Analyst Relationships

  If you’re looking for specific titles, I think the approach you laid out makes sense. The screener survey is super important for making sure you’re find representative folks to talk to (based on your customer base or intended customer base), and not wasting your time. For sourcing the initial list, I try to make them a mix of current customers (sourced from our database) and potential prospects.  For prospects, I use an intercept on some of our web content, and sometimes tap into panels like Google Surveys.  For specific titles, you could also try LinkedIn targeting which I think allows ...

Respondent.io is great tool for this - you can target specific job titles in any number of industries and weed out interviewees based on a survey. We typically ask things like company size, job function, whether or not they're already using our software, etc. We just redid all of our personas and Respondent.io was amazing. I also sent out a survey via PeopleFish which is another great (and typically cheap-er) way to get intel outside of your customer base.

First things first, I believe that a representative sampling of non-customers can actually be a better source of information than current customers, so you're in a good position there. However, I wouldn't start with a survey. I would instead start internally (product and sales) to understand who this was built for, what it can do for them, why they should care and how they react when presented with it.  Quality interviews with product and sales should help you figure out your "who" for profiling. When it comes to the interviews themselves, my best advice: Ask colleagues for introductions...

Based on your question detail, it sounds like you are targeting some specific persona details. If you have the time and capacity to take the approach you described, then it's a good way to do it. The other is to use a third party. I've used a few in the past, SurveyMonkey and Respondent.io. They were both pretty easy to use and got us the insight we needed without the hassle of prospecting.

If you're going after a whole new market, consider using services like G2G where you can provide the desired profile including industry, companies, titles, and areas of expertise. Then you'll get scheduled interviews where you can ask very specific questions. Set aside some budget for these interviews and be selective because they are costly. 

This is a great approach. It's best if you get as specific as possible to identify prospects (ie. country, company size, verticle/industry, job title) and get clear on where you want to focus.  I shared in another answer that we partnered with a leading thought leader for a specific vertical (retail) and conducted a survey with their audience, who was our target person (retail execs). We used the survey results to share industry trends and insights and used this asset for lead generation, which drove a ton of interest!  Always consider, what's in it for them? I'm always pleasantly surpr...

I think your plan is a good way of moving forward. If money is no object, you could obtain a panel, and do a survey, and then contact those who seem to fit the profile for a deeper interview.  I've used LinkedIn for reaching out to target personas and asking them for 30 minutes of their time to chat. If you leverage partners in your GTM, they may have some contacts to connect with. I've also learned about this resource recently, but have not yet used them. Userinterviews.com.

This really requires a dedicated effort and should be owned by Product Marketing. Different industries change at different paces – in some cases, a quarterly review process is needed, in other case, it might be less frequent. It really depends. Product Marketing needs to keep a close pulse on customers, talk to sales and product management, and keep an eye on the competition. There are other factors to consider as well that may trigger an off-cycle review: major industry news, significant new competitive offerings or new entrants, win or loss of a key customer, an upcoming key tradeshow or...

Your CMS (content management system) should have some sort of archiving parameters in place that should remind the PMM team when things get stale. With that said, all the reminders in the world won't matter if people ignore them, so I recommend you also have a "librarian" of sorts manage your content site - whether it's in a sales portal or in another tool, someone who is in charge of managing the site, tracking metrics, and also monitoring / organizing PMM when content needs to be refreshed/archived.  

Align on needs and get buy-in on the program from key stakeholders upfront, otherwise, you will just be reactive and the expectations will be that every request is handled and every asset is up to date. By setting a strategy upfront, defining the set of deliverables and the cadence at which they'll be updated, and creating rules of engagement and set venues / channels for to communicate with teams, you can create a scalable system. For larger orgs, you may have to create SLAs between your team and sales and product.  Specifically with competitive, I really believe you need to define ours...

In the "real world" this is a function of whose responsibility sales collateral is. If it's product marketing, the answer is simple: Supply new collateral when it's time for an update. However, if product marketing is responsible for informing, and letting sales create its own materials, then it becomes more complicated. For me, it all starts with the buyer personas (or, as I like to refer to them, stakeholder profiles). I have a particular way of approaching these, leveraging psychographic, rather than demographic, inputs and structuring outputs as stakeholder-specific business cases. T...

There's two parts to keeping all the above content up to date, including content creation and content delivery: * Content Creation: This is all about capacity planning of the Product Marketing team on the capacity of the team to update content vs. the amount of content that needs to be updated. First, you need to define what content must be kept up-to-date and how frequently these updates need to happen. For example, some product marketing content needs to be updated frequently (e.g. information about new products and/or features that have come out in each release), wher...

