Gary

At most B2B software vendors that I’ve served, we devoted an incredible amount of time every year on gathering data, building and recording demos, and defining our product vision in preparation for our submission for the analyst reports that define the pecking order of vendors in our industry.

You see it all the time on the homepages of vendors who rely on these reports for independent credibility.

Check us out in this year’s Magic Wave!

Many of my peers believe that appropriate positioning in these analyst reports is necessary to be placed on buyers short lists. Analysts are in a unique position between clients and vendors, and the information and questions that they receive from each often help them shape the direction of the market at large, and occasionally, the fates of vendors looking to sell into the market.

It’s a critical relationship to navigate.

I am so pleased to be joined in today’s What Great Looks Like podcast by Robin Schaffer, a veteran of analyst relations for B2B SaaS vendors and today an entrepreneur and business leader who guides clients on achieving their goals and their relationships with the analyst community.

1:45

Gary

Robin, it’s great to have you on today’s podcast. Thanks so much for joining me today. Please tell our listeners a bit about yourself and what you’re up to these days. 

Robin

Boy, well, about myself, I could talk for hours, but I’ll try to make it brief. I am an analyst relations expert. I have worked for my whole career in B2B technology, doing pretty much everything one can do in B2B technology.

And about 15 years ago, I came into the field of analyst relations, a little niche within the technology marketplace. And I felt like I was home. So that’s what I had done for about 12 years or so, working for different corporations. And then I went out on my own. So now I have a consulting agency, and we just specialize in working, particularly with startups and scale ups and building and running their analyst relations programs for them.

2:44

Gary

That’s awesome. And the first question I’m particularly interested in what you just said. In my experience, the power of analyst relations changes depending on the company’s stage in its journey. So is how you engage with the analyst  world different when you’re a stealth or seed startup than it is when you’ve had your exit and perhaps are a PE backed company?

Robin

Yeah, definitely. And that’s why I chose to specialize in this, because I found when I worked in much larger companies, I found from working with the analysts that they are very interested in what’s happening in the startup world, yet startups aren’t aware of that and don’t appreciate how much analysts appreciate them. So startups tend to not work with analysts very much, not tend to have programs and be proactive with the analysts where they’re missing out because analysts want to know, you know, if you think that an analyst, their value is how well they know the market and how well they can advise buyers, enterprise buyers in particular on technology decisions. 

So when an analyst is an expert in a space in fintech or cybersecurity or CRM or any of the thousand worlds and analysts are specialists in, they need to know all the major players, they need to know the Oracles and the Microsofts and the big players in the world. But they need to know what’s going on in the startup market and they’re very, very interested.

So for startups, they can get a lot of attention from analysts because analysts are interested in them. And if they have a very interesting, compelling, disruptive approach to the market, the analysts want to hear about it. So for really not a lot of effort or expense, they can start to get on the analyst radar and start to get the analyst working for them.

The other thing that’s interesting about small companies is the other side of analyst relations, where analysts are giving them insights because analysts, when you have conversations with them, may give you feedback on your strategy and your products and your roadmap or your partnerships, or you go to market, they give you feedback of all those things. And what I have found almost 100% in larger companies, it’s very, very difficult for those companies to take action on those suggestions and input.

And for startups, they are pivoting, moving, changing, taking input. So you can see the direct impact of this analyst gold, this feedback and this insight on their business. So it is really, really different at the startup and emerging stealth stage.

5:31

Gary

I think that’s a really, really interesting point is it’s not just about pitching right and getting your product in front of them.

It’s about learning. When I was doing analyst relations earlier in my career, I would just ask analysts, what have you heard recently? And it may not have been completely related to what we were doing, but all the adjacencies and all the different things in the market and information, I would never have gotten from other sources,

6:01

Robin

What analysts see is, they see what your competitors are doing?

