An IDEAL situation

Lighthouse is offering analyst relations teams a free conference call on the IDEAL methodology – to get an invitation, please email analysts at lighthousear dot com.

Over the last couple months we have been engaged in our IDEAL powered AR audit. This sees us interviewing leading AR practitioners about the makeup of their analyst relations programs to understand where they focus most and where they need to focus more.

Generally speaking, mature AR programs have a broader focus than their younger competitors; whilst the vast majority of vendors’ analyst relations activities achieve competency in at least one of Identify, Drive, Engage, Align or Leverage, it is rare to see a high level of focus across the board.

The most common area of high-level focus is Leverage, with most vendors scoring on average, 7 out of 10. This makes sense because leveraging analyst relations requires little budget yet produces noticeable differences relatively quickly.

For instance, increasing internal, active support for the analyst relations program often starts by gathering key AR stakeholders into some form of committee or council. Another area we look at is the level of best practice and networking AR teams engage in. These activities are simple and low in cost to execute – this is why many score highly when it comes to leveraging within the AR paradigm.

This leads us to an interesting and recurring theme: how to make AR budgets go further. When it comes to Leveraging, success is easier to come by because it doesn’t require that scarce resource, capital. However, does this mean that there is a funding problem with achieving success in the Drive and Engage functions?

We welcome your thoughts on the most efficient ways to deploy your AR resources.

Duncan Chapple

There are 2 comments on this post
  1. January 27, 2009, 1:37 pm

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  2. January 17, 2012, 12:59 am

    […] discover how a more committed AR program can help your firm drive sales, ask for our free IDEAL AR Audit. AKPC_IDS += "1139,"; […]