Tuesday 28 March 2006

Ovum is floating -just about

As we announced before, Ovum has now gone through their IPO on the 10th at 190 pence. Their stock shot up to 219 on the 12th and went back to 198 on the 24th in small volumes.

Some in the industry have been speculating on what may happen next:

  • A mass exodus of suddenly enriched analysts?
  • An acquisition?
  • Aggressive development plans, for instance in consulting?

Read also:

Friday 10 March 2006

NEW: AR 101 feed

In response to the success of our popular AR 101 series, we've introduced a specific feed, with a number of subscription options below. Note that any input and suggestions for upcoming topics is welcome.


RSS (Atom + XML feed)

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Tuesday 7 March 2006

AR 101 series: briefing analysts

James, Jon and Andy kindly provided quite a lot of (free) advice on how to brief IT Analysts.

Here are six simple steps to get your briefing right (tell us if we forget anything guys).

1. Synch briefings with research agendas
A good briefing should be prepared before to make sure that the information given to analysts match their research agendas and interests. This is of course easier done for one-on-one briefings (some simple filtering questions at the start help). For one-to-many briefings (not the preferred briefing for most analysts but often the most practical compromise to update analysts on announcements in a short timeframe) it is good practice to send 2-3 questions to key analysts before the call.

Read AR 101 series: the research process for more. Jon made the following remark:

  • Take the time to understand research programs and assignments of the analyst firms you have in your sights, and use this information to make the correct people available to support the analysts that you meet. For example, if a firm is conducting a market analysis study, there is little point in providing a technical expert at a briefing; similarly, a brand manager will be of only limited use if a product comparison is taking place. Either of these situations may lead to the worst-case scenario of not being mentioned at all.


2. Don't give analysts a dog's dinner
Bear in mind that you may be talking to a diverse audience. Analysts fall into four categories: RAS analysts, market watchers, consulting analysts and sell-side analysts.

So, as Jon says in this great post, you need to "Make Briefings Worth It":
  • "At the best of times, briefings can be dull for analysts as much as for vendors. This is often down to the fact that briefing sessions are inappropriate, badly planned or conducted."
He suggests that a good preparation is paramount:
  • Only use source information that is relevant to the briefing at hand. Don’t waste anyone’s time in briefings, by slogging through irrelevant presentations that have been picked off the shelf
  • Customize your message before the briefing
Analysts usually want to hear the following:
  • Corporate strategy
  • What are you announcing? (high-level messages AND product details)
  • How is that going to fit with the strategy and go-to-market model
  • How are you going to compete?
  • How does this fit with your announcement roadmap?
And be flexible to respond to analysts prompts during briefings, do not hesitate to skip the introduction and go directly to the point. A common mistake is to explain granny how to suck eggs, for instance by lecturing numbers analysts (say from IDC) on market stats (say from Gartner/Dataquest). Andy illustrates this graphically in his post:

  • "That mistake is mostly made by smaller companies, where some VP or Director of Marketing is doing his (or her) run-of-the-mill pitch that would be equally used in any sales opportunity. So they go on and on about stuff that we have heard a million times already, have zero value to an analyst, and simply waste time. It's particularly annoying if those briefings are conducted via WebEx, because the analyst cannot [...] tell the vendor to skip to slide 32 [...]"
  • Vendors that do it very well [...] spend two or three minutes on chit-chat [...], then run through a few figures [...] and not more than 10 minutes after the call starts jump right into the product update, demo, or discussion.
Read also the comments Vinnie, Dean and Jon have left here on the subject. We had the following bottom-line in the same post:
  • ARmadgeddon is against unnecessary analyst cruelty and agrees that vendors could do a better job at scoping briefings to better address analysts needs.
Finally, read also: AR 101 Series: Don't use a sales presentation with analysts

3. The best briefings are interactive
Do allow time for analyst feedback during briefings ; bearing in mind that there must be something in for the analyst -the analyst should not feel like she/he is giving out all his IP for free. Bear in mind that analysts need to make a living and allow budget for buying reprints or getting the analyst under retainer. When the interaction is good, your company will gain a lot.Do not let short-term tactics waste this potential by making sure that your briefings are win-wins.

As Jon writes:
  • If you are able to provide an analyst and his or her company with timely, tangible value, the analyst is more likely to have something to say about your company and your products.
James made similar comments in his post Redmonk: how to brief analysts):
  • So, an analyst briefing is (should) a two-way conversation (otherwise it's called a press conference).
4. Don't forget NDA's
Analysts are interested first and foremost by future strategies and roadmaps. Do balance this requirement with the need to keep your job (and those of your executives) by being careful to flag what is presented to analysts under a non-disclosure agreement. Always keep the required paperwork at hand.

