Depending on Your Industry, Analyst Relations Can Be a Valuable Tool for Product Marketers

Product Marketers have a lot of tools at their disposal. One critical one, depending on your industry, is Analyst Relations for a variety of reasons.

We see a number of advantages that organizations can get from the analyst community which we outline here:

  • Provides insights on developing marketing trends in your industry through market reports, perspectives and consults with analysts
  • Provides access to thinkers on your industry
  • Analysts often have extensive exposure to other companies so that feedback you get from them may be indicative of insights with other firms
  • Gets you third party feedback on elements such as your offering’s value proposition, positioning and messaging
  • Ranking reports, if your company or product places well, can lead to new opportunities
  • Helps build awareness if the analyst firm is considered as a go-to for market and vendor information by your potential prospects
  • Provides potential co-marketing channels to reach your targeted prospects such as joint reports, joint webinars and the like

Recommendations

There are some pitfalls with working with analyst firms you need to be conscious of. We’ve outlined some here with recommendations.

Recommendation: Commit to the commitment.

If you’re going to undertake Analyst Relations, you need to be committed to the process and that means conducting regular communications and engagement with analysts throughout the year. If you can’t commit, then you are better spending the limited investment you have elsewhere.

Recommendation: Be sure that what you need is actually Analyst Relations.

Depending on your industry and your target audiences, there are times when engagement with analysts may not make sense. For instance, let’s say your company sold to very small businesses who would never have any idea as to analyst company and why that analyst might be recommending your company in a rank report, then this might not be the best place to invest time and resources.

Be sure to think through what you hope to gain by going the Analyst Relations route and how that plays out in terms of your company’s overall growth or portfolio-specific growth strategies as well as impact with prospects and customers.

Recommendation: Before you engage the analyst community, get prepared.

You should lay out a formal plan for what you are trying to accomplish in Year 1, 2 and 3. You should also identify Product Owners, Product Marketers, Leadership including Engineering and any others that you expect should be part of efforts in engaging analysts. Do you have content ready in terms of corporate overview deck (specifically made as an analyst deck).

And practice for your initial engagements where you explain what your company does, the value it delivers, differentiators from the competition and other important elements. Don’t wing it.

Recommendation: Carve out a budget

Engaging the analyst community is not a ‘for free’ endeavor. You should be prepared to sign on to some level of subscription services with 1-2 of them depending on your resources. And if your aim is to do some type of co-marketing such as joint webinars, build that cost in as well.

Recommendation: Target the 2-3 most influential and recognized analyst firms to establish a relationship with.

You need to focus on the right analysts. Not all analyst firms have the clout or engagement by your prospects. Some firms may do market reporting well, some may do consultation with vendors well, some may have broad awareness and appeal, and some may have all three attributes. You need to be sure you understand the capabilities, reputation and reach of each of the firms you target.

Recommendation: Treat your efforts as a marathon and not a sprint.

Treat the analyst relationship as a long-term one. If you’re trying to get your company mentioned in reports and/or ranked in “Magic Quadrants” or “Waves” or the like, be prepared that it may take a few years to go from first mention to placing respectably in any ranking report. Analysts don’t give the recognition easily.

If you’re fortunate that your company’s offerings are already captured in a report like the above, plan to make a deliberate effort over time to move it up in the rankings.

Recommendation: You may not like the results of your efforts at times, but don’t get an attitude.

I once worked with a company whose Product Owners got pissy with the rankings of their company in a major ranking report for our industry. They called out the analyst and tried to explain point by point why they should have fared better. In this case, the analyst was right and stuck their ground.

You can disagree with the analyst but be respectful at all times and keep your long game in mind.

Recommendation: Put your approach in the proper perspective.

Analysts can be over-relied on as “thought leaders” when instead, they report on and bring awareness to the realities of the market already happening that no one else has articulated. Imagine that you talk to a lot of vendors on what they are working on and you see a market problem that is being addressed but that each vendor believes they are the only ones addressing it. However, no one has written about that market problem so you do. You might apply a new name and acronym to the solutions that are being developed and marketed. And at the same time, you call out the vendors playing in this arena. Now, you’ve put a report out that talks to the market problem and promote that to a much broader audience. Each of the vendors say, “You get it” and “Can you tell us more about what you’re seeing?”

That’s not a knock against analysts, it’s just a recognition that if you expect analysts to have a crystal ball on the future of the market, you don’t understand what market knowledge they actually yield.

As I work in the cybersecurity industy, one of the influential analysis is Anton Chuvakin with Gartner. Anton developed a list of Do’s and Don’ts for Vendor Briefings. However, it’s a great read to help put yourself and your team members in the right frame of mind for what Analyst Relations is going to require.

There are certainly more elements to consider but the above is a great start to what could be a very beneficial relationship.