I just came across some interesting tweets (click on image to enlarge) by Gartner’s Jeff Mann (bio, Twitter). It seems that he is deep into planning Gartner’s Fall 2008 EMEA Symposium in Cannes. Money quote from a tweet: “Pouring 10 kilos of Symposium presentations into a 3 kilo sack.” Do you think that topics and presentations that are critical to your company are guaranteed to make the list of presentations? Or, will your important topics get cut?
As we said in So, have you started planning and executing your Fall Symposium campaign yet?, vendors can contribute ideas on what to include at Symposia. However, the analysts are not mind readers so you have to talk* to them to get them to consider you input.
Another key point from Jeff’s tweets is that he is considering what is relevant for a European conference. Remember, Gartner fine tunes the agendas for each of the four Symposia to better suit the region.
SageCircle Technique:
- Schedule inquiries with your top Gartner analysts to discuss
- What topics are under consideration for inclusion at each Symposia
- Which analysts are track managers for topics relevant to you
- Determine what you can realistically influence
- Schedule inquiries with relevant track managers
- Lobby – subtlety – the relevant track managers for inclusion of the topics of highest importance to your company
* SageCircle Advisory clients can schedule an inquiry to brainstorm how to approach the analysts about what is going into or being left out of the Symposia agendas.
Bottom Line: It is critical that analyst relations (AR) professionals work to have their points-of-view about topics that should be included in Symposium agenda heard by Gartner analysts. Unfortunately, time is running out so it is imperative that AR teams act fast to contact analysts to start the dialog.
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