What analyst activities actually help reinforce your brand differentiation vs are expensive and produce little ROI?

Analysts will not endorse any vendor directly. Your goal with AR is to help shape their POV about the market, especially if this is a new category and ultimately get well positioned on MQs and Wave reports. Shaping their POV means showing analysts how customers are getting value from this new type of solution and what critical capabilities that are required to be successful. Do this by building a personal relationship with the analysts, sharing insights, connecting them with your customers, and ...Read More

Spending more money with analysts won't guarantee a good placement in a Quadrant or Wave. I've seen companies mistakenly spend money on: - Buying more seats or licenses than they actually need; - Signing up for datasets or services they won't use frequently; - Spending too much money on marketing services such as webinars, custom reports, etc. My general recommendation is to focus your money and efforts on what actually gives you an advantage: - Schedule frequent inquiries and briefings - Create ...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

Anthony's take is provocative but I've seen the same pattern. Let me add some specificity on what's actually worked across the companies I've been in. The highest-ROI analyst activity, by far, is the unsolicited analyst inquiry. When a prospect calls Gartner or Forrester for advice on your category and the analyst mentions you unprompted, that reference is worth more than any paid report. You cannot buy that. You earn it through consistent briefings, clear differentiation, and making the analyst ...Read More

It may be a controversial pov, but my perspective is that the analyst community is getting disrupted by DTC user review sites like G2, TrustRadius, and the others. Customer voice is just as powerful as it's ever been, but now, there are increasingly more and more ways to access that customer voice in context of making purchasing decisions.In 7 years of building Gainsight, I think the only value we had from working with analysts was sponsoring a thought leadership paper with Forrester. It was exp ...Read More