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

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 eve ...Read More

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 t ...Read More

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 cu ...Read More

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 giv ...Read More

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 tra ...Read More

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 th ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 launch ...Read More

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 a ...Read More

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 analyst ...Read More