Author: SageCircle

Portland’s tech startup community – Startupalooza [Startup Saturday]

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rocket-for-startups.jpgLast Saturday I attended one of the events coordinated by Portland’s vibrant startup tech community and encountered entrepreneurs, executives, bloggers, analysts, and consultants.  Startupalooza (link) is one of the various ways that social media is helping to bring people together.  Organized through the web this event had capped the attendance at 200 people due to space limitations, but had an additional 67 people on the waiting list.  Its goal was to provide a live networking opportunity as well as a forum for presenting ideas.  Many of the attendees had their twitter addresses on their name badges.

Among the presenters were executives from Jive Software to explain their successful startup process.  They understand the influence of the analysts and have dedicated resources to an AR program.  You will note that […]

Beyond BRIC — David Mitchell’s “geosophical technologies” takes a global view of the IT industry

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If you are interested in a global perspective on the IT industry I recommend that you check out David Mitchell’s geosophical technologies blog. David is a VP at Ovum, but geosophical technologies is his personal blog. One of the best aspects of this blog is that David just does not focus on the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil,[…]

The organizational challenges of managing AR, CI and MR [Practitioner Question]

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question-mark-graphic.jpgWe often are asked about the differences in management techniques when AR is organizationally under corporate communications or marketing as compared to a when it is part of a strategy group.  How you deal with analysts, and the need for strategic interactions as compared to product-level briefings, will be altered based on the client base you are attempting to serve.

Analyst interactions also occur in the Competitive Intelligence (CI) and Market Research (MR) groups.  They are also often the keepers of the major analyst contracts and the “repository” of the purchased analyst data, reprints, and commissioned research.  In addition to providing research for the product and strategy teams they contribute to the sales organization with share numbers and competitive bullet points.

Sometimes these groups are in very separate parts of the company (e.g., AR in corporate communications, MR in product management and CI in field sales) while at others, especially in smaller vendors, one person does it all.  In larger companies these functions may be so organizationally separate from AR as to require processes for enhancing the communications and collaboration, despite the fact that you are all dealing with the same analysts.

From time-to-time, companies make organizational changes with AR being told – sometimes over AR’s reasonable objections – to take responsibility for the CI/MR teams. Incorporating the CI/MR teams with AR can prove to be an interesting challenge for the AR manager because […]

Training the sales reps: keep it simple, short, small words [Vendor Sales]

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icon-dollar-euro.jpgOK, that title was not fair to the sales team, but it makes a good point about how to do training.  Often AR teams try to teach sales so much about analysts that they overwhelm them and miss the real point.

The sales team needs basic information about who the analysts really are, which ones you believe influence your revenues, and how to deal with both positive and negative commentary.  They should also understand how to feed information back to the AR team.  They don’t need extensive information, but material that is brief, understandable, and relevant.  Establishing a communications channel with sales is more important than […]

Using inquiry… Influence the analysts’ research agenda

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icon-phone-headset.jpgWe have repeated stressed the importance of inquiry, both from the role of the vendor and that of the research consumer.  Obviously it can be used to obtain information as well as inform the analyst.  Another aspect of inquiry is the use of it to influence the research agenda of an analyst or a firm on behalf of either IT clients or vendors.

From the IT client perspective it can be very valuable to align the research agenda in the direction of your specific research needs.  Analysts rate client inquiry highly in understanding the market direction.  Your questions and observations, coupled with those of other clients, often cause shifts in the planned […]

Show your favorite analyst some love vote in the IIAR analyst of the year survey

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There is still time left to vote in the International Institute of AR’s “Analyst of the Year” survey. Go to Analyst of the year – submit your answers today to find the survey link. 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

On the Reading List – Groundswell by Forrester’s Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

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I have been reading a reviewer copy of “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies” by Forrester analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. Rather than waiting until I finished the book and write a review, this post is a suggestion that if you or your company are interested in using social media either[…]

Involving the analysts – The need for early and often

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sagecircle-need-for-early-and-often-200w.pngToo often, communications and IT vendors wait until a few weeks prior to a major announcement to brief the analysts. This is a problematic practice for a number of reasons which we will investigate in future posts.  Perhaps the most important is that the advisory analysts are talking continuously to many people that fill many roles. When analyst relations (AR) teams are not involving the analysts early and often, the vendor is missing the opportunity to influence all these other people.Advisory analysts (i.e., analyst firms where enterprise IT managers are a major part of their client base) talk or interact with IT executives, IT buyers, financial analysts, reporters, vendors, bloggers and others. Concurrently, the analysts are preparing and giving speeches, writing research, conducting teleconferences and so on. All of these activities are intertwined and occur frequently (click on the graphic to enlarge). Without information from the vendor, analysts will not be able to […]