Forrester Research’s Kevin Lucas raises a good question: what core corporate business value can your analyst relations program deliver? His point is that AR programs shouldn’t commit to delivering sales value unless there’s good reason to do so. As logical as that advice may sound, I don’t agree with it.
Analyst relations programs can be designed to deliver on a wide range of business objectives. There’s no reason to shy away from aligning AR with the customer purchase decision process. In fact, that has been the basis of the analyst business — and analyst relations — since the late 80s.
What you can’t do, is bolt sales performance expectations onto an existing AR program. Objectives are fundamental to how you design, staff, fund and measure an AR program.
A legacy AR program — perhaps focused primarily on what’s said during a conference, or improving where your dot is placed on quadrants — is not going to shorten sales cycles tomorrow because somebody issues an edict today.
The magic wand scenario just doesn’t fly.
That doesn’t mean that an AR program can’t deliver sales value. It means that delivering sales value will take time. It will take intention. It will take planning.
Kevin asks a good question. It’s up to each of us to come up with a good answer.
Republished from my Influencer50 blog, Sway.
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December 16th, 2008 at 7:29 am
The trick here is to aim for balance plus sales decision-making focus: First, industry analysts talk tech with customers, partners, press, investors, increasingly each other (due to social apps like Facebook and Twitter), family, friends and competitors. The AR plan should consciously account for all of those information channels because they all have impact. One might argue that the customer channel is the most important, but not to the exclusion of others. And if you believe that the customer channel is the most important, then your plan should take action well ahead of the buying decision point: 95% or more of the work happens before the customer gets to a short list or a final decision. In terms of measurement, any senior manager who understands how all this fits together isn’t going to look to count number of sales attributable to AR, they are going to look to ensure that the actions are being taken to optimize the chance with customers, and that is where the metrics should be placed.
December 17th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Evan,
One of your points hits home in particular — taking action in advance of a buying decision point. This is one reason that it’s so important to build an AR program based on facilitating specific business objectives.
Barbara