The COVID-19 pandemic created or accelerated massive societal changes, and the telecoms industry was also affected. Most telcos suspended significant tech investments for the best part of a year and then returned with a more profound commitment to virtualization, cloud, and improving the customer experience.
Since 2000, I’ve been involved in three independent surveys of telecom buyers. Most recently, at the start of 2024, I wrote a report for CCGroup, Trusted advisors: the role of industry analysts in telecoms purchasing, summarising a transatlantic survey of 150 telco buyers. It’s interesting to compare the changes over time.
Paul Nolan and I hosted a webinar to discuss our investigation on the response of technology procurers within telecommunication companies to diverse marketing channels and their impact on procurement determinations. The webinar, in April 2021, showed how the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted conventional marketing platforms. Paul outlined the key findings, and I discussed the implications for analyst relations.
The Influence of COVID-19 on Telco Tech Procurement
Approximately 70% of telecommunication firms encountered setbacks in their technology procurement procedures due to the pandemic, albeit most hindrances endured for a maximum of nine months.
Key findings
The clout of analysts escalates throughout the procurement journey, emerging as one of the most potent channels for awareness, initial long listing, shortlisting, and final selection.
- Industry analysts rank as the second most influential channel in steering vendor selection, following internal business analysts.
- Reports from industry analysts reign supreme as the most influential form of content on vendor selection.
- Analysts play a notable role in nearly half of all telco procurements and are present in almost all deals.
- 37% of telcos are spending more with analysts.
- The most influential analyst firms included Strategy Analytics, Gartner, Juniper, and GlobalData.
Enhancing Analyst Relations
The implications are pretty straightforward: Vendors selling to telcos need explicit goals for their analyst relations initiatives, which allow them to strategically embed analysts into business development, marketing, revenue, and sales functions. That involves key processes:
- Targeting. Few vendors understand that different individuals utilize different analysts at varying stages in the purchasing process. That’s why prioritization is so challenging: it stands as the linchpin to concentrating time and resources on the most influential analysts.
- Alignment. To hit the ground running, you must speak in the analysts’ language: Alignment guarantees that analysts effectively convey and comprehend messages.
- Outreach. Engagement should be judiciously allocated and executed to optimize its efficacy.
- Measurement. Evaluation is pivotal for garnering visibility, monitoring progress, and formulating well-informed determinations regarding analyst relations programs.
- Leverage. Harnessing analyst testimonials can magnify credibility, bolster marketing communications, and hasten the sales pipeline.
Analyst Influence and Engagement
The study we presented in 2021 had a necessary limitation: we could highlight several influential firms working with the buyers we surveyed. However, influence has a long tail, and it’s often about individuals as much as the firms that employ them. Individual analysts can wield substantial influence within the sector and may develop impactful careers grounded on exceptional relationships with diverse telecommunication companies. Analysts’ influence is accentuated by the organizations they are affiliated with and by vendors, underscoring the significance of targeted interaction with analysts. There’s a notable advantage available for vendors to not only address the big firms, but also allocate effort to this ‘long tail’ of analysts. The effort you put into them should be proportional to their influence on your audiences.
Analyst relations in context
Usefully, these studies asked buyers about their full array of marketing channels beyond analyst relations, encompassing media relations, industry media, virtual and physical events, and industry trade associations. In all these studies, we found that influencers (industry analysts and management consultants) surpassed other channels in terms of efficacy as a marketing conduit.
