Be candid and cooperate

Duncan for once posted something quite interesting on Analyst Equity: Credo 1. AR should be co-operative .

In this post, he says that AR should focus on the analyst goals rather than on written research. Why? Because focusing on written research only antagonises AR and Analysts (think of the arguments and escalation arising from some research notes "courtesy" vendor reviews) and does not eliminates negative comments from analysts to their end-user comments.

ARmadgeddon's take: while Duncan is quite right to say that AR should not be transactional and focus on working with analysts on their goals and research agendas and on relationships, AR still need to master two processes. The first one is segmenting analyst audience: some analysts only influence through written research and focusing on reports is the right thing. The second one is vendor reviews: AR managers still need to understand this process and devote enough bandwidth to carry reviews rigorously.
One final observation is that it's easier to be cooperative with EMEA analysts than US ones, who tend to be more adversarial and transactional themselves.