Analyst Relations 101 for Product Marketers
This piece was originally posted on PMMHive along with a 22-minute interview on the This is Product Marketing Podcast. Find those here!
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Many product marketers, particularly in smaller startups, may suddenly find themselves owning Analyst Relations (AR) at some point in their careers. If this is your situation, don’t panic. In fact, I’d look at this as a big opportunity: managed well, AR can offer a profound strategic impact on your business, and doing AR well has a way of naturally upping your PMM game at the same time. Here’s an in-depth primer to get PMMs who are new to Analyst Relations up to speed:
Step 1: Understand AR Basics – Who are Analysts and Why Do We Care?
Analyst firms like Forrester, Gartner, and IDC play significant roles in advising large enterprises on all different subjects – including technology purchases which hopefully will include your products. These firms are most often consulted when the stakes are high—think expensive implementations, long-term contracts, or significant impacts on customer-facing operations. Some analyst work is published or otherwise publicly available, but a lot of their influence also takes place 1:1 in personalized sessions with individual clients.
The bottom line thesis of Analyst Relations is this: Industry Analysts are highly influential to software buyers because they give impartial, vendor-agnostic, and trusted advice. But in order to give that good advice, they often actually need education from vendors. This dynamic gives you an opening to spend some time with analysts, potentially influencing how they think about the market and what is important within it. If you do this successfully, you can ultimately influence the recommendations they make to your buyers and have a direct revenue impact.
Step 2: Set Realistic Goals about what AR can (and cannot) do for your company
This take is controversial, but I think there’s only one defensible goal of analyst relations in B2B SaaS: Sell more software more easily through the power of third-party influence. There are two additional sub-goals that also support this one in the end.
Learn things from analysts about your market, product, or competition that will help you make better decisions and eventually… sell more software more easily
License or create bespoke analyst content that attracts buyers at the right stages of the sales funnel and supports their buying process…so you can sell more software more easily.
Be wary of diluting your efforts by choosing metrics like the number of analyst mentions or briefings held. These are attractive because they are easy to measure – but in the end, no matter how high the counter gets, the business impact stays close to zero.
Instead, here’s a simple northstar goal that will serve most small and early AR programs pretty well:
Build analysts who function like sales champions do – selling on your behalf in the moments when it serves their clients to do so.
A goal like this one gives you room to prioritize ruthlessly – If you can’t explain how an AR activity you’re engaging in could have a direct line to a buyer making a purchase, it’s probably not worth your time.
Step 3: Audit the Analyst Landscape
Now that you understand what Analysts do and have our goals in mind, you’ve got to figure out which analysts can help you drive them forward. Some questions to ask yourself:
Are we hearing about any influential third parties in win-loss studies (or through sales generally)
Are our competitors clearly engaged with any analysts or analyst firms? (just google it)
Which analysts are our buyers reposting or engaging with on linkedin?
At a very high level, Gartner tends to specialize most in IT buyers, Forrester in Marketing buyers, IDC in speaking to CFOs and doing marking sizing types of analysis (they become especially important if you’re targeting an IPO or raise in the near future). There are lots of others with verticalized specialties – for example KLAS for healthcare.
If you are in a clear market category, this exercise is pretty straightforward. If you’re not, look for adjacent categories where the technologies or approaches you’re replacing are being covered and the analysts are likely directly engaged with your prospective buyers.
Most importantly, keep this list short – focus on the center of the venn diagram of “Influential with a large set technology buyers” and “those technology buyers could be open to MY product as a solution”
Step 4: Understand Major AR Levers
Now it’s time to start thinking about potentially spending money. Your money buys you time to spend with analysts, and more time means opportunities for influence. Typically vendors do this by purchasing one or more seat licenses with each analyst firm, which gets you access to reach that firm’s reports and engage in activities like inquiries with the analysts that are of interest to you. Here are some of the major Analyst Relations activities you might have a chance to take advantage of, listed roughly in order of cost:
Briefings: A one-way presentation from a technology vendor to an analyst. You don’t need to be a client to brief an analyst – though the analyst has to accept them and time and frequency may be limited.
Major Evaluations: Forrester Waves, Gartner Major Quadrants, etc – these are highly structured evaluations meant to create an unbiased look at technologies in a category. You don’t need to be a client to participate – in fact if you are a client you’ll lose access to some of your client privileges like access to analysts while you’re in an evaluation.
Report Mentions and Awards: Award programs like Cool Vendor from Gartner are great PR opportunities for startups; getting a customer story cited in an analyst publication is another great opportunity. Representative vendor mentions exist, but are less useful in the market. I would put vendor landscape type pieces in this category as well.
Inquiries: Short conversations with analysts that are driven by questions the vendor asks
Advisory Time: Extended inquiries – typically several hours long where your company executives can engage with an analyst for deeper advice
Sponsored Research: Webinars with an analyst, TEI reports, and other pieces of content where your company partners with a firm to put content out together.
Although AR gets a reputation as being “Pay for Play” this isn’t strictly true – in fact, you’ll have noticed that there are several free ways to engage in basic Analyst Relations listed above.
Step 5: Engaging with Analysts Effectively
Analysts are trying to be good sources of advice for their clients. That means you serve them best by cutting through as much marketing fluff as possible and getting straight to CREDIBLY and clearly articulating:
Who are you trying to serve in the market (and who are you not)
Your differentiation / what makes your approach special
Proof that you are a stable bet for their clients (growing customer base, proven founders, long runway, etc.)
I write more about effective analyst briefings on my linkedin, as well as my blog at uprightar.com. Robert Karel also writes an excellent piece from the analyst perspective.
Keep in mind that great analyst content typically ends up somewhere between your investor deck and your sales deck, and requires a lot of strategic thought your company may not have actually written down previously. The good news is that once you’ve gone through that exercise, you’ll be crisper in articulating this story to virtually every other audience. Good AR truly does make you a better product marketer!
