How to Use Analyst Relations to Drive Shareholder Value: Strategic steps for an innovative and measured approach to AR

Building a world-class Analyst Relations (AR) program is a worthy investment that delivers positive returns companywide. AR is a way for you to strategically influence the worldwide technologists who are recommending products and technologies, conducting research, and making industry projections that can directly impact your business. AR can strengthen your company’s position as a thought leader and ultimately enhance shareholder value. Success in AR requires a solid program foundation, which can be developed by following these key steps:
Step 1: Define AR’s Worth
Internal education is essential. Since AR is somewhat of a new industry practice, it’s important to demonstrate the value to executive and marketing personnel by clearly articulating its purpose. Manufacturers, service providers, IT professionals and others look to analysts to guide their purchases. An analyst’s recommendation of your products to their customers can help drive revenues. By providing analysts with early product information and experiences, AR plants the seeds for product success, making it the ideal first step in bringing a product to market. At Qualcomm, we implemented this strategy for our launch of Plaza Retail, a complete application retail solution, with great results. Through AR, we were able to access analyst insight to validate our go-to-market strategy and build detailed awareness of the product prior to press release distribution.
Step 2: Build the Right Assets
The right staffing and structure are critical to AR success. The key is to assemble a team of people who have strong relational, business and technical expertise. You want professionals who can generate interest and engagement with your products and technologies before bringing in subject matter or product experts to provide a deeper dive. This strategic approach requires thinking of AR as a business, rather than a cost center, to deliver greater value.
Step 3: Leverage Your Audience
Analysts provide valuable market insight, but they can also give you perspective on the latest and most effective AR strategies. Ensuring you meet the needs of your analysts is part of building strong relationships, so asking them what they value in an AR partnership is essential. In addition, many analyst firms have industry councils that offer peer-to-peer support. You can also look to industry leaders to identify best practices and successful AR approaches that you can adopt for your company.
Step 4: Measure Success
Measuring the business value of your efforts can help generate continued AR achievement and build credibility internally. From research inclusions, media quotes and blog mentions to outright recommendations and shaping of industry language, AR influences the market in many ways. In the Plaza Retail example, briefing several analysts from multiple firms resulted in analyst press references that were effectively used for third party verification, as well as inclusion in research publications and online media.
Demonstrating AR value requires that you create metrics to regularly track outcomes leading to ROI. Consider using measurement against operational and performance goals, a balanced scorecard, and subjective measures, such as feedback from analysts, as well as your outputs and outcomes.
By following these core steps and turning to organizations like the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations (analystrelations.org), you’ll be on a sound AR path to enhance shareholder value.