To Be or Not to Be a Business Plan

I am currently mentoring some MBA students for a Business Plan Competition. I gave them my perspective on preparing a business plan including differentiating between theory and practice since there seems to be a wide gap in real life. Many of the companies I have worked with only worry about creating a business plan when they need one to raise capital with a VC. In theory it should be a decision making tool and one that is dynamic and updated regularly. In practice, that rarely happens.

Wikipedia has a great article on Business Plans and Dilbert--of the comic book fame-who actually has an MBA from Berkley, is used in another very good article, with a shot of humor:
Five Criteria for a Successful Business Plan in Biotech. The Five Criteria are: Management, Management, Management, Management and LUCK.

Gartner and Forrester's leftovers

Analyst Equity wrote a post last month on picking up the money Gartner and Forrester leave behind. As these two leaders concentrate on the big boys, the other analyst groups are focusing on their weakpoints: the smaller and medium sized businesses and the verticals. In my experience, Gartner, on the content side, is blown away by some of the other analysts, in the Financial Services space; but they still are the winners on the buy side.

The Value of Customer Case Studies for Analysts

One of the most successful analyst relations strategies for a vendor is to use a customer case study or "success story". When you talk to an analyst you can suggest the possibility but be very sure that your customer has been fully briefed before and will deliver the success story to the analyst. Jonny quotes one of my favorite analysts at Gartner, Massimo Pezzini on this with his post on : Customer Evidence and the Source of Credibility.

Using Analysts for Market Intelligence

Another great post from Jonny at Technobabble on using Analyst Relations for Marketing Intelligence. A new site for me: http://www.alltheanalysts.com/ gives you a list of all of the analysts reports on your topic. It is free but does not go into the reports themselves as does http://www.itanalystreports.com/.

In addition, I encourage my clients to ask the analysts for introductions to specific people in potential customer or partner organizations which helps on the sales and biz development side of business also.

Some Cool Tools to Measure your Positioning Power

I found a neat website: www.marketingnpv.com that focuses on the financial return from marketing process. It offers articles and practical tools, with tutorials to help measure your ROI on your marketing efforts such as : Perceptual Mapping, Bass Diffusion Tools, Markov Chains, Decision Trees, Simulation Tools and Competitive Radar Tools. You do have to register to get access but it is free. Check it out.

More Best Practices and Tips for AR Professionals

Another good post which lists several good articles on Best Practices and Tips for AR professionals.
http://www.johnsimonds.com/2007/08/good-links-that-analyst-relations-professionals-should-read/

This is one of the best ones with some good tips from a former analyst. The bottom line is that, as with any other target audience, it's about building relationships.

http://armadgeddon.blogspot.com/2006/11/ar-classics-series-seven-ingredients.html

Mapping out Social Media

This is a great post on social media illustrated with maps of : the world of social media, online communities, and an internet trend map.

http://technobabble2dot0.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/social-media-maps/

The map of social networks shows the international spread of the sites including one I have never heard of: http://www.hi5.com/ which is considered the most international of all and on their home page gives you options for: english, french, spanish, dutch, german, portuguese, italian, dutch and romanian.