Leveraging the ISG Awareness Framework
Advisor Relations
Hello everyone, I hope the year continues to treat you and your company well.
I’m reaching out with another of my monthly notes to start a dialogue I hope will help you get the most out of ISG. The last topic centered around helping you understand how ISG’s CPQ process helps us build provider long-lists. Now, I’d like to walk you through using the ISG Awareness Framework to build an effective advisor engagement program.
Our Awareness Framework data is gathered by polling our global partners, directors, and principal consultants on approximately 100 service providers each year. The intent is to measure how well they both know and trust a service provider. Let’s first look at the components of the Awareness Framework.
The first two metrics are information-based:
- Awareness – the percentage of advisors who are familiar with the company but need more info to consider them for a deal.
- Understanding – how many advisors know the providers well and can identify appropriate deals for them
The second two metrics are relationship-based, and a little more abstract:
- Trust – the percentage of advisors who feel comfortable inviting the provider to a deal
- Advocacy – those advisors who proactively recommend a provider to their clients
Conventional wisdom may suggest that your goal with the framework is to raise your scores at each level. But the Awareness Framework can be much more than a simple benchmark of your progress towards educating and building relationships with ISG advisors.
Let’s think about it from the context of an advisor working on a deal—Once a long-list of 18-20 qualified providers is developed through the CPQ process, the ISG project team will use that data and their own knowledge and experience of providers to help the client create a more manageable short-list of around 6-8 providers. This is the moment where the Awareness Framework comes into play.
A 50 percent “understanding” rating in the framework translates to a 50 percent chance that the project director assigned to the project understands your capabilities. That makes for a good chance your firm’s name will get crossed off the list in about half of the deals for which you’re long-listed.
Now imagine the project director is an advocate, someone who indicate your firm as someone they would proactively recommend to a client. That gives you a much better chance for your firm to remain in the discussion.
So, how can you leverage the Awareness Framework data to create stronger trust and advocacy in the ISG advisor community? Here are a few things for you to consider when building a programmatic engagement program:
- Many providers are tempted to always have the highest title in the room, especially if that person is a partner. But the people who build lists with our clients are usually directors and principal consultants (possibly even consulting managers). Resist the temptation to always have the highest title on the call and focus your education program on the having those that are more likely to build consideration lists!
- You can leverage the Awareness Framework to use the right engagement types with the right advisors. For example:
- It is easier to create awareness and understanding with briefings, exclusive messages, and other education-type programs. Your CSR can target ISG advisors who are delivery-oriented but lack an understanding of your capabilities. Understanding can be built with targeted engagement.
- Remember this quote: “Trust is built on many small actions over time.” Ask your CSR to identify advisors who understand your capabilities but whose trust you haven’t yet earned. Then focus on those advisors in small groups across a longer time period, using more relationship-building techniques, like networking or sharing case studies; we know that advisors who engage with a provider using four or more different engagement techniques during the course of the year are twice as likely to recommend a provider to their clients.
- Finally, you should self-assess who your advocates are and include them on briefing calls (and get them to say something nice about the work you’ve done together). Their opinion matters and their words might help get someone who understands, but doesn’t yet feel comfortable inviting your firm to a deal, over the hump!
- NOTE: Your CSR will not tell you which advisors are at each level and will always mix in advisors from other groups so you can’t tell exactly which advisors are at which level. We do this to ensure our advisors will continue to participate in the Awareness Framework research (so they trust the Momentum team!).
After all of that, remember that the Awareness Framework is just that—a framework. The content that it contains is ultimately going to be up to your firm. So keep your focus on crafting messages that are memorable, articulate your differentiators, and add value to each discussion.
Once again, I encourage you to reach out to me directly if you have any questions or comments about our Awareness Framework, last month’s topic of CPQ, or Advisor Relations in general. I received a ton of feedback from my last letter and was grateful for all the conversations we were able to start, and I think we all benefit from keeping that dialogue going.
All the best,
Paul
