Three years ago, I wrote a blog post called “What Makes for an Effective MQ Briefing?” This is a follow-up, with my thoughts somewhat more organized.

For AR and PR people, before you do anything else, if you have not read it, get and read Richard Stiennon’s UP and to the RIGHT. I cannot recommend it enough; Richard has seen the process as both a Gartner analyst and as a vendor, and it is chock full of good tips. It will help you understand the process, how the analysts think, and how you can best present yourselves.

This is part 1 of a two-part post contains the general tips. The next post contains tips that are applicable specifically to each of the three types of vendors. Every single one of these tips comes with one or more horror stories that I can tell you about past Magic Quadrant briefings. What seems obvious often isn’t.

General Tips

Pick the right presenters. You don’t need your most senior executives on the phone. You do need people who can present well, who thoroughly know the source material, and can answer whatever questions arise. Ensure that your presenters will have a good clear phone connection (use of cellphones or speakerphones should be strongly discouraged), and a quiet environment. If possible, choose presenters that speak fluent English and do not have accents that are difficult to understand — even if that requires using someone more junior and simply having the expert or executive on hand to take questions. You may even want to choose presenters that speak relatively quickly, if you feel time-crunched.

Send the presentation in advance. Ensure that you have emailed a copy of the presentation deck, in PowerPoint format, a day in advance of the briefing, to the administrative coordinator (who can take care of distributing it to the analysts). Be prepared to quickly resend it to anyone who has not received it. Do not send PDFs; analysts like to take notes on the slides. If you’re relying on a web conference, make sure that you still send the slides in advance — and get set up on it ahead of time and use a single PC to drive the whole presentation so you don’t waste time and possibly run into technical difficulties switching from screen to screen.

Be on time, and don’t waste time. Make sure that your dial-in number is distributed to everyone who needs to be on the call. Dial into the bridge early if need be. Have someone available to wrangle your executives if they’re running late. Have a backup presenter if you have an executive who’s notorious for not making meetings on time. Do not waste time making introductions. A presenter can briefly state their name and functional role (“I’m Joe Smith, and I run our support organization”) before starting their portion of the presentation. If you think your executive bios are important, include them as an appendix to your slides. Do not spend time having analysts introduce themselves; there are bios for them on Gartner’s website, and they will state their names when they ask questions.

Watch the clock. In a Magic Quadrant briefing, you typically have one hour to present your thoughts. Analysts are almost always scheduled back to back, so you will not have one minute extra to present, and may in fact have several minutes less if for some reason the analysts are held up from a previous meeting. Also, you want to have some time left for questions, so you should target a 45-minute presentation. If you think you have too many slides, you probably do. Rehearse to make sure you can get through your material in 45 minutes, if need be. Do not expect to be given the opportunity to do another briefing if you fail to finish in your allotted hour.

When an analyst prods you along, move on. One or more of the analysts may cut you short and ask you to move to the next slide or even skip a few slides. Listen to this and move on. By the time someone has gotten to the point of cutting you off, the analysts, who are almost certainly in an IM conversation with each other, have all already agreed that what you are saying is collectively useless to them, and that this part of the presentation is dull beyond enduring. If you think that there’s a really important point somewhere in what you’re saying, make it and move on. Or incorporate it into some other part of your presentation. Do not keep plodding along.

Focus on this particular Magic Quadrant’s market. If you have a broad solutions portfolio, that’s great, but remember that the analysts, and this Magic Quadrant, will be focused on something specific. The broader solutions portfolio can be worth mentioning, especially if it allows you to deliver higher-value and directly-relevant highly-integrated solutions, but not at the expense of focus on this Magic Quadrant’s topic. That topic should always be front-and-center. If you’re finding yourself wanting to instead talk about this somewhat-related market that you think you’re much stronger in, don’t — re-focus on the core topic.

Don’t talk about the market in general. Any analyst involved in a Magic Quadrant is, at least in theory, an expert on the market. They don’t want or need to hear about it. The only exception might be if you serve some specialized niche that the analyst does not often come into contact with. Your perspective on the market should be made clear by the specific actions that your company has taken, and will take in the future; you can explain your rationale for those decisions when you go through them, without doing a big up-front thing about the market.

Focus on your differentiation. The analysts want to know what you think makes you different, not just from the market leaders, but from your closest competitors. They want to know who you’re locked in bloody-knuckled combat each day, and why you win or lose those deals. But focus on explaining what you do well and where you intend to be superior in the future — don’t waste time badmouthing your competitors.

Be concrete and incorporate metrics whenever possible. Analysts hear broad directional statements all the time, and are usually unimpressed by them; they’re interested in the specifics of what you’ve done and what you’re going to do. Analysts love numbers. Their lives are full of vendors making grandiose claims, so they like to see evidence whenever possible. (For instance, are you claiming that your customers are much happier this year than last year? Show last year and this year’s NPS scores, ticket closure times, whatever — concrete evidence.) You don’t need to read the metrics. Just make the general point (“customer satisfaction has increased greatly in the last year, as our NPS scores show”), and have the metrics on the slides so the analysts can dive into them later. You can request that the metrics be kept under NDA if need be.

Disclose your future roadmap. A one-year or two-year roadmap, especially one that’s quarter-by-quarter, is going to make a much bigger impression than a general statement about aspirations. If you have to state that part of the briefing is under NDA, that’s fine; the analysts will still factor that information into the rating, implicitly. You may have great things planned, but if the analysts don’t know about them, you’ll get zero credit for those things when they consider your vision.