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 Analyst
firms play an interesting role in the modern world of
information technology. In the good old days the major system
vendors like IBM would take care of their major customers in
the case of a bad decision that IBM had promoted. There was
real substance to the phrase: ‘‘You never get fired for buying
from IBM.’’ The modern world of open systems and vendor
interchangeability has changed all of that. System vendor
profit margins have been whittled down to the point that they
cannot provide this kind of cradle-to-grave support to their
loyal customers. Analyst firms have jumped in to partially
fill this void by providing independent viewpoints that assist
decision—making regarding technology deployments and to assist
the trade press as they develop articles and news stories
about your industry.
People do not buy
technology based on ads they read. That may be how they find about
them. But when they are considering purchases, they check with
friends and look for recommendations from people they trust. This
is where industry analysts come in. They play an important role
this process by explaining to customers and the media the
ownership issues associated with new innovations.
So as part of telling
the world about your next big thing, you have to brief analysts
and they end up listening to countless briefings. From that
receiver perspective here is our list of do’s and don’ts for
briefing analysts like us.
Dos
1. Know what you want
to say. Remember, we get lots of these briefings and necessarily
forget most of the details or never hear them in the first place.
Be as clear as possible in your own mind what few key points you
want to make and have stick.
2. Make those points
quickly. You have at most ten minutes while people are listening
before they start doing their e-mail or sending sarcastic IM
messages to one another about how bored they are. Omit the
philosophy and background. None of those first ten minutes should
be wasted.
3. Answer the basic
questions. How big is the market (tell us why we should care),
how are you different, and how does your business model let you
win? If all you do is answer these three questions, then your
presentation will be a success.
4. Teach—help us
understand the space better and in an interesting way. Analysts
are always looking for new ideas to include in the next report.
Explain the problem in an interesting and innovative way, and if
you are lucky, the analyst will steal what you tell them and use
it in their work. If they promote a problem for which you have the
solution you have gone a long way to making the visit worthwhile.
5. Know where we come
from before you arrive. Management teams regularly come to our
office without the foggiest idea what we care about. It only takes
a minute or two to do a Google search to get a good idea of who
you are about to talk to. Hey, if we are going to spend an hour of
our time listening, then give us a break and at least find out
what we have been doing.
6. Tell us how you fit
in. There are many of big players in the technology world that
exert a lot of influence on customers. We want to know how your
company will succeed despite (or because of) the presence of the
big players.
Don’ts
1. Don’t bring large
groups unless they have something to say. Keep the entourage
small. Do not bring along someone if all he or she is going to do
is sit there and smile. Focus the meeting on your target audience
and get the most out of their time.
2. Don’t quote other
analysts. It is rude and not at all productive. Just as you
compete with others, so, too, do the analyst firms, and they
really do not like one another (go ahead, call all of us petty if
you want).
3. No brown nosing. Do
not ask for our opinion unless you really want it and are willing
to hear our input. If you do not care about someone’s opinion, why
are you talking to them in the first place? If you do care and
ask, listen to what they say and acknowledge that you heard it
(you do not have to agree with it). From time to time we seem to
really offend companies by giving critical feedback to a weak
presentation. If you do not want the feedback, then do not ask. We
are sure it is not the most pleasant experience, but it is a lot
more pleasant than having your product bomb in the marketplace.
4. Don’t do all the
talking. We have this saying that the person who talks the most
during a meeting always feels that the meeting was a good one, and
we have had plenty of briefings where people must go away feeling
good because they had did not let anyone else get a word in. It
does not really bother us when someone talks nonstop through a
briefing; we have plenty of e-mail to catch up on.
5. Don’t tell us
something that we have heard before. Junior salespeople are told
that if they go into a customer’s office and see a mounted
swordfish on the wall to never ask their customer about it; they
are guaranteed to get a really long answer that their customer has
probably told a thousand times before. In other words, it wastes
everyone’s time. We have groups come in all the time and have a
half-dozen slides telling us things that we have heard a million
times before like ‘‘the Internet is growing’’ or that ‘‘security
is a problem.’’ Don’t waste time pointing out the crudely obvious.
6. Don’t slam the
competition. We get pretty tired of people coming by and telling
us that their competitors are a bunch of dopes. The funny thing is
that many of the guys coming by badmouthing their competitors
eventually end up jumping ship and going to work for the very
companies they were disparaging. We know most of the companies in
your business are made up of people just like you. So keep your
opinions of the competition to yourself.
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