Reinventing the B2B Sales Cycle: Rajan Sodhi on Product-Led Growth That Converts

Today, I'm joined by Rajan Sodhi, co-founder and CMO of Hyperview. Rajan is a seasoned B2B leader who specializes in helping technology companies scale. I've seen him do it many times, crafting repeatable go-to-market playbooks, driving international expansion, and aligning marketing, sales, and product for growth. Which is a lot easier said than done. Rajan's practical insights on go-to-market strategy, storytelling, metrics, and also keeping abreast of the latest marketing tech. making him a great guest for anyone focused on growth and international expansion in the b2b space rajan is always ahead of the game in terms of experimenting and working with new marketing technologies as just said so always interested and we'll be asking him about what tools he's currently using and playing with welcome to crossing the pond rajan thank you for joining us thank you thank you richard honored to be here the honor is ours but um before we dive into the integrity of the marketing and b2b world that um we're going to be discussing Can you tell us about Hyperview's origin story and the problem that you set out to solve when you started the company? Because I don't think there's been a time when it's been more relevant, given the geopolitical situations that we find ourselves in, than the benefits that Hyperview is offering. So please tell us a little bit more about Hyperview. Yeah, I'd be happy to, Richard. Thank you for asking. So really, the genesis of Hyperview came from an experience that we had, myself and my partner, Jajabara. We worked for a company called Pierone Hosting. We were there for almost a decade. At that company, we were managing 22 data centers across two continents and four time zones. You can imagine the inherent complexity in managing that kind of distributed infrastructure. When you are managing that kind of infrastructure, you're dealing with things like outages, you're dealing with downtime, and all those things are very costly. So anytime that we wanted to really know what was happening in real time was very difficult. We were dealing with fragmented systems that weren't speaking to each other. We had different silos that were reporting different data that wasn't matching up. We had very error-prone human processes in place like auditing, which would take a lot of time, a lot of cost, a lot of human resources. And at the end of the day, we were running a company based on these type of metrics that weren't in sort of a unified manner without the real true visibility into the infrastructure. And, you know, thankfully, we had a great team. And so we relied a lot on heroic efforts. But at the end of the day, that doesn't scale. So when we left, we had decided that we were going to create a platform that would resolve a lot of those issues and really build a platform that we dreamed we could only dream of back then. So The real starting point for HyperView, as it exists today, was in 2016. We acquired a software called RAMP out of St. Louis. We brought it in-house, did some enhancements to the UX and UI, improved some features and so on, and went to market with it. We did that for a good 18 months, and there were a lot of learnings in that. Number one, The product was really a me-too product, meaning it was just like everything else that was in the industry. Number two, it's an on-prem software, which means it requires care and feed from internal resources. That means you got to spin up servers, you got to spin up databases and so on. The implementation cycle could take anywhere from three to six months. People, they're not very satisfied, obviously. They don't get to taste the value of the product. immediately which is what most people want these days and on top of that the the it was a big ticket item in terms of a lot of money a lot of spend had to be up front uh professional services contracts support contracts you know perpetual licenses at that time and so we decided that this wasn't good enough this is not going to resolve the issues that data center operators are facing on a day-to-day basis so after about 18 months we decided to go stealth and start developing our own platform from scratch. And in that, we made some very key decisions. The first one, the big one, is that we decided that we were going to go all in on being a SaaS platform, so truly cloud native. Right. And it might not sound like a big deal today because we have so many SaaS platforms, but in this particular space, all of the products are out there on-prem. So this is toward 2016, you said? 2016 to about 2018 is when we were running uh we were selling ramp and we were you know with that product around sort of middle of 2017 we made this decision and so we went stealth and we decided to go and start developing this product hyperview which exists today that took a you know a good two and a half years of development just focused development and with that product yes we decided to go all in being cloud native At that time, and the reason why there's a lot of on-prem products is that there were still many customers that were reluctant to put their data in the cloud, which sounds really funny because we have CRM systems, we have ERP systems, we have human resource systems in the same companies that were afraid to put their data center data in the cloud. But we knew that the things were shifting. Using a famous hockey analogy, we decided to skate where the puck is going and not where it's been. And so fast forward to 2020, we launched the first version of Hyperview. And in that time, we started getting some adoption, some early adoption, which was fantastic. And I have so much respect for the companies that took a chance on us early on. And with that, we kept on tweaking, kept on testing. We tested our pricing model. We tested our go-to market strategy. We were really using that sort of full year of 2020. 