Measuring the Impact of Your Influencer Relations Program
Startup metrics quantify everything from business and finance health, to product development and customer engagement. It’s possible to know the lifetime value of a customer, how much that customer cost you to gain, and which features customer use and which they ignore.
Sadly, the same is not true of measuring your influencer relations program. Influencer relations is a long-term strategy of building mind share among a cadre of analysts through briefings, inquiries, customer interviews, and newsletters. This ensures your influencer community has the most accurate data and can speak positively about your firm.
Your customers and prospects touch several sources before purchasing. Several people may also be involved, from the technical champion to the economic buyer and, eventually, procurement. Even if your sales team can track an analyst interaction, weighing the impact of that interaction is difficult to quantify. Because of that difficulty, the impact influencers have on deals is chronically under reported.
All is not lost, however. There are concrete things you can do to better gauge the effectiveness of your influencer relations program.
Ask the Analysts
This one seems to slip past those newer to influencer relations. Schedule catch-up calls with your core analysts every other month to ask about customer interactions. Are they trending up or down? What kinds of questions are they getting? Are inbound conversations mentioning your company specifically, or is the analyst educating the customer about your offering? Which competitors are coming up on calls?
Don’t forget your account team. Work with your account executives to generate reports on mentions your company is getting on analyst calls. Bewilderingly, not every firm offers this type of reporting, but, when available, it’s invaluable for your IR program.
Ask Your Customers
Recently, a customer joined a company all hands call. The technical champion shared they talked to a large analyst firm about their challenges related to observability data, and that the analyst suggested the customer may want to look into the product area my company specializes in. Guess who else heard the customer say that? The entire company.
“I talked with an analyst and they said I should talk to you”
Ask Your Prospects
Train your salespeople to ask prospects how they heard about your company. Make it part of a script, with the results tracked in Salesforce (or whatever you’re using) with fields for analyst referrals and reports. The more information you can collect here, down to the firm and analyst, the better.
Ensure you’re also asking this to booth attendees at any events you sponsor. Once, a massive prospect came up to our booth and said, “I talked with an analyst and they said I should talk to you.” Leads don’t get much warmer than that!
Conclusion
Every company is different, meaning every influencer relations program is different. You’ll need to figure out the best way to measure the impact of an IR program in your space, but you will need to engage across the company to ensure you’re tracking how IR effectiveness.
One last thing: don’t focus solely on research mentions. It’s easy to get bogged down in counting the number of company mentions in research reports, but those reports may not exist if you’re in an early space with few competitors. For a startup, winning in the trenches with word of mouth is far more important than research mentions.
