Background

Teradata is the connected multi-cloud data platform company — transforming how businesses work and people live through the power of data. With about $2 billion in revenue, Teradata is headquartered in San Diego (CA, USA), with many other offices across the globe. 

The company’s analyst relations (AR) team is composed of four full-time, dedicated AR professionals, who are spread across the US and work remotely. The AR program seeks to work with and influence industry analysts at large and traditional firms, as well as independent business analysts, consultants and academic business influencers (particularly important for key verticals) — keeping them up-to-date on all things Teradata. 

Their efforts pay off. Teradata was named a leader in the 2021 “Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems” and a leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Data Warehouse, Q1 2021,” among other key report inclusions.

Challenge

Supporting evaluations like Magic Quadrants and Waves — along with the many other activities in an AR professional’s day — takes time.

“Not having enough AR resources — that’s always the issue,” says Kim Dossey, Teradata’s Head of Global Analyst Relations, who has worked in AR at Teradata for 17 years.

Teradata’s AR program had ambitious plans and goals: wanting to reach a broader group of analysts, execute on additional campaigns and activities, and report on metrics more consistently and thoroughly. But there are only so many hours in the day!

“Reporting is one of those things that you know you need to do, to show value,” Kim says. “But, when you have all these other fire drills and deadlines, it falls to the bottom of the list. We wanted the capacity to do more.”

Solution

Teradata turned to ARInsights. At the time, Teradata had been an ARInsights customer for five years, using the AR productivity software ARchitect to track analysts, manage AR projects, monitor coverage and more. 

“Prior to ARchitect, we’d been wrangling spreadsheets and trying to track activities through our CRM — which didn’t come close to meeting our needs,” Kim says.

Now, Teradata sought to expand its relationship with ARInsights, using the ServicePlus offering to augment its team. ServicePlus provides AR operations support, including program reporting, project support, ARchitect administration and more.

“When it came time to choose an AR operations partner, we didn’t consider anyone else,” Kim says. “We already had an established relationship with ARInsights, and ServicePlus was reasonably priced. Plus, ARInsights had already provided a great level of value. Why would we look elsewhere? It wasn’t even a thought! Anything we’ve needed, ARInsights has delivered. It’s been incredibly beneficial.”

Teradata uses ServicePlus to help support AR projects and activities, including:

Identification of additional relevant analysts across Teradata’s core coverage areas. ServicePlus monitors for — and lets the Teradata AR team know of — new analysts of interest, as well as departing analysts and analysts who change firms or coverage areas.

Analyst research summaries, with the ARInsights team synthesizing the topics and trends that key analysts are writing about, and sharing the information at regular intervals. “We’d never been able to do that before,” Kim says.

A quarterly analyst newsletter, sent through ARchitect. Kim notes: “ServicePlus designed the template, loaded all the content, helped us select images, assisted with the rollout, tracked engagement and trained us on how to do this going forward. Just having them there, to provide that level of expertise and show us best practices, was fantastic!”

An Analyst Portal, which is an ARInsights-hosted, self-service and secure digital destination for Teradata analysts. They can access briefing decks and presentations (with access given to the relevant firms, for instance) and other materials that aren’t public-facing to aid in their research. Teradata also posts press releases, whitepapers and other thought-leadership, product data sheets and videos to the portal. “We launched this in conjunction with our analyst summit in September,” Kim explains, “which gave us a very good adoption rate. ServicePlus helped us design the portal, populate content, choose images and more. They also trained us on how to maintain it.”

Bi-weekly and monthly reports on analyst interactions, research inclusions, performance of communications with analysts and more. “ServicePlus set up all our custom reports, and runs and delivers them to us regularly,” Kim says. “It allows us to keep up with more than just our coverage, and report on other key metrics to demonstrate value.” 

“In order to do all this, ServicePlus has been instrumental!” Kim says. 

Results

“ServicePlus freed us up to do all the other things we needed to do for our day jobs!” Kim says. “We really made some inroads in AR this past year, by being able to recover our time so we could address strategic priorities. With ServicePlus, we were also able to do extra campaigns and activities that provided value internally.”

In particular, Teradata’s AR team has been pleased to:

    • Reach more analysts, through its newsletter and portal. Kim notes that these communications tools are especially valuable in providing information to a much broader set of analysts (especially those that the company isn’t able to brief, one-on-one). “Using ServicePlus significantly reduced the time to launch our newsletter and portal,” Kim says. “And we’ve gotten great feedback from analysts about these communications!”
    • Augment its team resources and know-how. “This has been a very cost-effective way to extend our AR team,” Kim says. “We’re working with people who know the ARchitect software, know the templates, know the portal and know communications best practices. They’re seeing what others are doing, and we benefit from all that!” By offloading operational and tactical activities to ServicePlus, the Teradata AR team is also better able to support internal requests.
    • Better demonstrate AR results. “Everything that’s involved in reporting and metrics and providing value back to the organization… We couldn’t have done that without ServicePlus!” Kim says. “It gave us a tremendous ability to move forward with the program this past year.”
    • Increase AR’s value and visibility internally. “By doing so much more, we’ve gotten increased visibility for AR within our organization,” Kim says. “And there’s been greater understanding of what AR is all about and why it’s so critical. People are seeing too – AR isn’t just about where your dot is on a graph; there’s so much more involved than that!” 

“Being able to extend what we do by using ServicePlus is fantastic!” Kim continues. “We started small and basic, and moved into more advanced activities. It’s been a great journey, and we hope to continue to expand the relationship and our use of ARchitect moving forward!”