How we rank the impact of analysts in sales

The most effective way to rank the impact of analyst in sales is through market research. Too many firms rely on subjective judgements and, for the last decade, Analyst Impact Modelling has emerged as one of the strongest methods around. The AIM method involves a series of stages. We take your list of analysts and then expand it using our AR Intranet, which is a contact management solution for AR we have run since 2003. It’s pretty extensive. Then we collate data about each of those analysts to show the overlap in their research with your market, so we can weight analysts by how much of their time is spend on your sort of solutions.

We then call each of those analysts and aim to interview all of them. The interviews are done by former analysts, including myself. We use those interviews to validate our research and to get a better idea of how close each analyst is to clients’ buying decisions (very senior analysts, for example, often don’t have much time with clients going through buying decisions). Usually, analysts also give us further analysts’ names. We run that list by the client, if they want to see it, and then aim to interview them as well. After eliminating the analysts which are not relevant, we convert all that data into statistics.
We then link that with our market analysis, which shows how far each firm’s client base overlaps with your markets. So that means we identify firms that are stronger in your key vertical markets, horizontal solution areas and geographies. We use a statistical process, called Key Factor Analysis, which looks at our CIO and IT Buyer Survey to weight each analysts’ score (which really show their topic relevance and closeness to clients) with the ability of the firm to ‘amplify’ the analysts impact on clients. We convert the scores into percentages, and then rank the analysts by the score. That’s how you get the AIM ranking.

We can often segment the score by business segments nominated by the client. That’s done by taking the research into which topics each analyst focusses on and then validating that with the analysts. We turn that into percentages to show what we call relevance, breaking each analysts’ time across the segments, and then multiply the AIM score by that to give the segment weighting.

The whole methodology has been tested and used over and over since 2000. It’s very stable. As market research goes, it’s highly tailored, with normally around 200 hours of interview time and custom research. Then we add into that our market analysis of the industry, which segments each analyst firm by geography, vertical market and solution area.

To find our more, contact us.