AMA: Pendo.io VP Product Marketing, Jackie Palmer on Analyst Relationships

The first thing to do when trying to get your company into a Wave or MQ is to study the category and find out what the inclusion criteria are. If you don't meet the inclusion criteria right away, work with your product team on building out a roadmap path that allows you to qualify. Or if you have all the required product features but still don't meet it, see what other hurdles like revenue growth or number of customers you need to track to be able to qualify over time. Once you are familiar with the inclusion criteria, start building a relationship with the lead analyst and secondary analysts. Start with an inquiry about the category or market and ask them about the inclusion criteria and vendors currently on the evaluation report. Keep up with regular inquiries to build rapport. Also make sure you are maintaining a steady cadence of update briefings, both about your company and your product. That way you will remain top of mind to the analyst. It's important to remember that you can do briefings even if you don't have a license/seat at the analyst company. You won't be able to schedule inquiries but you can at least do briefings. If you are still not included in an evaluation report, reach out to the lead author and schedule some time to discuss why. Maybe there is an inclusion criterion you weren't aware of, maybe there was a misunderstanding on the analyst's part. Keep it light and don't get combative. You always want to be positive and friendly with the analysts even if they don't include you. Keep building the relationship and over time you will see success!

The best kept secret in the analyst community is that you can ask for a briefing even if you don't have a seat/license to the analyst firm! And you should be doing this and following my briefing recommendations above. Don't just wait to be asked to brief the analysts for an eval like an MQ or Wave, be proactive! Reach out quarterly at a minimum and schedule update briefings with all the analyst firms who cover your space. The more they hear from you, the more likely they are to mention you on their calls with end-user clients. Another secret is that they want to talk to your customers! Analysts often only hear from their own end-user clients who, it must be said, are typically laggards! It makes sense, why would they call the analyst for an inquiry unless they didn't know what to do or need info. The analysts want to hear from bleeding-edge customers! They are often willing to take a call with one of your customers who is using your product for an innovative use case. You can broker the introductions but don't expect to be on the calls. Putting your top customers in front of analysts is a great (and free) way to make your case for your product. The customer also doesn't have to have an analyst contract - this is totally free! And sometimes it's a win/win for the customer where the analyst will give them a speaking spot at a conference or do a case study on them. My only suggestion here is to make sure you have a prep call with your customer to ensure that they will be saying positive things about you. Let's talk about some of the paid things you can do with analysts. Many of them offer ROI or business case reports that you can pay for. They interview 5-10 of your customers, build an ROI model, and write a report. Sometimes they are also willing to do a webinar on the topic. For a company just getting started, this can be very costly but is often key to help provide third-party proof of the value your customers get. Don't be afraid to shop around for this type of asset. Forrester Total Economic Impact reports are the best known but also the most costly. Other firms do them as well and can deliver almost as much cachet for a lot less. The last thing I want to mention is licensing reports. These can be trend or thought leadership reports or they can be analyst evaluation reports. My feeling on paying for analyst evaluation reports is that you need to be a leader and then you need to have some distance from your competitors. Or if you are new then sometimes it's worth it just to show you are equivalent to the other leaders, your top competitors. If you aren't a leader or of there's too many vendors in the leader area or if you're not new, then often it's not worth licensing these reports as you'll just be giving your competitors free promotion. Trend or thought leadership reports on the other hand are often valuable pipeline generation assets. Many prospects don't have analyst firm licenses/seats themselves but love to see the trends out there. Done with a smart campaign, these can be great marketing assets.

There are three types of analyst briefing decks you need to be able to prepare. The first is a quarterly update, the second is the product update, and the third is the evaluation briefing. I outlined my approach to each of these in a previous answer so here I wanted to highlight the key ingredient in a successful analyst briefing deck. The absolute key thing to include in any analyst briefing deck is customer proof. Whether it's new competitive wins you highlight in a quarterly briefing, beta customer success stories you highlight in a product update, or top customer case studies with meaningful results that you highlight during an evaluation briefing, the analysts want to see your customer proof. The best way to prove value to the analysts is to show them customer stories and results! And don't forget you can provide introductions and set up conversations with customers even outside of evaluation periods. And often those are the most valuable and helpful to build credibility and rapport with the analysts.

In the early days of an analyst relations program, the key metric you are going to be able to track is touches (inquiries, briefings, conference 1:1 meetings etc). The number of touches can be a proxy for measuring how you are building relationships with the analyst community. I like to track touches per month or per quarter and you should ideally be touching every one of your key analysts at least once per quarter. Once you're a little farther along in your analyst program, you can start to track mentions - both by the analysts in their thought leadership and landscape reports but also by prospects and customers who may have heard of you during their inquiry calls with the analysts. Sometimes those are hard to find but you can set up Gong alerts for the names of your analysts or analyst firms to see if prospects mention them during the sales cycle. Then, if you're luck enough to be part of a category the analysts are tracking for evaluations like MQs, Waves MarketScapes etc, you can measure and report on placement status and movement. You'll want to plot year over year movement and score changes. I know everyone wants to be a leader but sometimes depending on the category, it can be great to even just be included as a niche vendor. You may be on the evaluation for a specialized offering or something where it makes sense to be included but you won't ever be a leader. Even those placements can have value so don't just measure movement into the leader area.

