By Susan Galer (@smgaler, LinkedIn)
Everyone knows the industry analyst relations landscape has changed with firm consolidations, resultant influencer moves and content proliferation across an explosion of new channels. In a headlong rush to understand and exploit this new world, it’s easy to get reactive and lose focus on what really matters: having the right information to make the right decisions about working in the best way with analysts most relevant to an organization’s business objectives.
The IIAR>’s latest Best Practices Paper, “Beyond Best Practices: Industry Analyst Tiering for Business in the Real Word,” sheds some light on a new foundational approach to sort out which analysts matter to a company, and develop a rationale for optimal engagement strategies. As the title suggested, this paper goes beyond traditional best practices to offer a step by step guide for navigating the industry analyst community in the context of real world challenges. It’s designed to help teams get the in-depth knowledge needed for accurate decision-making about who to engage with and why. Included are answers and suggestions for handling difficult situations thereby mapping advice to situations faced every day.
In many ways, analyst tiering is foundational to industry analyst relations program success. Armed with information about who analysts are and how they form opinions, practitioners can figure out how to work together for mutual advantage. When done correctly, analyst tiering positions the industry analyst relations team as trusted advisors, and lays the groundwork for relationship building to achieve organizational success. We welcome your thoughts and feedback on this important topic.
IIAR> members can access this paper on our extranet: Industry Analyst Tiering for Business in the Real World
IIAR Best Practice Paper on tiering
Other AR Best Practice posts
- IIAR> Best Practice Paper: Engage the right audience, using analyst tiering
- [GUEST POST] How to lose an industry analyst in 10 days (and ways)
- IIAR> Best Practices Webinar: Strategic Analyst Tiering For Digital Business
- Why and how should you tier the analysts?
- Latest IIAR> Best Practices Paper – A New Foundational Approach to Analyst Tiering
Thanks for this report. This is such a critical topic for AR practioners in these challenging economic times where we all are being asked to do more with less, and still make a major impact. The only way to do that is to really determine who’s impacting your business, not just who’s making the most noise. This gives some good practical guidelines.
Two points:
1. IMHO, tiering should be at the individual analyst level and not at the firm. Read my comment here:
http://sagecircle.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/gartner-and-forrester-are-not-tier-1/
2. Still IMHO and still in that comment I made the point that tiering should be related to the AR plan objectives.
Read also the conversation here:
http://technobabble2dot0.wordpress.com/2007/04/27/what-makes-a-tier-1-analyst/
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