A guide to better relationships with industry analysts

1 - Have ongoing communication with analysts
2 - Do analyst relations in every country where you want to sell
3 - Be honest and consistent
4 - Fit into their box, but don’t make it a coffin
5 – Focus on the analysts who influence customers, not the easy analysts
6 - Send in your top people as well as your techies
7 - Draw a roadmap and stick to it

How strongly do industry analysts influence buyers of high technology?

• Analysts affect purchasers both through direct contact with buyers of software, hardware, telecoms and associated services and indirectly, through investors, journalists, equity analysts and their audiences.
• Analyst influence is felt through the entire buying and selection cycle.
• Over 40 per cent of businesses with revenues of over $100 million use analysts: so do 80 per cent of Fortune 1000 companies.
• Independent analysis and consulting on high technology is a five billion dollar market, according to market leader Gartner.

Industry analysts are all in the US, aren't they?

• Many US-based high-tech vendors understand that market analysts
influence between 40 per cent and 60 per cent of their sales.
• A few vendors focus their outreach to analysts almost exclusively in the
US. This seems to make sense because US-based analyst houses comprise
the majority of the analyst industry.
• However, analysts outside the US influence billions of high tech spending
– and meeting analysts in the US doesn’t transfer knowledge across to them.
• US vendors will lose sales, the opportunity to validate their strategy as
well as an insight into local markets if they only speak to US analysts.
• To avoid this loss, vendors should allocate their analyst outreach between
the regions in line with their desired sales.

Forrester and the future of the analyst research model

Forrester’s opportunity is to focus on giving analysis and sharing
insight with its enterprise and vendors clients as part of a strategy
of growing core subscription revenues.
This is reflected in three ways, which we explore below:
1. The growing impact of its emphasis on data-driven analysis.
2. The emphasis on business drivers rather than technology
trends, both generally and at GigaWorld.
3. Forrester’s intense distain for potential consulting approaches
that are quite unlike its WholeView research methodology.

Measuring the effectiveness of analyst relations outreach

In a nutshell
• Analysts’ influence keeps on rising over businesses that buy
technology.
• However, even vendors with well-resourced and positive media
relations often develop poor relationships with analysts.
• Analyst relations without objective measurement make proving
ROI difficult for vendors because they are not measuring how well they are doing. Typically, they are using measures which are bad, one-sided or just self-serving.
• Analyst relations programs need require objective measures that are both qualitative and quantitative – and focusing us on the analysts who really impact sales.

E-CRM: Personalisation Technologies for the Web

Why Do Analyst Relations In Every RRegion Where You Want to Sell