Following on the heels of layoffs at Gartner and AMR Research, comes word that Yankee Group and iSuppli also reduced headcount. Yankee Group CEO Emily Nagel discussed the reduction in the company blog. Meanwhile, there is word of a reduction at iSuppli, a firm that just recently acquired Telematics Research Group (TRG). This much consolidation in the tech industry analyst community has implications for analyst relations and influencer programs.
Tech suppliers can react in one of two ways.
The most common reaction is list management. The premise is that you automatically replace one analyst name on your list of influencers with another analyst name. When somebody moves out, you move somebody up.
That’s exactly what the analyst salespeople want tech suppliers — and IT decision makers — to do. Swap one analyst with another. Treat them as interchangeable parts. Transfer your trust, no hesitation.
That strategy would work really well, if analysts were toasters.
The other option is research. This entails pulsing your salesforce and decision-makers and evaluating the overall market segment, to find out how influence is shifting on the ground. The idea is that you think outside the box, and make no assumptions that one analyst is replaced by another analyst out in the marketplace.
You may find that a trusted analyst is being supplanted by a consultant or a thought leader from an IT association. You may find most decision-makers taking a wait-and-see attitude, opting for no immediate adjustments to their circle of advisors.
In the end, trust is not about lists or toasters or interchangeable people. Trust is personal, especially when company or career is on the line.
Short-term, there’s little likelihood that you can uncover every decision where an exiting analyst was advising. Look into the priority transactions in your pipeline; assess and act on those situations on a case by case basis.
For the long haul? My advice is don’t rush to revise your influencer list. Live with the gaps until the dust settles and you can figure out what’s really happening.
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February 10th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
This is an interesting thread and I’d like to provide some context, having just listened to Gartner’s 2008 Q4/yearend earnings call a couple of nights ago. While they did lay off a bunch of people, they had a record year last year, had a record Q4 (while the world was cratering), and had single or double digit growth in just about every operating metric. The layoffs are a pro-active measure to manage profitability in what they expect to be a flat year for research, and a down year for their events business (due to constrained travel budgets). So I don’t think you can just look at the new about layoffs at Gartner as true gloom and doom the way this post does. As for AMR, no idea.
February 10th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Mitch,
Thanks for commenting. I’ve no idea which of my comments gives you an impression of “doom and gloom” relative to Gartner. That was not my intention — in fact, Gartner’s performance wasn’t top of mind for me. The company is doing just fine.
I’m advocating a couple of ideas. First, that the analyst business needs more mid-sized companies to provide better ballast to the space and more employment options to the practioners. As Dan Taylor has commented, the practioners are not just analysts. They are also sales, management, consultants, administrators, project managers, researchers, and marketers.
I’m also taking the position that vendor marketing teams and IT research/consulting buyers avoid knee-jerk reactions to analyst firm layoffs.
Tell me what you think.