They understand what customers want because they study the customer needs. They talk to clients, they talk to buyers, and they understand the technology trends that are going on. So they have this very, very interesting perspective that can offer you so much value if you take advantage of it. It’s different than we can get from any other sources 

Gary

100%. And it’s fun to have the conversations because they get excited by it. It’s really their jam. They love to share. 

Robin

They’re very nerdy these analysts. I love them dearly, but they just get very excited about this technology in the business spaces that they impact. 

Gary

Yeah, it is so cool. But on the flip side, you know, I’ve heard from colleagues who had the experience of working with a CEO who just wanted to show the analysts who covered them, right, how amazing the product was.

So they did briefings whenever they could, but they never went the other direction to ask, so what’s the best way to build relationships with analysts, when you’re so small that you can’t afford a seat, a research relationship? 

7:13

Robin

Yeah. This is so interesting and so complex.

The first thing I will say is that, you get a lot of access to analysts and they get a lot of, like, passes, kind of a pass as a startup, and they will give you a lot of attention and time without having a seat.

That is interesting for the startup community. To build a relationship with the analysts when you don’t have a seat, it’s very important to be honest and forthcoming about the reality that’s going on in your business. Analysts know it’s not all perfect. And CEOs and executives that want to paint a shiny picture, it’s never effective, because the analysts know that everything is not that rosy.

There are challenges. They want to hear about those challenges, and they accept that and they embrace it. And then what happens is if you’ve got these great things going really great that you want to share with them, these interesting product differentiators. But you have challenges in these other areas. Well, the truth is, if you paint everything rosy and everything is great and everything is wonderful, they’re not going to listen to you because they know that’s not true.

They know that there’s warts. Every company has warts. Big, small in between, and you build up great credibility and trust when you’re honest with them about what you’re actually facing. And when you’re honest with them, it gives them the ability to help you and the willingness to help you, because they kind of know how you are with people that you bond with, you want to give to them, you want to give them information.

So as a larger vendor, when you have a seat or a subscription with an analyst firm, you get access to the analyst for advisory. If you’re very smart, you use that advisory to have frequent engagements and build a relationship.

When you’re a small startup, you probably don’t need to or don’t have the budget to invest in those seats, they’re actually quite costly for a lot of firms.

But when you have, when you are communicating, when you have interesting things, when you’re honest, when you develop a relationship, you can get more frequent engagement and more feedback from the analysts, and you can work that to your advantage. So building relationship is about trust and frequency, right? Building a trustful relationship and talking to them frequently enough that you come top of mind when they’re thinking about your space.

9:42

Gary

Yeah, it really is. It’s relationships, right? It’s called analyst relations, not analyst pitching. Right. 

Robin

Exactly. There’s so much nuance to building these. And that relationship doesn’t mean you send them a bottle of wine, right? Or you take them to dinner. Those things don’t actually hurt. But that’s not what it’s about. It’s really about. They care about the clients.

They care about the buyers, and they care about solving buyers’ problems. And if you come to them and you share with them how you can solve these problems, you’re part of the solution that they can offer to their customers, to their buyers, that advise with them and that helps them. You’re in a way, helping them and helping them understand their world, helping them with their research and the advisory that they do, is really bonding.

You know, it really helps you get on their radar and stay on there and be very positive. 

Gary

One of the things I found interesting, you know, relating to that, especially when I worked with some of the larger, analyst organizations, is my account manager was fierce at asking me, have you talked to this one? Have you talked to that one?

Because they don’t all reside in single swim lanes. They often overlap with others in the group. And my account manager got me in front of as many people as he could to meet them. And that percolates across the organization. And those were inquiry calls. It was, let me learn what your coverage area is and share. And those were some of the most valuable conversations that I had. 

11:23

Robin

They can be super valuable, you know, especially in, you know, a lot of technology companies today, especially the startups.

So not only the startups and scale ups are not; they’re breaking ground. They’re going into new areas. They’re not in well-worn paths where the analysts are, you know, lined up. And they cover different things, and you fit very neatly into an analyst coverage area. Very often a lot of my clients cover, you know, many different areas because they can look at the solution from different perspectives.

