Portfolio: Analyst Relations

Are you selling technology products to enterprise customers? You can’t even get in the door with many enterprise companies unless industry analysts such as AMR Research, Gartner Group, Summit Strategies and Yankee Group are recognizing, and recommending, your products. We’ve been actively involved in analyst relations for 15 years, and Key Marketing Group can help you make your best impression on the analysts who inform your industry.

Take the biggest analyst prize of all: For technology companies, the Gartner Group Magic Quadrant is the Holy Grail, the bases-loaded home run in the bottom of the ninth. FieldCentrix landed in the top “Challenger” spot its first year on the Magic Quadrant — ahead of Oracle, SAP and PeopleSoft in the field service software market.

How did a young company hit that home run? The same way we scored many other favorable analyst reports — by helping the analysts do their job.

Industry analysts are inundated with information from enthusiastic companies with PowerPoint presentations, prototype products and rosy projections. Our strategy was different: Execute a highly credible KPI (Key Performance Indicator) program with customers to quantify business results. This was a year-long program to establish the benchmarks with the clients and then perform measurements as the product was deployed.

Here's what the customer says:

"Judy Key Johnson and I first worked together on a project aimed at gathering KPI (Key Performance Indicator) baseline metrics. As the executive sponsor responsible for proving ROI it was critical that I understood the project facts and could communicate them. Many traditional marketing people would have focused on the sizzle, however Judy drove to Sigma level measurements."

  — Greg Lush, CIO, ServiceCo Holdings Inc.

At the end, the customer had the hard numbers it needed for its management, and we had exactly the verifiable information that analysts seek and rarely find. We packaged the data with “lessons learned” stories and went calling on the analysts. Their reports then became a major selling tool for the company’s sales team.