Perry Gartner
- 20+ years professional experience specializing in industry analysis, competitive intelligence and knowledge management
- Held management and directorial positions at numerous firms including SpaceX, Morgan Stanley, and Gartner Group
- During tenure leading competitive analysis at Giga Information Group, company became the fastest-growing firm in history of analyst industry
- Led propulsion data and knowledge management programs at SpaceX as company won NASA LSP and Air Force EELV certification
- All 5 Best Practices
- Pre-Meeting Discovery Process
- One-on-One Call with Expert
- Meeting Summary Report
- Post-Meeting Engagement
Making Sense of the Analyst Industry: Best Practices for End Users
Common Problems
- Analyst firms continue to offer terms and conditions that are inflexible and anachronistic.
- Clients want flexibility in their relationships with advisory firms rather than being locked into rigid terms and conditions that can’t accommodate changing needs. But many analyst firms remain resistant. Subscriber contracts typically specify fixed numbers associated with the advisory’s deliverables: of seats (with varying levels of access), of hours of inquiry, of tickets to events, of products and services. Many analyst firms also still have siloed research and delivery models with multiple discrete services that must be subscribed to individually. Clients lacking the budget to pay for comprehensive access, or whose needs and preferences change over the course of the contract – which is to say, almost all of them – are ill-served and increasingly frustrated by such models.
- Client firms find it difficult to quantify the value they receive from analysts.
- Determining an actual ROI from advisory relationships can be a complicated process. Many large organizations have contracts with dozens of analyst firms – from boutique two- or three-person shops to large broad-based advisory companies – and often spend well into seven figures annually on analyst services. Yet there is no standard method of rationalizing this spend or for measuring value. The analyst firms themselves do little to help their clients figure it out. This contributes to everything from variable and sometimes arbitrary price-points to inefficient subscription usage to confrontational relationships between client and advisory sales staff.
- Client firms struggle to identify the most appropriate providers for the research they need.
With the large population of analyst choices available, differentiating among them can be a challenge. Particularly for end-user clients, there really isn't any resource that can act as a “watcher of the watchers.” (There are a few small analyst relations services available for vendors.) Clients are left to their own devices to figure out the best sources for any given need. It may or not be clear which advisory services specialize in coverage areas important to the client – which analyst firm, for example, covers technology as it relates to financial services, or which specializes in telecom, etc. But on a much broader scale, there are so many companies offering so many types of services, products and service models that it is difficult to figure out where the dollars should go.
- The knowledge gap between analysts and clients is shrinking.
,With tech and digital expertise becoming more distributed throughout the enterprise, some end users believe they know as much or more than the analysts they’re paying to advise them. It’s not entirely their imagination: Senior analysts who have been out of the “field” for years can lack practitioner perspective, and advisory firms with high growth rates are often forced to scale using less experienced junior analysts. Certainly, the bottom line is that, on average, the knowledge gap between client and analyst has been getting smaller. Clients thus need to be ever more diligent in identifying the advisory resources that are best suited to them and in which they have the most confidence.
- Pay-to-play suspicions undermine confidence in the recommendations of analysts.
Most analyst firms have policies meant to separate the research arm of the company from the sales side. An analyst firm may derive significant revenue from the vendors it covers, but this revenue is not supposed to affect the analysts’ coverage or rankings. Unfortunately, since the dawn of the industry, clients – both technology vendors and end users – have harbored suspicions that if vendors don’t “pay” enough in terms of contracted services, it can affect the analysts’ recommendations to the user market. The truth is more complicated and certainly less sinister than many of these suspicions suggest; but perception is often reality, and the behavior of certain analyst firms does not help matters. For vendors, this can cause resentment; it has led to adversarial relationships with specific analyst firms in the past. For end users, this can compromise their confidence that the advice they receive on products and services is free of bias.