Kevin has written another insightful article to help AR professionals upgrade their current program.   Forrester defines the Learn and Earn sides of working with analysts and define 4 stages of AR Relatonships: Establishing, Engaging, Influencing and Partnering.

“Many newcomers to industry analyst relations believe that analyst influence begins with the first briefing. But analyst influence depends on many more prerequisites than just turning up and saying your company is great — even when you have an hour to make the case. Experienced AR managers know that there are more precursors to influence but, in the hectic environment of day-to-day AR, even they easily forget that poorly planned or executed interactions can slow their progress toward a position of influence.

Consequently, AR managers at all levels must understand how the early life cycle of each analyst relationship affects the time required to reach this position — we call this period the time-to-influence (TTI) — and must actively reduce its duration for their influence program to be optimally effective.”

“Forrester uses the term time-to-influence to indicate the period between the first contact with each analyst and the first point that you begin to achieve lasting influence over them. For many AR programs, this period is infinitely long — they never get there. But savvy AR managers take charge and:

· Plan to minimize the time-to-influence. Recognize that the effectiveness of your earn-side AR program depends upon how soon you can influence the analysts who matter. Together with your analyst tiering scheme, assess your analysts, their current relationship phases, and their propensity for deeper yet productive relationships. As with tiering, use the results to drive analyst-specific interaction programs.”