The Analyst Sales Impact Matrix is one of the most-requested custom analyses produced by our Analyst Value Survey. Over the years, the AVS has gathered the opinions of thousands of users of analyst services about how they use analysts, and for what. The main report is a massive document, around 180 slides, but it does not answer every question. The Analyst Sales Impact Matrix shows which firms have the most influence on your firm’s sales process. The Matrix shows each stage of the Buyer Decision Process, which was presented to the 2014 Analyst Relations Forum in the session led by Caroline Dennington and my colleague Samyr Jriri.
The Analyst Sales Impact Matrix narrows the focus onto the five or ten firms that are most influential over your target audience, in your target segments. We get that insight in either of two ways. Either companies using the main AVS pick the market areas that work for them, and we slice our data accordingly, or firms give us a list of their contacts and we conduct a customised study (normally of clients and prospects, but sometimes of the vendor’s salespeople and other customer-facing staff). As you can see from the simplified sample above, the result is an influence mapping tool that can help focus and accelerate the sales cycle in several ways. Clients can use this research in their sales enablement work, in sales training, to help management the implementation of alignment between communications, social and sales, to help reallocate effort between sales and AR, and to help sales and AR to work together to sell sales enablement projects internally.
Many people say that the particular advantage of their Matrix is the way that it can link AR up to specific points in the sales cycle. For example, after a product launch you might need to persuade colleagues to allow AR to streamline its efforts and focus on a subset of influencers for a while. In another setting, a sales team that’s really fighting at one particular stage in the sales cycle might find that it needs to speak more with the influencers whose sweet spot that is.
Many firms want to keep the strategy and implementation of their sales enablement as much in-house as possible. However, they often lack the sort of hard data that goes into the Analyst Sales Impact Matrix. Few firms have the enormous volume of data that we collect through the Analyst Value Survey, and they certainly don’t have our access to their competitor’s clients. Furthermore, because Kea Company is the sole vendor of ARchitect Express (the contact management solution for the influencer industry) no-one has a more complete, or more up-to-date map of the influencers themselves. Kea’s deep expertise in sales enablement also means that we have the business development skills and industry knowledge needed to let you hit the ground running with the Matrix.
To find out how to get an Analyst Sales Impact Matrix produced with data from buyer organisations in your target markets, contact Samyr or me to find out more.
This post originally appeared on InfluencerRelations.com.
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