Most AR teams fail to link operations to strategy and, as a result they end up doing the wrong things – but increasing efficiently. By focussing on improving operational outputs only, AR managers turn their attention away from hard-to-shift analysts who advise their clients, and focus on easily swayed analysts who are often funded by vendors and are less influential on buyers.
Jonathan D. Becher, SVP Marketing at SAP, made an interesting comment about AR measurement recently:
On Friday, a colleague in another division asked me “How do you measure the effectiveness of analysts relations?” It’s an unanswerable question that we’ve all been asked 1000 times about a wide variety of topics (even a marine terminal gate).
Of course it’s not totally unanswerable. As Jonathan later points out, the Net Promoter approach is a very solid one, and you can use it looking at reports and in surveys of analysts. However, the issue is how to look at causality: what things make analysts more positive? That’s why the most effective AR measurements aim to correlate inputs and outputs.
Look out for our free white paper, ‘Measuring the effectiveness of analyst relations outreach’, at http://bit.ly/L9Da
