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.