2020 to 2021 of just doing a lot of go to market you know gtm testing and we finally arrived i would say in 20 sort of late 2021 we got to the point where we we were able to define our unit our our unit of value which was an asset so meaning that um if you come to to hyperview you just sign up for a number of assets that you have and you pay based on that so in our case three dollars per asset per year and you can start very small in those days you could start with a hundred dollar account today we have a free trial so you can sign up for a 30-day free trial no credit card needed you can get going at that time we introduced a hundred dollar model it was a minimum uh i think it was a 50 asset count or something like that and so we went to the market with that and we found we were starting to get really early indicators that this was working and what was really fascinating to see is that when we were selling ramp and quite a lot like a lot of the legacy decent providers today it because it is a big ticket item because it has multiple stakeholders and so on it would take a very long time uh to get you know from move from a a prospect to an actual client sometimes 12 to 18 months uh and you would you know getting budget approvals and so on and we felt that we could reduce that to 45 days so we took you know with this model of going cloud native sas and taking advantage of all the features and benefits that you can deliver to a data center operator, we felt, number one, we could create a very easy way to adopt the software at a really low price point. And you literally could put it on your credit card. And you can just, you're off to the races. And it's very easy to then expand. You can just add more assets. Everything gets prorated to the existing subscription term. And that... really started to come to fruition and we saw really great results and increased adoption and by i would say 2020 to 2023 things really started to explode we started not only seeing a vast increase in adoption not just you know in north america but really around the world again being a sas platform that follows a product-led growth strategy where the product does the majority of the selling We really just rolled it out. We focused on the one thing that was the most important thing, which is an exceptional user experience. I truly believe that the reason why Hyper-V stands out is because we're the only decent software that puts the user experience first, which is a big thing to say, but it is reality. If you look at this category of software, the feedback has been that it's very complicated to use. it costs a lot of money it uh over promises and it under delivers uh many times after you know a multi-million dollar rollout about dsim software it ends up being sitting on the shelf you know teams are not adopting it they're not using it and it's quite useless at that point well also i mean the story you were telling in terms of the the gestation period from opportunities to a deal a lot of the people that would have initiated that conversation with other dsim providers would have probably moved on by the time it was implemented and installed adding more friction to the process yeah one of the interesting things about moving to this platform in a product like growth model is we were no longer targeting you know executive levels you know to the the the main decision makers who hold the purse strings we were able to now target you know network engineers day center managers system administrators and they would find us they would be able to test the product very easily a hundred dollars get going or a three day today a 30-day free trial and go through the process and the next thing they know they're experiencing a level of visibility into their infrastructure they never had and then it's very easy for them to start evangelizing and internally and it starts moving up the chain and and getting the you know approvals for a bigger budget in terms to support their specific environment and uh That's exactly what we've seen. And as a result of that, we have reduced the sales cycle significantly under 45 days. We're moving towards that 30-day mark. Basically, somebody signs up a free trial right after the end of it. They're already going. And that model, that experience, and the feedback that we've been receiving, one of the things that I'm really proud of what we do here is we work very closely with our customers. We have a feature request button that's available inside the portal. We get feature requests all the time and we prioritize every quarter our product roadmap. We will reprioritize depending on what features make sense. If it does make sense and there's enough customers who want it, we will then actually prioritize that. We are averaging now a