Read also Ovum breaks the iPod cellphone embargo?

5. Do a dry run
As we've said before: NOBODY should be talking to analysts without going through a good AR training first. This should be a corporate policy. If you don't have the skills or the credibility to deliver it in house, get some professional help. For instance from Duncan or David (to name only some who linked to us), if you pick-up someone else, make sure that they know the European market (not like KGC).

Furthermore, AR professionals should rehearse unless they're fully confident in the speaker's capabilities. This will not make them look appear as PITA's but rather as pros who need to make sure they avoid un-necessary risks.

5. Follow-up
Finally, do make sure that AR does the follow-up and stays in the loop -possibly by recommending that executives don't give out business cards. This should not annoy the analyst if you're responsive and has the benefit of being in a position to schedule additional briefings when required and stay abreast of the analyst agenda. This brings us back to step 1!


Additional bedtime reading:


Monday 6 March 2006

[deal architect:] Credibility of Analysts

Vinnie has a special talent for finding the sweet spot and sharp comments.

In this post, [deal architect:] Credibility of Analysts, he comments on the Borg IP police: the Gartner Ombudsman blog.

They posted a lame rebuttal to the Information Week article on Analyst Credibility. The comments on that post (the Borg must be congratulated, yes congratulated, for having a real blog) are worth a read.

Carter Lusher, the HP (HPQ) AR head argues for greater separation and transparency.

Chris Carter (?) asks two penetrating questions, only to find deafening silence. Follow-on through to Vinnie's blog for more....

Friday 3 March 2006

The Borg AR call

We were hoping that Joe, Duncan or Dave would write a take on Wednesday's Gartner call as it was really quite dull... The only really funny thing was that Pamela Miranda referred to the Miranda act, so she must have read this Gartner Watch post.

Laura McLellan, Gartner Research VP was first to speak. She covers vendor (IT providers) marketing strategies research. She started to say Gartner was not going to start to analyse AR (as the Oracle AR VP pointed out, this would be a conflict of interest) and compete with KGC.

She had an interesting take on analyst taxonomy, depicting it as an inverted triangle: on top analyst which are end users focussed (advise buyers), in the middle market watchers (who look at forecasts and trends) and on the bottom (tip) the vendor focussed analysts (advise sellers). Quite why the triangle is inverted, we don't know -there may be more user facing analysts in Gartner but in the overall analyst landscape the vendor facing analysts outnumber them by far. ARmadgeddon will be publishing an official Analyst Taxonomy soon. She then said that you need to adapt your approach to the kind of analysts. Not exactly new news but maybe a useful reminder.

She then further continued to explain grandmas (AR professionals listening into the call) how to suck eggs: one needs to segment the communication type to audience. Laura also plans to research which AR comms are effective or not and why. That would indeed make up for an interesting and more specific call.

She gave a quick round up on what analysts love most: face time, AR contact list (inc. responsibilities), announcement advance notice / pre-briefing and email opt-out.

She gave some insight on analyst psychology (gives a new meaning to analysing the analysts): they are motivated by influence and knowledge (explains the ego side) and turned off by community and reprocity (not sure what James will have to say on this).

These other points were on her charts:

  • Semi-annual tours with topic managers to discuss the “bigger picture”
  • Portal to find “basics” without bothering AR person
  • On-line presentations and [important] transcripts
  • Upcoming events calendar
  • Annual executive sessions [access to the “big cheeses”]
  • Opt out “push” e-mails with the news
  • Access to your customer presentations

Probably worth a reminder indeed. She finished by saying what makes a good AR person: being a good relationship builder. What does the R in AR stand for again?

She gave the following good and bad for AR managers:

  • GOOD: Enabler vs. roadblock, Proactive, Accountable, Responsive, Truthful, Trustworthy, Empowered, Persistent, Follows up, Management confidante, Value creator, Helpful, Relationship builder
  • BAD: Defensive & suspicious, Gatekeeper (analyst = enemy), Unresponsive, Self-important (does not mix well with analysts?), Territorial, Siloed (not like Gartner then?), Roadblock, Inconsistent, Inaccurate, Don’t understand own organization, Don’t understand how analysts work, Not influential in organization supported

She finally hinted that Gartner might create a research role to look at vendor marketing.

