimates were real finger in the air stuff. It could well be that the true revenues (and therefore also EV) of HG is much higher than the numbers you quoted...
Powering B2B Data Providers with Custom AI Signals
1 年Thanks for this write-up Michael Levy. You mention a few different strings to HG Insights' bow from: vendor and product data, IT budgets, contract information, intent data, broader company intelligence, contextual intent and partner intelligence. Beyond these, what do you think AI will do for market intelligence providers? i.e. what types of data that previously not accessible, have become accessible? Curious to hear your thoughts after observing the industry.