From Analyst Relations to Influencer Relations

Duncan Chapple posts an interesting comment on the expansion of analyst relations (AR) departments to a wider Influencer Relations approach. He notes that in starting from an AR perspective firms may miss out key groups of influencers, or gather them together as “left-overs”, and subsequently treat them inappropriately. I agree.

I think AR (or PR for that matter) can be a good starting point to adopt an influencer model. AR is a defined function within most firms, and (importantly) has a line-item budget allocation. There is also an established body of good practice and plenty of discussion to keep AR fresh and top-of-mind.

If you’re coming at influencer from an AR starting point, then SAP’s model is a great archetype to follow. Don knows that his model will evolve over time, as indeed it has done already, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Redefining AR as a sub-division of Influencer Relations is a start, if for no other reason than it identifies the gaps to fill.

I do think, however, that the ‘Relations’ model (AR, PR, media relations, investor relations, influencer relations) is often seen as an end in itself. At a practical level, in most IT organisations there is little coherency between relations and any marketing or sales activity. Sure, an analyst may be wheeled out at a lead generation event, or quoted on a product website. But it’s hardly integrated marketing.

AR and PR firms complain that they’ve been pushing an influencer model for several years, but firms lack the budget or insight to implement such a shift.

Not true – firms are deploying influencer models, but they are mostly not starting from within the AR and PR functions. They are typically emerging from operational marketing functions. Why is this? It’s simply because marketing is increasingly ineffective through the use of traditional models. It’s hard to differentiate a message, even harder to get that message heard, and even if it is heard, you’re unlikely to be believed. Why? Because it’s you that’s delivering the message. Get an influencer to deliver the same message, and it’s more likely to be trusted.

More importantly, by understanding why customers don’t buy from you, and then mapping influencer-led messages onto those objections, you can create a portfolio of counter-arguments based on what influencers are saying. That’s Influencer Marketing.

Unsurprising, then, that most firms truly engaged in an Influencer model are coming less from an AR or PR start, and more from a marketing start.

Influencer Marketing, as we define it, is precisely aimed at growing sales. It does this through a process of influencer identification and engagement, leading to an embedding of influencer-led messages that support and enable sales.

Influencer relations may get you on a shortlist. Influencer Marketing will make sure you get the purchase order.

Analyst of the year...

Better late than never, I've just read the IIAR's Analyst of the Year results. Really interesting stuff - check it out. The rise of the smaller guys is remarkable. Maybe they've done a better job of engaging with the AR community...

The full report is here.

A good analysis of the results is here.

Analysts and their share of influence

For the record, I’ve never said that analysts are no longer influential. (Some of my best friends are analysts…) What I have said is that the share of influence has shifted away from analysts towards a plethora of other influential categories, some new (eg. bloggers) and some old (eg. consultants, regulators, academics). In fact, what’s most relevant is that it is now possible, using sophisticated search capability (plus a good deal of research diligence) to detect influence (if you know where to look and don’t prejudge the answer).

I’ve also stated, in the book and elsewhere, that analyst influence is often overstated. Analysts are influential, but they are not at the top of the influence hierarchy. Indeed, I don’t believe there is an influence hierarchy.

HP, and now SAP, confirm that view that analysts are just one of multiple groups of influencer. It’s interesting that Don at SAP detected this 18 months ago and reacted by establishing an Influencer Relations division. What’s surprising is that so few companies have followed this lead. But I know many are watching this trend closely.

Analysts influence, as measured by HP

HP's AR blog announces its research findings of its survey of what influences customers’ decisions to place a vendor on the short-list. Interesting stuff.

But note that while 55% of respondents say analysts do influence the decision, this doesn't not equate to share of influence. It might be that 80% of respondents think peer customers have influence, or that 100% think consulting firms have influence, or that journalists have no influence at all.

Unfortunately, they don't say who else also influences customers, or where in the ranking analysts come. I assume it wasn't top...

The only tidbit they offer is that bloggers and social network sites rank 11th of the 14 types. Go on, HP. Tell us the order of influencers. We'd all love to know.

SAP Industry and Influencer Relations blog

Just picked up on Don Bulmer's blog, courtesy of ARmadgeddon. Don is VP of Industry and Influencer Relations at SAP, and is a welcome addition to the otherwise sell-side blogs promoting greater focus on influencers. That is, Don is a practitioner of what others (me included) are preaching*. We can all learn from his insights.

