A recent piece by Lighthouse Analyst Relations on
“bloggers vs. analysts” raises some interesting questions about whether and how firms should target their limited AR resources.
One argument says that AR professionals should focus their efforts only on those analysts who have the most direct influence on sales by advising end users, and that because of the demands that they make, it is hard to maintain meaningful relationships with a broad constituency of analysts.
A counter argument is that there are some very smart and influential analysts working within the vendor-facing analyst firms and smaller, more specialised consultancies and an AR programme will be the poorer for ignoring them. Proponents of the latter approach also point to the indirect influence that analysts can have on a firm’s brand awareness and sales, for example through quotes in the media and blog posts.
At the core of this discussion is the understanding of analyst influence. Why are industry analysts such an important audience?
Let’s be clear. In our view, there’s no doubt about the influence of the industry analyst community as a whole on purchasing decisions by technology buyers. In a
report by a team of analysts (including Ellen Carney and Kevin Lucas),
Forrester Research recently published the results of a survey of 1,143 IT decision makers in North America and Europe which showed that independent IT research firms came a close fourth in a list of information sources relied upon when researching and comparing IT products and services (see Figure 1).*
Knowledge Capital Group, Lighthouse AR, Hill & Knowlton and Freeform Dynamics (to name a few) have all done something similar so this Forrester study is just the latest piece of research that shows the direct importance of the analyst to the technology buyer.
It also shows that the media is an important source of information to the buyer. So should we target analysts that get themselves quoted in the business media? Vendor web sites come top so perhaps we also need to talk analysts who can provide us a quote for the website – or will write a report that we can then post up as marketing collaterial?
The way that analyst influence works is complex and multi-facted. It changes depending upon where a buyer is in the sales cycle. It varies depending on the buyer’s industry and country.
The bottom-line is that, as AR professionals, we all know analysts are important to our business and influential on our buyers. The bigger question is how that influence works and how we can best tap into it.
We’d love to hear your views.
* Source: Mastering the First Analyst Briefing Tour by Forrester Research, Inc., February 26, 2008. Reprinted with Forrester’s kind authorisation.
Other posts on analyst relations best practices
- display-posts category=”ar-best-practices” include_date=”false” posts_per_page=”30”]
Like this:
Like Loading...
Related
There are a lot of views and theories kicking around in this space at the moment, and I, like most, am learning day by day from the points raised by others. The only viewpoint that doesn’t really resonate with me is the ‘nothing is changing, direct involvement in procurement is all that matters’ one, which just doesn’t feel comfortable against the backdrop of the complex and dynamic landscape that is described in the post above and elsewhere (see here for a rebuttal). Other than that, most of what I am hearing is that no one has yet worked it all out, but people on the whole sense a need to revisit some of the ‘accepted wisdom’.
My own thoughts in this area have generally been pretty well documented on the Open Reasoning blog, and we also discuss the relative influence of different inputs into the buying cycle in our recent Buzz Report (which I think is the reference made to Freeform Dynamics above). I’ll therefore not repeat myself here, but I am really interested to see what others have to say.
Thanks for your answer Dale. You raise an interesting point: I’ve been theorising for awhile that one needs to use/target analysts based on their output/outcome/impact: for explaining this when doing my AR Spokesperson Training, I use what I call the SOSM model. Basically, analysts impact 5 things: Strategy, Opinion, Sales and Marketing. An analyst from a very large firm said about the same thing this morning, in different terms.