And that ends up, leading into different analyst coverage areas. So the more you talk to analysts and the more they refer you, “oh, I think Joe would be interested in this.” You know, you build your networks and those conversations as you had mentioned, can be extremely fruitful, can really help you in both ways. They can help you learn and you learn interesting things that can help you business, and they have the opportunity to help mention you to their buyers and promote you in the market in different ways. 

So the more of those engagements you have, the more likely you are to get those wins to happen for you. 

12:35

Gary

The more top of mind you’ll be with the various folks in the organization.

So I’m going to ask you to debunk a myth for me. And I’ve heard too many times, I think that it’s a necessary evil to work with an all the analyst community. It’s pay for play, but you need to be there. I mean, I know that you don’t feel that way, but help our viewers understand why that’s come up and why that’s a load of rubbish.

13:06

Robin

It is so interesting. And it’s very, if you believe this, you’re not alone out there. It is a very common misconception that analysts are pay to play. There are analysts that are paid to play, or people that call themselves analysts that are, that you can pay to promote you or say positive things about you. Those are not really analysts.

Those are marketing companies that pose as analysts. True. Analysts are interested. You know, first of all, they’re allegiance is into the buying market. So they want to provide value to IT Directors and CIOs and buyers and organizations and help them make all kinds of decisions from, you know, how do I solve this business problem all the way down to what vendor should I select?

They want to be valuable to the buying part of the market. Therefore, if they become biased towards vendors that are paying them, they kind of lose their value and their credibility, because buyers can see through that. 

So analysts really protect their independence and they focus on what what technologies, what vendors, what approaches can truly make a difference for the buying organizations and to the extent that you can show your solutions and how your solutions solve problems that this analyst is helping clients solve, you will become relevant to them and they will promote you.

It’s not pay to play. They’re not promoting you because you’re paying them. Now, the reason it gets very tricky and nuanced is because there are many places that you do pay analysts. Right? As you mentioned, you pay them for a research seat and advisory seat. So this is the common model with most of the firms is that you as a vendor would purchase a seat with them and that the reason you do that is for two reasons.

You get access to all the research. And that could be extremely valuable. And you read what they’re writing. And I think most important is you have access to the analyst. I was saying before that, not only trust, but frequency of engagement is what builds that relationship. When you have an advisory kind of relationship, you can meet with an analyst much more frequently than you can when you’re not a client and you’re approaching them purely in a briefing.

Briefings are one way. Theoretically, you’re supposed to be just educating the analysts. And when you have an advisor relationship, which you pay for, you have two way dialog. So if you’re a vendor, you can talk about questions you have. If you talk about problems that you have, you discuss the market and the combination, excuse me, of the frequency, because you can do that much more often than you can brief them, because how often can you really brief an analyst?

It’s only when you have big news or something big to say. But you can have these inquiry conversations quite often. And because they’re often and because they’re two way and they’re interactive, that helps you build a relationship and then building a relationship, if you’re smart about it, if you understand how, where you want to go in this analyst relationship, you know they are influential in the market and you want them positive with them.

You want them rating you in an evaluation report like a magic quadrant or a wave. You want them to be positive about you. Well, if you have frequency of access, you can chip away at their perceptions and you can shape their perceptions, and also kind of win over their hearts and minds. 

And that eventually, if you do it right, gets them more positive, talking about you, and writing about you. So it’s not that you pay them and they write good things, but if you pay them and use it really smartly, you can impact their perception of you. Does that make sense to you? 

17:28

Gary

100%. Yes. I mean, one of the things I always challenged myself to do, whenever I had an inquiry call, was share something that the analysts hadn’t heard before.

So I become a source for them, and then eventually they would seek me out. 

