If the analysts can't place you, you're not in the evaluation.
Buyers start with the analyst's view of the market. If that view has you in the wrong category, or nowhere at all, you lose deals you never hear about. We change what the analysts say about you.
Why analyst relations matters
Your buyer asks an analyst before they call you. So does the reporter covering your category, and so does the LLM that writes the shortlist.
You can pitch a buyer. You can pitch a reporter. What you can't do is sit in the inquiry call where an analyst tells three of your prospects who to look at, or write the research that a reporter reads before your interview, or feed the source an AI model leans on when someone asks who leads your category. Analysts sit in all three.
That cuts both ways. If an analyst has you filed under the wrong category, or doesn't have you at all, you're out of the consideration set and nobody tells you why. Most vendors find out at the end of a lost deal.
Getting into the research is deliberate, unglamorous work, and it takes quarters rather than weeks.
How we run it
Analyst relations and PR are one effort, not two.
You won't land in a Magic Quadrant or a Forrester Wave on the strength of briefings alone. Analysts watch the market, and the market is what they read about you. They also get incoming inquiries from prospects asking about you. When an analyst decides whether you belong in the report, your media coverage is part of the evidence. It shows traction, customer proof, and that you're a voice in the category rather than a vendor asking to be included.
So we run them together. The briefing books, spokesperson prep and customer introductions run off the same story as the media program, and analyst quotes and influence feed straight back into it. The same launch that earns coverage gives the analyst a reason to take the call.
Run apart, the two drift. That's the argument against hiring a standalone AR consultant and a separate PR firm, and it's the most common way companies end up telling two versions of one story.
Our AR services
What an analyst program actually includes.
Analyst strategy
We work with you to build the strategy, starting with which analysts genuinely influence your buyers rather than which firms have the biggest name. Then we work out how your business should use the relationship: the research you should be reading, the inquiry hours you should be spending, and the feedback worth taking back to product.
Most companies with a subscription use a fraction of what they already pay for.
We shop before you spend
Plenty of companies cancel Gartner or Forrester because the coverage wasn't there. Before we recommend spending anything, we map who is actually writing about your corner of the market and whether they reach your buyers. If the answer is no, we say so.
The messaging comes first. The analysts have to buy into your category story, or none of the rest pays off.
Briefings and inquiry
Vendor briefings cost nothing to request. We build the engagement strategy and the cadence, write the briefing books, prep the spokespeople and join every call, then run the inquiry conversations that turn an analyst into a sounding board instead of a scorekeeper.
The analysis and insight is the product
We analyze every briefing and circulate what the analyst actually said, so the whole company gets value from the call rather than the two people who were on it. Product hears the objections. Sales hears the framing. Marketing finds out which message landed.
Analyst insight is what you're paying for. Insight that helps you make business decisions.
Magic Quadrant and Wave positioning
Getting into an evaluation, and moving up in it, is a multi-year campaign. We track inclusion criteria, manage the questionnaires and customers, handle the analyst portals, and keep you visible between research cycles so you aren't starting cold every year.
Category strategy
Sometimes the right move isn't fitting into a category. It's helping the analyst see that the category is out of date. That work is slow and deliberate, and it rests on real relationships plus customers already buying the future. When it lands, you help define the lane instead of competing in someone else's.
A year of educating analysts before the new category had a name.
Customer introductions
Once the relationship is real, we work to get your customers in front of the analysts covering you. That's the part that moves prospects, because an analyst who has spoken to three of your customers describes you differently than one who has only seen your deck.
Perception audits
What the analysts actually say about you when you're not on the call. Advocate, neutral or skeptical, whether they'd recommend you in an inquiry, and what would have to change. It's the only honest read on whether the program is working, and it's uncomfortable reading the first time.
Ongoing engagement
Recognition is earned and then kept. We run the regular communication, keep your wins, launches and customer proof in front of the analysts who cover you, and maintain the cadence between research cycles, so a placement becomes a relationship instead of a one-time event.
Case study · Selector AI
Analysts had Selector under AIOps, which was the wrong category.We helped Selector become a key voice in Gartner's creation of a new category.
Fighting for a better seat in AIOps wasn't going to work. The category itself was the problem, because the existing frameworks couldn't describe what Selector actually did. So we made the harder play and set out to show the analysts where AIOps fell short.
We bet on Gartner and went deep. Thirty-three introductory inquiries, then three to four real touchpoints with each key analyst. Depth over breadth, education instead of a feature list, and the customers already buying the future in the room.
- 43 Gartner mentions since 2024: 10 in 2024, 16 in 2025, and 17 in 2026 to date, already exceeding last year’s total
- Subject of the first Market Guide for Event Intelligence, with three more in 2026 so far
Selector AI
Gartner mentions by year.
2026 to date: 17 mentions, already exceeding the 16 mentions in all of 2025. Updated September 14, 2026.
Measurement
How you know it's working.
A briefing count is not a result. These are the things we report, and the questions they're meant to answer.
Cadence
Briefings and inquiries held, compared with the engagement plan. We track consistency alongside changes in analyst understanding, research inclusion and recommendations.
What they say about you
Not whether the call happened, but how the analyst described you afterward, and whether it changed.
Message pick-up
Whether your positioning shows up in the research, the notes and the market guides, in your language.
Research inclusion
Mentions, market guides, Hype Cycles, Quadrants and Waves. Where you appear and where you still don't.
Time with the right analysts
Are we spending the most time with the analysts who spend the most time with your prospects? An analyst with a big title and no inquiry volume in your category isn't worth the quarter.
Advocate, neutral or skeptical
Would they recommend you in an inquiry call? Perception audits answer this, and it's the closest thing AR has to a revenue metric.
The AI-era reader
AR drives who shows up in AI answers.
When a buyer asks ChatGPT who leads a category, the answer is assembled from the sources that describe that market. Analyst research sits near the top of that pile. The reports themselves are gated, so what the models actually read is everything built around them: Gartner's own press releases, the free market guide summaries, the licensed reprints vendors post on their own sites, and the trade stories and blog posts that quote a single line from a Quadrant.
That makes analyst position compound in a way it didn't five years ago. If the research has you in the right category with the right language, the models inherit it. If it has you filed under something stale, they inherit that instead, and they'll keep repeating it long after you've changed the pitch.
Alongside briefings held and research inclusion, we track how the major models describe you and your category, and whether the analyst language is the language coming back.
What it's worth
Analyst standing is the gold standard.
When a buyer is overwhelmed by options, the analyst report is the compass. It's the one source in the evaluation that isn't selling anything, which is exactly why it carries weight a vendor can't talk its way into.
It shows up in deals of a different kind too. When Bomgar acquired our client BeyondTrust in 2018 and folded three companies into one business, the buyer gave up its own name. The CEO of the combined company cited BeyondTrust's standing with industry analysts, its partner network and its brand recognition as reasons to carry that name forward.
Analyst position is slower than media. A placement can happen this week. Position is a campaign measured in quarters, which is why we run it alongside the media program and not in place of it.
Ready to get on the analysts' radar?
Book a 30-minute conversation. We'll talk through where you stand with the analysts who cover your market, whether they're the right ones, and what it takes to move up.