A couple of things occurred to me when reading his most recent post:

1. SAP has evolved its Industry and Influencer Relations group from its Analyst Relations team. That's one way of getting there. But not the only way. Influencer50 has clients that have arrived at Influencer identification & engagement from marketing effectiveness, sales effectiveness, PR, product marketing, corporate marketing and a bunch of other activities. That's not to say that it's a solution to all problems. Just that Influencers can be useful in a variety of ways.
2. SAP isn't the first firm to evolve in this manner - there are several others. For example, Wipro has been doing this kind of thing since 2006. We wrote a case study of Wipro for the book.
3. Don says that when SAP identified its business and IT influencers "We were surprised to find that a number of our assumptions on decision making authority and influence were challenged." That's completely normal for this exercise - influencers are not obvious, and take detailed and diligent research to identify and rank. IBM's Information Management group was "shocked" to discover it didn't know its influencers (again, a case study in the book). So don't embark on influencer identification expecting it to confirm what you already know.

And thanks, Don, for the link back to this blog.

*Before anyway starts, yes, we do use our own approaches. I'd like to think the book is a good example of what I call Influencer-led collateral...

Carter Lusher's new gig

You may have heard that Carter, who ran AR at HP in the US, departed HP recently. He emailed me yesterday to point out his new role, heading up a reborn SageCircle AR firm. I read Carter's blog while he was at HP, so his SageCircle Blog should be similarly stimulating. Good luck on the new gig, Carter.

Interestingly, the blog site names this blog as an AR blog, not the first time I've been pigeonholed as such. Lord help anyone visiting here expecting advice on how to run an AR practice. Read this post from Skip, then come back and see analysts in the holistic context of influencer ecosystems...

I also note that SageCircle blogs cite (what I guess are) SageCircle's competitors - ASG, KCG, Lighthouse, Tiger Lily, etc. Good on you, SageCircle. It's a small market and the more informed the target audience the better for all. Grow the pie, as they say.

It's also good influencing strategy, as your competitors are usually influencing your audience. Engage with them, arther than ignore them. It nearly always has benefits.

Is the penny dropping for AR professionals?

Carter Lusher and Skip MacAskill two long-standing Analyst relations professionals, both ex-Gartner, now heading up AR at HP and Cisco respectively. I recently linked to Carter’s post on influence here.

Skip’s recent post on influence is important because he states a belief that “the traditional business models that analyst firms have employed for years will become less relevant within the next three to five years.”

He also thinks that the “traditional” firms won’t disappear completely, but they will be hard pressed by emerging information delivery models and processes – along with a new breed of alternative influencers – that are fast-moving and in-the moment.

Finally, Skip believes that “that the number of users that buy a product or invest in a technology off the back of a traditional Gartner, Forrester or Yankee report will significantly decrease over the next five years.”

These are important comments from the AR perspective, notably so because AR stands to lose as much as analyst firms. As Skip notes, “I don’t welcome that development with any type of mirth or glee – as an Analyst Relations guy, I’m quite interested in things like job security and my function’s own continued relevance – but I definitely sense a shift in the air.”

I think that the way forward for AR is for it to broaden out into a wider understanding of where influence is actually applied, beyond analysts to encompass consultants, academics, bloggers, procurement bodies, financial authorities, regulators, government agencies, consumer groups, and the rest of the influencer community.

The difficulty is, most vendors have no idea who really influences their customers and prospects, and wouldn’t have anything to say to them if they did know. That’s why I wrote a white paper on the subject a year ago, to shake vendors out of the “Analysts equal influence” mindset. It is still pertinent today.

The question for AR now is, do you take note of what senior AR pros are saying on the shake up of influence and act on it? Or ignore it and hope for the best?

How analysts can increase their influence

It turns out that I’m becoming known for my “analyst bashing” blog posts and other writings. It's not a reputation I've sought. But I've made no secret that I think analyst influence is generally overstated, and that’s with eleven years of inside knowledge at Ovum and IDC. I’ve seen analysts with huge influence and those with very little. The real issue is, how do you tell them apart?

As Richard Holway told me:

Any fool can be an analyst
But very few get to be influencers.

