Most analyst briefings follow a predictable arc. A vendor walks in, introduces the company, describes the platform, runs through features, and answers a few questions. The analyst nods, asks something clarifying, and suggests a follow-up in six months. Everyone leaves satisfied.
But satisfaction is not the same as impact. And impact — the kind that changes how an analyst writes about you, positions you in research, or recommends you to their clients — requires a different kind of conversation.
What McGroc Reveals
In 2020 and 2021, I worked with Zoë Crichton to develop a framework called McGroc for categorising the content of analyst conversations. The name is an acronym for six categories that capture everything a vendor and analyst might discuss:
- Markets — industry trends, market sizing, competitive dynamics, and regulatory shifts.
- Customers — buyer profiles, adoption patterns, pain points, and evidence of customer outcomes.
- Go-to-Market — sales strategies, channel partnerships, geographic expansion, and how the company reaches buyers.
- Relationships — the interaction between vendor and analyst, rapport-building, plans for future engagement.
- Offer — product features, capabilities, technical architecture, and differentiation from competitors.
- Corporate Strategy — company vision, M&A activity, organisational structure, and long-term direction.
When you apply McGroc to a debriefing note — a structured record of what was said in an analyst call — you get a map of where the conversation actually spent its time. And that map, across dozens and then hundreds of briefings, reveals a pattern so consistent it deserves its own name.
The Offer-Company Gravity Well
Here is what we see, again and again, across different vendors, different analyst firms, and different industries: the Offer and Corporate Strategy categories absorb the overwhelming majority of conversation content. Markets and Customers are frequently left blank.
This is not a failure of any individual briefing team. It is the natural gravity of the format. When a vendor prepares for a 30-minute analyst call, the instinct is to explain what the company does and what it sells. The corporate overview slides come out. The product architecture diagram gets shared. The acquisition timeline is walked through. The analyst asks a few questions about technical specifics. Time runs out.
The result is a briefing that scores well on completeness — every feature was mentioned, every acquisition was explained — but poorly on strategic resonance. The analyst leaves knowing what you sell, but not why it matters to the market or how it changes things for customers.
Why This Is Almost Unavoidable at the Start
The gravitational pull toward Offer and Corporate Strategy is strongest in early-stage analyst relationships, and that makes perfect sense. When an analyst meets a vendor for the first time, both parties need to establish a baseline. The analyst needs to understand what the company does, how big it is, where it operates, and what it sells. The vendor needs to make sure the analyst has the basic facts right before any higher-level discussion can take place.
So an initial briefing that scores 2 or 3 on a perception scale — product-focused with moderate analyst engagement — is not a bad outcome for a first call. It is the expected outcome. The problem is not that this happens. The problem is that it keeps happening.
A company might brief four or five analysts at the same firm over the course of a year and deliver essentially the same corporate overview and product walkthrough to each one. The messaging is consistent, which feels like a virtue. But consistency becomes repetition when it means the conversation never progresses beyond the introductory mode. Analysts at the same firm compare notes. If three colleagues all received the same pitch, none of them will come away thinking the vendor brought something distinctive to the conversation.
The Conversation Does Not Elevate Itself
This is the critical insight from applying McGroc across a large number of briefings: the imbalance between Offer-heavy and Market/Customer-light conversations does not correct itself over time. A second briefing with the same analyst will default to the same product-centric pattern unless someone — either the vendor or the analyst — deliberately pulls the conversation to a different level.
When an analyst asks a probing question about competitive dynamics (“who are your main competitors in each of those four areas?”), the conversation shifts into Markets territory. When a vendor opens with a customer deployment story rather than a feature list, the conversation shifts into Customer territory. When either party raises a market trend and asks the other for their perspective, the conversation becomes genuinely two-way.
The highest-scoring briefings we have documented — the ones where analysts are most active and the discussion is broadest — share a common trait: they were designed to provoke dialogue, not deliver information. The vendor came with a point of view about where the market was heading, shared evidence from customer outcomes, and invited the analyst to challenge or build on those observations.
The lowest-scoring briefings that are not outright failures — the 3/5 cluster — share a different trait: they were thorough, professional, and entirely one-directional.
What Pulls a Conversation Up
Three things consistently shift a briefing from product-centric to value-centric.
- Market provocations. Open with a claim about where the market is heading that the analyst can react to. This is not about showing off market knowledge. It is about creating a reason for the analyst to participate rather than listen. If your view of market direction is interesting or surprising, the analyst will engage. If you simply describe what you sell, the analyst will take notes.
- Customer evidence. A named case study, an anonymised deployment story, or even a quantified business outcome gives the analyst something they can use in their own research. Aggregate statistics (“we have 10,000 customers”) are background information. A story about how a specific bank in the Nordics reduced onboarding fraud by 40% using your orchestration engine is material the analyst can cite, reference, or investigate. That is the difference between information and evidence.
- Deliberate pauses. The simplest technique is also the most underused: stop talking and ask the analyst what they think. After presenting a market observation or customer outcome, ask the analyst if that aligns with what they are seeing from other vendors, from enterprise buyers, or from their own research. The analysts who score briefings highest are the ones who feel their expertise was valued, not just their attention.
The Pattern Across a Programme
When you apply McGroc across an entire briefing programme — say, eight or nine analyst calls over six months — the aggregate pattern tells a story about the vendor’s strategic maturity in analyst relations.
- A programme where every briefing clusters at 3/5 with heavy Offer content and empty Markets and Customer categories is a programme that runs on autopilot. The briefings are competent but undifferentiated. The vendor is doing the work but not getting the return.
- A programme where scores range from 3 to 5, with the highest scores correlating to briefings where market context and customer evidence were present, is a programme that knows how to shift gears. The question is whether it does so consistently or only when a particularly engaged analyst forces the issue.
The ideal pattern is a programme where initial briefings establish the baseline (scoring 2 or 3) and subsequent briefings with the same analyst deliberately move into Markets, Customers, and Go-to-Market territory (scoring 4 or 5). That progression signals to the analyst that the vendor is thinking beyond its own product and has something to contribute to the analyst’s research agenda.
What to Do With This
If you run an analyst relations programme, apply McGroc to your last ten debriefing notes. Count the comments in each category. You will almost certainly find that Offer and Corporate Strategy dominate. Markets and Customers will be thin or absent.
That finding is not an indictment. It is a starting point. Now ask: in which briefings did the analyst score highest on engagement? What was different about those conversations? The answer, in our experience, is always the same: someone brought market context or customer evidence into the room, and the conversation shifted as a result.
The McGroc imbalance is the default state. Getting out of it is optional — but the analysts who matter most will notice when you do.
Duncan Chapple is an analyst relations professional at Elisa Industriq. The McGroc framework was developed in collaboration with Zoë Crichton in 2020–2021 as a systematic approach to analysing and improving the quality of vendor-analyst interactions.