Driving Sales and Marketing Alignment

Evolving Analyst Relations: First Steps

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According to our research, vendors are the least trusted source for information when it comes to B2B buying, while industry analysts are one of the most trusted, making it more critical than ever that your AR function is able to communicate messaging and positioning to the analyst community effectively. The collective experience of SiriusDecisions has sat through thousands of vendor briefings across every industry. Based on this understanding we’ve identified four areas where AR can optimize their activities to influence the way the analyst community perceives you and impact the way they communicate about your organization:

• Know your target. Executing AR is really no different marketing your products; just as you target your messages to different audiences, make sure that you communicate with the right analyst firm as well as individual analysts.
• Analysts aren’t PR. While AR should do their best to make sure an analyst has all the content and collateral needed to influence their positions, it’s not an analysts job to do your PR and marketing for you. Few (if any) analysts will take your messaging and simply communicate them out to their customer base; they must analyze competing solutions to help them identify the the most appropriate matches based on a customer’s requirements.
• Empty claims. Many vendors tout claims that rival the statements made by politicians in an election year. You can say that none of your customers have any serious support issues, that your customers achieve ROI quicker than with a competing solution, or that you had the best quarter ever but don’t expect an analyst to be convinced or repeat that assertion without proof.
• Prepare adequately. Too often analyst relations doesn’t adequately prepare the staff who are going to give a briefing. It is the job of AR to make sure that the most appropriate resources are used in a briefing and that these resources are adequately prepared.

Beyond these first steps, AR needs to ultimately to evolve to influencer relations, a topic we'll cover in a future post.