Tag: AR

Do I place my bets on AR-Sales partnering or adopting social media?

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icon-dollar-euro.jpgQuestion: If I had to choose between starting an AR-Sales partnership or launching a social media initiative, which way should I go? If I did both, but with limited resources, how should I divide my efforts?

 During the happy hour after the first session of our STRATEGIC ISSUES advanced AR seminar, one of the attendees asked these great questions. Both Dave and Carter answered immediately and in unison:

     “AR-Sales!”

Why? Even a simple AR-Sales partnership pilot will give the AR team an opportunity to gather real world examples of the analysts impacting sales opportunities. These types of hard sales numbers, even in anecdotal form, are powerful tools for illustrating the strategic value of AR. In addition, a pilot project can […]

Is your email to industry analysts value-add or spam?

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Forrester analyst and best-selling business book Groundswell co-author Josh Bernoff (blog, Twitter handle, bio) has an interesting little critique of the emails he receives in Three quarters of the PR email I receive is irrelevant. Why? Josh tweeted me that this post applied just as much to analyst relations (AR) professionals as PR.

You should take a moment to read his post and do a quck review to see if you are you guilty of any of Josh’s offenses.

SageCircle’s Analyst Hierarchy of NeedsAs we pointed out in the “Analyst Hierarchy of Needs”, the analysts do appreciate outreach by AR teams. However, they want more than simple, generic outreach. They want “Personalized Outreach.” In our interviews with analysts the common refrain is “Just send me information about stuff I care about.” Once your AR program is proficient at providing analysts the basic information they need, your program should work to begin personalizing content based on the specific coverage, speaking calendar, and editorial calendar of individual analysts.  Targeted information supporting issues they are concerned about is highly prized by the analysts and can raise your AR program’s visibility significantly.  However, analysts who receive too much generic content will stop looking and miss your personalized information.  

Another point to be aware of when applying the Hierarchy of Needs to your analyst email distribution is emphasis changes depending on the analyst’s status. A Sage analyst will be significantly less tolerant of generic emails than a Novice analyst, who might appreciate the basic information (see Know your analyst – Novice, Luminary or Sage).

The situation differs when you are […]

What are the pluses and minuses of former analysts taking on vendor AR roles? [Practitioner Question]

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question-mark-graphic.jpgComment/Question: Re: your point below about jobs for senior analysts, here’s an idea for a blog entry – the pluses and minuses of former analysts taking on vendor analyst relations roles. That ought to stimulate some discussion on the comments section.

Rob Curran, wicked smart AR professional at Waggener Edstrom, sent along that comment after this week’s newsletter where we wrote in light of the recent spate of layoffs at analyst firms: 

“Do you know of a job appropriate for a senior analyst? – Now is the time to grab talent. The job could be at a firm you know is hiring or maybe your company has a position open in product management, strategy or market research. If so, notify the analysts you know that are “in transit” between positions. Not just former Forrester analysts, but the others as well.”

It looked like Rob noticed we did not include analyst relations (AR) as a possible job for former analysts. Hopefully that was a simple oversight on my part (this is Carter, a former Gartner analyst, writing) and not a Freudian slip. Obviously there can be real value to having a former analyst in the AR role. On the other hand, I have seen some former analysts really botch the job of AR.

This is a topic that really does […]

AR & recession – Ruthlessly revisiting analyst lists and service level frameworks

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Analyst Relations PlanningDuring a recession AR managers are confronted with the need to cut back work either due to headcount constraints or the need to refocus their priorities (e.g., providing more support to their company’s sales force and increasing lead generation via analysts placing the company on purchasing short lists). Two areas of low hanging fruit for saving time that can then be reallocated to other activities are the normally important analyst lists and the level of service provided to each tier of analyst. 

One of the biggest ongoing mistakes that AR professionals make is not using a rigorous methodology for managing their analyst lists. This often leads to too many analysts on their lists and too many analysts designated “Tier 1.” This state of affairs leads to inefficiency and ineffectiveness as AR teams are spread too thin over too many analysts to effectively influence the most relevant analysts. While bad enough in good economic times this mistake can be fatal in recessions when all corporate functions are being scrutinized for efficiency as well as contribution to revenues and corporate/business unit objectives.

Another major problem is that many AR programs have not revised their service level frameworks – or do not have formal service levels in the first place. These plans to allocate effort must be adjusted to reflect recession driven resource constraints. This results in AR teams being too generous in the amount effort they give to lower ranked analysts’ information/briefing requests which in turn siphons away precious AR bandwidth for higher priority activities. A related problem is not having the discipline to follow established service levels.

To correct this situation, AR managers need to ruthlessly revisit their analyst lists, aligning them more tightly with today’s business objectives and cutting back on the number of Tier 1 and Tier 2 analysts in order to focus more intensely on the most relevant analysts. Second, AR programs have to reduce, perhaps significantly, the amount of service they provide to […]

Kudos to CEO Emily Green for transparency about latest Yankee Group job action

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I am in complete agreement with Hill & Knowlton AR guru Dom Pannell’s post on the ARcade blog that Yankee CEO Emily Green deserves a compliment for her blog post Time for the shoemaker’s children. While the layoffs are painful, transparency can help raise the confidence of the analyst ecosystem about Yankee’s prospects. SageCircleSince 2000, SageCircle has[…]

Gartner statement on Spring Symposium

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logo-gartner.gifHi Carter,

Thanks for your note on Friday. Regarding Spring Symposium/ITxpo.

Every year, as a normal course of business planning, we conduct a thorough review of our worldwide event portfolio and make adjustments based on the trends and performance of individual events.  As a result of this review, we have decided to cancel this year’s Spring Symposium/ITxpo in Las Vegas and Barcelona. While a number of factors influenced this decision, the primary reason for the change is the current macro economic environment and its anticipated impact on attendee travel and overall event attendance.
 
Traditionally, Spring Symposium/ITxpo focused on […]

Integrating your ARM into your daily activities using an Outlook plug-in

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icon-tools.jpgWe often hear AR teams complain about the difficulty getting full team participation in their Analyst Relationship Management (ARM) application.  It seems that some team members don’t appreciate the value or perhaps are not sufficiently trained.  When only part of the data is entered it limits the ability to generate metrics or encourage good collaboration.

Dave was speaking with the CTO of ARInsights the other day during one of the periodic calls we have with them about ways their product can more effectively manage an AR program.   The discussion was about their soon to be released Add-In for Outlook 2007.  Just as with the 2003 version this code helps to integrate their ARchitect product into the normal work day and automate data entry.

If you send an email to one or more analysts, even using blind carbons, the integration allows you to create an interaction and post the data directly into the ARM.  This makes tracking activity such as sending out quarterly earnings, press releases, or simple exchanges very easy.  You can also track your email threads automatically – allowing team members to know about activity with analysts you have in common.

Forward planning is critical for an effective AR program.  Integration between your Outlook calendar and ARchitect enables you to easily create future interactions, add then to your personal Outlook, log them to ARchitect, and display them on […]

Forrester’s Ray Wang on analyst usage of social media

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Ray dropped by the analyst and AR meet up that SageCircle hosted on Monday, January 12, 2009 in the Silicon Valley. We asked Ray (blog, Twitter handle) to explain how he uses social media in his job. . . [blip.tv ?posts_id=1672663&dest=-1] SageCircleSince 2000, SageCircle has helped analyst relations teams to focus on business value by encouraging[…]