It is a harsh reality that technology firms live and die by the ratings that they receive from industry analysts and are an important part of the communications and PR/AR strategy. I have even seen requests for proposals (RFPs) for managed cloud services where you can’t actually submit a bid unless you are listed in the renowned Gartner magic quadrant. All the more reason that you ingratiate your organization with the analyst community to ensure that your organization ranks highly in the industry reviews. After all, this is where your clients go for advice.

How to ace your next analyst briefing
Having delivered several analyst briefings working for various vendors in the past, I can recommend that you can never be over-prepared. Diligently do your homework first, put some real effort into your briefing, and you’ll stand an improved chance of ranking well.

• Fact-check in the early stages. What is the purpose of the report, who is the target audience, and which regions will be covered?
• When is it going out and will you have the opportunity to review BEFORE circulation? Pre-book your social media outreach to spread the news (assuming it is good).
• If they will share it with you, ask what other companies (your competition) are being interviewed? Analysts will sometimes disclose this and it greatly helps with positioning.
• If it is a report that comes out every year, locate the one for last year and carefully note down the important issues they are highlighting. Play these back in your briefing.
• Look up the background of the person/people holding the interview on LinkedIn. What is their area of expertise? How senior are they? Etc.
• Then meticulously collect your data. Talk to subject matter experts in your company (and outside). What relevant projects or customers can you reference during the call?
• Research the competition’s offerings (you should be doing that anyhow) and the future market trends. It is a good tactic to playback excerpts from reports that the analysts have published themselves. (Stroke their egos). They will almost always ask you where you see the market going.
• Prepare your briefing carefully. Take time to build it out in a logical fashion and stick only to facts. If during the interview you don’t know the answer to something like “What is your market share in EMEA?” tell them you will get back to them – and make sure that you do it!

The above tactics have served me well when delivering IT analyst briefings and should work for any technology vendor.

Though written way back in 2014, these recommendations from an Analyst at Gartner still hold true and provide good further reading: Gartner Blog

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