At Forrester's recent European AR and Marketing Council workshop, Martha Bennett ran through the analyst team's' top peeves about vendors (and the PR agencies they use). It makes for fascinating reading.
1. Showing complimentry quotes, market projections or assessments from competing analyst firms
2. Hounding analysts with invitations - and then not being available when the analyst trys to make contact
3. Claiming to be the first vendor to do something, based on obscure statistics
4. Trying to rewrite analyst opinions or recommendations (correcting factual errors is fine, and completely encouraged)
5. Sending a 60 slide deck for a 30 minute briefing and / or spending the first 20 minutes of the briefing on "positioning" - in particular when asked to skip this or speed it up
6. Sending a constant stream of press releases about insignificant developments
7. Assuming all analysts live in Cambridge, Mass.
An eighth peeves came up in conversation - not using Forrester's web-based vendor briefing process.
Every week, on average, 10 - 60 briefing requests are made direct to each Forrester analyst. For most, this is too many to respond to. Using the vendor briefing process ensures a response (even if it's negative). It also helps ensure that all appropriate analysts know about the briefing.
Some vendor briefing processes deservedly have a bad reputation. Forrester's isn't one of those. It's very simple to use and really does work.
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1 comment:
Hi David, Very useful post :-)
I've written more about this and posted a link here:
Weekly roundup: Forrester, IT-director and Quocirca (Part II)
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