Skill: HG Functional Area Intelligence
Outreach that lands with the operational buyer — the person who actually uses the product daily.
Overview
Target the buyer who actually runs the workload — not the most senior IT title. Claude learns to read HG's Functional Area Intelligence as 'which department operates this product' rather than 'who signed the contract', and points your AE at the working-level VP who lives in the tool every day instead of the CIO who's three levels removed.
Use cases
Stakeholder lists that name the right title, not the most senior one
A CRM at Siemens shows Sales 58% in FAI. Your brief leads with the VP Sales Operations — the person who lives in the tool — and treats the CIO as a budget signature, not the discovery target.
Reach signals you'd otherwise miss
FAI also reveals a small Engineering 8% on that same CRM — a real touchpoint for an integration play. Claude flags it as a secondary stakeholder list instead of dropping it as noise.
View full skill
HG Functional Area Intelligence
When to use
- A workflow needs to know which department actually runs a product, not which one signed the contract.
- A prompt is picking a stakeholder — FAI tells you whether to target the budget owner or the operational lead.
- An author is about to claim "their CRM is owned by Sales" without checking — FAI confirms or refutes.
Tools you'll touch
company_fai— Functional Area Intelligence: department-mix percentages per installed product
What HG actually returns
For a given (company, product) pair, FAI returns a department mix: what percentage of the company's headcount associated with that product sits in each functional area (Sales, Engineering, Marketing, Customer Success, Operations, etc.).
The signal answers "who operates the workload", not "who bought it". Two workflows confuse this constantly:
- "Salesforce CRM at Siemens, FAI shows Sales 58% / Engineering 8%" → the operational buyer is the Sales org (they use it daily). Engineering 8% is a reach signal — Engineering touches the CRM enough that an integration play has surface area.
- "Snowflake at the same company, FAI shows Engineering 71% / Data 19% / Sales 4%" → the operational buyer is Data + Engineering. The Sales 4% is noise; do not target a Sales VP for a Snowflake conversation.
The HG Insights credit cost is 2 credits per call.
How to read it
Dominant department (>50%) → operational buyer. That's where the daily users sit. Their VP / Director is the right title to target with a discovery call.
Plurality (30-50%) with a clear runner-up → split decision. Common in mid-stage SaaS where Customer Success and Sales co-own the CRM. Plan for two stakeholders.
No department over 25% → highly distributed deployment. Often a horizontal tool (Slack, Office 365). Don't treat this as a sales lead — treat it as "company-wide rollout, target the IT/platform owner".
FAI overrides org-chart inference. If LinkedIn says the company has a CIO and FAI says the CRM is 58% Sales, the CIO is not the operational buyer for that CRM workload. Lead with the Sales VP, optionally cc the CIO.
Common pitfalls
- Equating FAI with budget ownership. Budget often sits one level up from operations. Sales 58% on a CRM means the Sales VP runs it; the Sales SVP or COO often signs the renewal. The skill
hg-fai-vs-contact-searchhas the composition rule. - Reading the C-suite as the FAI top result. FAI is mass-of-headcount, not seniority. The CRO won't show up at 58% — the working-level Sales org will.
- Treating low-percentage departments as noise unconditionally. A CRM with Engineering 8% is a reach signal — not the primary buyer, but a real touchpoint for integration plays.
Citation rules
When FAI drives a stakeholder choice in the deliverable, cite it. Format: "FAI: Sales 58% / Engineering 8% (HG, May 2026)". The percentages are part of the claim.
Reference
hg-insights-api.md#functional-area-intelligencehg-fai-vs-contact-search— composition rule