product release every seven weeks, which is absolutely unheard of in this industry. I'm going to come back to customer feedback because that's clearly been such an important part of your journey. The story you were telling suggests that the target customer and the decision maker has evolved as you've grown as a business. Can you tell me about that? How has that definition of your target customer in terms of the decision-making units surprised you or changed since Hyperview was first launched? Well, when we started Hyperview, we were very much focused on the SME market. We felt that the SME market was underserved when it came from Decem software because it was cost prohibitive. There wasn't a lack of need for Decem tools, but there was a big barrier. It was basically just large enterprises that were adopting Decem at any kind of scale. Originally, we went to the market really focusing on the SME market, and we thought that's where we'd get the best adoption, particularly being a new SaaS platform. To our surprise, now in 2026, that's completely changed. uh not that we don't still have smes but we have a lot of large enterprises now that have adopted hyperview and are not only have adopted they are growing significantly with us you know we're lucky enough to have some of the top three largest financial services companies as clients we have healthcare we have government we have uh you know penetrated some of these industries that were traditionally a few years ago so it has to be on-prem it has to be a perpetual license you know all those sort of things and today it's like no it has to be a sas platform it has to be subscription based we don't want to deal with the headaches of managing the software we just want it to work and that has been a significant shift so making that early decision you know back in 2017 that we're going to go all in as a cloud native platform only not have an on-prem version or and so on and strictly subscription And I guess the third thing that we did, which was very different at that time, we published our pricing. We made an early decision that we're going to be completely transparent with our pricing. There's no hidden fees. There's no gotchas. You don't even really need professional services. And if you want to have that support. we offer some you know basic bundle packages of hours that people can use but they don't have to consume it because we have doc you know very thorough documentation online we post videos and today now we have lots of product tours so we make it really easy for people to self-serve and that was the goal so then the the shift in seeing requests like rfps that we get today now state we it needs to be a sas platform uh that was very different back then and obviously we feel you know we made a really good decision there because we really are the only truly cloud native uh decent software at the moment and whilst obviously the technology aspect to hyperview is a huge part of success actually what you're talking about here is the marketing positioning and the communication with the stakeholders and the story seems to be about removing friction make empowering the customer making it as simple as quick and as easy which is a a lesson that many B2B brands can look at regardless of what actual technology or what the B2B product or service is that they're selling. But with that in mind, given the demand for automation, the demand for self-service, what are the biggest challenges facing B2B brands today in terms of the marketing communication part? Yeah, I mean, I think right now we are so cluttered with, there's a lot of noise. i think just as a consumer let's start as being as a consumer this the amount of noise particularly you know targeted advertising the way the algorithms work in social media it's almost impossible if you just rely on those sort of avenues to get true understanding of a you know a product that's out there that could actually solve your problems so one of the things that we you know are one of the things i i made a very early decision on is that we're going to focus on really using the product as a vehicle for our marketing, meaning that we don't need to fluff it up. We can just show what it does, demonstrate it, get it in people's hands as fast as we can. Because we know the second we get into their hands, the chances of them falling in love with it are great. For me, it's more important that we make it easy for data center operators to discover us, to try it, and fall in love with the product. And really focusing on that, it's like an ethos for myself and how we then market the product. In order to do that, I need to be able to provide as much information on the product itself and how it resolves very specific challenges that data center operators are facing on a day-to-day basis. It's a very stressful role. And a lot of people don't, unless they're actually in the data center space. don't really understand what it takes to keep the lights on. They don't understand what it takes to keep all that, you know, the networks up. And, you know, God forbid there's an outage, the amount of scrambling and stress that it puts on still, you know, on very limited resources is incredible. And so when you are able to introduce, you know, automation tools to allow them to make that easier. It makes a big difference. When I look at now how we