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"Enterprise buyers use third parties to buy software. They consult Gartner, Forrester, and others to establish trust in vendors. These research agencies diligen

"Enterprise buyers use third parties to buy software. They consult Gartner, Forrester, and others to establish trust in vendors. These research agencies diligence software products directly and through surveys. This is the reason analyst relations are so important. Presence on the magic quadrant confers trustworthiness." Does anyone involved with enterprise purchasing decisions know how valuable Gartner/Forrester endorsements are? And if being in the unmagical quadrant is terrible? I see companies tout them but I can't tell if they're effective.

otoburb 7y ago
>>Does anyone involved with enterprise purchasing decisions know how valuable Gartner/Forrester endorsements are? And if being in the unmagical quadrant is terrible? Enterprise purchasing stakeholders value these endorsements to the point that they would be more likely to take a meeting with a vendor positioned in Gartner's magic quadrant or covered favourably in Forrester's Wave reports. This does not mean that purchasing teams will solely base their decisions on these types of reports, but it certainly can (and often does) positively influence your funnel momentum for a particular year. After securing one or several meetings with various stakeholders in an organization, you'll then have to do the rest of the legwork in your standard sales cycle to close the deal (e.g. demos, tender bid responses, deployments, onerous commercial negotiations, etc).
wolco 7y ago
I've seen it in action. The internal person pushing the product using includes a slide during presentations and uses it as the base to compare products. Purchasing decisions are made later but it is used to narrow the field.
alxlaz 7y ago
I've got some experience on both sides of the fence -- working with people who made enterprise purchasing decisions, and working on devices aimed at them. It's not that much experience, mind you, so it's not invulnerable to sampling bias. Take it with a grain of salt. In my experience, these things work largely as a barrier of entry thing. No one will buy something just because Gartner endorsed it, unless they're really clueless, or trying to sabotage their companies while maintaining plausible deniability. However, getting this kind of endorsement requires some level of organizational stability, business connections and money. The fact that you have one is an indication that people can do business with you without jeopardizing their bonuses. That won't convince anyone to make the purchase, but it will get you through the door. The endorsements and studies themselves don't mean much. I personally know of at least one such study that was highly effective, and cost an unspeakable amount of money to conduct and market, and was absolutely bollocks. It showed that one company's implementation of a failsafe feature was "at least as efficient" as the industry standard. It was a 20-page-ish whitepaper, with graphs and benchmarks and whatnot. What it didn't even test for, let alone mention, was that exposing that feature to the kind of conditions it was meant to protect against caused it to fail, and then crash the whole system.
inthewoods 7y ago
I've had the experience of being ruled out as a software vendor because we weren't in the Magic Quadrant - but it generally doesn't function that way. Usually, for large enterprises, it creates a short list of vendors to evaluate - and I've seen that happen many times.
gk1 7y ago
I help software startups get enterprise customers and can say with certainty that yes, placing in Gartner's "Magic Quadrant" or Forrester's "Wave" boosts inbound interest from enterprise buyers. Those two firms have done well in building up their credibility in the enterprise market, which means anyone they recommend gets carry-over credibility. Getting onto those is hard (not going to list all the steps and tactics here for brevity's sake). A relatively easier accomplishment would be to get mentioned in one of their dozens of reports that get published year-round, which focus on a particular use case or subcategory of products. Easier still is to get mentioned by one of the second-tier (but still valuable) analysts such as IDC and 451 Research. Edit: I've also been in the position to purchase marketing software with a six-figure budget, and used Forrester's Wave as a shortlist of reputable and popular products. Otherwise I would have to sort through (literally) hundreds of marketing platforms and tools.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sytse 7y ago
At GitLab we spend a substantial amount of effort on Analyst Relations (AR) which is working with groups like Gartner, Forrester, and 451 Research. On https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/ you can see we have two people who are a dedicated Analyst Relations Manager. They manage the relationship but many of our product marketing managers and product managers are involved to answer questions and give presentations. An important thing these firms do is aggregate customer feedback. For a consumer tool I can look on Quora and for a development tool I can look at Hacker News. But for enterprise tools the people that use the product are often not allowed to share feedback themselves. However they are allowed to talk with analysts. That is why the opinions of these analysts are often really important to convince new customers your product is any good https://about.gitlab.com/is-it-any-good/ https://about.gitlab.com/is-it-any-good/ BTW We just won a 451 Firestarter award https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2020-01-14-gitlab-recognized-as-451-firestarter.html https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2020-01-14-gitlab-re... which we're stoked about.
- techpop10 7y ago
  An important distinction (as I mentioned in another comment) is that you have no idea how much "aggregate customer feedback" Gartner really has, they don't disclose their research methodologies at all. That's a real problem. 451 research does... and sincere congrats on your award.
  - sytse 7y ago
    Thank you! BTW Gartner now has an online review tool called Peer Insights https://www.gartner.com/en/products/peer-insights https://www.gartner.com/en/products/peer-insights Here you can read the customer reviews https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/application-release-orchestration-solutions/vendor/gitlab/product/gitlab https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/application-release-o... I might be a bit biased because in 2018 GitLab won Gartner their customer choice award and recently we won another awards based on peer insights https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2019-07-26-gitLab-recognized-in-gartner-peer-insights-customers-choice-for-EAPT.html https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2019-07-26-gitLab-re...
Daneel_ 7y ago
It depends on the industry and the size of your company. I’ve been in a position where the only choices we were given were upper-right quadrant products - nothing else was on the table. That said, other companies don’t care two hoots about it and prefer to evaluate against their own criteria. Even for this it doesn’t hurt though - it can only add weight to the test results. So yes, it’s valuable for many reasons.
gumby 7y ago
> Does anyone involved with enterprise purchasing decisions know how valuable Gartner/Forrester endorsements are? And if being in the unmagical quadrant is terrible? > I see companies tout them but I can't tell if they're effective. They are very important; their models shape how enterprise thinks about a domain and their recommendations basically make sales. The contents of their expensive reports goes into countless slide decks within the Global 1K. So working with them (as with the parallel comment from someone at Gitlab points out): you have to be on these companies' decks, which means you have to do outreach to them and shape the technology landscape for them. They are cheaper than hiring McKinsey who will write a report for you -- Gartner et al will sell you a report they've already done, and then also come discuss it with you. === Oh wait, you were asking for the quality of the work? It's better, but not much better, than those clickbait review sites that summarise the vendors' spec sheets. I had a college friend who worked for one of the "major" enterprise analyst companies. My friend had a degree in French literature and needed a paying job. They could write well, so in exchange for a low salary plus benefits they wrote reports on laptops, CNC tools, servers, you name it. They never actually clapped eyes on an actual CNC mill until visiting me one day at work.
- dctoedt 7y ago
  > I had a college friend who worked for one of the "major" enterprise analyst companies. My friend had a degree in French literature and needed a paying job. They could write well, so in exchange for a low salary plus benefits they wrote reports on laptops, CNC tools, servers, you name it. They never actually clapped eyes on an actual CNC mill until visiting me one day at work. <rant> The last two sentences of this quotation illustrate the perniciousness of they as a singular pronoun for an individual. The first rule of writing (unless you're a egomaniac) is Serve Your Reader; when a reader encounters these last two sentences, it disserves her to force her to look backwards at context to figure out how many individuals the writer is talking about in those sentences. If you want to be inclusive, then just use she as your gender-neutral pronoun, as here.</rant>
  - gumby 7y ago
    I understand your pain, but I did the right thing. I used to do as you suggest but my message is a good example of the sexism problem as it would imply the stereotype of the dumb female humanities major. The singular “they” has a long history.* Yes, words change (“elite”, “peas”, and even “you” as the article points out). But I think it is past time to put the tyranny of a prescriptivist plural-restricted “they” to bed. https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...