Robin

That is one of the goals we always have for our clients, is we want them to become the go to vendor. We want the analyst to say, I wonder what vendor X is thinking about this, and pick up the phone and contact you and ask for your opinion.

That is like the brass ring that you want to get to in every relationship. And super, super powerful, 

Gary

Absolutely was. But you mentioned, you know, there are various ways to interact, right? We’ve talked about the research or analysts seat. Most of, especially the larger organizations, have a ton of different kinds of offerings from paid reports that even could include demand gen support, webinars and so on. What’s the best way to approach those? 

Robin

Those are great. So what you’re talking about is working with an analyst firm to communicate to the mass, to the market, about your brand or your concepts that you’re trying to get out there. So, an analyst firm, most of them, not Gartner and not really Forrester. Forrester has some limited offers, but most firms have pretty robust offers where they’ll help a vendor get messages out to the market.

Now, that sounds very point two, but it’s not really because you can’t buy an analyst to write some kind of nice paper about you and put it out in the market. What you can do is you can get analyst to write about the space that you’re in, the concepts that you’re trying to get across, the importance, the market impact, and mention you as a provider, but not talk about how great you are, because they won’t do that, and they also won’t talk about things that that go against what they have discovered and they believe.

So if you think the market is right for this technology and everybody needs to have it, and the analyst research has not proved that, they’re not going to write about that. They’re going to write about the things that they believe in that will support your go to market efforts. So yes, you pay them and they write things, but you don’t pay them to write great things about you. You pay them to write content or appear on a webinar, or do a speech, or develop an ROI calculator, or write case studies that support what you’re trying to do in the market that aligns with their viewpoint.

So again, it can be very strong and valuable because you could just say you want to get an idea out in the market. You could write something yourself or get it ghostwritten. But if you can get a reputable analyst firm to write that, you get that third party validation and that interest, because it will get more downloads, more attention from the market if a reputable analyst firm writes it for your concept.

Does that make sense?

20:39

Gary

So that makes a ton of sense. Robin. And one thing I wanted to ask you about is I’m seeing more of a shift into analysts leveraging. Maybe leveraging is the wrong word, but relying on not just the opinions of the vendors when they brief or what they’re asking in the inquiry calls. But the client side of things, what customers are saying.

And can you talk about how that’s changed the way that vendors and analysts work together? 

Robin

Interesting. The analyst has always been interested in the customer, the vendor’s customer. So the vendor’s customers point of view and the experience that that customer has with that vendor, they used to depend on, you know, when they did an evaluation report, you would provide them a certain number of reference customers.

And it was very controlled. Right? So the vendor would vet and then give them 5 or 10 customers that were carefully curated to give the analyst their perspective. During COVID, actually, that became cumbersome for the vendors to do and for the customers to do. So, Gartner in particular, shifted their process, so instead of a vendor needing to provide their reference customers, they would use their property, Gartner Peer Insights. 

So Gartner Peer Insights is one of many peer review sites, kind of like Yelp for restaurants. Right. So a peer review site is where somebody who is a customer can rate their vendor and then you get all those ratings and the analysts will review, so during COVID they switch policies and the analysts will only be able to review what was on Gartner Peer Insights.

So those reviews impacted those customer reviews which were open to the markets. And they weren’t hand picked by the vendors, would impact the analysts perception when they were doing an evaluation. That has changed and changed a lot. So while Gartner in particular now will kind of leave it up to the analysts, whether they want to use Gartner peer reviews or they want to ask for references, it’s a little different each analyst.

They still will look at the peer reviews to understand, untainted maybe by the vendor selection, understand what the market is saying. There are many other review sites. There’s one called G2, there’s one called TrustRadius, there’s Capterra, there’s many of them. And if you look beyond Gartner to Forrester and IDC and all the other firms, Omdia, all the other firms that do these evaluations, they also depend on, you know, they’ll go to G2, because these are public facing, you know, resources and they’ll get a customer viewpoint on a particular vendor using those sites.