are doing our marketing from that specifically, the areas that I've been focusing on is how do I find ways to get that content out? How do I find the proper delivery models to get our message out? So number one, obviously, public relations is a huge one for us. And the reason why is that if we want to actually resonate with a potential customer of Hyperview, we need to give them a message that is authentic, that is rooted in, you know, a bold sort of opinion or take on the industry, on where things are going and tying it back to the platform. And so we use PR to get that message out. We use, you know, very focused on right now, sort of the founder's brand approach. Jad, my partner and the CEO of the company. He has been a prolific writer these days on LinkedIn, just sharing his thoughts. There's no selling. I think that's key. Yeah. Anything that's happening in the industry, where the industry is going, trends, challenges in the space, and ultimately how does DSIM in general has to evolve to help resolve these growing challenges that are happening. Data centers today are not just these single data centers anymore. It's hybrid environments. data center. The cloud is co-location. It's edge now. And so, again, very distributed infrastructure, which creates even more challenges than, you know, back in the day when we were working at Pier 1 hosting. So being able to actually cut through all the noise, being able to deliver a signal that helps people understand that we understand, that helps them know that we understand their challenges. You know, we know we live their shoes. We know exactly where they are. That has been probably the most important aspect in the way that we market. The way that we deliver it, obviously, I mentioned PR. Another one that's been very, very effective for us is Reddit. And I don't mean advertising. I mean, for example, there's a subreddit called Data Center. I'm very active in it. One of the things that if there's some post about DCIM or anything related to that, and I feel there's something relevant that we can say about it, I'll post there. I always make sure that I disclose that I work for the company so that I don't get flamed. But again, it's very much not selling. It's just saying, oh, you have this issue. This is what the software can do. And we have actually found that to be very, very effective. And it's the credibility and the empathy and the trust that is evident in forums like Reddit and also in editorial environments that I don't think you can buy that in terms of advertising or paid-for media. And if you look at the data center, operators and the people within that environment, they are very savvy individuals. They consume information. They do a lot of their own self-learning. They prefer that. And so they go to Reddit boards to find, you know, they want to get the real stuff. They want to get the signals. They go to, you know, reputable editorial publications to get to consume that information. And in our case, we're going direct, you know, using like a platform like LinkedIn to deliver that message. That has been very, very effective because what it allows us to do is shape where Hyperview stands in this space. How is Hyperview different? What is our take? We have a very bold take on where the space is, where the space is going. In fact, my partner is going to be doing a speaking engagement, Data Center World next month, and it's called the Now, New and Next in Data Center Infrastructure Management. an example of how we look at things. We're always keeping ourselves abreast on how things are shifting. For example, today, now data sovereignty is so critical. Probably five, 10 years, people weren't really thinking that much about it. I mean, it was there, but they weren't really thinking about it as heavily as they are today. How does DSM make sure that we support a user's needs for data sovereignty and where their data resides? That's very, very key. So there's so many things happening. And now with AI and the explosion there and how that fits in, you know, AI on its own and just using the word AI doesn't really mean much. But using AI effectively to help, again, reduce manual tasks that are error prone and just suck up a lot of resources and make each individual within a data center operations team. more and more effective. It's not about replacement, but it's about being more effective and also being more efficient with the time and resources that they have in place. And you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation about the role that customer feedback has played in your product development. Can you talk me through some of the mechanics? How does that work? How does a company like Hyperview listen? Absolutely. So it's really simple. We have a button that's available in the portal. It says, submit a feature request. A simple form pops up. The user fills in the information, tells exactly what they're looking for. It's submitted. They immediately get an acknowledgement. It's then sent to our product engineering team that triages it. And based on what they're looking for, we then make a decision. Do we add it to the product roadmap? Is it a valid request? Have we been receiving other similar type requests for this feature? And once it's determined that... For example, in this case, yes, this is a go. We let the user know that, hey, we