Executive Summary

• Software vendors make frequent mistakes in their marketing.
• We cover some of the major ones in this article.

Introduction

This article explains the complications in leveraging IT analysts for smaller vendors.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

History of Witnessing Software Vendors

A listing of the mistakes I have witnessed by software vendors and consulting firms would take a while to describe in full. However, a few examples include.

1. Believing marketing companies that obtain hits on social media posts without checking the connection to real leads.
2. Handing money over to Gartner without understanding how Gartner functions.
3. Trying to develop a partnership with a major systems integrator without understanding that the system integrators are normally “spoken for” and prefer large vendors as dance partners.
4. Jumping over the process of spending on conferences before one’s messaging or website is in a complete state.
5. Using young and inexperienced (and inexpensive) writers to create articles.

A major issue with the mistakes made by vendors comes from overconfidence. Marketing is in a general qualitative field that is based more around assertions than evidence. A good example of this is my earlier book Promotions Forecasting: Forecast Adjustment Techniques in Software.

In this book, I cover the observations from many companies where I found the marketing departments were faking their ability to measure the impact of promotions. Marketing was running promotions that they could not quantify the benefit of but which were asserted by marketing to be beneficial to the company. The book goes on to explain that the academic literature on promotions is extremely contradictory. Still, the marketing departments did not communicate this uncertainty in the companies for which I consulted. And operations never asked that marketing demonstrate the effectiveness of the many promotions they were forced to account for. And these companies were much more interested in running promotions than accounting for them in operations. This is just one example of this assertion-based philosophy of marketing, but there are many other examples. In fact, working off of unsubstantiated assertions is very common in marketing agencies. This type of thinking is a complete anathema to Brightwork Research & Analysis.

Interacting With The IT Analysts: Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc..

Brightwork Research & Analysis is literally the only entity to critique the major IT analysts. The book Gartner and the Magic Quadrant: A Guide for Buyers, Vendors, and Investors

It is the only book to explain how Gartner really operates.

The other books about Gartner are by dishonest employees or former Gartner employees who intend to deceive readers as to how the sausage gets made at Gartner. We have also been really the only entity to critique the other IT analysts and have shown a clear line of money that motivates most of the publications of all of them. You can read our analysis of several IT analysts in this article. The Brightwork Research & Analysis Rating of IT Analysts Like Gartner, Forrester, and More.

We were also the only entity to observe and publish that IDC is now owned by a Chinese company, which is a country that ranks just four places above North Korea for press freedom, according to transparency.org Can You Trust IDC and Their Now. China-Based Owners?

The issue is that any IT analysts can be hired to publish just about anything that a vendor wants to publish. This is something we covered in the article How SAP Sponsored Studies Are Repeated in the SAP Ecosystem.

For medium and substantial vendors, this works out very well. They can use their financial muscle to deceive their prospects into believing that a “research entity supports their marketing concocted assertions.” One example of this, which broaches into the humorous category, is a fake study by IDC that was sponsored by a data center company that needed to muddy the water in the eyes of prospects, and comingle what they offered with true cloud PaaS providers as is covered in the following article How Gartner Helps Vendors Co-Opt New Things They Are Unrelated To.

However, this system does not work for smaller vendors. This is why the IT analysts are of limited use to smaller vendors. Of course, this does not stop Gartner and other IT analysts from overpromising what they can do for prospects, as I covered in the article How IT Analyst Firms Like Gartner and Forrester Overpromise Marketing Exposure to Vendors.

The Challenges with Leveraging IT Analysts

The problem with IT analysts is that they go where the money is. And this invariably leads to the high bidder. This is what happens when one tries to “profit maximize” research. It is the end of the research and simply becomes promotion disguised as research. There is not a single IT analyst that we have reviewed that is immune from commercial incentives. And this leads to an extreme bias in favor of the largest vendors.

So how to deal with them for smaller vendors? Some vendors already have investments with IT analysts, and that has to be managed, and it is not always feasible to just cut off all involvement with IT analysts. This is a case-by-case analysis of where to take the financial relationship. Then there is the question of if a vendor has no current relationship with any IT analyst, what to do. Furthermore, the field has grown to include online rating entities, the best-known being G2Crowd. G2Crowd is entirely vendor funded and operates a marketing front end for vendors, something that G2Crowd does not disclose to its readers, as we cover in the article. G2Crowds Problem with Financial Disclosure.

Conclusion

As with the mainstream IT analysts, participation with the online rating or review entities is another question that requires analysis. Generally, new vendors and startups tend to want to participate with these entities before they have their messaging and even website in the proper shape. As one begins to participate with IT analysts and rating and review entities, the costs begin to escalate. So participation depends on the vendor’s status as much as what the IT analyst or rating or review entity has to offer.