How does one become an analyst? [AR Practitioner Question]

At a recent client meeting we got an interesting question: How does a person become an analyst? Is there certification? A test?
At this time the requirements for becoming an analyst consist of ownership of a laptop, cell phone, business card and an opinion. A website and / or blog are nice, but not required. There [...]

The organizational challenges of managing AR, CI and MR [Practitioner Question]

We often are asked about the differences in management techniques when AR is organizationally under corporate communications or marketing as compared to a when it is part of a strategy group.  How you deal with analysts, and the need for strategic interactions as compared to product-level briefings, will be altered based on the client base [...]

Will you get analyst opinions in a briefing if you are not a client? [AR seminar question]

Yes… if you give them a chance to actually speak and if you take the time to ask correctly.
There is a common (mis-)understanding that analysts will only provide opinions if you are a paying client of their firm.  So can you get their opinions during a briefing? For the most part, analysts are more than [...]

Can the IT industry analysts be objective?

I recently saw this question on Twitter. It was from an AR practitioner, but it also applies to research consumers as well. Several studies* of IT manager clients surfaced that “objectivity” or some variation is an important consideration for buying analyst services. But is this a reasonable expectation for the research consumers? The answer is [...]

Why do analyst consulting days? [AR Practitioner Question]

 As was briefly mentioned in Strengths and weaknesses of analyst research delivery types, analyst consulting days (aka SAS or strategic advisory service in Gartnerese) have a high risk/reward profile for vendor analyst relations (AR) teams. After that post, we received a question from an AR practitioner asking why AR would want to spend the money on [...]

Do you know of a headhunter specialized in recruiting AR? [AR practitioner question]

I just got pinged by a VP of Corporate Communications asking if I knew of any recruiters that specialize in the analyst relations field. Frankly, all the headhunters I have chatted with were their clients regular recruiters and were only doing the AR search as a favor. If you know of a firm that has [...]

How is corporate AR different from product-centric AR? [AR Practitioner Question]

Last week I had lunch with an AR manager at a software company where we had an interesting chat about “corporate” AR. She had always been focused on product-centric outreach and wanted to know what constitutes good corporate AR. That is a great question because most AR teams are focused on products for a good [...]