agree. This is a feature that we should be adding. And we are going to keep you up to date. And the system does that on the progress of it. And once it's ready to go live, we let them know that it's actually going to go live prior to it actually being released. I love that because I think it fosters a degree of investment. therefore loyalty and ownership of the successive Hyperview. And having used software as an individual and as a business myself and submitted requests, often it feels like they just go into the ether and you never hear anything about them again. No gratitude, no acknowledgement. It's like a business doesn't care. And it sounds to me that that step of acknowledging and keeping your market or your customer or your prospect informed of how you're responding to a request. how that's manifested in product development, I can only imagine is very powerful. It's absolutely critical. When I look at some of the dialogue between our product engineering team and our users on feature requests, so a lot of the messaging is automated in terms of the status, but there's a lot of dialogue that happens in between. The glee that I see from a user who sees that their feature request is going to be released in the next rollout is phenomenal. It also fosters a very close relationship with our users. That again, cascades within the organization, meaning the user's organization. Other users of the product, they find out, wow, John submitted this feature request and this just made our life easier and it's now live. Other users get more engaged into the product as well. That would cultivate. word of mouth, referrals and recommendations and that sense of pride that somebody's had an input into something that's manifested in a technological change. I also know that you put a great deal of energy into celebrating heroes within your marketplace. Can you tell us a little bit about that? It's a thing that I believe other B2B marketers will aspire to or maybe wonder if it's worth how to go about it. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about that program and the kind of results it's delivered. yeah so getting back to the data center world the data center operations world it's not an easy job there's a lot of stress there's a lot of pressure and a lot of those things go unnoticed you know as long as the the lights are on as long as the network is up everyone's happy you only hear about anything and when things are things have gone wrong or uh there's an outage or things have gone down now everybody's paying attention we recognize that again being being from that space and seeing it firsthand that there are a lot of unsung heroes that are keeping our digital world together and working and so we decided that we were going to start recognizing those unsung heroes and you know bring them to the forefront and let people know what these people do and so we created this program called guardians of the infrastructure and with that recognition program we started profiling different data center operators anywhere from management to executive level to people within the space that are influencers that are really tied in, dialed in directly into the space and bring them to the forefront and help raise the profile, not only of the individuals, but of the profession itself. Honestly, it's been a lot of fun. We've had a lot of fun with it and we're going to continue. There's some other ideas that we have around it to expand it further. But the feedback has been great. I know that when we go to some of these events, we get a lot of questions and accolades about, hey, that's such a great job that you guys are doing this. Again, it's a space that doesn't get a lot of recognition. It's a space that it's a profession that doesn't get noticed much. But when you're in it, you know, those are the guys or those are the people that are putting in those heroic efforts to make sure that. everything is working and our digital world continues to be what it is today. And so celebrating the industry and the people that you celebrate in the guardians of the data center, for other B2B marketers, they might be looking at it and looking at this conversation and thinking they could do that with their customers. Do you do that with just people that happen to be customers that you're working with or does the celebration go beyond that? Yeah, no, it has nothing to do with just customers. In fact, our first guardian was the CTO of Lenovo. A lot of the people that we profile are not simply our customers. It's anybody in the industry that merits the recognition. And the nice thing about the program is because others within the space see it and they get... they're excited by it. Then we get other people say, hey, well, they start nominating somebody else and then we get that information. It creates a bit of a loop. You get that referral. The nice thing about that story is I think it talks to the credibility and the empathy and the respect that you've got for the customers, which in a B2B space is so evident and often is lacking, I think. I agree. For us, If we're going to relate to our users, if we're going to, they need to know that we understand their pain, that we understand the space. We're not simply just a company that came together and put a software and hoped for the best that we could resolve their problems. We lived