From illuminating how macroeconomic trends impact customer behavior to unpacking aggregated user feedback, the traditional industry analyst firms play a major role in technology vendors’ business strategy and data-driven marketing efforts. In addition to consuming qualitative-research driven advisory services, many vendors also make use of quantitative data from the analysts that covers broad stroke metrics on market size and vendor share, broken up by basic firmographic filters.
There is no question that industry analysts provide valuable insight to vendors while boosting their visibility throughout the market ecosystem. This is why analyst firms are entrenched as trusted market intelligence partners for many organizations. However, there are gaps in traditional analyst firm subscription offerings:
- Lagging data. A lot of quantitative data reporting is retrospective – lagging behind by several weeks up to a year, depending on the service. Even qualitative analysis can go stale quickly, given the lead times on major reports.
- Static reports. The data found in syndicated research reports is most often delivered in a static format, creating extra data modeling steps in order to get to the necessary level of detail.
- Limits to granularity. Many reports’ data filtering gets no more specific than broad industries and geographic regions. For data cut by install base, more specialized verticals, and smaller countries, users must make assumptions or pay additional for custom reporting.
- Category fragmentation. Analyst-defined market categories don’t always line up to where vendors’ solutions actually live. This means organizations might subscribe to and pay for multiple services – or when budgets are tight, simply go without certain information. In addition, different coverage teams might use different forecasting methods (e.g. top-down vs. bottom-up). This creates the need for end-users to make additional assumptions to arrive at the data they need.
- The second problem is equally critical: even when a strategy team arrives at a market view, there is no path from that view to execution. The number is a roll-up of analyst estimates, not a roll-up of actual companies. RevOps builds their own list from scratch. Sales works whatever accounts they can find. Marketing runs campaigns against the broadest available list. The strategy the company spent months developing never gets operationalized.
In hyper-competitive markets, speed and accuracy are critical to competitive advantage. Vendors need a complete data picture that takes them from the market level to the account level, illuminating all relevant technographics and firmographics.
What does a complete data picture look like?
Today’s economic and competitive forces mean there is an unprecedented need for go-to-market efficiency. It is more important than ever that executive, strategy, finance, marketing, sales and revenue teams coalesce around a cohesive data picture. A picture that can be easily shared and retouched when necessary. This includes the freshest and most granular available data on:
- TAM/SAM/SOM
- Competitor market shares and growth rates
- Technology install bases
- Category spending by industry and geography
- Account behavior and buyer intent
With this, strategy decisions such as what Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) as well as areas of product innovation and whitespace to pursue can be made from a place of alignment.
However, it’s not common to be able to find all the necessary information in one analyst firm technology practice – or even across one firm. Many vendors find their market intelligence pictures to be missing some shading, if not an entire palette of colors.
How do end-users fill in the missing pieces?
From startups to large enterprises, vendors are incredibly resourceful when it comes to answering market data questions. Analyst firms provide a serviceable baseline with their well-informed reporting on market size, share, and projected growth. Their qualitative insights, informed from myriad conversations with vendors, end-users, and other analysts, provide one lever on which report end-users can build assumptions for shaping the data to their needs.
However, vendors often have questions that can’t be answered by the data they have at hand. They may need market sizing and vendor shares for a hyper-specialized segment, say ERP in the Asia-Pacific Hospitality sector. In another common scenario, they need data on a niche market not covered by traditional analysts. Perhaps an emerging category, mostly populated by startup vendors, is aggressively closing in on your market and you need to quickly assess the threat. How do you get the data that you need quickly?
For many, this means tedious desktop research where you cobble together whatever you can from the most reliable-seeming resources you can find online. Take the example of an established software company assessing the install base of its three main startup competitors. As newer companies, these competitors have yet to receive much analyst coverage. As private companies, there are no publicly available quarterly or annual reports to fall back on.
Let’s walk through what a team of desktop investigators from the product marketing department might be able to pull together on these three companies:
- Competitor #1: Sometimes, press releases can contain surprisingly detailed information about revenue, customer count, and growth. Fortunately, Competitor #1 made a momentum announcement where they shared some very pointed estimates around their install base and current revenue run rate. This is a big score, but you still need to find this info for the other two competitors (and when you present this information, you’re going to be asked to research the long-tail competitors in this market).
