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”.

Are you guilty of monologuing and death by PowerPoint?

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One of the top annoyances of IT industry analysts are vendor briefings where the spokesperson is talking at the analysts instead of having a conversation with the analysts. Not only does this annoy the analysts, it causes vendors to miss the opportunity to find out if their message and content is getting through. We have heard analysts often say: “If they had only stopped to take a breath and asked us what we thought, we could have eliminated the misunderstanding right upfront!”

One of the easiest ways to improve the effectiveness of a briefing is to dump the 64-slide, 153-build PowerPoint presentation and engaging in a real and candid dialogue.

SageCircle Technique:

Illuminata’s Gordon Haff on four things AR teams should be doing to be more effective

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photo-gordon-haff.jpgCarter ran into Gordon at the Redmonk 5th Birthday Party in San Francisco. When asked about what AR could do to become more effective, Gordon immediately came up with four suggestions:

#1 – Don’t use Webex or virtual rooms.

#2 – PR agencies should understand analysts’ coverages and not […]

Adding Twitter or other micro blogging tools to the AR tool box

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgAnalyst relations (AR) has a number of tools available for interacting with the IT industry analysts ranging from prehistoric-based face-to-face meetings to the 19th century telephone to the 21st century TelePresence by Cisco. Social media (e.g., blogs, communities, wikis and so on) represents just the latest technology to come along to enhance the AR interaction tool box. While social media should be considered an opportunity, many AR teams see it as a challenge because they perceive that that cannot add one more item to their to-do list (see Why social media scares the analyst firms and vendor AR teams). However, if approached correctly, social media does not have to be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.

One of the new social media tools that could be very useful is the micro-blog (e.g., Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce). Micro-blogs are easy to learn, simple to experiment with and, best of all, free. Micro-blogs could be a constructive one-to-many communications tool, especially for fast-breaking […]

Know your analyst – Novice, Luminary or Sage

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For IT vendor analyst relations (AR) teams, a critical success factor is treating each IT industry analyst as an individual, not some faceless member of a crowd. For example, knowing that an analyst loathes PowerPoint presentations can be an important “ah ha!” to improving a briefing by eliminating an irritation. Similar “ah ha!”s can be gleamed by knowing where an analyst is in his or her career. There are three major stages in an analyst’s growth cycle which will impact how you deal with them: Novice, Luminary and Sage. Each stage has specific motivators and the analyst comes into discussions with vendors with specific ideas, techniques, and needs.

While critical for AR teams, it is also important for research consumers – end user or vendor – to understand if the analysts they are reading or doing inquiries with are Novices, Luminaries or Sages. Each growth stage can provide different types of insights and advice.

The Novice Analyst – Motivated by knowing what their clients don’t know

Being a Novice analyst should not be considered a negative by any means. Novice analysts generally have strong industry experience – usually focused in one segment; have a sharp intellect; can be very […]

Tips from analysts about how to interact with them more effectively (new tips added 2/19/08)

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(Editors Note:  Robin Bloor’s tips # 6-8, two by James Governor, two by Jeremiah Owyang and one by Charlene Li  added on 2/19/08)

I have been running across a number of interesting blog posts by analysts providing tips to the AR community. This is very useful information for AR professionals, both to improve their AR execution but also to get insights into one of their analysts. Here are the blog entries I have found […]

Avoid emotion when building the analyst list for emerging tech markets [Startup Saturday]

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rocket-for-startups.jpgJust as with larger firms, emerging technology companies need to rank and tier their analyst lists.  Ranking establishes the relative importance of the analysts and sets a priority, while tiering is the process of allocating resources.  Based on the available time, money, staff, executive support, and so forth you need to group the analysts into top level analysts who get full attention and lower significance analysts who get email responses only.  SageCircle has detailed information on this process for traditional vendors.

So often the problem in creating these analyst lists is that emotion and the squeaky wheel syndrome play a larger role in […]

IDC’s Henry Morris on three things AR teams should be doing to be more effective

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photo-idc-henry-morris-final.jpgSageCircle’s Dave Eckert and Carter Lusher recently spoke with IDC’s Henry Morris, SVP, in charge of Integration, Development & Applications Strategies (IDeAS) Solutions Research and Services Research. The occasion was last Wednesday’s IDC “Software Predictions 2008 – Beyond Consolidation” breakfast briefing in Burlingame, California. Of course we had to ask Henry a question about how vendor AR teams can be more effective. Dr. Morris did not disappoint with three good suggestions:

#1 – With all the consolidation happening in the software market there are more […]

AR teams should ask their analysts about their uses of social media

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgIn Why social media scares the analyst firms and vendor AR teams, we pointed out that social media was here to stay and that analysts and AR can’t hope for it fade away as a fad. In fact, AR teams that have yet to start experimenting with social media (e.g., blogs, social networks, microblogging, et cetera) might be surprised to find that some of their analysts are much more into these forms of communications than expected.

 For example, I launched my company AR blog and promoted the blog heavily to the analysts. What was interesting was the feedback I was getting from older, long-time analysts that found the blog useful. So my assumption that only younger, junior analysts would read it went out the window.

SageCircle Technique:  My suggestion to AR teams is that you […]