Influence versus Intelligence

For years now as I have done sourcing work with my corporate clients I have wondered why I have not been asked to work more with Gartner or Forrester.   Then when I did some analysis for my expert witness role for PeopleSoft's attorneys last year in the Oracle legal battle, it hit me. Buyers use analyst firms primarily as  a "check mark".  Only during a step or two in a sales funnel process do buyers actually reach out to analysts. They read analyst written reports even less. The highest impact of analysts is in the short listing process but in equally important scripted scenario, site visit or contract negotiation steps their impact is far less. No wonder, corporate buyer as against vendor revenue has been shrinking at many analyst firms.

Analysts need to become more "invasive" in the technology deal flow...morph themselves more in to high impact strategy and sourcing experts,  not just writers and in-bound telephone consultants. Most analyst firms have consultants available to hire on a project basis, but it is a different talent and incentive pool from the research analysts.  Gartner has a group called CFC which helps clients  review software contracts.  It is a purely contingent model  so this review is done when the client ha s a "best, close to final" proposal. We all know negotiation advantage is often at the beginning or middle of a  sales cycle, not at the end. Also, Gartner has been somewhat quiet  about this so as not to disrupt  too much vendor revenue.

But wait a minute, if they did morph then they would be more like my business...on second thoughts may be I do not need that competition! Seriously, though - as their buyer influence shrinks, vendors will also move away. Vendor marketing groups may pay for market intelligence, vendor sales executives just want the influence. You can assign a Gartner probability of 0.9 to that!