BC Startup Sales Podcast – Analyst Relation Strategies That Work with Grant Halloran (Anaplan)

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Grant Halloran, CMO at Anaplan, to discuss “Analyst Relation Strategies That Work.” Anaplan is driving a new age of connected planning. Large and fast-growing organizations use Anaplan’s cloud platform in every business function to make better-informed plans and decisions and drive faster, more effective planning processes. Anaplan also provides support, training, and planning transformation advisory services.

Mr. Grant Halloran serves as Chief Marketing Officer of Anaplan and brings more than 18 years of expertise in the software industry. Prior to Anaplan, he was the CEO, President, and Co-founder of Orbis, acquired by Infor in 2012. Following the acquistion, he was the Global Vice President and General Manager of Integrated Marketing Management. He also spent more than 10 years as the Managing Director and Co-founder of Australian-based companies Brand Manager and ProductBank. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the Australian National University.

In our episode today, Grant joins the podcast to discuss analyst relation strategies that work. First, he talks about how the landscape over the last 10 years has shifted from working strictly with Gartner or Forrester to working working with newer, independent analysts that produce their own research, as these smaller guys can be very important to companies serving niche type markets, while still working with the two giants. He says to nail analyst relations, you must start by engaging them very early on. He stresses the importance of a CEO or Founder working with analysts from the start and not to think of analyst relations as a marketing function for a CMO or Head of Sales to figure out. He’s helped companies become Gartner Magic Quadrant leaders and touches on ways to help your company get there. Grant thinks it’s important to become a paying customer of these research vendors and that it’s smart to bake this in to your budget early on. If you get to a point where you feel you’ve invested in analyst relations and aren’t seeing any traction in write-ups or reports, he suggests asking them real questions about why this is the case. Grant says that your pitch to an analyst is a level above a normal sales pitch, and that running your sales pitch by an analyst for feedback and to see how you differentiate from competition is a good idea. He advises to try to quantify your success in gaining traction with analysts, and talks about how Anaplan does this. Finally, Grant wrapped up by urging CEO’s to make analyst relations one of their top 3 or 4 priorities and that having a good attitude towards the community will resonate with analysts and help you in the long run.

If you liked “Analyst Relation Strategies That Work” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the podcast to get all our new content each week!