Make it jointly owned. Your team will (almost certainly) not grow as fast as sales, success, support, etc. Even talented PMMs struggle to keep these things relevant and useful for every season of the company’s journey. So rather than boil the ocean, make it everyone’s responsibility. If your best competitive and market positioning is in the sales onboarding guide, sales managers and VPs have an incentive to keep it accurate for new hires. Plus new hires can comment on/correct things over time. If you have personas, consider jointly owning them with the product team. Product teams have...

This really depends on your product and industry. Let me outline a framework with four elements: * The customer perspective * The competitor perspective * The technology perspective, and * The marketplace perspective Take a look at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/product-marketing-three-words-part-ii-rajendran-nair/ and https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/product-marketing-three-words-part-iii-rajendran-nair/. I have laid out the framework I use to listen to the market.

This is tough, but you can prevent foundational PMM assets from going stale by having (1) defined processes (e.g., establishing which components of your market intelligence are most important to update and on what cadence, and using what inputs), (2) quarterly prioritization to revisit key assets (e.g., dedicate budget and get buy-in from cross-functional partners to spend time and energy updating these assets as a part of quarterly OKR planning. If you don't dedicate and protect the time and budget, you're likely to let them fall by the wayside), and (3) cross-functional participation (e.g...

I'm big on updating information based on actions that need to be taken / decision that need to be made.  When it comes to market research and personas, clarify what decisions you need to make based on the information and the cadence to which you will make them. If you use market research to inform half-by-half planning then updating the information prior to the beginning of each half is a good starting assumption.  I recommend keeping a regular pulse on the competition, though. For example, by regularly read news about your industry. If there are public announcements that necessitate ...

Starting with the customer insight is always the #1 job of a product marketer. Ideal customer profile, target verticals, buyer personas, etc these are things that aren’t going to change on a weekly or monthly basis. However, as part of routine planning cycles – perhaps every 3, 6 or 12 months depending on your market or industry, it’s always good to re-evaluate with sales and CS leadership and understand if we’ve been seeing any shifts in user base or even with the demand gen team to understand how mix in titles might have changed in your inbound lead mix. Competitive insights are a sepa...

The good news is sales people notice when materials are out of date, and will let you know it is time for a refresh. :) Joking aside, here are some proactive tips on how to keep materials up to date. Market research: With Google alerts, you can capture trends, survey results and news for the topics your personas care about. If you subscribed to analyst research, be sure to have a look at new research on a regular basis. As PMMs, we write about many of these trends in blogs, and use updated stats in sales presentations and prospecting emails. You could make it a policy to refresh sales co...

I have been a Product Marketer since 2013 and have built numerous VoC programs back when I worked at Medallia.  For one, generally speaking, PMMs don't always own the VoC program.  That being said, there are some common mistakes some companies make with VoC programs: 1. Score Watching: They only look at the NPS score and don't take any action. 8/10 companies will do this. The NPS or equivalent north star metric is only useful if the action is taken on the qualitative feedback and improvements made accordingly.  2. Surface Level Only: They don't measure key drivers of satisfaction i...

I think the biggest mistakes with starting a formal VOC program are 1) to do it without truly knowing what the goal is, and 2) to not secure CEO-level buy-in. If you don’t do the first one, then how will you know where to focus or how to measure the impact? And second, if you don’t get that commitment from the CEO, then you risk turning it into a temporary pet project that ends as soon as the exec sponsor departs the organization. I’ve seen it happen first-hand.

The two biggest mistakes I see are (1) not having a clear goal as to what you want to learn from customers and how this will inform product / go-to-market strategy, and (2) not truly prioritizing or resourcing the effort.  With regard to (1), I find it's really important to be clear about what you are trying to learn from Voice of Customer. Don't get me wrong, it's important to have broad discussions with customers that raise topics you may not have thought... however, I suggest gathering these type of insights should be 20% of the effort not the 80%. I recommend guiding the feedback you...

I think the easiest thing to miss when setting up Voice of Customer programs is alignment cross-functionally on the purpose of these programs. As product marketers, it’s easy to drive towards your goal of turning your customers into heroes and heroines via case studies and testimonials for your site. However, a strong VoC program needs to do more than just build a pipeline of case studies. You need to be able to infuse the customer voice back through all facets of the organization. So I think the best way to avoid common mistakes when building one from scratch is to: 1. Align with sales,...

The most common mistake I've seen in developing VoC programs is thinking too narrowly about the customers' voice. Often, VoC programs start with marketing or customer success with the goal of obtaining advocates for case studies, reviews and references. Advocates can be leveraged for so much more; for example: * Participants in UX research * Beta participants * Participating in persona interviews or providing feedback on messaging In addition to obtaining case studies and references, VoC programs can be used to help product marketing and product teams understand: * your product's ide...

You can identify other documents produced by Gartner in the segment in which you work and contact the analyst who produces them. MQs do not exist when there is no variation between vendors in each quadrant, it becomes meaningless to continue issuing them. However, there are other documents, such as Market Guides, Critical Capabilities and others. You can start there. There is the option of having product briefings with the analyst working on these documents and thus gaining visibility.

