Clear Communication
Your Analyst Relations Strategy Needs a Narrative Built for Analysts, Not Prospects
Strategy & Market Positioning Series
Explore how clarity, consistency and credibility help your company earn a lasting place in analysts’ minds, and turn a memorable, repeatable narrative into influence and competitive advantage.
Clear Communication
Contributing Author
I'm a content and product marketer who's spent the last 10+ years helping B2B SaaS companies explain complicated products to people who don't have time to be confused.
Tara Porter
Product Marketing Manager
Your Analyst Relations Strategy Needs a Narrative Built for Analysts, Not Prospects
Analysts sit in a different room than customers. The narrative that works there comes from product marketing and analyst relations building it side by side.
An analyst relations (AR) lead spends weeks lining up a briefing, only to watch the analyst nod through every slide and ask, at the end, how this is different from three other vendors already on their list. The deck answered every question a prospect might ask. It never answered that one.
So what was the problem?
Messaging written for customers doesn't do the same job as messaging built for analysts.
That's why building an analyst relations strategy starts with product marketing and AR shaping a narrative for the analyst audience, rather than repurposing the deck built for prospects.
Why Customer Messaging Fails as an Analyst Relations Strategy
A customer wants proof the product fits their situation. An analyst wants a framework for comparing this company to everyone else covering the same space. Hand an analyst the same deck you gave a prospect, and you've handed them the job of translating a sales pitch into an industry analysis. Some analysts do that work well. Plenty don't.
Gary Frazier, director of analyst relations at Icertis, put it this way:
"A deck built for customers focuses on why we're the best or the first to meet their current needs. A deck built for analysts has to tell a bigger story: where we sit in the broader market, what trends are driving customers to invest in this kind of technology, and where we're headed to meet future challenges, not just today's needs."
That bigger story, the market context and the trends behind it, is what a customer deck skips and an analyst deck can't. A customer deck says "we help you close deals faster." An analyst deck says something closer to "the market is moving from point tools to consolidated platforms, and here's the decision we made to get ahead of that shift." Same company, same product, a completely different argument.
Why This Takes Both Product Marketing and Analyst Relations
Product marketing has access to what the product team built and why. Analyst relations has access to how the market reacts to what's already been said about it. Neither half is complete without the other.
Frazier described what that partnership looks like day to day:
"My product marketing managers have been my closest partners. They help me build content for briefings, and they're integral to the RFI response and demo development process. They often act as my liaison to the product team, translating technical detail into business terms and identifying the competitive differentiators behind new innovations. In turn, I make sure my PMMs have access to key research and analysts, and I feed market insights back to them at every opportunity."
Skip either half and the gap shows up fast: sharp on the technology and thin on why the market should care, or the reverse, a compelling market story with nothing underneath it an analyst can verify.
Finding the Point of View That's Genuinely Yours
A strong analyst narrative starts with a genuine point of view, something analysts haven't already heard from every other vendor in the category.
Every company claims it's innovative.
Every company claims it's customer-obsessed.
Every company claims it's built to scale.
None of that helps an analyst distinguish one vendor from the next.
Start by asking product and engineering what they built differently on purpose, not what they built better. "Better" is an opinion, and a competitor can claim their version is better too, which turns the conversation into a fight neither side wins.
"Different on purpose" points to a decision your team made deliberately, one another vendor would not have made the same way.
Say your team decided to build one unified data model, skipping the usual patchwork of stitched-together tools. That's a decision someone can point to, explain, and defend. It becomes something an analyst can repeat accurately, since it describes a fact about how the product works, not a judgment about how good it is. The claim that comes out of it reads something like: "We built one data model, so customers don't need middleware to keep records in sync, where most competitors bolted three systems together instead."
A real differentiator is something no competitor could also say. "We help businesses grow faster" could come from almost any vendor, so it doesn't count. If your claim could double as a competitor's tagline, you haven't found it yet.
Everyone Claims AI. Be Specific About What Yours Does.
Generic messaging gets almost funny once you look at how companies describe AI. Every vendor pitch these days claims to be AI-powered, and the ones that skip that word swap in "intelligent" or "built on the latest models." Repeat a phrase enough times and it stops carrying any meaning. It becomes wallpaper. I'd guess most analysts could finish that sentence before the vendor does.