The call then moved on to Pamela Miranda, Head of Vendor Briefings who spoke about briefings. She did not really cover the points that were on her agenda:

  • How to seek analyst attendance at your events
  • What’s the latest on vendor-paid travel
  • Focus: The most frequently misunderstood parts of the process


Joe commented on the scheduling process here: Gartner's briefing on their briefing policy (Gartner Watch). As we've commented before, this process is lengthy and time consuming. One of the reasons that was


Read also:

Thursday 2 March 2006

AR 101 series: selling the value of AR

As we previously wrote, AR is NOT an outbound tactic: briefing analysts and expecting them to write something is called PR and does only harness a small part of the value AR can deliver. However, few AR people feel confident selling the value of AR back to other stakeholders, such as sales and marketing.

Here are a simple 5 steps guide to getting it right.

Step 1: establishing AR
AR often grows out of media relations and tend to have communication as a reporting line (this seems to be the prevalent model for small organisations). AR practitioners should seek to clearly differentiate their audience (read AR 101: Analyst vs. press) as it will impact management and stakeholders expectations.
In this post (AR 101: Measuring Analyst Relations), we lay out three models for AR:

  • Outbound: pushing information out to analysts in the hope of generating reports
  • Transactional: pulling targeted analysts into a relationship with the firm
  • Insight: primarily using analysts to develop internal understanding and direction
AR professional should strive towards establishing an insight-based AR practice and align with sales and marketing rather than with comms. See Duncan's tips here.

Step 2: setting goals and measurements
Thanks to Pavlov, we know that rewards conditions behaviours: it is crucial to align AR with sales and marketing goals. In this post (AR 101: Measuring Analyst Relations), we give the following recommendations:
  • AR's primary goal should be create a positive external environment for business
  • Focus and attention should be given to setting up balanced metrics to measure AR not only on raw clippings and quotes but also by weighting them to reflect the importance of the analyst, by surveying all analysts and through independent perception audits.
  • AR need long term objectives and can contribute positively to developing corporate strategies.
Read also ANALYST EQUITY: Share of Voice: Useful, Often Vital.

Step 3: impacting the strategy
Well executed, AR can leverage the analysts privileged position and wealth of knowledge as a competitive advantage. Do use analysts to get a sanity check and/or coach execs, balancing independent analysts (they offer better value) from those having customer insight. Do schedule message testing sessions way ahead of launches (under NDA). Do allow time for analyst feedback during briefings (bearing in mind that there must be something in for the analyst, like buying reprints or getting the analyst under retainer). Do not let short-term tactics waste this potential.

Step 4: Shaping the agenda
Having engaged proactively with analysts should give your company clues about trends you might not have spotted before. This not only gives your execs the chance of fine tuning their strategy and messages, but armed with this knowledge you should be able to also synch briefings and announcement with the analysts' research agenda. Read also AR 101 series: the research process.

Step 5: delivering to sales and marketing
There are multiple ways for AR to help marketing. Do start by making sure that AR tactics are included into the marketing plan, it should also provide for analyst deliverables (such as speaking engagement, research projects, etc...) Do plan AR tactics way ahead of product launches.

Do spend some time to explain how analysts come in the sales cycle and do raise awareness with the sales community so that they come back to AR when they hear of an analyst being consulted by the prospect or client. If you have followed step 4, you should be able to know where the analyst is coming from and what should her/his objections. You should thus be in a position to balance this with either positive research (from another firm or sometimes from the same firm) or to help sales refocusing the discussion. Remember that sales always get the kudos for wins and will try to deflect the blame for losses.
Read also Reacting to an analyst attack and Advisory analysts do impact vendor sales and make/break products.


Good selling!

Wednesday 1 March 2006

Borg softens 30mn rule

In an email today, the Gartner Vendor Relations (briefing police) and Ombudsman (IP police) appear to have read ARmadgeddon's posts on briefing length:

  • the 30 mn limit is now only a proposal
  • they recognise the vendor briefing request process is f****d-up, as vendors commented it leads to intolerable delays
  • analysts can extend the time if they deem it "required to obtain maximum value from the briefing"
ARmadgeddon's comment: recognising a problem is a first step to correct it, we will be monitoring Gartner's briefing process closely in the coming months.

In the meantime, there has been a lot of interesting comments on what briefings are and how long they should be, mainly here, there and there:
  • We agree with the analysts that vendors need to do a better job at briefings and to avoid death-by-powerpoint. Vinnie quite rightly says that briefings should be more focused ; that pitching to analysts is quite easier than pitching to the Wall-Mart procurement team.
  • There seem to be a consensus that 30 mn are okay for a quick update on a specific offering but does not allow enough time for wide-area-analysts (WAA, as opposed to Narrow Silo Analysts)
  • Dale and others however said that restricting briefings to a mere half an hour would eliminate the discussion. James argued that this was precisely what the Borg intended ; that it is an opportunity for independent analysts.
We look forward to today's call where the Borg will share its recommendations for AR professionals, and more.