MQs and waves aren's static and evolve over time as new categories emerge and old categories get consolidated or unbundled away. Analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, IDC know this and their analysts are always looking to stay ahead of the curve by talking to emerging technologies. They publish their thoughts in things like market guides, or cool vendor lists. They update the capability matrix of their usual MQ, or can point to emerging trends in the MQ write-ups. They can even talk about this informally on platforms like Linkedin.  So the best way to influence analysts is to talk to th...

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:  1. Drive awareness, pipeline, deal acceleration of your solution (outbound): I measure this through research mentions and perception audit. Analysts publish regular vendor guides. These are not evaluative but are important ...

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 buyers (CxOs) with the analyst community on what you have to offer. The best way to really do it...

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 be meeting with various analysts (not just the core group who drive reports!) regularly. As ...

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 expensive (~$100K) but allowed us to leverage the brand equity of a trusted brand in the market to...

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 keeping them updated about your roadmap and product innovation. 

I recommend creating a more high-level analyst stategy that outlines your actual need for analyst partnerships. Once you and your stakeholders are aligned on the need, you need to carefully select analyst partners who will drive the desired results. Do your research. Ask for references. Be critical of their proposals and scope of work. Get involved in the research. Ask questions. Good luck!

Well first of all, it’s always tough to be a team of one. You are definitely going to have to ruthlessly prioritize and as a team of one, it can be easy to get stuck as the sales content/collateral & product launch factory. So with the spare time that you have, I think a few things that can help you understand the customer a bit better perhaps in order of ease: 1. Sign up for daily newsletters from the industry trades that you’d want to cover your launches 2. In those newsletters sign up for the webinars that come thru, or webinars from competitors that you think your target mark...

1. Listen to sales/CS calls. As a team on 1 you can't be on every call but make it a weekly habit to listen to at least 5-10 calls (you can listen at 1.5 or 2x speed 😊). Be strategic about the calls you listen to - use keyword search or tagging for key topics of interest that are relevant to your business like competitors, pricing, implementation, ROI, etc. This will give you great insights into what your customers and prospects care about and how your team is responding.  2. Read G2 reviews. There's so much information shared in these reviews about what your c...

Quick answer: Data. Bring them snippets of real customer conversations or data points that they haven't seen from customer interviews, surveys, CSAT, NPS, customer service feedback - you name it. This will show the value of talking to customers, and will leave them wanting more.  To be even more influential, if your product or design team isn’t listening - make sure your exec team is. Get an executive sponsor who wants to champion the “voice of the customer” - and leverage their position to promote the customer insights you’re finding.  It’s really dangerous when a product / eng team ...

I agree with Mary. Data. How you package that data, though, really matters. Some people are swayed by facts, some are swayed by process/method, and some are swayed by stories. Know your audience and package your facts accordingly. 

One thing I'd add to Mary's response is what I think is the hardest part of your question: identifying the questions that matter most to the business. Getting and using data is critical, but it will fall on deaf ears and undermine your credibility if you aren't getting the right data at the right time for the right decision-makers. How do you identify what data to go get? Look for one of the following: * Internal disagreements: Are members of the Product team regularly having a philosophical argument that impacts the direction of the roadmap? For example, does one camp think user...

While I agree with Mary's answer ("data") and the other great points that have been added here, I would caution against taking the exact same approach you would to influencing product as you would to influencing culture. If data were sufficient to change culture, the world would look dramatically different.  Culture is theoretically owned in people, HR, operations, and exec leadership. It's an intangible and can be attached to personality. That's a different audience and perspective than a group of product managers and engineers. Put your marketing hat on and adjust your approach accordi...

To me, it's about creating a customer-centric culture, not just a "market research" culture. "Market research" is a bit of a stigmatized term - most of it is considered not valuable, not actionable, and an expensive "nice-to-have". I'd encourage you to re-orient around building a habit of listening and talking to customers - often. What I try to do, very tactically is:  1/ help make the case for "discovery" in roadmaps as an official line item. Make sure formal product development time accounts for talking to relevant audiences before anything is built or designed.  2/ i invite product, d...

This is concerning to hear. Unless you have the next Henry Ford on your design team, this mentality will ultimately lead to a poor product-market fit. That’s not saying that your design team should not have a voice at all – they may have a solid product vision and if they are market experts, then they will have an equally strong understanding of the market’s needs. But that understanding doesn’t just randomly come to them. It is carefully honed by having a close pulse on the customer. For instance, there is one particular product leader at my current company who understands our customers b...

Market research is the most powerful tool for influencing product. I recommend applying your marketing skills to your internal stakeholders in the same way you use them for your externally-facing initiatives. If you have some great market insights in hand, consider these steps: 1. Understand your internal target audience: Why does product and design consider themselves as the consumer? Where are the largest differences between our internal teams and the actual customer? How do internal teams best consume information? 2. Create a messaging strategy for your insights: What are the key takeaw...