Specificity fixes this. Here's what that looks like in practice:
Swap "AI-powered forecasting" for what the model predicts and on what timeline. Example: "Predicts inventory shortfalls three weeks out, using live supplier shipment data."
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Replace "intelligent automation" with the exact decision the system makes without a person, and where a person steps back in. Example: "Automatically approves invoices under $500 and flags anything higher for manager review."
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Trade "built on the latest models" for what you trained on top of the base model, and why that choice matters for your customers' results. Example: "Fine-tuned on five years of claims data from healthcare payers, so it flags coding errors general models miss."
That level of detail is what survives a room full of analysts who have heard every generic pitch already.
Evidence Carries the Argument
Claims without support don't survive an analyst conversation, because the first question out of their mouth is some version of "how do you know?"
Here's the evidence that holds up, and what to check before you bring it into a briefing.
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A customer proof point names a specific customer and ties the result to a measurable outcome and a timeframe, not a general sentiment about satisfaction. A line like "this saved us so much time" won't survive a follow-up question. How much time did it save? How was that measured? What's it compared against? If you can't answer, the evidence isn't ready yet.
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Original research is a number your own company generated, not a stat borrowed from someone else's report. This can be a survey, product usage data, or a study your company ran itself. Before you use it, ask how many customers were involved, over what time period, and what the number is measured against. A percentage with no context attached does about as much damage as having no number at all.
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A named use case documents the specific way one customer uses the product day to day, the workflow itself, not just the result it produced or a generic category of customer. Keep it current. A two-year-old case study reads as evidence of stagnation, not strength, since it suggests nothing notable has happened since.
Let Analyst Feedback Shape Your Strategy
Analysts spend their careers listening to dozens of companies describe similar problems, and their questions often catch a weak spot in your positioning before a single customer does. If three analysts in a row ask you the same clarifying question, take the hint. The messaging needs work. Don't just reword the sentence, either. Go back to the differentiator itself and run it through the same competitor test from earlier: would a rival's product marketing team sign off on the same claim?
Treat every analyst inquiry like a small usability test for the narrative. What confused them? What did they ask twice? That's free feedback, and skipping it means missing a chance to fix the story before it reaches a much bigger audience.
Frazier uses inquiries deliberately to test whether his differentiation is landing:
"I run about twice as many analyst inquiries as briefings, partly to get their perspective on that question so I can bring the answer back later. If our differentiation doesn't come through in a briefing, that tells me I didn't prepare the spokesperson well enough."
A Simple Strategy for Building a Powerful Narrative for Analysts
Everything covered so far, the differentiator, the evidence, the feedback, comes together into one process. And it only works when product marketing and AR run it side by side, start to finish.
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Gather the raw material. Ask product and engineering what they built differently on purpose.
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Test each claim. If a competitor could say the same sentence about their own product, cut it.
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Attach evidence to what survives. A customer result carries more weight than an adjective. So does a piece of original data. So does a specific example.
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Preview the draft with a friendly analyst before it goes into a formal briefing. Ask what confused them and where they wanted more detail.
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Revise using that feedback, and keep doing it. Treat analyst questions as an ongoing input you return to with every new briefing, rather than a box you check once before launch.
A narrative built that way is the one analysts repeat. It's the one they cite in the report. And it's the one they still remember the next time your name comes up.
Common Questions About Building an Analyst Relations Strategy
What is an analyst relations strategy? An analyst relations strategy is the plan a company uses to shape how industry analysts understand and describe it. It covers the narrative given in briefings and the evidence behind it. It also covers the process for updating both based on analyst feedback.
How is an analyst relations strategy different from customer messaging? Customer messaging is built to move someone toward a purchase decision. An analyst relations strategy is built to help an analyst place a company within a market and compare it to competitors, which calls for a different narrative and a different kind of evidence.
Who should own the analyst relations strategy, product marketing or AR? Both. Product marketing typically builds the narrative and the supporting evidence. Analyst relations delivers it, gathers feedback from briefings, and brings that feedback back to product marketing so the strategy keeps improving.
How often should an analyst relations strategy be updated? Treat it as an ongoing process rather than an annual refresh. Update the narrative whenever analyst feedback surfaces a recurring point of confusion, or whenever the product or competitive landscape changes enough to affect the underlying claims.