them. And so part of that is, you know, that's the authenticity. We know exactly what you're going through. We know uh you know the challenges you're facing on a daily basis we know it's growing we know that uh the pressure is increasing and look you have a you have a friend in hyperview um here's a platform that will alleviate a lot of those you know daily challenges and pains that you have so you can focus on on the on the more meaningful work yeah and and i suppose if you were to just restrict the guardians of infrastructure to just your customers who would have less value have less um currency and it's the credibility that gives you the prestige and the value for the people that receive those awards. How do you measure marketing effectiveness? Because it's always so difficult, especially in the fast growth stage and innovating, disrupting measurement and marketing. How does that work for you? Yeah. The amount of KPIs that are available to you is infinite at this point. Again, we're a really small team. So I have to focus on things that really kind of get us through the process and understand where our leads are coming from, what's working, what's converting, and so on. So very much from the beginning, it's still marketing qualified leads that come through. In our case, trial signups. In an early trial signup, the first, we look at... um you know how many active users we measure active use by the number of assets they start adding to the platform uh that's the first early indicator that they're actually using the software uh and then from there on it then turns into okay in the case of a of a trial it that converts into an actual paid customer and then as we look at those early stages we start saying how are they growing and so then we look at opportunities Are they starting to add more assets? It's usually the first thing that we look at. How quickly and how often are they adding more assets to the platform? Because again, that's our unit of value. As you get into the later stages of a client's time using Hyperview, you're now looking at not only just asset, but are there add-on features that they're now adopting? That's another one that we start to look at. We also look at, and we're starting to see this in many cases, are they adding more users in terms of inviting another division? Recently, we had a university in the US that was a client of ours for two years. And late last year, they said, there's another division on our campus that is very interested in using Hyperview after seeing what we've done. And they want to basically ditch the current platform that they're on. by the end of the last year they they signed on so that that expansion occurred so we're always looking at you know how are they expanding in terms of assets are they adopting more of the add-on features are they uh expanding in terms of um uh users um i mean we have in terms of the platform itself there's no limit on users we don't charge for users but the the ability to expand to another division uh that you know wants to add their basically that means that they're going to add more assets again gets back to the the expansion of asset that are being used in in the platform and as as one of the co-founders that must be tremendously rewarding to see that expansion within an organization you're already working on looking here to the next three to five years what marketing technology shifts do you think will change the way that b2b vendors are engaging with enterprise buyers Well, I mean, it's AI. AI is by far, I guess, for every industry at this point, but specifically in marketing. It's happening now. It's going to continue to, as these tools get more and more intelligent and easier to use, the adoption is going to be like mad. I mean, today, if I look at myself, two years ago, I had in my budget to hire a writer. And I happened to, you know, one morning happened to walk into a coffee shop on my way to work. And one of my closest high school friends was sitting at a table in front of the laptop. And so we were chatting for a while and he was in the middle of writing some blog material. And so ironically, you know, we're in completely different industries. I mean, he's a mold inspector. Mold as in? as in mold on the wall kind of molding actual yeah mold how did somebody get a job like that yeah i bet there's some very fascinating facts about mold to be had yeah absolutely so he as he was developing this content and he was he was writing quite a few you know pages and he said have you ever heard of this tool called jasper.ai and i said no i've never heard of this so he you know two minutes of kind of him showing it to me and and and describing what it does i was absolutely fascinated so i i rushed to the office and the first thing i did was i looked up jasper.ai and um i signed up for the basic you know didn't take me long to say you know i'm gonna give this a try it was like there was a 14 day trial and um signed up started playing around with it and i was sold i was like wow okay this is something. And after about, I think a month to two months of using it, I went back to the team and said, you know what, scrap my budget request for a writer. I think I'm good. I think there's a, I'll be able to manage this just between myself and this platform. And, you know, fast forward, you know, now two years later, I mean, the