Comments on: Researching Is Their Job, Not Yours: On Analyst Relations

By: Forms debate, Should A/R do it or should the analyst do the research « delusions of adequacy

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:06:07 +0000

[...] Relations — deladequacy @ 4:06 pm I’m not sure who started this discussion, either James Governer or ARmadgeddon, likely it was David Rossiter on who is responsible for providing information [...]

By: jgovernor

jgovernor — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:50:37 +0000

Actually Barbara you appear to have raised a slightly different issue from Catherine’s. As I read it Catherine was talking about the fact analysts use “client” as a handy shorthand which allows them to not say they get paid by vendors. Vendors of course fall into this trap all the time – “tell us what your clients are saying”. we always have to stress that while we have many enterprise, service provider and grassroots conversations, the root of our paid client work is vendors.

Also- i don’t know about other analysts but the majority of briefings at RedMonk are push rather than pull.

Ric- I was going to do a briefings blog a long time ago. we never filled it in. Maybe if we got vendors to fill in a form beforehand, we would.

By: Barbara

Barbara — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 19:12:42 +0000

The one point in the original post that made sense to me was frustration over using briefing requests to feed the sales pipeline. This is a proven business practice for reducing long term revenues and/or brand reputation.

Catherine touches on another business practice that challenges 21st century common sense — an analyst sending out a survey (or requesting a vendor briefing) without coming clean that it’s part of a custom research contract. Now, there’s a black list worth publishing because it’s about naming individuals — not just companies — who abuse trusted relationships.

By: Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:31:09 +0000

Simple solution – since the required information is pretty much canned – have it available on an AR web page. Job done. If incompletely.

By: Ric

Ric — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 01:29:40 +0000

Aronaut’s response had an idea – a ‘briefings’ blog … does this build on the idea of ‘blogs as RFPs’?

By: Catherine Helzerman

Catherine Helzerman — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:06:44 +0000

I agree with the person who said that a lot depends on context. Like Amy, I have received questionnaires that are so long they’re more like fill-in-the-blank books. If those come to me out of the blue (rather than as a result of my requesting a briefing), I tend to be suspect. I can’t name the amount of times I’ve been asked to essentially provide fodder for a paper being funded by a competitor.

My advice to AR people is, if YOU request the briefing, be prepared to require whatever the analyst wants. Don’t like filling in forms? Don’t ask that analyst for his or her time. If THEY are approaching you, you’re well within your rights to question how the information will be used and, based on what your impression, participate or decline. You can always just send the analysts to your website, however, in my opinion, even if it might be the most logical response, it’s not really polite and the word “relations” is in your job title after all.

To analysts – you can only claim that your only relationship is with the clients if you don’t take funding from vendors. Asking vendors to do your work for you might save time, but could hurt you next time the client -sorry, I mean, vendor- has a project they need done (they might pick someone who has a more original approach).

By: jgovernor

jgovernor — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:34:39 +0000

Good stuff everyone. Thanks for the clarification ARmadgeddon people. Quite aggressive about the “naughty” companies, which is fun.

Ian- right on. We’ll get that email address right after we staff up our office of the CEO…

Nancy- thank you so much for your feedback. That makes makes a lot of sense.

Amy – as ever, right on the money.

and Tim your advice is awesome. Maybe you should be looking for a role as an analyst.

Luis – a bit of compare and contrast never hurts

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:22:19 +0000

Seems to me that it’s a question of importance and prioritisation.
If you think the analyst is important to your business – then providing this information shouldn’t be too much trouble, and could save time in the brieifing to focus on the actual important stuff. To be honest is pretty easy to find and should be top-of-mind for both in-house and agency AR folks.
If you don’t think the analyst is important or influential enough for you to provide this information it begs the question why are you wasting an hour of your time/your spokespersons time talking to them anyway.
Tip for agency folks – why don’t you ask your clients to provide you with this info upfront, then just cut and paste it into the questionnaire as needed.
Tip for in-house folks – why don’t you ask your agency to provide you with this information to see if they’ve been paying attention!

By: ARonaut

ARonaut — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 15:11:21 +0000

James,

Good post but we don’t agree with it all…
Our response was getting too long for the comments so we’ve posted it there:

Who’s sloppy? AR or analysts? [ARmadgeddon]

By: Nancy Shapira

Nancy Shapira — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:51:53 +0000

I have to agree with James. In my capacity as AR Manager for a Software Group of 13 companies, I do counsel our companies to save as much time as possible pre-briefing by providing the Analyst with all the information they ask for. I do believe that the exercise of filling out the form each time brings value to the companies also since these things do change over time. I also would stress the importance of investing time in making the information interesting enough to catch the analyst’s attention and hopefully generate more questions on issues that are important to the companies.