Analyst Analyst launched today. It has an interesting premise – have the analyst ecosystem police the analysts. SageCircleSince 2000, SageCircle has helped analyst relations teams to focus on business value by encouraging innovative thinking that leverages insights and drives revenue. sagecircle.com
It is common for tech vendors to cut marketing spend in a recession. Because Industry Analyst Relations (AR) is typically in the marketing department, AR is often asked to shoulder part of the cost cutting burden by cutting spending, freezing hiring, or even cutting head count. As a consequence, AR often cuts back on the total number of interactions it conducts with key analysts. This can be short sighted for a variety of reasons:
Since 2000, SageCircle has helped analyst relations teams to focus on business value by encouraging innovative thinking that leverages insights and drives revenue.
SageCircle promotes the use of inquiry and we have offered suggestions on various topics for both Enterprise IT research consumers and Communications and IT vendors. In general, vendors spend far less time doing inquires than they should. This both decreases the business value they are receiving from the analyst contract and misses some important soft dollar benefits that are hard to achieve in other ways. Not getting value from the inquiry contract also contributes to the perception of some vendor executives that advisory analysts like Gartner and Forrester are “pay for play,” otherwise why spend the money on the annual contract. In this post we will look less at the techniques and more at the realized benefits of a program of regular analyst inquiry.
Gaining real information
The stated purpose for inquires is to gain greater depth and understanding of an analyst’s research and opinions. As always, you should review the currently published materials before scheduling a briefing. However, inquiry can provide insights into an analysts’ work-in-progress and allow you to […]
Since 2000, SageCircle has helped analyst relations teams to focus on business value by encouraging innovative thinking that leverages insights and drives revenue.
On Tuesday April 1 SageCircle conducted a web-based Coffee Talk around the potential impacts of budget cuts and how AR teams can best handle them. We began with a few slides to review the techniques for managing a budget and then opened the session to questions from the participants.
Often when resources are trimmed certain areas experience across-the-board and significant cuts. While some of these areas can be quick to recover in the future analyst relations is generally not one of them. Developing relationships that can truly provide a positive revenue impact takes sustained effort over time. Once your program begins to slip the effort required to […]
Since 2000, SageCircle has helped analyst relations teams to focus on business value by encouraging innovative thinking that leverages insights and drives revenue.
A common thread in blog postings is that because bloggers are becoming more influential, analysts have to becoming less influential. Also, not a week goes by where we hear that some vendor executives – who often loathe the communications and tech industry analysts – have said that analysts and AR are less relevant due to social media. The common underlying idea is that influence must be a zero-sum game where there is a finite and fixed amount of influence in the universe. If one group increases their influence then other influencers have to see their influence decrease. Nonsense.
The amount of influence is not fixed, but can grow and morph over time as we pointed out in the SageCircle’s Fog of Influence. For instance, the […]
Since 2000, SageCircle has helped analyst relations teams to focus on business value by encouraging innovative thinking that leverages insights and drives revenue.
Startups are often in the position of introducing themselves to industry analysts as they start or expand their AR outreach. In addition to the initial outreach, startups find themselves introducing themselves to new analysts because the analyst landscape is very dynamic. Analysts change firms, but more importantly change coverages and areas of research. This means that your analyst lists need to be updated regularly and there is a significant chance you will need to interact with new analysts at some point. Startups lack the name recognition that larger communications and IT vendors can leverage, but the process of meeting new analysts applies to all vendors.
How you handle meeting new analysts is somewhat dependent on the level of experience of the analyst as well as your product or services maturity. Novice analysts are far more likely to […]
Since 2000, SageCircle has helped analyst relations teams to focus on business value by encouraging innovative thinking that leverages insights and drives revenue.
This is the first in a series of posts that will explore the resources required and the advantages gained in using a formal analyst relationship management (ARM) system. In this post we will look at the characteristics of a good system. In future posts we will review some of the commercially available products, suggest some best practices in using a system, and look at the values that can be obtained. Your comments are encouraged.
What is an ARM?
Sales and service organizations have long used customer relationship management (CRM) systems to provide customer service, track and promote sales, and maintain general customer records. These can range across home-grown in-house systems, commercially-available software run by IT, and hosted solutions provided by outside firms. The value of these systems is well documented. Public Relations departments often track their work in PR-specific systems that fit into the same three categories. Analyst Relations teams need to look to […]
Since 2000, SageCircle has helped analyst relations teams to focus on business value by encouraging innovative thinking that leverages insights and drives revenue.
For the most part the SageCircle blog concentrates how various members of the tech analyst ecosystem interact more effectively with the analysts (e.g., AR best practices and research consumer tips). This post is an experiment to give the community a chance to give a few friendly tips to the analysts.
SageCircle heavily encourages the use of inquiry for both communications and IT vendor AR teams and end-user client researcher consumers. While most analysts are well prepared for inquires we have personally experienced and received comments from members of the analyst ecosystem about those analysts that might have needed a bit more coffee before getting on the phone. One not so amusing story is the analyst who could not discuss the research he had written, could not remember writing it and […]
Since 2000, SageCircle has helped analyst relations teams to focus on business value by encouraging innovative thinking that leverages insights and drives revenue.