My colleague Elena Georgieva gave a great Lunch and
- A briefing is a great way to inform both analysts, and analyst research, on provider updates and market disruptions.
- Analysts may know less than spokespeople expect them to. They are primarily to educate analysts, not spokespeople.
- Analyst Days can showcase strategy, solutions, and draw in executive spokespeople, customers, partners and topic-experts, both in plenaries and 1-2-1.
- Analyst Days are costly, but they allow greater intimacy, undivided attention [especially valuable for often-overlooked firms] and exclusive insights into the future than a half-hour briefing can.
- Analyst visits and tours, going to their offices, can be especially powerful if your executives are already visiting global analyst hubs like London or Boston.
- A different cadence of calls and webinars gives different experiences to analysts with differing levels of business impact. Webinars are especially useful with geographically-distributed analysts.
- Multi-analyst webinars can be challenging (especially for third- or fourth-tier analysts for whom this is the only interaction). Drop-out rates can be high unless its valuable information. They can allow insightful moderated discussion, but relationships are invaluable.
- Online tools like portals and newsletters concentrate multiple content items in an easy-to-access format.
- Be friendly, not formal, with analysts. Be brief: no to marketing puff, over-claiming or an extensive journo-type pitch.
- Analysts have full days, so it’s hard to stand out in a briefing. Spokespeople can be taught to get to the point crisply, highlight solution value and make sure they answer analysts’ questions.
- Analysts will ask questions in a briefing if they don’t understand something. No questions can signal that the analyst is engaged and grasps the content well.
- Analysts’ major benchmarking reports both chart major plays and will have passing mentions of point players. Draft reviews are for fact checks: too late to change perceptions.
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NDAs are often time-limited, like PR embargoes. Even outside formal NDAs, analysts generally honour oral requests not to disclose information. - War story: one vendor asked analysts to sign an NDA with a liability of $5m. In practice, hard to enforce and damages the relationship. Oral requests are enough to secure confidentiality.
