What do you want to be bad at? (The exercise I use to kick off every evaluation cycle)
Picture it… (no literally, picture it). You’re reading the final writeup of your critical Forrester Wave or Gartner Magic Quadrant. Your team crushed every step, you planted the right seeds against your competitive set, and you’re as up- and to-the-right as you ever could have imagined.
What does the writeup say?
I kick off every major evaluation with this exercise. We post the results on the wall, we keep it on the front page of our working decks. We write it on a post it note next to the screen as we work through questionnaire, briefing content, choose references, and every other step. This step helps you visualize and crystallize exactly how you hope to be portrayed in the market, and doing that will help you keep your presentation consistent and on message.
You probably have a pretty good idea what your targeted strengths would say: ideally these are the key differentiators that are the reason your best (most sticky, profitable, best fit customers) choose you. The more resonant they are with your target market, and the more differentiated they are from your key competitors, the happier you will be with the final results.
Think about quotability here as well - remember that in a final wave writeup or press release, whatever the analyst writes here about how and why you stand out will be the quotes you can highlight. Take some time to manifest your dream writeup, complete with some pithy wording you can imagine highlighting on your website or in PR. Then take that wording and use it repeatedly throughout your response. These belong in your slide headers and your key takeaways at the end. Proving they are true with data and customer stories should be a major goal for your Data Wranglers and Story Tellers.
That was fun!
Now… I want you to do the same thing for three weaknesses (or cautions or whatever the firm is going to call them). I rarely see Analyst Relations teams do this, even though we all start this process knowing our analyst is going to need to find something to write here. If they are going to have to write three negative things for us - lets do our best to choose what they are.
Some ideas of things that are good to be bad at:
Serving buyers outside your ideal customer profile - this business is not ideal for you to sell anyway, so it’s not the end of the world if the analyst steers those customers away to a different vendor
Geographies you don’t serve - “Vendor X may not be the best choice in Asia Pacific [where they have no sales teams]” —> oh well no harm done!
Verticals you aren’t appropriate for - if there are regulatory gaps or something along that line making certain verticals inappropriate for you, lean into that gap and let the evaluation weed out those leads.
Things you recently started doing - sometimes you can get a frame like “Vendor X is investing heavily in <new area> but buyers should exercise caution as these offerings are still new. That’s a pretty neutral negative, all things considered.
Price or Cost. Especially if you are targeting a leader position and serving some more highly-complicated enterprise grade types of customers, sometimes you can’t avoid this one. Just aim to show a lot of data around ROI and value, so you can make sure this ends up a high number of dollars paid vs. “some references didn’t feel the value was justified.”
Starting out your evaluation cycle with this exercise will help you get really clear about what you are trying to demonstrate - helping you create consistency and stay on message throughout the process.
Upward (and to the right!)
-Elena