amount of changes in that platform are unbelievable to the point I'm not consuming all the features. Similarly, another product that I've adopted is a platform called Storylane.io. One of the things that I want to do with Hyperview is make it really easy for any visitor to our website to learn as much about the product and familiarize with the product. Again, I want it to be in their hands as quickly as possible. None of this old school, everything's behind the gate. You can only see the software once you book a demo or all that stuff that is rampant in our industry. I'm the opposite. I said, here, this is what it looks like. This is exactly how it works. You want to see how this feature works or you have this challenge, this is how it resolves it. Story Lane allows me to develop product tours and it's a phenomenal software. that has allowed me to go from having no product tours and thinking about the whole video process of having to film it and record it and edit it. Suddenly, over a weekend, I had two product tours done after signing up. That's another example of an AI-enabled platform that is changing, allowing me to be far, far more effective. There's others. AliAI.com is another one. That's for SEO. I do a lot of work on SEO, but it's grueling. You know, there's a lot of aspects to it, not just content and keywords, but there's a whole back-end optimization of it. And so I've been focusing much more on the front-end side of it. The back-end side is not something I truly enjoy. And again, I was looking at I'm going to be needing to hire an SEO agency and so on, and was introduced to AliAI.com, actually through my partner. And he said, take a look at this. And again, I played around with it. And within a couple of days, signed up. And the next thing I know, I'm optimizing the back end of our website at scale in a way that I've never been able to do in 10 or 11 years. So you look at how is it impacting marketing? I mean, we're still kind of in the early days of AI. And yet the power. of these platforms, the power of these AI-enabled tools is incredible. This morning, I woke up and was reading about Claude, a gentleman had tweeted about, did you say tweeting or did you say exed? I have no idea, but let's just say tweet. Yeah, exing. Exing, right? But he put out a tweet and to his credit, he was very transparent. He said, hey, I just used Claude Cowork. And I was able to basically, at scale, develop an entire SEO program and have it execute it and literally was an SEO agency in the box. And he shared exactly how he set it up. He shared all the prompts and I was blown away. I had a bookmark and I'm very, very intrigued by it. I think it was you that advised me. maybe about six months ago that every time i see a post that offers me prompts advice and prompt save it because it will become useful so i've taken i've adopted that i've got now a whole bunch of whether it's instagram or linkedin or any other just advice on different prompts it's incredibly generous the way that this industry this particular aspect of marketing people are sharing their expertise very freely which i think is new i'm not sure that the marketing professional was as collaborative as it has become. The last question I want to ask you is regarding the buy-in, the B2B buying process, and the way that that has changed. Because when you started doing business for Hyperview, presumably the way that buyers were acting and operating and discovering and exploring solutions was very different from the way it is now and the way in which you think that's going to be in the next three to five years. Well, I think what you just said is a big part of it. People are sharing information readily. If you go to Reddit, you go to a subreddit, the amount of really good, authentic, genuine advice or hacks or ideas is amazing. And this is why you see these subreddits just exploding in terms of usage. I find myself going to them for very specific. you know, areas of interest. I think what's changed is, is really, there's sort of, there's been a cultural shift in general. We've all, we're all feeling it, right? There's the good and the bad of social media. The good part is that people are able to share their ideas very freely and very easily. They're also able to find like-minded individuals. It's a double-edged sword, you know, depending on which, where we're talking. But in terms of marketing, I think it's been very effective. We're definitely seeing people being far more collaborative, being far more, way less guarded. Yeah, I mean, when I was coming up through the profession, you know, it was very old school. You know, everyone wanted to, you know, they want to hold on to their information and their knowledge because that was their value. They can't, you know, I can't share my expertise because that's going to somehow devalue me. You know, very much that kind of approach. And I... you know it's funny even back then i never liked it um i remember when blogging was just kind of taking off still very early but you know there was definitely happening i started experimenting i remember um one of the founders of of pure one gentleman by the name of lance tracy who was always on the bleeding edge of everything and uh he kind of planted a bug in my we're talking 2004 here and said you know you should you should look at blogging you know and kind