How to: Maximize your win rate working with industry analysts (Part 2)

Maximise your win rate working with industry analysts

Following my previous article about working with industry analysts, I wanted to write a follow-up article on how to maximize your scores when responding to the questionnaires sent by the analysts before writing their reports.

This article is about how you can present your solution in a way that supports your sales and marketing efforts.

Planning your answers

Analyst questionnaires, such as a Forrester Wave or Gartner Magic Quadrant, require contributions from across organization.

For this reason, it’s worth staying in touch with the analysts. This helps you stay top of mind and makes it more likely you’ll get advance notice before they send out their questionnaires.

This allows you to plan on having the right people available to assemble your responses (typically, this includes product managers, marketing, pre-sales, and finance). The last thing you want is for the questionnaire to arrive only to realize that everyone who needs to contribute is on holiday!

How to formulate your answers

When responding, it helps to cover more detail than they explicitly ask for (keeping in mind you’ll likely be given a word limit, so keeping your answers to the point is also important). This gives the analyst more background information - and gives you additional credibility.

The industry analysts are interested in how you deliver the capability they are asking about, the approach you took to do so, the advantages of this approach to your customers (as opposed to an alternative approach your competitors have taken), when you started providing this capability, and ROI numbers, if possible.

In short, when responding, think about the Who/What/Why/Where/When/How approach to your answer.

Hypothetical example:

Does your product offer high availability?

1.      “Yes” is clearly a terrible answer!

2.      “We offer high availability through the use of multiple servers in a cluster configuration spread across multiple regions” is only slightly better.

3.      A far better approach is to say something like:

“Our high availability capabilities allow our customers to handle what would otherwise be significant server and network outages with zero to little impact on their operations and their customers.

We support high availability using a robust messaging system, guaranteeing messages between systems are delivered. If a server fails or a communication link between clusters goes down, it is flagged as needing attention (with server clusters operating independently where necessary), and the workload is distributed across alternative servers or clusters until they become fully operational again, at which point the servers and clusters are automatically synchronized.

This has been deployed for six years at the following customer examples: XYZ. Our customers believe this is an essential requirement of enterprise data storage systems, and we have offered this capability since the launch of ProductX in 2018. As a result, our customers say this has saved them over $100 million in downtime costs.

We have continued to work with our customers to deliver enhancements to this capability, for example, by adding feature y, which has delivered the following incremental benefits for our customers… ”

By doing this, we’ve not only answered the bare minimum of the question asked but also explained why the capability is so important for customers, how we implemented this capability, and the advantages this approach delivers, both in terms of the peace of mind for the customer and the resulting ROI.

When drafting your answers, emphasize what sets you apart from your competition and the advantages of your approach to delivering the capability in that way. Using customer success examples and concrete ROI numbers further increases your credibility.

Make sure your answers are relevant, compelling, and easy to follow. If you need further clarification, ask the analyst team for guidance! If you don’t have an industry analyst team, we can help.

Using the report to support sales

Analysts will often offer a draft version of the report before publishing it to give you a chance to correct any factual misunderstandings. They may also offer a debriefing where you can ask questions and discover what they were looking for from the vendors.

Bear in mind that their answers will be based on the report they have just completed; their emphasis on what is important will change over time as customer requirements evolve, the market matures, and as industry leaders such as yourselves influence their opinions on where the market is heading.

Consider licensing the report for your sales teams and marketing outreach, including the press, social media, blog posts, advertising, etc. Please remember to get approval from the relevant industry analyst before making reference to (or quoting) their content.

You’ll find it helpful to summarize the report's key positive findings so that salespeople have soundbites they can use. This will help them save time digesting the report's contents and ensure they are all on message.

Finally, analysts strive to be seen as presenting a balanced view of each product, highlighting strengths and perceived weaknesses. You should assume that any prospect you engage with will have read the report. So, it is important to arm sales and marketing with a prepared response to each 'potential area for improvement'.

Conclusions

When answering industry analysts’ questions, explain what sets you apart from your competition, emphasizing the advantages of your approach.

Describe who (which types of customers) the capability is important to, why this is important, what features deliver this capability, the advantages of how it’s been implemented, and at what point it became available, ideally giving customer examples.

Using customer success examples and concrete ROI numbers increases your credibility. This will give analysts the information they need to accurately present and position your product effectively within the report.

If you would like any help or advice with your industry analyst strategy, including being included in their reports, feel free to take advantage of our free expert advisory session to discuss this topic with one of our experts. Our experts have helped products achieve the coveted ‘leader’ category multiple times.