By Ken Rosen
Analysts are not your customers. Not close. Not even a little bit.

I’ve nothing against analysts! Some friends are analysts and heck, I even act like one sometimes. The point is analysts get paid and promoted to put things in boxes: companies, products, industries, people. Functionality boxes. Quality boxes. Market presence boxes. Usability boxes. They know, for example, that Business Intelligence is different from Corporate Performance Management, but overlaps in reporting and analysis—and those areas of overlap matter in some industries and not others. That can be valuable to vendors who need to know the competitive landscape and to their customer clients who ask if a product will fit their needs. But that customer question is exactly the point:

Customers just want to solve problems.

It’s cliché…and true. Sometimes a Customer’s pain maps to traditional product or service boxes. Sometimes not. When it doesn’t (and even when it does!), lose the labels and solve the problem.

If you speak to a Customer as you speak to an Analyst, let’s say by “helping” them understand the fine points of your product category and why a competitor who claims they compete with you really doesn’t, you don’t get closer to the sale in the best case and you annoy your customer in the worst case. Host Analytics is a good example of getting this right:

To Analysts, they are the most robust, SaaS-based Corporate Performance Management system (see that? Three boxes in one phrase).
To Customers, they improve decision making by letting execs see financial implications of decisions.

So if Analysts want put things in boxes and Customers want to grow their business, speak to each about their true interests.

In defense of our Analyst friends, the best Analysts easily understand a story built around customer needs. In fact, they may test you to see if they can put you in the “They understand customers” box. This is critical as they decide whether to put you in the “My clients should be them” box. However, this doesn’t change their job. They still translate your story into what they get paid for…putting you, your product, and your amazingly effective customer solution-oriented story…into a box.

Takeaways

  • Know your audience’s goal: Customers solve business problems while analysts categorize companies into boxes.
  • Obsess about Customer problems…and then on how to solve them…and then on your story about your solution.
  • Determine in what box you want Analysts to place you. Maybe a crowded one…maybe a new one. Either way, help them understand why this makes sense. What? None of the boxes are good fit? We’re out of space, so how about if we make that a future post topic?