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Leading a GTM team

When should we start talking to Gartner and Forrester, and what do we actually say?

Start earlier than you think, but start for the intelligence rather than for the quadrant. In the first stage you simply answer inbound analyst inquiries, then move to one way educational briefings where you explain what you see in the market, and only later does a two way commercial relationship make sense. Inclusion in a Magic Quadrant has published thresholds on revenue and customer count, so it is often a one to three year game and your first outcome is usually Niche Player. Treat every briefing as free buyer research, and never pitch, because analysts talk to your prospects far more often than you do.

Go deeper

3 resources, 3 link-checked.

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Advanced

A four stage model for analyst relations from inbound only to a dedicated team, written for founders rather than AR professionals. It is honest that the value is market intelligence long before it is a quadrant placement.

Why You Should Engage With Analysts, and How to Do It Right

From a16z by Michael King and Stacy D'Amico 14 min read

  • Gartner and peers influence the slower moving buyers who drive about 70 percent of enterprise technology spend.
  • A commercial analyst relationship needs 25 to 30 percent of one person's time to run properly.
  • Plan on 6 to 10 analysts: about 4 you work with regularly plus a few covering adjacent markets.
  • You cannot be in a Magic Quadrant for a category of one, Gartner only builds them for mature markets.
Open a16z.com →
📰 Newsletter
✓ Link checked Freemium Advanced

Deals with the four places positioning work actually stalls, including teams that cannot agree on their competitive alternatives. Useful once you have tried positioning and it went nowhere.

A guide to advanced B2B positioning

From Lenny's Newsletter by April Dunford 18 min read

  • B2B vendors typically lose about half of all opportunities to whatever the prospect uses today, sometimes over 80 percent.
  • There are only two pure points of value in B2B: help a business make money or save money.
  • Watch for whale bias, where the team positions against one big lost deal to a competitor they rarely meet.
  • About half of status quo losses are customer indecision, not a real vote for the incumbent.
Open lennysnewsletter.com →

Browse all 796 resources →

The same ground, at another level

How category design reads from a different seat.

What does category actually mean in go-to-market, and why does everyone keep telling me to pick one? A category is the mental shelf a buyer puts you on before they judge anything else about you. The moment someone hears what you do, they reach for ... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → How do I test whether a category name lands before we commit the whole website to it? Put the words in front of real buyers before you put them in a headline. Run the line past twenty people who match your ICP and ask them what they ... Doing the work 4 resources → How did Gong actually create revenue intelligence, step by step? Gong started life as conversation intelligence and found that senior revenue leaders heard that phrase and mentally filed it under sales enablement... How the best do it 3 resources →

People also ask

What does category actually mean in go-to-market, and why does everyone keep telling me to pick one? 3 → Should we create a new category or just say we are a better version of something that already exists? 5 → How do I write the one line that says what category we are in? 5 → Buyers keep comparing us to a big incumbent. How do I even respond in a first call? 4 → How do I test whether a category name lands before we commit the whole website to it? 4 → We named the problem instead of the product. Is that a positioning mistake? 4 →

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The same ground, over in Find your idea & build the brand, our D2C track.

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