AR Performance Metrics – July AR Coffee Talk

There are two types of AR metrics – operational and performance. Operational metrics are useful for the AR team only. Proving the value of AR requires data on the performance of the AR program rather than simple counts of analyst mentions or briefings held.

Join us to chat about what make good performance metrics that demonstrate the strategic value of AR.

August 4 at 8 AM Pacific – Free – Click here to register

August 13 at 10 AM Pacific – Free – Click here to register

AR Coffee Talks

Networking and chatting with peers is a great way to expand your knowledgebase. Unfortunately, we do not always have the time to

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June’s AR Coffee Talk is on AR’s social media monitoring

Some of today’s new challenges for AR teams are how to determine if there is value to monitoring analyst opinions on blogs and Twitter, how to do the monitoring and how to use the information gathered. In this Coffee Talk, SageCircle strategists and AR professionals will discuss these issues and potential approaches to measuring and reporting on the analysts’ social media-based commentary.

June 10 at Noon US Pacific            Free – Click here to register

June 23 at 8:30 am US Pacific       Free – Click here to register

AR Coffee Talks

Networking and chatting with peers is a great way to expand your

Are the vendor-centric analyst firms heading for tough times? Will end-user centric analyst firms do fine?

Forrester and Gartner both posted double digit gains in Q2FY08 while IDC and Yankee Group are laying off analysts. What’s up? 

One explanation might be the difference in client base composition of the two types of analyst firms. Forrester and especially Gartner get most of their revenues from end user clients and much less from vendors. For example, we estimate that over 70% of Gartner’s revenues come from IT managers in corporations. Contrast that with IDC where we estimate that it gets over 85% of its revenue from technology vendors. This difference is very relevant because enterprise end users don’t dramatically decrease their spending on analyst contracts during an economic downturn, they are pretty steady. Often they are using analyst information to validate and justify IT expenses.  Vendors, on the other hand, dramatically change their spending on analyst contracts during economic downturns. This is because most analyst services are paid by marketing budgets, which are usually the first to be cut as an economic recession approaches.

This was the pattern during the last major tech economic downturn, 2000-2003, during the post-Y2K period and concurrent ecommerce Dot Bomb. While Gartner’s vendor business cratered during this period, its end-user business was reasonably