Four Top Tips on Using Analyst Relations for Product Management

As the former head of EMEA at NEC, I led the charge on analyst relations and continue to work with organisations to deliver insights that direct product managers to their future.

I am fortunate to have worked with organisations that understand the true requirement of creating and developing products and services that deliver to a real need, rather than trying to establish a need for a product. There are too many organisations that don’t start with asking by asking the right questions.

By working with analysts, a product manager can gain valuable insights for their future roadmap, value proposition, positioning and messaging. While AR is often utilised by marketing, PR and sales, it can also be used by product marketers and managers.

Here’s four tips on how to integrate analyst relations into your product management and help your organisation thrive:

Tip 1: Use analysts’ insights to develop your product roadmap

Whether those insights come from a ranking report (wave, matrix, quadrant) or from an inquiry call, the analyst relations team can feed back any relevant thoughts on product. Their insights are informed by a wide and deep view of the market, your competitors, your prospects and your end users. Take note.

Let’s use an example. Let’s say the Peak Matrix provides a caution on your scalability or ability to work under load. This is something the product team needs to know about and create an action plan to address. If this is an experience of your customers, or a concern of your prospects versus your competitors, it’s an actionable insight and can help you with feature prioritisation.

To get further under the skin of the issue, the AR team can set up inquiries to pull out more information for the product team. This also creates goodwill credits, as in the next briefing you can show the analysts you have listened and acted – a valuable part of the relationship journey with analysts.

As part of this process, present your roadmap. This can seem daunting, but it gives you the opportunity to demonstrate how your company believes in its products and their longevity. It gives you the opportunity to identify anything missing versus competitors and also discuss partners that would work with you towards your product vision.

Tip 2: Analysts can help you identify the right partners

Analysts understand the market and know your potential partners (or can work to find out). You can talk about partners and how they can help work with you to enable you to penetrate new industries and new markets. Let’s take the example of banking in LATAM - you need local organisations that specialise in in-country regulations.

Partners can also help you with speed to market as they are already well known and as a result reduce the burden of cost to enter new markets. Analysts can provide critical insights to your prospective partners.

Tip 3: Use market and competitive intelligence to stay at the forefront of innovation and market need

It is an analyst’s job to know and understand everything that is going on in your market. Whether that’s an emerging new category, or a new competitor. This provides intelligence on which your product decisions are based to ensure your product evolves in line with trends and market needs. Product managers need to know about the emerging threats and opportunities. By taking analyst insights to them, you can make sure you stay competitive. You can even use it to carve yourself a competitive play.

By listening to, and acting on, analyst insights here, your clients, prospects, partners and investors will know you are a good bet for the future.

Tip 4: Utilise analyst insights to bring your teams together for success

Product management teams translate the technology the R&D and product development teams create. A fundamental part of taking products to market is by working with marketing and sales. Analyst relations helps provide insights to the GTM strategy, product development, sales and marketing. It helps teams work together for a greater purpose, and for success.

If you are interested in learning more about how analyst relations can help your product marketing, get in touch today.