Bill Hopkins’s AR text Influencing the Influencers maps out very clearly why a few analyst firms carry the majority of influence within the analyst community – I commend you to read it. As Bill states in the book, “Some influencers are more vital to you than others.” Though it’s completely obvious if you think about it, many vendors (and AR agencies) don’t think about it, and propagate blanket importance of analysts. PR agencies do the same with journalists.

I think a primary challenge for all analyst firms is to make their analysts more influential. The first question to be asked, as always, is who do they influence? A better way of understanding the relevance of this question is to ask another: who do vendors want to be influenced by analysts? Usually, vendors are trying to influence decision makers, so that they buy products and services. It’s logical, therefore, to want to know which analysts have influence over those decision makers, that can sway a decision in one direction on another. These are what Hopkins calls Deal Makers and Breakers.

Clearly, then, the more analysts are influencing decision makers the more influential they are to vendors. And while it’s risky to categorise all analysts within one firm together, a firm’s business model will point to the likelihood of influence on decision makers. So Gartner, with its end-user research focus and consulting business, is likely to be more influential than, say, IDC, which has a predominantly supply-side viewpoint.

Additionally, the closer an analyst gets to the decision maker, the more influence they will have on that decision. In my experience, this deep level of influence is delivered only through client engagements and consulting. So analysts that directly advise decision makers carry the greatest influence.

There is also an issue of when influence is being applied. Analyst research papers are used by end-users as guidance and pointers, sometimes in the development of shortlists. This occurs early in the decision making process. Consulting, again in my experience, happens later in the process where evaluations and recommendations are being made. At this point the stakes are high, and individual analysts much be sure in their understanding of both the needs of their client and the capabilities of the vendors they are judging.

I think that this is where many analysts, and analyst firms, cop out. They are unwilling, or unable, to help a specific end-user client make a final decision. They may claim that doing so would conflict with their vendor independence. Nonsense. Recommending a specific product to a specific end-user organisation does not conflict with independence, as long the same analyst is just as likely to recommend a different product to another client with different needs.

So I think analyst firms should tell their analysts to get out more. Talk to, engage with, and start influencing end-user decision makers. It’s the only route to real influence.

Review of H+K's Influencing Technology Decision Makers research

There’s a really interesting video and white paper produced by Hill and Knowlton, the PR/AR firm. The title is Influencing Technology Decision Makers (sounds relevant!) and the work is based on a research project carried out on behalf of H+K.

On the whole it is a really thought-provoking piece of research. The interesting bits, for me, are (in italics, with my comments):

• Previous experience is the primary driver for decision making. I agree, and where a decision maker doesn’t have this experience they have to borrow it from another source – influencers.
• Decision makers are cynical towards sales collateral and marketing messages. Yep.
• There is increasing influence of blogs, even in the C-suite. I disagree – we’ve completed a round of research for a client which shows that, except in France, blogs have little influence at the C-level. Blogs do tend to influence more technical audiences, and where blogs are part of the cultural make-up of the market under investigation (i.e. predominately online markets).
• Gartner and Forrester are the leading analysts, and there is not much between them. Gartner has greater influence on the IT managers, while Forrester is more widely read in the boardroom. Interesting. This indicates that Forrester has caught up with Gartner, and has more credibility with senior decision makers. We certainly see these two far and away the biggest influential analysts.
• Events are not that influential. I think this referred to analyst events, but I find it’s true in general. Gartner Symposium is the only analyst event that occurs in our research on a regular basis.
• The Financial Times is the most influential non-IT publication. The Wall Street Journal leads in the US but trails the FT in other countries. In the UK, the Sunday Times, Telegraph and The Economist ran highest. No real surprises here, except perhaps for the poor showing of the Journal outside the US.
• Print media is more widely read than online media. I agree, though the boundaries are often being blurred. As far as I know, the study didn’t track whether a respondent that read the FT did so in print or online format.
• Analysts are important throughout the decision making process. Absolutely. In the book we’ve mapped various influencer types to the decision making process, and analysts play more roles than any other type. It’s important to understand, though, that although analyst firms play various roles, it’s not the same analysts that play all roles.
• Use the media and analysts to influence decision makers, not to please your CEO on tour. Hoorah! If vendors take a decision maker focus, rather than creating noise to satisfy their own internal ends, then they might not annoy their customers and prospects so much. It is refreshing to hear this from a PR/AR firm.