So for a vendor, it’s very important that they have good reviews up there on those sites because the analysts, not only from Gartner but from all the different analyst firms, will refer to them. And in some cases there are like customer choice awards and different things that the analyst firms put out. Also that can and celebrate where your customers are very happy.

24:19

Gary

It’s really interesting. It’s the last company, the last vendor that I worked for, we had an aggregate score, I think, on Gartner’s Peer Insights of something like 4.7, and we worked with our customer success team to drive reviews. But every time we got a four, which ain’t bad, our score would go down. It’s a challenge. 

Robin

It is really a challenge and you know the sites, the GPI, Gartner Peer Insights, G2 TrustRadius, they want everybody they want to be open and they want everybody to be able to rate. And a four rating is very good. Right? So they want an honest, full true description of what the customers think. From the vendor perspective, well they only want five right. 

So they work to get usually with the vendors they’ll work with their customer success teams as you said, or they’re you know, they have like NPS scores, net promoter scores or customer SAT scores. They’ll try to get their happiest customers to rate them. They’ll have campaigns, to try to get their happy customers, to rate them, to get the scores up. And the sites would like you to open it up to all customers because they want everybody to rate you.

But if you’re a vendor, you want to really over rotate on getting those happy customers to rate you and get your numbers up and get your happy, happy quotes out there. 

25:52

Gary

And I think and people largely buy from what their peers have to say, not necessarily what the vendors have to say, so that it really is important to create happy customers and then ask them to spread the word.

Robin

Absolutely, because happy customers are not only on those sites, but when you have happy customers, the analysts, the analysts now really want to understand the value you deliver.

And the best thing you can do as a vendor is get your customers talking to the analysts. Now that may be in the form of these formal evaluations like you’re talking about. But I’ve always as a vendor, you know, shared case studies and offer to try to broker conversations with analysts and my more innovative customers, because that will. the analysts are really interested in that.

And that will help you more than you talking for hours at them about how wonderful you are. Getting a customer to talk about how wonderful you are really goes for them. 

Gary

I would expect that also helps the analysts understand when they’re talking, when you’re talking to them about your roadmaps, product roadmaps, getting customer input on the direction that they’re looking at.

It allows them really to kind of pause the expression, square the circle or connect the dots. 

Robin

And that’s why analysts are so helpful giving you feedback on your product roadmap. Right? So a really great exercise when you have a relationship with an analyst is to just do an inquiry call and say, this is what we’re planning on a roadmap.

These are the capabilities we’re bringing. These are how we will prioritizing us. Help us.

And because the analysts have spoken to so many buyers, so many customers and examine their needs and what they’re looking for in challenges, they can be a great voice to you about how to change that roadmap, because you may be looking at it from the perspective of a handful of your customers, which is good.

But getting an analyst view gives you a bigger, broader perspective on how to prioritize things on your roadmap. It’s a great, great thing to do Inquiries on. 

Gary

And then to pivot, you know, into the big analyst reports, sort of the big question for me is big reports like Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, the Forrester Waves, they take up a huge amount of time from wide swaths of the vendor organization.

People have to reprioritize other tasks to accommodate their response to the requests for information. Is it worth it? How valuable are those reports, really? 

28:32

Robin

It’s a great question. And you are correct. They are extremely demanding. And when an analyst puts out one of these reports and the vendor chooses to participate, there is a requirement for an endless RFI, you know, the spreadsheet with bazillions of questions.

And you have to do a demo and you have to do a briefing. And they’re extremely they take up, you’re right, they take a lot, a lot of focus from the organization. So are they worth it? I think yes, in general, I think that especially the Magic Quadrant and the Forrester wave and the MarketScape, those are the three big ones, carry a lot of weight in the market.

And buyers look to them.

Do buyers make their final decisions based on them? Not usually. The buyers will get, very often, buyers will get their short lists. You know, they’ll go to the big reports and they’ll see who’s in the top right. And they’ll make their shortlist. So it’s very important if you play in the market and you’re a leader in the market, to be there and be a leader on those reports, because that will follow into the sales cycles.

