What would make an analyst firm sales representative really great
During our “Managing Your Gartner and Forrester Expenditure” webinars and inquiries where we were helping clients with contract renewal issues, one comment we frequently heard was about the “great relationship” the contract manager had with a sales rep for an analyst firm. Often the definition of “great” turned out to be a rep that would not harass the client over “violations” of the contract, get the occasional freebie research note, or would bring a visiting analyst around. While these are all nice and useful, this did not strike us as being particular “great.” For both vendor and end-user clients these are more baseline activities that should be expected.
What we think would truly make a sales representative great is someone who make sure that the client got full business value from their contracts throughout the contract duration. Here are some questions you should consider to determine whether your sales rep might qualify as “great:”
- Does the sales rep actively work to demonstrate how the client has achieved business value and even hard ROI from the analyst contract?
- Does the sales rep provide monthly reports on utilization of the services (e.g., the number of inquiries conducted by each advisory seat holder)?
- Does the sales rep conduct a contract checkup at least quarterly?
- Does the sales rep actively push clients to use the services purchased?
- Does the sales rep proactively identify underutilized services and make suggestions to increase the utilization?
- Does the sales rep proactively identify underutilized services and suggest that the service be given to another person that might use it or suggest swapping the service for a potential more useful service?
- Does the sales rep work with you about incremental purchases in order to prevent redundant purchases or identify new users for underutilized services?
SageCircle Technique:
- Vendor and enterprise analyst contract managers need to communicate with their analyst firm account executives the expectations of […]
Since 2000, SageCircle has helped analyst relations teams to focus on business value by encouraging innovative thinking that leverages insights and drives revenue.