Your Core Influencer Left For Your Competitor — Now What?
You’ve finally convinced your boss on the value of an influencer relations program and they’re on board. You’ve got the green light to present your company’s six-month product roadmap to your main analyst. You spend weeks pulling data out of product management, compiling slides, and getting speakers scheduled. The presentation goes well and the influencer offers some valuable feedback on market direction and what end users are saying. Notes are taken, documents written, and everyone’s ingesting the new feedback.
Two weeks later, your product team has questions about some things the influencer said. You fire off and inquiry request. The response comes back immediately: The influencer no longer works here.
The first reaction is likely confusion, and probably a little anger. You spent months, perhaps years, cultivating a relationship with the influencer. Now, that investment has been wasted. A week later, your boss sends you an email with the subject line “WTF?” and a link to a LinkedIn profile. Your former influencer — the person you just gave your six-month roadmap to — took a role with your closest competitor. Before you know it, you’re curled up at the bottom of your shower, listening to Morrissey, wondering if you’ll have a job tomorrow. (Just kidding. No situation is bad enough to listen to Morrissey.)
When you spend enough time in influencer relations, this scenario will happen to you. Vendors pay far better than influencer firms.
“They have my product roadmap!”
I’ll admit this sounds awful. It isn’t. Your management will likely assume your former influencer is coughing up every piece of data they gained about your product, customers, and roadmap. This is unlikely for two reasons, and irrelevant for one.
First, influence is built on reputation and technology is a much smaller world than it appears. An influencer sharing what he or she learned under NDA does more to harm the influencer’s reputation than it does to boost the competitor. It’s easy to be cynical, but ethics still matter.
Next, influencer firms, like 451 Research, Forrester, and IDC, do everything they can to ensure former influencers don’t share what they’ve learned under NDA from clients. There are non-disclosure agreements in place and the threat of lawsuits if they’re broken. Reputations matter for influencer firms just as much, if not more, than for individuals. Credibility is the name of the game.
Finally, who cares about your product roadmap? Even if you’ve shared twelve months of your proposed roadmap, technology markets change quickly. External factors and customer demands will have more impact on your product roadmap than what some competitor does. That said, it’s easy to look at a newly announce feature from your competitor and claim it was stolen from your roadmap. The reality is there isn’t much that’s new in technology, making it highly probable that feature was in the works for months or years before it was announced. Don’t look for conspiracy in every coincidence.
Next Steps
There are things you can do when your core influencer leaves for a competitor. Reach out and congratulate him or her on the new role and express hope that you’ll be able to work together again. Technology is a small world, remember?
Next, schedule a meeting with the former influencer’s manager. First, express your concern that your confidential information may leak to competitors and demand to know how the firm protects your valuable data. Be indignant but polite.
Ask if anyone else on the manager’s team is likely to leave soon. They won’t answer, but your intent here is to express concern that you continued investment with the firm will pay off. Ask about the impact to written research. Will the Wave or Magic Quadrant be delayed? If not, how will they guarantee consistent analysis across different researchers? This can be a great opportunity to escalate if you don’t like where your dot ends up on the graphic.
Finally, and this is key, find out what the plans are to backfill the role. As soon as the role is filled, that influencer is your new best friend. The trend in influencer hiring is to hire younger, less experienced people because they cost less. These less experienced influencers may not be as stuck in their worldview as legacy influencers, and they’re your opportunity to influence the influencer and shape their view of the market and its players.
Ending a relationship always comes with some level of pain and regret, and breaking up with your favorite influencer is no different. The key is to maintain the investment in your influencer relations program and look for opportunities to engage with new influencers.
