‘Powerhouse’

Global ‘Powerhouse’ works with Lighthouse Analyst Relations to deliver superior Analyst Relations Training to its team of professionals
This Global ‘Powerhouse’ has always included Analyst Relations as a fundamental element of its business strategies, having incorporated it in into its central marketing efforts. By appreciating the business benefits that establishing and maintaining excellent relationships with key IT analysts brings, it now leads the way with established Analyst Relations programmes.

Our client considered a regular review of his groups’ Analyst Relations activities a necessity to ensure that the corporation continues to provide an outstanding Analyst Relations practice. As such, he agreed with his team that formalisation of his Analyst Relations spokesperson training procedures was required.

All Analyst Relations training of spokespeople was currently carried out in-house. Our client decided to approach Lighthouse Analyst Relations consultancy with a view to bringing in a team of AR professionals who could provide:

• A company that specialises in regularly delivering tailored training courses to spokespeople, in-house analyst relations staff and analyst relations professionals in public relations companies, and
• A trainer who, as an ex-IT Analyst, could bring a wealth of experience and understanding of the needs of the analyst community, as well as in-depth market knowledge
• A third party to work with him to validate and sanity check the existing in-house methodology and materials, so helping to integrate them with new course content and training materials which together would deliver a fully integrated series of training programmes which could then be delivered time and time again.

“I decided to focus on formalising our spokesperson training as a priority as I believe it is absolutely essential to reduce any risk to our business by training our AR professionals to prepare for meeting with analysts, to know what information to provide - and not provide - and to learn how to build and maintain relationships which these key industry influencers,” said our client.

The outcome was to work with Duncan Chapple, Managing Director at Lighthouse AR, on two projects. The first was to ‘Train the Trainer’ - in other words, Duncan comprehensively trained the client in order that he could then train his executives and any other AR staff who would potentially speak with IT analysts.

Our client’s response to this training was that “It far exceeded my expectations. I needed a refresher in delivering training courses and needed an extra pair of eyes to critically review my existing material, which I aim to update annually. Duncan took my existing material and integrated it into a succinct, tailored presentation that I can now take to my spokespeople. My opinion is that this project was excellent value for money and very competitively priced.”

Our client has now trained several key spokespeople and concludes that the training has certainly produced the business risk-management results that he had hoped for.

“My spokespeople are so much more confident when speaking with the IT analysts because they now understand their aims, requests and influencing capabilities, and therefore their importance, far better. They now regularly speak with IT analysts, both face-to-face and on the telephone, and we have already built several really solid relationships with key analysts.”

The second project was to deliver training courses directly to the AR spokespeople. Lighthouse AR’s tailored training programmes included an insight into the analyst community, how they differ from the media and how to prepare for meeting them; a safe environment in which to role-play; a special focus on improving ways in which PowerPoint presentations are used to structure discussions with analysts; and, the ability to discover and prepare for testing questions from analysts.

A ‘Powerhouse’ attendee on a recent Lighthouse AR training course, who has been working in Analyst Relations for some time, found the course to be invaluable and will use the lessons learnt and the content from the course time and time again in her daily working life.

“This course has enabled to me to prioritise my workload as it has helped me appreciate what is important from the analyst’s perspective. It has, in particular, given me the criteria to target those analysts that are critical to my business,” she said. “The course content was of a very high standard and I turn the theory learnt into practice every day!”

She continued, “Duncan was a great trainer - he was extremely clear and motivated to help us, and was very patient with us, both of whom are non-native English speakers. One aspect that we both really appreciated was a list of English sentences to use when speaking with an analyst so as not to offend them or make ourselves misunderstood in what may often be a rather pressured situation, especially for non-native English spokespeople.”

She also felt that, because Lighthouse AR has a trusted relationship with her colleague, and the person who recommended Lighthouse AR to her team, that she almost felt as if the training course was run by an internal trainer. Hence, she was far more relaxed and open, and worked more in confidence with Duncan, than on other courses she has attended. In turn, this means that she took away far more useful, practical and personalised information from the course.

Both clients would be happy to speak with potential clients of Lighthouse Analyst Relations to discuss their experiences of working with our team.

Our client concludes, “We used Lighthouse AR to bring expertise to our existing Analyst Relations business. Using external specialists in Analyst Relations has brought us an unbiased view of our existing materials, helped us to deliver outstanding training courses and, in so doing, has saved us a lot of time. Ultimately, it has given our AR team first-class credentials within our corporation and has gone to support my belief that the best way to improve our Analyst Relations is to work on these types of point projects which deliver on - and often exceed - our expectations.”