Do you want Gartner to consider your company?

Get your customers to talk and ask about you!

In addition to my daily job at Excalibur, I advise cybersecurity startups and scale-ups on commercial strategy and partnership development, and regularly converse with channel partners globally in my free time.

A value-added distributor recently shared their strategy for selecting new vendors for their portfolio, and one of the factors they consider is their placement in Gartner Magic Quadrants and other reports.

No surprise there, as not every channel partner has the bandwidth to introduce new-to-market companies, and unknown products could sit on the shelf, frustrating both the vendor and the distributor.

Much has been written about advancing to the 'upper right' in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, yet many vendors seem to overlook these insights.

If you haven’t yet, I’d recommend starting with Richard Stiennon’s book.

The challenge is a chicken-and-egg situation. You want channel partners to sell your solution to their customers, but they are influenced by the Gartner reports, which require that you have certain amount of end users to be considered…

How to crack the shell?

There’s a first, simple step that every cybersecurity vendor should take to start to solve this situation, but many don’t: they need to get their customers to talk about their solutions!

Gartner and other analysts provide advisory services to companies all around the world, and they pay special attention to companies that are mentioned often and favourably by their subscribers.

Cyber startups and scale-ups will be making a very profitable investment by taking the time to work with their most satisfied customers and motivate them to publicly and actively talk about their solutions.

"But how can I ensure they discuss our products with Gartner?”, you may ask. You don’t need to do that. The platform to get Gartner attention already exists and it’s provided by them: Gartner Peer Insights.

When you start to acquire your first customers, after making sure they are happy and willing to recommend your solution to others, you need to put someone on your team to actively invite them to write a review on that platform. Every successful vendor has an active program to do so, and this is a source of information for Gartner analysts when they write their reports.

“But … We don’t have enough customers and we will look small with just a handful of reviews!”, you might think. You couldn’t be more wrong in believing that matters. You know you are small, we know that too, everybody does! Every high-quality, truthful review will be valuable!

Everyone needs to start somewhere, and you must leverage the few initial customers you have as much as you can if you want to attract more. This should be a key part of your strategy since the very beginning of your journey as a cybersecurity vendor.

While you are on it, consider other relevant peer review platforms like G2 that, while targeted to a different audience than Gartner, are also a source of information for not only industry analysts but also customers and channel partners.

If you are looking to achieve something meaningful today with your company, start to work on getting your customers to talk about you to Gartner today. Many leads and potential partners are probably ignoring you because you didn’t take this step yet.