How do you measure and communicate progress for your analyst relations program, when it can sometimes take a couple years to see results?

This is a great question and top of mind for me right now.  For your executives, their primary goal may be to get into a Forrester Wave or Magic Quadrant. Yes, that would be the ultimate win, but it can be a long game AND there are many other ways to measure success over the life of a program. There are two buckets of goals to measure success:  Drive awareness, pipeline, deal acceleration of your solution (outbound): I measure this through research mentions and perception audit. Analysts publish ...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

Treat AR like a bullseye program. Success in AR is the ability to get in front of the most influential analysts. Goal your team on getting this face time, and track how often that’s happening. You want to have multiple touch points each quarter with those folks. Some KPIs I track key analyst engagements Mentions in research AR-sourced opps (customers who are referred to you by an analyst) Track all of these well, but the real Valhalla is when you see your architecture, words you used, or your na ...Read More

Great question. First of all, make sure you set expectations up-front that results will take a while to see. Overall count the incremental wins, and show the milestones your crossing as a way to share that progress. Have a great conversation with an analyst where they told you a key piece of insight? Share that amongst your executives and PMM team.  Also, make sure you -- or your executive team -- are regularly talking with analysts. If you're responsible for AR, or have an AR team, you should b ...Read More

Analyst relations programs are best run as a partnership between PR/Comms teams and PMM. The PR and Comms teams will be helpful in driving longer term thinking and time horizons. How do we start to influence the narrative in the market today for the future, how do we position the company today for where we want to be in 3-5 years, those type of questions. For PMM, the value is in getting feedback on how you’re positioning products for buyers today, and driving awareness especially for enterprise ...Read More

First, establish the goals for your analyst relations program. Think beyond the placement of your company in a 'Magic Quadrant' or 'Wave' type of report, and identify additional KPI's, such as: - number of mentions in analyst reports - increased number of customer inquiries - increase in analyst reports about your market or category - etc The right metrics will depend on your company's stage (pre-seed, early stage, pre-IPO, etc.) and goals for the AR program. Make sure to communicate the goal an ...Read More