Category: AR best practice

SageCircle defines “best practice” as the approach that is generally accepted. Superior alternatives that are not generally accepted are “leading-edge practice”, not “best practice”.

Not responding to analysts can lead to major issues

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SageCircle believes strongly in ranking and tiering your analyst list and applying your resources in a reasonable and carefully thought out process.  By determining the relative importance and impact of each analyst you can decide how much of your available resource to allocate.  This allows you to give sufficient resource to the real influencers rather than spreading your energy so thin as to have no impact.

That said, it is important to determine a policy for dealing with tier three analysts other than ignoring them.  Recently an article was published about Motorola where an analyst was quoted as basically saying that they were losing talent and the entire AR had left (see article).

Investigation by SageCircle strategists determined that […]

Will you get analyst opinions in a briefing if you are not a client? [AR seminar question]

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question-mark-graphic.jpgYes… if you give them a chance to actually speak and if you take the time to ask correctly.

There is a common (mis-)understanding that analysts will only provide opinions if you are a paying client of their firm.  So can you get their opinions during a briefing? For the most part, analysts are more than happy to comment on what they hear in a briefing. The primary reasons why they don’t express their opinions are […]

Because analysts are increasingly using blogs as development platforms, AR has to participate to be part of the conversation

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgOver the weekend in a Twitter exchange, AMR Research’s Phil Fersht (Twitter, blog) told me he “uses blogging to cultivate ideas for research.” In addition, Phil said that he uses “it as a networking tool to attract and influence users.”

For AR managers who have Phil on their analyst lists – and any outsourcing vendor should – you should be following’s Phil’s blog.  If you are not, this information should send a shiver down your spine […]

AR programs should put their contact info on the company website

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A recent survey of vendor websites indicates that while PR and IR contacts are clearly listed often AR teams do not post their contact information.  When questioned some AR teams have indicated that they know their tier one analysts and do not want to be contacted directly by other analysts.

The analyst landscape is constantly changing.  We suggest that every AR team follow the PR leads and post relevant contact information on their public websites for a variety of reasons:

  • Your tier one list should be dynamic, and there could be analysts worthy of being included […]

Why do analyst consulting days? [AR Practitioner Question]

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question-mark-graphic.jpg As was briefly mentioned in Strengths and weaknesses of analyst research delivery types, analyst consulting days (aka SAS or strategic advisory service in Gartnerese) have a high risk/reward profile for vendor analyst relations (AR) teams. After that post, we received a question from an AR practitioner asking why AR would want to spend the money on an analyst consulting day.

It is important to remember that building strong analyst relationships requires a mix of interaction types.  You cannot achieve your objectives using only briefings and inquiry. Consulting days can have significant benefits when done correctly.  Because there are different reasons for purchasing analyst consulting days from the firms, vendors need to clarify the goals they want to pursue through buying consulting days. The shotgun approach of “we’ll just throw some more money at them by buying consulting time” rarely succeeds in genuinely increasing an analyst’s positive perception of a vendor.

The various reasons why vendors choose to do consulting days vary in real value:

  • To build stronger relationships with key analysts
          – Rating: high value
  • To do a Deep Dive-style uninterrupted briefing
          – Rating: none to high value
  • To have a high profile marketing event speaker
          – Rating: […]

Blogs as part of the AR tool box — Is there a chicken-or-egg issue?

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgWhile blogs have been around for a number of years, they are seldom used by communications and IT vendor analyst relations (AR) teams*. I have found only Adobe, Cisco, HP, IBM** and Sun. This is too bad because blogs can be a valuable tool for communicating certain types of information in a less formal manner.

Now it is important to realize that a blog is not the end all and be all of analyst interactions. For one thing, blogs are usually not password protected, so nothing remotely confidential can be the topic of a blog entry.

There are a number of reasons why AR has avoided blogs:

  1. The AR team cannot get permission to launch a blog because their company has not developed a blogging strategy and policy yet
  2. AR is simply overworked and cannot add another task
  3. AR perceives that it does not has the right skills to create blog content
  4. AR believes there is no demand for a blog because the analysts are not asking for one
  5. AR thinks there are not enough interesting topics for them to consistently blog

Items #1 and #2 are show stoppers. Items #3 and #4 are what I call chicken-and-egg issues. For instance, […]

When hype can go overboard and hurt credibility

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SageCircle on the danger of vendors overhyping

Updated September 9, 2008 — In response to a tweet, a number of analysts have left new comments about specific types of marketing language that vendors should avoid.

Updated September 10, 2008 — Compiled a list of terms to avoid. Look for them after the “Bottom Line.”

While the US Federal Trade Commission in the Lanham Act said that puffery is “harmless exaggeration or colorful hype” and is not prosecutable as false advertising, too much hype can severely damage a vendor’s credibility. This was reinforced the other day when I participated in a Twitter conversation (right, click to enlarge).

Redmonk’s James Governor (“Monkchips”) in response to a marketing statement by a vendor about its product said “sorry but a. how can i take the statement seriously,. and b. what does it have to do with customer value?” Later another analyst, Jon Collins of Freeform Dynamics (jonno), joined in with the scathing “don’t think (products’) scalability issues are totally behind them either, a minor inconvenience to marchitects ;)”. While you might dismiss this because it is happening on Twitter, think again.

  • This Twitter chat represents the visible tip of the iceberg. Think about how many other chances these analysts have to convey this opinion to the press, other analysts, IT managers and the like?
  • Reporters are starting to follow analysts’ micro-blogging like Twitter so this can become a PR problem as well.
  • Don’t assume that “nobody is following Tweeting analysts” because their followings can be quite large (e.g., Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang has over 3,300 followers with new ones everyday).

However, the focus of this post is not on Twitter but on the issue of hype. SageCircle has identified hype as one of the five “analyst hot button” issues that can needlessly derail a vendor-analyst briefing. The big problem is that analysts really listen to […]