It really depends on a couple of factors for a vendor. If you are indeed, as I said, in a market, square leader, you’ve got to participate. You’ve got to show up as a leader. If you’re breaking into something or if you’re like a company, like we were talking about before, where there’s not really a clean place for you in the market, a lot of these startups are coming up with solutions to things that are not well established.

There’s not a report out there ready for them to be on. So, a lot of times we advise our clients to find adjacent reports or find reports to get on to. Because if you’re breaking into a market, being in a lower niche quadrant can be extremely valuable because it gets you into the conversation.

If you’re a leader in the market and you show up in the niche quadrant, that’s bad. You don’t want to do that. But if you’re breaking into a market or it’s a market that’s not 100%, you know, where you play, but it, you know, kind of addresses, even just the in the report gives you a lot about validity and gets you considered when you wouldn’t have been considered before.

So being in those reports can do a lot for you. Now if you’re in them, and the message that comes out of that is, this is a good player and you’ve beaten your competitors and you can make a lot of noise out there in the market and get a lot of attention and offer the reports for downloads and get thousands of downloads and your sales people and use it in the sales conversations.

And there’s a lot of power in those reports. So I think vendors really have to ask themselves how well this report fits them, how well they think they’re going to do, and imagine what they can do to market and get to promote that report. If they do perform well in it.

31:34

Gary

I don’t know where the time is flowing.

I could continue this conversation for hours. Robin, you are a fount of knowledge.

We’re at that point where I ask my guests to share three key takeaways. What are the best practices that our viewers should really be aware of in their AR strategy and execution?

Robin

Well, I think there are all kinds of things to remember, but I think some of the real takeaways that I want your listeners and your viewers to know is there have been a lot of research done about analysts and their impact on enterprises.

And the most common, reports and research that was done will show that about 75% or three quarters of enterprise decisions involve an analyst. So if you are a startup trying to, particularly a startup in any business, selling to the enterprise, you need to work with analysts. They could be extremely impactful on getting to the table and helping close deals.

So just remember that fact that the vast majority of enterprise buyers are looking to analysts for their input. 

Another thing relating to that is to remember that if you’re trying to break in, if enterprises are your target market, they tend to be rather conservative. So enterprise buyers tend to be rather conservative, and they are not going to consider a company they never heard of, if an analyst has never heard of them. 

So analysts can validate and give you credibility where it is almost impossible for you to build that as a younger, newer company. So it’s going to be a super, super ally. So I would say the last thing relates to that is if you are a startup, you’re in B2B tech, make sure you understand the opportunities for analysts in your business, with your goals and what you’re trying to accomplish.

And consider that now, maybe you consider it and it is a little early for you to engage. That’s okay. Just have a plan. Understand how analysts can impact you and have a plan and understand the milestones that you want to get to and how you want to start to work with analysts as early as you can and as strategically as you can, because it will pay off big time.

34:02

Gary

And that’s awesome because that really sort of rounds out where we started, which is, you know, where do startups and what’s the best way to approach from that point. But it really is a full company journey. At different stages of the journey. Wow. Robin Schaffer, thank you so much for sharing your experience and your expertise. I think we’ve covered a huge amount of ground in a pretty short time.

Robin

I love talking about this stuff. And you know, if any of your viewers, you reach out to me. SchafferAR.com I’m always happy to talk AR with anybody; with you, Gary and any of your listeners. I’d be happy to. 

Gary

That’s awesome. And, thanks to you and want to say thanks to all the viewers for staying with us on today’s podcast.

Be sure to like and comment and share this episode of what great looks like, here and on all of your social media. Subscribe to the podcast on our YouTube channel, and be sure to get your notifications so that you stay up to date with future episodes. And with that, thanks again, Robin. And until the next episode, everybody.