A Sneek Peak into HG Insights’ GenAI Navigator with Melissa Webb

Recently, HG Insights came together for the annual HG United event, setting the mood for AI-led transformation strategies. HG Insights’ Sr. Product Manager Melissa Webb won the ‘The Marco’ All Company MVP Award. This year’s theme was Step Up, which the company kicked off by awarding the best-performing HGers from different departments — Data solutions, Customer Success, Product, Engineering Management, HR, Sales, RevOps, and others.

Melissa sat down with us for the AiThority TechBytes Interview Series to reflect on HG Insights’ recent accomplishments, product launches, and the future of generative AI tools for sales, marketing, and customer success.

Hi Melissa, welcome to the AiThority TechBytes Interview Series. We’ve heard you recently won an award at HG’s recent company kickoff for excellence in your role at HG Insights. Can you tell us more about this?

I’m a Senior Product Manager at HG Insights and responsible for executing strategic product roadmaps, go-to-market product campaigns, and the messaging and positioning of our products and integrations.

I’m excited to share that I just received an important award at our annual company kickoff, HG United. “The Marco” is a company-wide accolade presented to the HGer who best embodies the HG core values and honors a not-forgotten member of the HG family.

But, I’m even more excited about what’s going on at HG! We had a very busy year last year. We got our first patent, one of six other patents pending related to innovations the team has created! In 2023 we introduced several new products and integrations (if you’d like to see everything we did last year, check out HG Wrapped, our annual product review!).

Some of these exciting projects are:

• Salesforce Connector
• LinkedIn Connector
• Small Business Data Set
• Partner Intelligence
• Functional Area Intelligence
• GenAI Navigator

The most recent was a market-first GenAI Navigator, which enables customers to identify businesses whose technology presence indicates they’re ready to pursue generative AI.

What is GenAI Navigator? How do customers use this solution for decision-making?

So, the HG Insights GenAI Navigator is an industry-first generative AI solution. It helps you identify businesses that are ready to take the next step with generative AI and uncovers massive go-to-market opportunities. You can understand the AI Maturity and cloud-centricity of your markets—of prospects, partners, customers, or competitors—something no other solution on the market can currently do. We’re already seeing success with the GenAI Navigator solution and lots of interest from customers and prospects.

It’s based on the combination of several different data points—firmographics, Technology Intelligence, and Functional Area Intelligence, which detects the footprint of departments and roles within a business to understand how they are changing over time. Then, by layering on Contextual Intent, we can learn what generative AI-related technologies a company is currently researching and evaluating. Then, we calculate HG’s patent-pending AI Maturity Index, which includes insights from AI product adoption by a company, the locations where adoption is detected, and the strength of these detections.

GenAI Navigator solution scores companies with the strongest generative AI interest that we detect. Then, we show you the main technologies in use so you can make better go-to-market decisions.

Want a sneak peek into the types of insights you can get with GenAI Navigator? 

The AI 1000 is the definitive list of AI-ready companies helping you understand a business’ AI maturity, cloud-centricity, and AI interest so you can capitalize on the wave of innovation in Artificial Intelligence.

You mentioned AI maturity. Could you tell us how you define AI maturity in your organization?

So, in our context, a business can be considered AI mature if their tech stack indicates they’re ready for generative AI. By identifying companies signaling AI Maturity and generative AI intent and acting on these signals in a more refined, targeted approach to support sales and marketing growth initiatives.

With HG you can understand where your markets, and individual companies, are in their AI journey with insights specific to AI product adoption by detection of AI-product-related signals.

This is built on our patent-pending AI Maturity Index, which includes insights from AI product adoption by a company, the locations where adoption is detected, the strength of these detections, and the application of an Ideal Customer Profile of data-related product detections.

What is the most challenging aspect of working on a Product team in the Gen AI era? How do you overcome these challenges at HG Insights?

The AI landscape is constantly evolving – so we have to stay one step ahead.

At HG, one of the more dynamic aspects of the job is that we need to help our customers find a new way to get the insights they need into an entirely new market. So, the work to introduce new products to meet this new demand — all with new features, capabilities, and competitors — is emerging at a rapid pace. By continuously learning about emerging developments and adapting their strategies, offerings, and messaging to remain relevant, product marketers can navigate the challenges and unlock the wealth of opportunities brought about by the AI era.

You are a pioneer in the Partner Intelligence technology. Could you tell us about the problems that customers meet in their partnership strategy and how HG Insights’ Partner Intelligence solution solves these problems?

Sure.

Many considerations come into partnership strategy—prioritization, compatibility, and alignment, to name a few. But, the biggest single challenge is identification.

That’s why HG Insights’ Partner Intelligence analysis is so effective. It uses vendors, products, and product categories to give you key insights into their current partner network and reveal new opportunities. Then, you can choose from multiple product categories that align with their partnership strategy.

You can focus your resources on driving only the most valuable and profitable partnerships, and that’s so important in changing markets like the one we’re experiencing right now with the rise of AI.

As a product leader in the SaaS industry, what advice would you like to offer to younger product leaders?

Understanding AI Maturity is going to be more and more important. As a Product leader with years of experience in SaaS, I’d tell younger product leaders to leverage AI-powered tools to analyze their markets to target the right customers with relevant messaging and optimize campaigns for better performance.

Be proactive in shaping the future of AI-powered products and solutions.

And as we continue to innovate and push the limits of what’s possible with AI, I look forward to seeing our customers continue to achieve impressive results.

Thank you, Melissa! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.

[To share your insights with us as part of the editorial and sponsored content packages, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]