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The Client

Headquartered in Bangalore, the client is a global IT services provider and the third largest IT services company in India.

Serving over 300 customers worldwide, the company provides a range of IT services, software solutions, IT consulting, business process outsourcing (BPO) services, and research and development services in the areas of hardware and software design.

Business Context

Sustaining leadership position and differentiating oneself in a crowded marketplace is a challenging task, especially in the intensely competitive IT services marketplace. As strong relationships with global analysts are essential to positively impact deal flow, mindshare, and solution planning as they act as influencers to the buying community, the client wished to set up an analyst relationship program.

As such a program was the first of its kind implemented by the company, it needed a partner who would be able to lay the foundation and provide guidelines to operate the same independently. Based on demonstrated expertise within Prayag’s core team in running analyst programs, the company awarded the mandate of setting up a global analyst program to Prayag.

Prayag Solution

Establishing the required analyst relationship program involved two phases -

Creating awareness
Sustaining the relationship

In the initial phase, Prayag focused on mapping the analyst space with the client’s needs through intensive profiling and comprehensive research, supplemented by interactions with the client’s management and marketing teams. This phase, which concluded in a clear articulation of positioning and differentiators, comprised the following activities –

Identifying analyst firms and specific analysts to be contacted
Developing the pitch presentation
Orientating and preparing of FAQs for the client’s spokesperson to be used during interactions with analysts
Scheduling kick-off meetings with key analysts for the client’s spokesperson
Guiding the client in hosting a road show
Helping the client in preparing for the meetings with analysts
Providing inputs on sustaining interactions with the analysts
Guiding the client in handling analyst visits to the organization
Recommendations on leveraging analyst subscriptions for more broad based interactions

Subsequent to establishing the initial contact with analysts, Prayag focused on sustaining the momentum of activities. Prayag’s role in this phase was to work with the identified resources within the client organization and provide relevant support - fine tuning analyst presentations, reviewing the analyst newsletter and portal and providing inputs on handling analyst briefings.

Benefits

The engagement resulted in significant benefits for the client in a relatively short span of time. Initiating the program with nearly 20 key analysts from leading firms, the client, with Prayag’s assistance was able to cross over to 170 analysts in a short period of 2 years, a significant achievement.

An important outcome of this exercise is that it led to maximum number of mentions for the client in analyst reports among the Tier 1 Vendors in the second year, which is a significant achievement and a key metric in determining mindshare among influencers.