The best thing you can do to influence analysts if there is not evaluation report like an MQ or Wave yet is to start early and build a continued cadence of conversation. In this case, it is super important to put your customers in front of the analysts. The more you can show that you have customers doing innovative things in the area you want an MQ or Wave in, the better ammo the analyst has to take back to their management. The big thing that analyst companies look to when thinking about launching a new Wave or MQ is client interest. So keep sharing your customer stories and get your customers to work on your behalf. They can also schedule inquiries on the topic with the analysts if they have licenses/seats or if they don't then you can make introductions and schedule conversations directly. The key thing is to keep up a steady drumbeat of interest. The analysts likely want to do an evaluation - they get great cachet internally and externally if they produce an evaluation that takes off interest-wise - so they are likely on your side. They just need your help to create that business case and client interest is one of the key factors the analysts' bosses will be looking for.

There are three types of analyst briefing decks you need to be able to prepare. The first is a quarterly update. I use these quarterly briefings to stay in touch with my analyst community and share new things that have happened in the quarter. I usually do them at the end of the first month of the next quarter so the revenue numbers are ready. My agenda for this type of briefing deck is: * Quarter Business Momentum - use this to communicate any growth and numbers you can share. I've found that even in private companies my CFO is willing to let me share numbers with the analysts as they are under NDA. And it's in your best interest to share because otherwise they will make stuff up based on their interpretation of the "market" which is usually wrong. I share quarterly revenue, YOY growth, number of customers > some ARR (like $100k), NRR if you have it etc. * New Wins - use this to show a few examples of how you beat your competitors this quarter. I include who you competed against, who was the incumbent, the business problem the prospect was trying to solve, and why they chose you. This way you can highlight your differentiators and your competitive momentum. * Product (or other) Updates and Roadmap - use a few slides to share the big things you've released in the quarter, or other big announcements like events. Then show an updated roadmap for what's to come in the current quarter or next 6 months. The next type of analyst briefing I usually do is a product update. Use this to keep the analysts up to date between quarterly briefings on anything big being released or use it to catch new analysts up on what you currently offer. You could do this prior to a big release as a special preview and sometimes the analysts are even willing to give you quotes for your press releases. The agenda for these briefings will change depending on whether it's an overview or a specific release product update. Make sure to include customer case studies and/or use cases and ideally be able to show momentum from beta customers or early purchasers. The last type of briefing and maybe arguably the most important is the evaluation briefing like for an MQ or Wave. Here you should structure your agenda EXACTLY as they have outlined. I've seen vendors who stray from what the analysts ask for and fail in being able to hit all the things in the time allotted. Another hint is to title each slide with the agenda item so the analysts can follow along. They have a checklist they are going off of for the evaluation and it is much easier for them to follow along and check you off if you leave them breadcrumbs. A sample agenda I've used for an MQ is: * Key differentiators - be concise here, pick your top three and show a slide on them before you get into the product stuff. You'll need to follow their requests exactly here and have slides for product capabilities, business model, services and support - whatever they ask for. In this section you can also include a slide that calls out a few key customer results, a slide that shows a few of your company awards, you can show your Gartner Peer Insights ratings (or Glassdoor ratings if they're good) etc * Significant changes - show any YOY growth, customer numbers, major new hires, new markets/industries entered into and other company related things * Mergers and acquisitions * Major product changes/innovations - you won't have time to go through everything so a hint is to use a table/list to show all the new releases but bold or outline only the biggest and talk through them. The analysts will only evaluate you on what you show on your slides so you can use the slides to show more than you actually talk about here. I like to have my Chief Product Officer do this section * Roadmap - same as above, show more than you actually talk about and bold/highlight the biggest things in some way. You can have your CPO cover product vision here too * Top three reasons for selecting your company - don't just state the three reasons, show some examples. I like to pull the competitive customer wins I've shown in the quarterly briefings and marry them up to the top 3 reasons/differentiators. The more customer results/wins you can show throughout the briefing the better! * Go-to-market strategy - This is where you can highlight anything exciting you are doing in sales, service and marketing. Also show your customer stats and logos * Pricing and packaging - you should not just show your pricing model here, you should say why it's different and what value it brings to the customer/prospect * A summary closing slide - reiterate what the top 3 differentiators you showed them at the beginning and add a customer stat or quote * Appendix: integrations, customer stories, roadmap details - make sure to talk about what's in the appendix and even page through it if you have time. Remember the more you can show, even if you don't read off everything on the slide, the better