The big criticism: where are the other influencers? This study only looks at the media, analysts and blogs. What about consultants, resellers, peers, user groups, academics, procurement experts, gurus and thought leaders, or the vendors themselves? I’d love to see the research run next year with this broader remit.


(A few words on the methodology. The research involved 420 interviews, across the UK, US Canada and China, and were conducted using a mix of online, face-to-face and telephone interviews. Interviews were also split by C-Suite and IT managers, and by large enterprises and SMEs. The sample looks a bit thin, when spread across all of these splits. But good food for thought.)

Is this blog influential to AR professionals?

I'm intrigued to find this blog mentioned on ARmageddon, the Analyst Relations blog, in the context of Forrester's research into the blogs that AR pros read. Apparently (though I can't trace the source email) Forrester sent a list of blogs to its AR program subscribers asking which one they read. Tacked on at the end of the list is my humble offering.

I'm intrigued because I wouldn't position Infuse as an AR blog, though I do have some strong views on the analyst industry (having been an analyst for 12 years). This is a blog on Influencer Marketing (and I trust this isn't news to you).

Have I been included by mistake? Or by misunderstanding? Or by the interest from AR in Influencer Relations? I don't know.

Perhaps Forrester will let me know when they complete their research. Ta.

Good news for our clients!

I’m a big fan of Seth Godin and his ravings on marketing and why firms must be remarkable in order to succeed. (Read Purple Cow for the full story.)

Paradoxically, Seth says that remarkable firms and products appeal not to mass markets but to early adopters. There’s more value in early adopters, as they seek to establish competitive advantage. Once something becomes adopted by the mass market it becomes boring and undifferentiating. (This was what Nicholas Carr was saying in “IT doesn’t matter.)

Over at the Analyst Equity blog, Duncan Chapple publishes results from a survey of AR professionals. He draws attention to the things that AR people are not interested in, one of which is “Understanding the wider influencer community”.

Phew! I’m delighted that understanding the wider influencer community is so low down the agenda of most AR folks. It means that those that are adopting Influencer Marketing are creating real competitive advantage. Which is what I’ve being telling them. It’s great when data supports the pitch.

PR moves from awareness to influence

I noted with interest Chime’s results announcement on March 14th. Lord Bell, the group chief, says that, “We have no evidence that the growth won't continue through 2007...business continues to move from awareness to influence, which is good news for PR.”

There are two points worth comment. The first is that the PR industry (or Chime at least) recognises that awareness is insufficient – it’s influence that matters. Chime has tangible activity to back this up: for example, it owns Sunesis and Insight, which talk about influencer relations, and it owns Opinion Leader Research, which conducts influencer research for BT among others.

Does this mark the formal shift of PR into Influencer Relations? We’ll see. Though nearly all PR firms think influence stops at analysts and journalists.

The second point is the assertion that the news is good for PR. Actually, I think it’s very bad news for PR. PR is an industry measured in “air cover” – broad coverage measured in column inches. Influence is measured in impact on sales. The two are at complete ends of the targeted communications spectrum.

If you were a small vendor with limited budget, would you spend your meagre market budget on unfocused coverage in any trade title that will carry your copy? Or would you spend it on knowing who is directly influencing your target market, and then getting those influencers to carry your message?

I believe that the PR wave is heading for a crash. It’s good news for vendors, but not for PR firms.

“Influencing the Influencers” reviewed

Just finished reading “Influencing the Influencers” by Bill Hopkins, CEO at Knowledge Capital Group (KCG). KCG is an Analysts Relations firm, and the book is a guide to AR in the technology industry.

I think that if you’re in AR you’ll get a lot of value from the book. It categorises the various types of analyst, provides best and worst practice examples, and even offers careers advice. All in all an excellent volume on Analyst Relations.

It’s a pity about the title, then. At face value, it’s a cosmetic thing – “Influencing the Analysts” is much less pithy. But it’s the assertion that analysts are the most important influencers that concerns, because our clients and our research tell us (at Influencer50) that it ain’t always so.

Perhaps it’s just that our perspectives are different. Bill examines the reach of various influencer types into IT deals. Bill estimates that peer groups influence decision-making in 80% of IT deals, analysts influence decision-making in 60-80% of IT deals, and so on. Systems integrators and consultants influence 20% of IT deals.

Note that these deals relate to Global5000 firms. Does anyone know of an IT sale to a G5000 firm that wasn’t influenced by a systems integrator or consultant? Hmmm.

