Regular readers of this blog know that I’m critical of marketing groups that don’t pull their weight. I thought it would be interesting to share a recent, real-life experience that, for me, illustrates exactly how absurd some marketing organizations can get.
First some background. As some of you know, I currently get the bulk of my income selling ideas for articles and then writing them. Like every writer, I often work with public relations (PR) groups to arrange interviews with executives and experts. Most of the time, PR folk are helpful because they know that getting their company’s gurus quoted in a business-oriented publication is good publicity for their firm, which translates into higher sales and bigger profits.
Because I often write about high tech issues, I frequently need to interview analysts who cover a particular technology area. And there’s where I sometimes run into problems.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with Gartner, but it’s the world’s largest high tech market research and analysis organization. They sell high-priced market research subscription services, along with special reports and consulting… to the tune of over a billion dollars a year.
Gartner’s ability to make money depends entirely on their analysts being perceived as experts in their respective areas of interest. The primary way to establish this all-important credibility is through getting quoted as an expert in as many publications as possible. (At some of Gartner’s competitors, in fact, analysts are compensated for getting quoted.) It’s therefore vastly in Gartner’s interest to have a PR group that helps writers contact and interview Gartner analysts.
Nevertheless, in the decade or more that I’ve been selling my writing for a living, I have never had Gartner’s PR group get me in touch with an analyst in time to meet a deadline. Not once. In every case, I’ve had to do a last-minute end-run around Gartner PR and contact the analyst on my own.
When writers call Gartner’s main number and ask to speak to an analyst, they’re routed to PR’s voice mail and given a recorded promise of a response within a few days. The half-dozen times that I’ve complied with these instructions, it’s been like dropping a message into a black hole. No response; nada. The other option is email, which most of the time has the same result.
For example, I tried emailing Gartner PR a couple of weeks ago. In this case, I was writing a story for a publication whose readership consists entirely of executives in the electronics industry. These are the very people to whom Gartner sells its reports and the story was about a subject that Gartner had recently issued a press release. Under the circumstances, you’d think that Gartner PR would jump at the opportunity, because this was a case where the publicity could not help but make it easier for Gartner’s reps to sell Gartner’s services.
This time, my email did get a response from a Gartner PR person, who sent me another copy of the press release. However, when I asked to speak with an analyst, I received no response for a few days, then, long after my deadline had passed, a message reading:
Regrettably, I have not been able to find analyst [sic] available for comment on this occasion.. I apologise for any inconvenience. Kindest regards…
What’s absurd about this response is that Gartner employs hundreds of analysts, four of whom were on the record being quoted on this very subject. Furthermore, getting an analyst to talk to reporters is about as difficult as getting a toddler to eat cake for breakfast. Gartner’s analysts know that getting quoted is their bread and butter; only Gartner PR seems to have missed this segment of the “how the analyst business works” meeting.
By the time I received the email from Gartner PR, I had not only already managed to locate and interview two Gartner analysts, but had found the time to write and file the article. Since I found the situation mildly irritating, I sent the PR contact a complaint to the effect that I’ve learned not to depend upon Gartner PR. While I sent the complaint privately to the PR contact, it apparently made its way up the management chain, because it resulted (several days later) in a response from Gartner’s head of communications, which read (in part):
Our global PR team handles more 800 [sic] incoming media requests each month. We endeavor to assist all journalists, but on occasion we can not meet deadlines due to increased workload or limited analyst availability.
He obviously expected me to think something like “Gosh, I’m just one of 800 journalists and those poor folk at Gartner are swamped.” Unfortunately, I know how to do simple mathematics, so I wasn’t particularly impressed. Here’s why:
While 800 requests a month sounds like a lot, Gartner has 3800 employees. If only a quarter of them are analysts (and I suspect the percentage is actually far higher), reporters are therefore requesting less than one interview, per analyst, per month — hardly a burdensome workload on the analysts’ busy schedules.
As for the “increased workload” on the PR group, assuming 22 eight-hour workdays in a month, that’s roughly one request from a reporter every thirteen minutes. A reasonably competent receptionist could manage that level of traffic — and still have time to do the odd typing job. I’ll bet, though, that Gartner’s “global” PR staff consists of dozens of “professionals.” What in God’s name are they actually doing?
But here’s the real irony: this is a company that purports to be qualified to give useful advice to the ultra-brainy billionaires at Microsoft and Dell, but which apparently can’t get its own marketing act together.
According to its most recent financial report, Gartner’s Selling, General and Administrative (SGA) cost consumes fully 40 percent of their gross revenue. That’s a high overhead compared with that of Gartner’s competitors, which means that Gartner is wasting money, big time, somewhere in the sales and marketing function. And based upon what I know about Gartner’s sales pros (who are among the best in the business), it ain’t the feet on the street that’s burning through the cash. Could it be the PR function? Hard to tell, but based upon what I’ve seen it isn’t adding much value to Gartner’s bottom line.
At root, Gartner’s problem is the same I see in company after company — an utter misconception of marketing’s proper role in the corporation. If Gartner PR realized that its primary job is to generate qualified leads (and was compensated for doing so) there would be no question about helping writers get in touch with analysts.
Rather than giving writers the runaround — and then quoting statistics that prove their own ineptitude — Gartner PR would be actively pitching stories, trying to get even more analysts quoted in even more publications. Instead, they’ve become yet another “sales prevention team” that’s actively making it more difficult for Gartner’s reps to sell.
So Gartner PR has my vote for the world’s most clueless marketing group. But I’m sure that there are worse examples out there. Anyone want to share?