otoburb 7y ago

>>Does anyone involved with enterprise purchasing decisions know how valuable Gartner/Forrester endorsements are? And if being in the unmagical quadrant is terrible? Enterprise purchasing stakeholders value these endorsements to the point that they would be more likely to take a meeting with a vendor positioned in Gartner's magic quadrant or covered favourably in Forrester's Wave reports. This does not mean that purchasing teams will solely base their decisions on these types of reports, but it certainly can (and often does) positively influence your funnel momentum for a particular year. After securing one or several meetings with various stakeholders in an organization, you'll then have to do the rest of the legwork in your standard sales cycle to close the deal (e.g. demos, tender bid responses, deployments, onerous commercial negotiations, etc).

wolco 7y ago

I've seen it in action. The internal person pushing the product using includes a slide during presentations and uses it as the base to compare products. Purchasing decisions are made later but it is used to narrow the field.

alxlaz 7y ago

I've got some experience on both sides of the fence -- working with people who made enterprise purchasing decisions, and working on devices aimed at them. It's not that much experience, mind you, so it's not invulnerable to sampling bias. Take it with a grain of salt. In my experience, these things work largely as a barrier of entry thing. No one will buy something just because Gartner endorsed it, unless they're really clueless, or trying to sabotage their companies while maintaining plausible deniability. However, getting this kind of endorsement requires some level of organizational stability, business connections and money. The fact that you have one is an indication that people can do business with you without jeopardizing their bonuses. That won't convince anyone to make the purchase, but it will get you through the door. The endorsements and studies themselves don't mean much. I personally know of at least one such study that was highly effective, and cost an unspeakable amount of money to conduct and market, and was absolutely bollocks. It showed that one company's implementation of a failsafe feature was "at least as efficient" as the industry standard. It was a 20-page-ish whitepaper, with graphs and benchmarks and whatnot. What it didn't even test for, let alone mention, was that exposing that feature to the kind of conditions it was meant to protect against caused it to fail, and then crash the whole system.

inthewoods 7y ago

I've had the experience of being ruled out as a software vendor because we weren't in the Magic Quadrant - but it generally doesn't function that way. Usually, for large enterprises, it creates a short list of vendors to evaluate - and I've seen that happen many times.