of see how that works and kind of walked away just left it kind of like a it just came into my ear and so it you know me being me i had to find out what this is all about and i tested out by introducing this blog called big marketing for small business and my whole premise on that blog was i'm going to share everything i know everything that works that helps small businesses get access to agency type advice without having to pay for it. As a result of that, it grew an audience. And it was simply because I was being straightforward and not guarded. So you look at that and you look at what's happening today. That's happening at scale. And it's happening globally. You're not limited to a regional knowledge. You're not limited to just a specific set of individuals that you can get this information from. Or you have to join some kind of an association, which we used to do about, you know, before i used to do you know different marketing associations to get access to certain information and and tools and what's coming up and what's happening in industry you can find that all on online you can find that in in communities all you know all different points of the internet and and get really really solid actually better better than that was back then that is actually practical and that can be useful and and you can put in you put into use right away I guess the advantage of this is that you can verify it by looking at different sources rather than just being reliant on an industry association policy or a conference or a workshop. There's more sources to verify the information, which gives B2B marketers presumably more conviction about the decisions that they're making. Yeah, I totally agree. I think that it's a very interesting time. Where is it going to go? I don't quite know. um i don't think any of us really know but i i will say that the marketing profession itself is definitely shifting there's a lot of things that i used to you know provide uh you know i just had a side hustle where i was doing consulting uh on branding and on uh and so on and you know i i can see the gaps today you know or not the gaps but i can see the the where people are not gonna you know they're not gonna spend the money for that kind of consulting anymore but it's so not only is it available online but the the quality is actually quite remarkable and that's coming from somebody who's been doing this for a very long time so i think as marketing evolves the there's certain areas you know areas of marketing are going to be very very hard hit during our last recording we had an electrical storm so um i wasn't able to wrap up the conversation with rajan which i thought was extremely insightful and so i want to thank him for giving his time his insight and engaging in crossing the bond thank you rajan and stay tuned

In this episode, Richard Cook speaks with Rajan Sodhi, co-founder and CMO of Hyperview. Rajan’s background spans B2B marketing, go-to-market strategy, and scaling technology companies, giving him a distinctive perspective on how product-led growth and clear positioning drive sustainable success. Rajan explains how Hyperview was built to solve the complexity of managing distributed data centre infrastructure, why shifting to a cloud-native SaaS model was a defining decision, and how reducing friction in the buying process can dramatically accelerate growth. He highlights the importance of empowering end users, shortening sales cycles, and using the product itself as the primary driver of adoption.

From marketing strategy to customer engagement, Rajan outlines how brands can cut through noise by focusing on authenticity, transparency, and real user value. He shares how Hyperview leverages community platforms, founder-led content, and continuous customer feedback to refine both product and positioning. He also discusses the growing impact of AI on marketing execution, the shift toward self-serve buying journeys, and the importance of aligning messaging with real customer challenges in increasingly competitive markets.

About the Guest:
Rajan Sodhi is the co-founder and CMO of Hyperview, a cloud-native data centre infrastructure management platform. He specialises in B2B growth strategy, product-led marketing, and scaling SaaS businesses globally. Rajan has extensive experience in go-to-market execution, international expansion, and aligning marketing, sales, and product teams to drive growth.

Key Lessons and Takeaways:
• Product-Led Growth Wins. Reducing friction and letting users experience value early accelerates adoption.
• Simplicity Drives Scale. Clear pricing, easy onboarding, and strong UX outperform complex enterprise models.
• Customer Feedback Fuels Innovation. Continuous input from users strengthens both product and loyalty.
• Authenticity Builds Trust. Community engagement and real expertise cut through marketing noise.
• AI is Reshaping Marketing. Lean teams can now execute at scale with the right tools.
• Metrics Should Reflect Growth. Adoption, expansion, and usage matter more than vanity metrics.

Resources and Mentions:
• Product-led growth strategies in B2B SaaS
• The role of community platforms and founder-led content
• AI tools transforming marketing execution and SEO
• Customer feedback loops and continuous product improvement

Connect with Us
Host: Richard Cook
letstalk@championcomms.com