Do Half the Analysts on Your List Belong: Fixing an Analyst Relations Program

Sage Circle, an analyst relations firms, makes an controversial statement in a recent blog post: Your analyst list is likely wrong - half the analysts should not be on it, half that should are not.

I tend to agree. Just as I would that half the reporters on the average media list don't belong -- or, at least, won't be interested in most the news coming out of most companies. (In terms of media lists, many lists contain reporters who are likely to write about a company, but that determination may be based on a single article caught by a PR staffer, and that article could have been written to fill in for another reporter. It's like reading tea leaves.)

One reason analyst lists could be wrong is that analysts may have moved to another firm, another coverage area -- the same is especially true of media lists, by the way, given layoffs, shifts to cover the Wall St. crisis (and until last week, the election).

Here are reasons that Sage says leads to analyst lists containing wrong media.

• Perception that there is no time to do the work
• Lack of formal analyst list methodology
• Inadequate consideration of corporate, business group and team objectives
• Lack of carefully considered weighted criteria
• Infrequent review of the analyst marketplace for changes in analysts and coverage
• Lack of mechanism for capturing how analyst list decisions were made
• Focusing on large firms while giving boutiques short shrift
• No access to a database of analysts
• Internal political pressure
• External squeaky wheels

In another blog post, Sage says it's important to understand how an analyst list was compiled, and notes some important questions:

• Which criteria were used?
• How those criteria were weighted, and so on?
• When was the list created?
• Has it been maintained?

Good points.