- Competitor #2. Competitor #2 had several press releases but they were just focused on new product and leadership announcements. However, our researchers see a document from a reputable boutique analyst firm – and it gives an unverified estimate of Competitor #2’s most recent fiscal year revenue. This feels like an informed estimate, so they’ll use it. This isn’t uncommon – many analyst reports are licensed for marketing purposes and a lot of these are available ungated on the web. Often, these reports are excerpts, mostly containing just the portions pertinent to the licensing vendor.
- Competitor #3 Luckily, our first two competitors had some good research tidbits floating around. Competitor #3 is proving much harder. The team finds some interesting and pertinent statements in consulting surveys, the business press, and on LinkedIn. After locating a customer and a sales rep who have both moved to your company, you chat with them about what you read and use those conversations to validate your assumptions.
Obviously, your team just did a lot of work and feel better about these customer numbers they’re going to use for planning and competitive intel than if they bypassed this research. Nevertheless, this patchwork approach leads to some formidable problems:
- Accuracy. While many of the sources (press, analyst, consulting firms) you can find online are ethically obligated to be truthful, it can be difficult to validate.
- Confirmation bias. Similarly, it is human nature to gravitate toward information that supports what one already believes. Bias is heightened when one is finding data from disparate sources as opposed to an objective single source of truth.
- Sustainability. The amount of manual effort it took to put together this intelligence for a limited set of metrics may have to be repeated in the future. The cumulative time impact is substantial.
These are just some of the problems that come with this approach. While the desktop investigative approach is unavoidable for bootstrapped startups, your enterprise needs consistent, unified, and objective data – accessible with a single click.
The benefit of a dynamic market intelligence platform
Data-driven decision making functions more effectively when your cross-functional stakeholders are working off of a unified single-source-of-truth with objective data that is updated automatically at regular intervals. This data should be able to give you the big picture of the market, but also drill down to the account level for coherent decision making from corporate strategy to account planning. You should be able to freely filter, manipulate and share data without having to tie together disparate sources.
HG offers a powerful platform that brings together disparate data sources into a single, comprehensive view. Whereas analysts provide the base colors of your market intelligence painting, HG’s new AI-powered Market Analyzer and Copilot adds the details that inform taking the right actions, so that your organization can stand out in competitive markets. In other words, analyst insights point you in the right direction, while HG’s precise data lights up the correct path.
A robust, AI-powered foundation of the HG Insights platform, the RGI Fabric unifies access to over 20 billion market data points across more than 25 million companies, including 240+ million verified technology install detections, spend forecasts across 140+ IT categories, and layered buyer intent signals processed from billions of weekly records. By integrating this comprehensive range of signals, spanning firmographics, technographics, IT spend, buyer intent, AI Maturity, cloud consumption, contracts, and buying center data, with first-party data from your CRM and GTM stack, the platform creates a holistic, AI-driven view of the market, from broad market segments down to individual account and buyer behavior.
Designed for Strategy Executives, Product Management leaders, and CMOs, the Market Analyzer’s Copilot combines conversational queries with AI-powered analytics to:
- Size any market from the bottom up, with the actual companies attached, so the number survives a CFO or board review
- Define the precise segment that matters to your business and see exactly what is in it, filtered by vertical, technology stack, spend level, or geography
- Understand where competitors are strong, where they are gaining, and where there is genuine whitespace before it shows up in your results
- Build your ICP from real market data and hand a prioritized account list directly to sales and marketing, with no rebuilding from scratch
In addition, HG Insights makes all of these features and data available under a single usage-based pricing model, giving customers access to all solutions whenever they need.
Whether you are heading into annual planning, defending a market size to your board, launching a new product, or responding to a competitor gaining ground, Market Analyzer gives you a market view built from actual companies, with the competitive context to act on it. The market view and the account list are the same thing. Strategy, operations, and sales all work from the same source of truth.