gk1 7y ago

I help software startups get enterprise customers and can say with certainty that yes, placing in Gartner's "Magic Quadrant" or Forrester's "Wave" boosts inbound interest from enterprise buyers. Those two firms have done well in building up their credibility in the enterprise market, which means anyone they recommend gets carry-over credibility. Getting onto those is hard (not going to list all the steps and tactics here for brevity's sake). A relatively easier accomplishment would be to get mentioned in one of their dozens of reports that get published year-round, which focus on a particular use case or subcategory of products. Easier still is to get mentioned by one of the second-tier (but still valuable) analysts such as IDC and 451 Research. Edit: I've also been in the position to purchase marketing software with a six-figure budget, and used Forrester's Wave as a shortlist of reputable and popular products. Otherwise I would have to sort through (literally) hundreds of marketing platforms and tools.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sytse 7y ago

At GitLab we spend a substantial amount of effort on Analyst Relations (AR) which is working with groups like Gartner, Forrester, and 451 Research. On https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/ you can see we have two people who are a dedicated Analyst Relations Manager. They manage the relationship but many of our product marketing managers and product managers are involved to answer questions and give presentations. An important thing these firms do is aggregate customer feedback. For a consumer tool I can look on Quora and for a development tool I can look at Hacker News. But for enterprise tools the people that use the product are often not allowed to share feedback themselves. However they are allowed to talk with analysts. That is why the opinions of these analysts are often really important to convince new customers your product is any good https://about.gitlab.com/is-it-any-good/ https://about.gitlab.com/is-it-any-good/ BTW We just won a 451 Firestarter award https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2020-01-14-gitlab-recognized-as-451-firestarter.html https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2020-01-14-gitlab-re... which we're stoked about.

techpop10 7y ago
An important distinction (as I mentioned in another comment) is that you have no idea how much "aggregate customer feedback" Gartner really has, they don't disclose their research methodologies at all. That's a real problem. 451 research does... and sincere congrats on your award.
- sytse 7y ago
  Thank you! BTW Gartner now has an online review tool called Peer Insights https://www.gartner.com/en/products/peer-insights https://www.gartner.com/en/products/peer-insights Here you can read the customer reviews https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/application-release-orchestration-solutions/vendor/gitlab/product/gitlab https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/application-release-o... I might be a bit biased because in 2018 GitLab won Gartner their customer choice award and recently we won another awards based on peer insights https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2019-07-26-gitLab-recognized-in-gartner-peer-insights-customers-choice-for-EAPT.html https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2019-07-26-gitLab-re...

Daneel_ 7y ago

It depends on the industry and the size of your company. I’ve been in a position where the only choices we were given were upper-right quadrant products - nothing else was on the table. That said, other companies don’t care two hoots about it and prefer to evaluate against their own criteria. Even for this it doesn’t hurt though - it can only add weight to the test results. So yes, it’s valuable for many reasons.

gumby 7y ago

> Does anyone involved with enterprise purchasing decisions know how valuable Gartner/Forrester endorsements are? And if being in the unmagical quadrant is terrible? > I see companies tout them but I can't tell if they're effective. They are very important; their models shape how enterprise thinks about a domain and their recommendations basically make sales. The contents of their expensive reports goes into countless slide decks within the Global 1K. So working with them (as with the parallel comment from someone at Gitlab points out): you have to be on these companies' decks, which means you have to do outreach to them and shape the technology landscape for them. They are cheaper than hiring McKinsey who will write a report for you -- Gartner et al will sell you a report they've already done, and then also come discuss it with you. === Oh wait, you were asking for the quality of the work? It's better, but not much better, than those clickbait review sites that summarise the vendors' spec sheets. I had a college friend who worked for one of the "major" enterprise analyst companies. My friend had a degree in French literature and needed a paying job. They could write well, so in exchange for a low salary plus benefits they wrote reports on laptops, CNC tools, servers, you name it. They never actually clapped eyes on an actual CNC mill until visiting me one day at work.

dctoedt 7y ago
> I had a college friend who worked for one of the "major" enterprise analyst companies. My friend had a degree in French literature and needed a paying job. They could write well, so in exchange for a low salary plus benefits they wrote reports on laptops, CNC tools, servers, you name it. They never actually clapped eyes on an actual CNC mill until visiting me one day at work. <rant> The last two sentences of this quotation illustrate the perniciousness of they as a singular pronoun for an individual. The first rule of writing (unless you're a egomaniac) is Serve Your Reader; when a reader encounters these last two sentences, it disserves her to force her to look backwards at context to figure out how many individuals the writer is talking about in those sentences. If you want to be inclusive, then just use she as your gender-neutral pronoun, as here.</rant>
- gumby 7y ago
  I understand your pain, but I did the right thing. I used to do as you suggest but my message is a good example of the sexism problem as it would imply the stereotype of the dumb female humanities major. The singular “they” has a long history.* Yes, words change (“elite”, “peas”, and even “you” as the article points out). But I think it is past time to put the tyranny of a prescriptivist plural-restricted “they” to bed. https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...