Although this didnt make the splash that Gartner’s of AMR acquisition did- it signals a move towards more go-to-market tools for clients. I believe that this is a move that makes sense to a lot of marketing people who need real tools to quantify their decisions. Unfortunately it will not be a part of Forrester’s membership so it comes at extra cost.. Some answers to your questions on the acquisition by Forrester: http://www.forrester.com/sofaq
Archive for the ‘analysts’ Category
My take on Forrester’s Purchase of Strategic Oxygen
Saturday, December 5th, 2009Getting the New Product Launch Right
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009I found this post on the Frost and Sullivan website with important information and guidelines to use BEFORE launching a new product. This is geared to technology companies and unfortunately is a step that is skipped by too many people. Investing time and money in doing market research first does pay off in the end.
Many new products are launched into the marketplace with little prior planning for targeting the customers, creating a sales strategy, developing a distribution strategy, training the sales force, and integrating the competitive strategy. This mistake significantly reduces or eliminates any potential profit the product may have, and greatly increases the sales development time. These problems must be avoided if a company wants to survive in today’s competitive marketplace.
10 Ways Market Engineering Can Help Make New Product Launches More Successful
- Identifying the best customer segments for penetration
- Positioning the product successfully against competition
- Optimizing impact of sales strategy
- Creating a system to maximize sales leads while minimizing marketing expense
- Basing sales strategy on customer benefits rather than features
- Making the team market-driven rather than technologically-driven
- Setting sales goals based on market potential, not staff’s guesses
- Reducing sales development time and maximizing profit
- Improving market efficiency
- Identifying optimal mix of marketing tools and distribution channels to maximize sales
Market Engineering Checklist for Product Launch
- Market Engineering cross-functional team training
- Determination of Market Engineering Measurements
- Completion of customer survey
- Focus group performance
- Beta sites on product
- Selection of distribution channels analyzed
- Sales targets based on market size and potential
- Design of lead generation programs
- Design of market-based pricing strategy
- Lead tracking systems
- Design of public relations strategy
- Design of sales strategy
- Design of marketing strategy
- Competitive analysis and benchmarking
- Design of customer database
- Development of customer database
- Design of market monitoring system
- Buying, reading, and implementing Customer Engineering
Challenge Questions
- Into what market will the product be launched?
- What customer segments will purchase the product?
- For what applications will the customer use the product?
- Into what geographic segments will be sold?
- What are the benefits for the customers?
- What is the price/performance ratio relative to the competition?
- Who are the principle competitors?
- What will make your product unique in the market?
- What percentage market share is targeted at end of year 1 and year 3?
- What percentage of the customer base currently uses this product?
- From what distribution channels do customers purchase today, by percentage?
- What influences the customer’s decision to buy?
- How will competitors position themselves against this product?
- What is your sales strategy?
- What is your marketing strategy?
- What Measurement of Performance will you use to track success?
Are Analysts Becoming More Pay for Play?
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009I have heard twice in the last week from clients and potential clients that they believe that analysts will only write about you, put you in the Magic Quadrant, Wave, etc. if you are a member. Although I have many examples of clients that were not members of analyst groups and still got great coverage–this opinion still exists out there…What is your opnion on this? Has the economic situation pushed the analysts towards a more agressive selling position?
How Analyst Relations Can Boost Your Company’s Sales
Sunday, May 31st, 2009Upcoming Event: Thursday, June 11th, 9:00-12:00
Workshop on How Analyst Relations Can Boost your Sales
Place: Gelbart Kahana Offices, Azrieli Towers, Triangle Tower, 38th Floor, Israel
Agenda: 9:00 – Networking
9:30 -How AR Can Boost Your Company’s Sales
10:00- Case Studies
10:45- Tips and Tools for Effective AR
11:30- Q&A
For: Marketing Managers, Marcom Managers, VP Marketing, VP BizDev and Strategy, PR Managers of technology companies.
Please come with your questions and case studies to share.
Cost: 150 Shekels
Limited to 25 people only: RSVP to: nancy@gk-biz.com or 03-6070588
A Threat to Analyst Groups?
Sunday, May 31st, 2009Tech Crunch has moved into the Analyst/Research Group space with their new venture: Tech Crunch Research offering either single reports at $149 or an annual subscription at $450..
RedMonk was the first opensource analyst firm and their tagline is : Analysis for the people,by the people. They offer their research for free and sell their consulting hours based on the company size, use of research and ability to pay.
I see this as the business model of the future for the big guys also-Forrester and Gartner. The subscription model has a limited lifetime as a business model since everything else in the IT and Marketing world is moving towards transparency. I am guessing that Forrester will be the first to move and Gartner the last–but it will happen.
Free Whitepapers on Analyst Relations
Monday, May 11th, 2009Check out KCG’s website for free whitepapers on Analyst Relations. We recommend the Guide to Integrating Analyst Relations and Sales. You can send me an email at nancy@gk-biz.com
and I will be glad to send you a free copy.
The Easiest Way to a First Page Ranking on Google
Sunday, January 11th, 2009A good article from Forrester that I would like to share with you:
The Easiest Way to a First-Page Ranking on Google. “If you’re not optimizing your videos, you should start. “Blended search,” the practice in which search engines display videos, images, news stories, maps, and other types of results alongside their standard search results, has become increasingly common on major search engines. And optimizing video content to take advantage of blended search is by far the easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google,” says Nate Elliot from Forrester.
- Best of all, so few interactive marketers focus on video optimization that most of the videos in Google’s index aren’t very well optimized — so if you optimize your videos well, your chances of success will increase even further.
So how can you optimize your online videos? The agencies and search engines I’ve talked to offer a number of different tips:
*Insert keywords into your video filenames.
*Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site. Google says its algorithms consider how many times a video is viewed, and any views embedded videos receive on your own site get added to the ‘views’ tally on YouTube. (And yes, nearly every video we saw Google blend into its results came from YouTube.)
*Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos’ titles, descriptions, and tags.
*Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.
*Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.
Clients can read more about this topic, including some examples and further best practices, in our reports SEO for Blended Search (a Europe-focused report) and Video and Image Optimization (which is US-focused).
Should Analyst Relations Focus on Sales?
Saturday, December 6th, 2008This is the title of an article by Kevin Lucas, Forrester. The subtitle is: “It’s Not Just the Wrong Question-It’s Downright Misleading.” so you can guess what Kevin’s answer is. From Forrester’s perspective the real question should be: What corporate business value can AR Deliver and that may or may not be Sales. Forrester’s research shows that AR managers felt more confident about reaching goals for marketing and product management.
Kevin lists other values that AR can bring including:
- Share Value
- Product and Service Creation
- Market Awareness and perception
- Order to Cash
- Service and Support
His recommendations are:
- Clarify which corporate business goals you’ll support
- Align all elements of your AR program with the chosen business goals
- Be realistic about what you can really acheive
My take on this is that all of the above is true– in a different economic environment; however, many companies are in survival mode now, or worse, and are cutting marketing and AR functions and focusing only on sales and the short term. Although this is not a recommended strategy–that is the reality of the situation right now and AR has to pay attention to the shift.
In light of this, I believe that AR must focus on Sales for at least one of their goals–no matter how difficult it is to execute–it can be done. In addition, the other goals mentioned are very difficult to quantify and if you can assist in shortenting the sales process-that will be noticed and is quantifiable. What do you think? I will discuss how AR can affect sales in the next post. Comments welcome.
