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”.

Analysts need to chill out and don’t get so emotional about “tiering”

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Note: An earlier version of this post showed up as a comment on ARmadgeddon, which was later elevated to a full post. Then I posted a version on my former employer’s corporate AR blog. However, this is a topic that still generates heat so we are now posting it on the SageCircle blog to stimulate discussion.

AR and analyst blogs that begin with vigorous discussions about tiering often end in flame wars. The loudest protesters are usually smaller analyst firms and single practitioners who believe that the practice of tiering slights and excludes them.

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

There is no generally accepted definition of what “tier” means in the context of the analyst industry, so let me offer some points to get the discussion started and lance the boil of negative emotions around this concept.

At SageCircle we promote the best practice of “rank then tier” industry analysts. This is a two-step process. An analyst list is ranked based on relevance to […]

Redmonk Michael Cote on dealing with analysts

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Interesting set of slides from Redmonk analyst Michael Cote. Click on the graphic to visit Michael’s blog post. 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

Why AR Matters – Analysts can get your company on short lists that you were excluded from

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icon-dollar-euro.jpgMost analyst relations (AR) professionals are in an environment where they have to continually justify the relevance of the industry analysts and AR. One of the best arguments for justifying the investment in AR is the impact analysts have on the company’s sales opportunities. Usually the easiest to find examples are negative, such as when an analyst’s commentary has caused a vendor to be removed or excluded from a short list, because a sales rep will be howling in anger. However, with some investigation AR can turn up positive impacts of the analysts, e.g., when an analyst has been your advocate by getting your company onto a short list.

In Reality Check: Sales reps matter more than product on the Software Insider blog, former Forrester analyst and current VP of Research at SSPA John Ragsdale illustrates how an analyst with a simple question can help a vendor get placement on a vendor short list. 

“…Over the last year I have become increasingly aware of something and wanted to share it with a larger audience. When I have conversations with companies about a pending software purchase (usually CRM or eService), they tell me the core business problems they are trying to solve, then give me the list of vendors they are considering. And almost every time, I hear a little jingle from Sesame Street in my head:

     “One of these things is not like the other
     One of these things just doesn’t belong
     Can you guess which thing is not like the other
     By the time I finish this song?

“Why? Because the obvious vendor(s) who are specialists in their problem are not on the list, and they are selecting from a group of vendors who all do something else. So I ask, “Um, why isn’t Vendor X on the list?” And here is the universal reply. ‘Oh, we started with them, but […]

When talking about partners, avoid the dreaded “shaking hands” clipart

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Two of the hoariest clichés used in PowerPoint presentations for analyst briefings are a slide full of partner logos or using clipart showing shaking hands as a sign of partnership.

The partner slide is an important component of many presentations made to IT industry analysts. Unfortunately, too many vendors use these clichés and miss the opportunity to communicate real information that supports key messages.

A better way to design the partner slide is to use text names instead of logos and organize the name listings in a way that adds information (see the second figure). The organization of the names should support the key strategic messages of the current briefing. A key message-centric slide is much richer than a logo-centric slide and more partners can be listed. In addition, by organizing […]

Best practices for partner collaboration on AR

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This best practice comes from guest contributor Gerry Van Zandt (Twitter handle), AR manager with HP Services.

Joint product, service, or customer announcements with partners are a common part of the marketing repertoire for large and small companies in the technology world. But far too often these “announcements” consist of two names or logos at the top of a press release, with only modest coordination between the PR teams of the two companies (mainly securing approvals and edits to press release text) and then shot-gunning the news release out on the newswires.

As always, AR teams should assess the potential benefits of joint announcements and engage in the process early to help shape content and key messages. To maximize effectiveness of important joint announcements, AR also should coordinate closely with AR counterparts (or resources handling AR) at partner companies and jointly plan an analyst engagement strategy and timeline, executed by both companies. By doing this, analysts get informed about the upcoming news in advance, and learn its context and significance to both companies. This also gives them the knowledge to accurately comment if called by a reporter as a third-party story source.

When engaging with AR counterparts at partner firms, AR should:

  • Identify appropriate AR and marketing resources early at the partner firm. When AR is called into a project, they should as early as possible inquire with […]

How to track a lot of analyst blogs and Twitter streams without spending a lot of time

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icon-social-media-blue.jpgOne of the side effects of the growing use of social media by IT industry analysts and analyst relations (AR) is a pending sense of doom that we are going to get overwhelmed by too… much… stuff. This certainly came out in discussions at the US Forrester AR Council panel I was on and in blog posts like When do we get work done? I certainly have felt that way in the past, but slowly and surely I have picked up techniques that permit me to monitor a fairly large number of social media streams (110+ blogs and 140+ Twitter streams) without spending hours a day doing so. In this post I will share these tips.

Note: These tip and tricks are not necessarily the absolutely best-in-class, merely ones that we have found to-date. Nor are the tools mentioned the results of systematic research and evaluation, merely ones that we have played with and decided to use. As we continue to expand the portfolio of tips and tools, we will make sure to share them with you.

The main tips are to use an RSS reader and to organize your feeds in folders*. This saves you the time of checking individual blogs that might not have any activity. The following example explains […]

Tip: create seating charts for analyst summits

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Jonathan Eunice (LinkedIn) sent along a tip about a seating chart creation tool called Simple Seating. A quick scan reveals several similar tools, often aimed at party panners or educators. We recommend seating plans as a really useful tool for those in charge of planning an analyst event. We think it is a best practice[…]

Avoid like the plague – Using pseudo-Magic Quadrants in your analyst briefing presentations

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After completing the in-depth Magic Quadrant series I was going to give this topic a rest for awhile. That is until I saw this tweet:

 

jowyang is the twitter handle of Forrester social media analyst extraordinaire Jeremiah Owyang. Jeremiah joined Forrester only last October and already he has seen so many vendors use a pseudo-Magic Quadrant that he is commenting on it. Can you imagine how bored and annoyed with this graphic other analysts that been around longer must be? I have seen pseudo-MQs that I swear were built on the idea of who is the leading vendor among left-handed IT managers who buy technology on Tuesdays in Guam.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the competitive landscape slide should be a component of almost every presentation made to IT industry analysts. There is no better opportunity to […]