Analysts need to demonstrate their smarts and relevance to the right vendor community, by Carter Lusher

Carter has made a series of of comments on one of our posts. We think they deserve higher profile so, without his permission, we are posting each of them as a post in order to separate the themes and promote more discussion.

Most analysts assume that everybody knows how smart and influential they are. Sorry, but that is dead wrong. Then the analyst gets angry, stamps his or her foot and yells about how smart and influential they are. Wrong again. Merely saying you are smart and influential proves nothing. Just like a vendor saying that it is the leader in a market means nothing unless they have something to prove that statement.

BTW, Gartner analysts fall into this trap as well. Just because they work at Gartner does not mean that AR, MI, CI or executive will believe that every Gartner analyst is smart and relevant.

Analysts, from single practitioners to the largest firms, need to develop appropriate proof points to demonstrate their smarts and relevance.

Roles of the Analyst – Market/Sales Influencers, Decision Support, Smart Advisors, Sales Support, by Cartner Lusher

Carter has made a series of of comments on one of our posts. We think they deserve higher profile so, without his permission, we are posting each of them as a post in order to separate the themes and promote more discussion.

A common misunderstanding that I deal with is that many boutique firms and single practitioners do not know that there are multiple communities with my company that interact with the analysts for different reasons. These analysts often assume that AR handles all the roles and get angry because they assume that because AR won’t brief them, then they cannot sell their services to that vendor. Wrong. The analyst is simply talking to the wrong vendor employee. While the communities different from one vendor to another, here is a high level description that works in many circumstances:

Analyst relations (AR) – Educates analysts who influence sales deals on the vendor’s capabilities so the analysts can appropriate position the vendor to IT managers with budgets.

Market intelligence (MI) – Buys syndicated market research and commissions primary research projects for decision support purposes. Often MI is mainly interested in market share numbers.

Executives – Execs will often have contracts with smart people whose opinion they respect to use as a sounding board. Sometimes these are analysts/consultants who were formerly at large firms and then left. Just because they left their prior firm does not mean the analyst got dumb, but often their market influence drops dramatically so they are not relevant to AR, but that does not mean that an executive does not appreciate the advice.

Competitive Intelligence (CI) – Group that provides information to the sales force about the competitors’ products and assists with request for proposal responses.

Bottom line is that the analyst needs to understand how each vendor is set up and then target the appropriate community. Merely yelling at AR because they won’t buy your services might be a waste of time if MI is the one who owns the budget.

Tiering versus Ranking, by Carter Lusher

Carter has made a series of of comments on one of our posts. We think they deserve higher profile so, without his permission, we are posting each of them as a post in order to separate the themes and promote more discussion.

Because there is no generally accepted definition of what “tier” means in the context of the analyst industry, let me offer some points to get the discussion started.

An analyst list is ranked based on relevance to what the vendor is trying to accomplish and tiered based on AR resources.

“Trying to Accomplish” – Hopefully the AR group is aligned with the vendor’s corporate strategy and marketing goals, which will in part indicate which analysts are relevant. When the corporate strategy or marketing goals change, then this impacts which analysts are relevant.

“Ranking” – Can be based on all or in part on how directly the analyst covers a market or topic, size of client base, overlap of the analyst’s client base with the vendor’s customer or prospect bases, visibility in the press or new media, public events she speaks at, demonstrated impact on sales deals and so on. Ranking criteria are subject to change over time.

“Tiered based on AR resources” – This is the tricky one and often not addressed. Not every vendor has sufficiently invested in AR staff to handle all analysts that want attention. As a consequence, the AR team has to focus on those analysts that they have the resources to provide appropriate support to. If one spreads the peanut butter too thin, then nothing is accomplished. This is no different than segmenting the customer base to provide dedicated sales teams to strategic accounts, while others customers share the same sales rep and yet other customers are supported by a telesales call center. There are only so many resources to spread around.

Example: In market A, there are 50 analysts that truly cover the market. The vendor’s AR team has ranked the analysts 1 through 50 based on the relevance of the analysts. Because the AR team consists of a single individual, the number of tier 1 analysts is 10. The vendor decides to hire another AR professional – doubling the team – leading to a doubling of tier 1 analysts. It is not that analysts 11 to 20 on the list suddenly got smarter or more influential, but that the vendor now how more resources to reach out to more analysts.

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Because most blogging software is really not set up to handle threads within a series of comments on a single post, I am putting “Topic” categories at the top of my comments as kludge. Perhaps ARmadgeddon can break some of these out as separate posts to make it easier to have a thread.

BTW, I am not hiding behind “Anonymous” and if anybody wishes to get in touch with me to debate this offline, I am more than happy to take your phone call. BTW, I expect to get flamed by “Anonymous,” so be it.

Which are the first-tier global analyst firms?

It's great to start the week with a laugh, especially after spring break, so thanks to the reader who sent us a link to http://www.canalys.com/pr/2007/p2007041.htm.

In that piece of startling modesty, Canalys (who?) announced that it is "recognized as a first-tier global analyst firm." With revenues of $5.6m, almost exactly Gartner's spending on office plants, we think the first-tier firms have nothing to fear. Canalys has revenue of $200K per analyst/consultant, so it is still a little short of Gartner's $880K.