It is important for all functions across the company to build empathy for users. Regardless of your segment, small advisory boards are helpful for this, and can be set up to feature 10-20 key customers who meet quarterly (or more or less often) to review roadmaps and provide feedback on either new initiatives or existing products. The key here is getting leadership buy-in across the exec team, as they will likely be the main headlines to actually get key customers to attend these sessions. Depending on the level of budget you have, getting teams together to go onsite with customers and a...

I'd say lead the way. Use a traditional PMM responsibility like refreshing your buyer personas as a reason to kick off a joint research project and pull in your partners from the product and design team. Set up customer interviews. Get outdoors and do a workshop. Have some fun with it. Bribe them with candy and fizzy drinks :o) If you can't get buy-in for that, go talk to customers yourself and present a read-out of what you learned.  Get with the sales and client services team and use them as a proxy for the customers if there is too much red tape around direct customer interaction.  Co...

In general, a good flow for an introductory briefing deck is:  1. Introductions, and why you're here: I always like to start the conversation with a little context on why you've requested a briefing with the analyst. So I'll have a slide or just a few talking points on their specific research that sparked my request for a briefing.  2. Company overview: Before you jump into what you do, it helps to give analysts a bit of context and be very direct. This isn't a sales pitch. Analysts want to know a few basic things about the company like primary buyers, funding, si...

An option here also is to really start with a point of agreement around how the market is changing and as a point of discussion. If it intersects with their research then all the better. Then use that as a setup to flow into why you exist are different/better. Finish with all the customer and company metrics to end on a strong note: 1. What has changed in the market.  2. Why current-state solutions are no longer a fit given this. 3. Founding vision and why your solution is different/better than the current state 4. Some detail to show that it's not BS. 5. How your GTM is different/bett...

I think the mistake here is making it too long. I’d suggest an inverse triangle approach, and keep it short depending on the length and purpose of your briefing, probably no more than 5-10 slides. My typical lay out is: 1. Company slide (founded in, team, key logos, etc) 2. Market context (TAM/SAM/SOM as needed) 3. Problem statement: Key persona & pain points 4. Unique perspective: What’s your thesis/why you 5. Product overview: Perhaps a traditional marchitecture slide to start and then some screenshots or even better a 10min product demo walking thru a fictional user problem...

Afraid that this is a confidential item I can't share---sorry! A few thoughts though about how we do this well (and I have to credit a colleague, Michael Dunne, who does this work and is an exceptional AR expert). 1) Sales slides: If they're good enough to sell with, they should be good enough for the analyst. 2) Growth & leadership: Show your momentum, your success, your profile in your market. Anything you'd show to a potential investor here too. Be bold without lying... 3) Format like the analyst: See what the analyst has published themselves and structure any custom slides i...

I've been on both sides of the table. Before you set pixels to powerpoint... #1 - What questions do you have for the analyst to help validate or refute your assumptions about the market?  #2 - Can you describe the customer problem and your offering clearly enough that when a customer who fits your ideal target calls the analyst, the analyst thinks of you. #3 - Do you have a unquie perspective or better yet data on customer behaviors that would help the analyst do their job more effectively? #4 - Have you read the recent research of the key analysts you will be briefing? #5 - ...

I covered the basic flow of an introductory briefing deck in another question. I'd be happy to connect with you 1-1 to walk through yours and share a bit of mine :) Find me on LinkedIn! I've found 3 things that have really helped me have good analyst briefings. 1. Being very thoughtful and very direct about why I've requested a briefing with that analyst. This gives the analyst context on why they should care about your solution, i.e. if you do a good job connecting the dots. As an example: You wrote X in Y report, and that's exactly what our customers tell us we solve ...

The best analyst briefing decks that I've either seen or helped build are not filled with marketing messaging. They clearly layout what analysts typically care about, which could include the following: trends you've observed in market you operate in, the challenges your product(s) solves, overview of your growth trajectory, industries you touch plus key use cases for each, unique differentiators, and insight into the product & (high level) GTM strategy and company vision.  Other elements I'd suggest: Include customer success stories, lay out the ecosystem that supports your products (ie. p...

I think the mistake here is making it too long. I’d suggest an inverse triangle approach, and keep it short depending on the length and purpose of your briefing, probably no more than 5-10 slides. My typical lay out is: 1. Company slide (founded in, team, key logos, etc) 2. Market context (TAM/SAM/SOM as needed) 3. Problem statement: Key persona & pain points 4. Unique perspective: What’s your thesis/why you 5. Product overview: Perhaps a traditional marchitecture slide to start and then some screenshots or even better a 10min product demo walking thru a fictional user problem...