Influencer50’s approach is to examine the available influence on a decision, and how this influence is distributed across many influencers. So we measure the extent of influence on IT decision making, not simply its presence. Analysts may appear in 60-80% of decisions, but what’s the extent of their influence? We believe it’s overstated.

KCG’s model even allows for this: in its categorisation of analyst firms it names only Gartner and Forrester in the “Deal Maker & Breaker” segment. In other words, most other analyst firms have limited influence on decision-making. (Exceptions are granted, such as specialist point players and regional buy-side players such as Ovum.)

I suspect there is more agreement than disagreement between KCG and Influencer50. To quote from the book, “Some influencers, of course, are more vital to you than others. But, overall, the effective management of influencers has become increasingly critical to the success of any enterprise.”

That’s pretty much what Influencer50 is about.

Open Source Analysts - taking on the big boys

I’m really interested in the emergence of a concept called open source analysis. Essentially, it’s an approach that links smaller industry analyst firms in collaboration – the analogy is with the open source software movement that allows programmers from all points to collaborate by contributing their programming expertise.

It’s unclear whether collaboration refers to research and opinion or to commercial relationships, or both (or neither?!). Interested parties have established a wiki project to sort out the detail.

I’m watching developments with interest because of the potential impact on the big influential analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester. It’s long been my contention that influence is a factor of the individual and the firm. In other words, some analysts are influential primarily because they work at a big firm, and some are influential because of their individual knowledge and expertise despite working for a small firm (or for themselves). But the most influential analysts both work for a big firm and are true experts individually. This is true in all but a few exceptions.

The open source movement aims to change this dynamic. There is the obvious commercial impact, that of individual analysts combining to deliver collectively a major project beyond the resource capability of each on their own. Freelance contractors have done this for decades.

The other potential impact is to collaborate on research, the intellectual property of analysts itself. The key challenge here is quality control. Collating input from a variety of different sources requires some oversight on quality, lest the overall value of the opinion and advice be diminished. Blogs already suffer from this dilution of credibility, and if open source analysis is to differentiate itself from “mere” blogs it must sort this out.

Unless, of course, blogs undermine the business case for analysts altogether…?

There’s no doubt that there are some smart analysts outside the major analyst firms – the Neils at MWD (former colleagues of mine), James Governor and so on. I’d like to see them increase their profile and influence because they have much value to add to the industry.

If open source analysis enables this then I’m all for it.

On Blogger relations and Influencer relations

There's a really interesting discussion on the emergence of Blogger Relations and so-called Influencer Relations at the ARmageddon blog. It's based on the idea that, as existing analysts increase their use of blogs and new analysts gain prominence through blogs, traditional analyst relations (AR) must evolve.

AR professionals are clearly unsettled by this move. Analysts have typically dealt in secrets, based on private briefings under NDA. Blogs, on the other hand, trade in openness. There's obvious conflict here. How blogs impact the analyst community is uncertain, hence the discussion.

There's an important shift happening in marketing generally (and I include corporate communications in this category). The shift is towards two-way communications with the market, sometimes called conversational marketing, or Marketing 2.0 (yeuch!). Blogging is an online version of this, but it's happening offline in a big way, often as part of a Word of Mouth marketing strategy. Good sources of info for this move include Naked Conversations, Seth Godin and Andy Sernowitz.

A few thoughts on the debate:

- Blogger Relations and Influencer Relations are functions of marketing, as are Analyst relations and PR. It's all marketing, just perhaps not direct marketing. So all of these "Relations" branches are subject to the big shift towards two-way communications.

- The term "Relations" is missing the point. In my 12 years working in analyst firms, vendors always think of analysts in marketing terms. Vendors understand the influence analysts have over prospects, and they market to analysts in order to affect that influence. So rather than "relations" (which sounds friendly and cosy) we should really call it marketing. That's why we're open about our use of the Influencer Marketing term - it is what it says.

- We should treat all influencers with the respect they deserve. This may mean adjusting our perceptions of who is important. Blogging is enabling the small guys (eg Redmonk, MWD) to compete with Gartner, Forrester et al. Ranking and prioritisation of analysts is more important nowadays.

- We mustn't forget the non-analyst influencers. They're just as important as analysts, and need to be marketed to (though in different ways).