One of the hardest things for product marketing teams is to keep things up to date! Unfortunately there's no magic bullet here, you have to schedule regular reviews of battlecards, decks, etc. One way to do this and leverage analyst insights and data is to use analyst report publication times as a trigger for your content reviews. Gartner, IDC, Constellation etc typically publish their reports (MarketScapes/MQs, market guides, hype cycles, etc) on an annual basis so each year at that time it gives you an excuse to update things. Forrester does it on 18-24 month cycles but you can schedule those in too. The end of the year gives you a great opportunity to update all your trend-based stats and content as the analysts will all publish their end of year predictions for the future year. The analysts often save up reports to launch at their annual conferences too so that can be used as another trigger point. It's tedious to keep updating things but sometimes a schedule is just the best way.

If you know there is an analyst evaluation report coming out and you didn't perform as well as you would have liked, or you weren't included at all, there are a few things you can do to mitigate the situation: * In the lead up time to the publication date, you can start to drip out social posts with customer proof and quotes about the areas where you might not have performed so well. * If there were product features you were missing during the evaluation but that you either have since released, or added to your roadmap and made progress on, you can also run campaigns highlighting new customers using those features. Even proof from beta customers can go a long way. * I always recommend creating a response doc for your Revenue/Sales team to use with key talking points, again with as much customer proof as possible. Make sure you go line by line on the strengths and challenges highlighted in the report, both for your company as well as your top competitors. Provide the Revenue team with insights as to why a particular score or ranking might have been lower than desired. * Another thing you can do is to highlight other third-party validation where you do show well. Start dripping out social proof and campaigns leveraging the other reports you have. The key thing to leverage is your customers. Actual, real-life examples and meaningful customer results always trump bad placements so get your customers talking for you across as many channels as you can. One important thing NOT to do, is please don't bad mouth the analyst or analyst company. I've seen vendors try to downplay the reports by referencing them directly and talking about why it is so off the mark for whatever reason. This is almost always a mistake. First, you risk your relationship with the analyst and analyst company. And second, you look petty and childish. The better option is to take the high road but show your customer proof and get the other third-party evidence you have to speak for you.

One of the best things you can do as a product marketer is provide market research value back to your PM team and your execs. You should be following the analysts that cover your market and reading every report they publish. Ideally you are summarizing those articles for your PM team, highlighting key stats, predictions, trends, and competitive insights you find. Your PMs usually can't read the reports themselves as they won't have logins but you can produce summaries. Gartner has even started to create sharable summaries for their reports recently that you can share directly with your broader team. I like to pick out a few key nuggets from reports by our major analysts and share them with PM management and the C suite. You may not change culture immediately but a steady stream of valuable insights is never a bad thing!

I don't know that I would recommend using a one-pager. In my experience, analysts are not going to read a document you send them unsolicited. The best approach would be to schedule some inquiries and briefings with the analysts as I've described in other answers. Then once you've had your briefing or inquiry, you can follow up and send them documents that relate to what you've discussed. This could take the form of one-pagers. The most important thing to include on any documents you send analysts is customer proof points. Highlight a customer story in everything you send them, even if what you are sending them is not customer-related. You can always squeeze in a customer quote, result, or story alongside whatever other content you are including in your one-pager or deck. They want to see that people are actually using your product and seeing meaningful results. That, more than any specific structure, is what I would recommend for any document you share with an analyst.

Sites like G2 and TrustRadius may not be official analyst firms but prospects don't necessarily know that! Because G2 in particular produces a grid report that looks and functions like an MQ or Wave, they are sometimes confused and mistaken for an independent analyst firm. And I would encourage you to treat them as such as well because your prospects don't necessarily know any different! Reach out to G2 to find who is responsible for your product categories and offer to have a briefing with them. While there are no formal surveys/RFIs for G2 grids, I have found that reaching out and building rapport can only help and not hurt your placements. Review quantity, recency and rating are certainly the top things that G2 and TrustRadius look at but they also look at other metrics as well for placing vendors on their comparisons and rankings. For example, G2 uses employee counts and company revenue that they pull from LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and Crunchbase to contribute to the market presence axis of their grid reports. They also look at website traffic and search analytics. So it is not only about reviews. But reviews are the things you can influence the most so I would encourage you to start a formal review gathering program at your company. Reach out to all your customers who have given you NPS ratings or signed up for your community or get your customer success team to nominate people. Then send them review requests. And keep doing this throughout the year because recency and consistency is just as important as rating. Also, don't forget Gartner Peer Insights and Gartner Digital Market properties like Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice. Depending on the size of company you target, those sites might be more important than G2 and TrustRadius which tend to focus on large and midsize companies.