You only ever brief an analyst on a given topic once, and, to borrow a cliché, you never get a second chance to make that first impression. So you really do need to prepare a set of briefings. This is especially likely to be the case when, as is usual, briefing the analysts is the beginning of a communications cycle involving briefings to journalists, financial analysts, sales staff and other staff, partners and existing customers.

The analysts come first simply because they are usually better at kicking holes in the presentation. I’ve already discussed this in #1 The Pre-Briefing and dealt with what a presentation should contain in #13 The Analyst Presentation. Here I’m interested in how to arrange and conduct the briefing.

Booking the Time

If you’ve ever tried to arrange analyst briefings, you know it can be a pain. Personally, I can need 5 or 6 weeks notice and some analysts, I’m told, can need 12 weeks. I occasionally get contacted by companies that think they can quickly arrange a briefing “in the next week”. Not possible. So you need to start early to book briefing times and you also need to book the time of the briefers. Juggling diaries is no fun, and it’s likely that some of the briefings will get canceled, because of “force majeure”, so you’ll be juggling diaries once the briefings start too.

You need to be fair to the presenters. It is possible to do 7 hours of briefings in a row, but it’s not wise. It asks a little too much of the presenters, giving them no time to review the previous session and no time to contemplate the next one. They probably won’t let you over-book them anyway – in their shoes I’d insist on no more than 4 briefings a day – but they might.

Preparing the Briefing

Ideally, there should be 3 people from the vendor side doing the briefing one. One is the AR person, taking notes and actions, and prodding presenters by Instant Messenger if need be – if it all starts to turn to custard. One presenter does the presenting and the other is the back-up, who steps in if needed. One should be marketing and one technical.

The presenters need a short set of notes on the analyst(s) being presented to along the lines of:

• What excites the analyst.
• How technical is the analyst.
• Are they generally positive, negative or neutral as far as the company or technology is concerned.
• What have they written on this topic.
• What might a positive outcome be. (Positive blog post, positive comments to journalists, appearance in comparison report, input to magic quadrant, advice to customers, etc.)

Presentation Points

If the presenters and the analyst(s) have not met, then be sure to do a round of introductions and have the analyst state their interest. If everyone knows each other, then still have the analyst state their interest.

I’ve already covered the presentation in #13 The Analyst Presentation but let me just emphasize that you mustn’t have too many slides, because the presentation will take too long, and you shouldn’t have too many points on each slide (no more than 5) or too many words, because that’s the same as having too many slides, and if you are doing a product demo then you should have the absolute minimum number of slides, or the presentation will take too long.

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