When Should a B2B SaaS Company Start Working With Analysts?

When Should a B2B SaaS Company Start Working With Analysts?

When enterprise buyers start asking which grid or wave you appear in, and not before. Analyst relations is a long, slow programme with a real cost in executive time. If your deals close without a procurement committee, that time is better spent elsewhere.

The reason this gets decided badly is that nobody reads the published process. Both Forrester and G2 publish detailed methodology documents, and almost every mistake we see companies make is answered somewhere in them.

So here is a practical framework, built from what those firms actually publish about how they work.

What Is Analyst Relations, Concretely?

It is the work of getting independent evaluators to describe your product accurately. That splits into two quite different activities, and conflating them is the first error.

The first is traditional analyst relations: briefings and evaluations with firms like Forrester and Gartner, whose output is an analyst's written judgement. The second is review platform work, where the output is an aggregate of your customers' opinions, as on G2. The first is influenced by how you brief. The second is influenced by whether your customers write reviews.

They need different owners and different budgets. A marketing team that treats them as one programme usually does the easier one and calls it done.

How Long Does an Evaluation Actually Take?

Longer than a quarter. Forrester publishes its timeline: "The Forrester Wave process lasts approximately 18 weeks from kickoff to publication."

Inside that window, Forrester says participating vendors "have approximately four weeks from the kickoff date to return a questionnaire and provide names of reference customers," hold strategy briefings and product demonstrations "within the two weeks following the questionnaire due date," receive initial scores "approximately six to seven weeks after the questionnaire due date," and get a courtesy preview "approximately five days prior to publication."

Read that as a resourcing plan, not trivia. Four weeks to complete a detailed questionnaire and source reference customers is not something a marketing manager fits around their other work. If you cannot name the person who will own it, you are not ready to participate.

What Do Analysts Ask You For?

Three things, per Forrester's own description: "a questionnaire, a strategy and product demo session, and reference customers." Each has a trap.

The questionnaire is scored against criteria the analyst set, and Forrester says it intends those criteria "to be differentiating, rather than exhaustive." So the questionnaire is not asking you to list every feature. It is asking about the things that separate vendors, and answering the question you wish had been asked is a way to score badly.

The demo follows the criteria and may include scenarios developed by Forrester. Forrester notes it "captures detailed notes and may record the presentation," and that it "does not provide a copy of the recording to participating vendors." Treat the demo as an assessed exercise, not a sales call.

Why Are Reference Customers the Hard Part?

Because you cannot manage them, and attempting to is explicitly penalised. Forrester says it asks each vendor to provide reference customers, contacts each of them, and does not name them in the report unless agreed beforehand.

Then it draws a hard line: "While the Wave is in progress, Forrester views any vendor attempts to speak with references about their responses or ask them to revise their responses after a Wave interview as a violation of the Wave Methodology. This may result in the vendor forfeiting part or all of the vendor review process."

That is the single most important sentence in the document for anyone planning this work. You cannot coach references mid-evaluation. Which means the programme that determines your score is the one you ran over the previous two years, not the one you run during the window. Building that bench properly is the work we described in running a customer reference programme.

Can You Decline to Participate?

You can decline to engage, but you cannot decline to be evaluated. Forrester states it "reserves the right to evaluate products and services, regardless of vendor participation," and that it "will not consider vendor requests to remove themselves from a Forrester Wave." Where vendors do not participate, Forrester evaluates them under a separate vendor participation policy.

So the choice is not whether to appear. It is whether to appear with your input or without it. That reframes the cost question usefully: you are not buying a chance at a good outcome, you are reducing the risk of an uninformed one.

Forrester also reserves the right to remove a vendor it finds "incompatible with the Forrester Wave objectives," so participation is not unconditional in either direction.

What Happens If You Ship Something Big Mid-Evaluation?

It probably will not count, and this catches product-led companies constantly. Forrester's stated policy is that it "presents each company or product as it is publicly represented at the close of our data collection period," and that announcements shared after kickoff "may inform our evaluation or the advice that we provide to clients," but "we do not guarantee that we will represent any changes that take place after the kickoff." It adds plainly: "We do not reevaluate companies based on changes announced during the evaluation period."

There is one documented exception. If a vendor being evaluated completes a merger or acquisition with another evaluated vendor, and the public announcement falls inside the evaluation period but before the courtesy preview, Forrester notes it as a footnote on the graphic and in each written review.

The planning consequence is simple. If a major release is eight weeks out, either get it public before data collection closes or accept that this cycle evaluates the product you have today.

How Did the Forrester Wave Change Recently?

The graphic itself changed, and the change tells you what to optimise. Forrester documents that for Wave evaluations kicking off on or after 1 July 2024, the graphic features three categories: "Leader, Strong Performer, and Contender," which it says "better show our calls about where vendors sit in a market relative to their peers and align with our 3-point scoring rubric."

The more consequential change is what the axis measures. Forrester states that "Customer feedback will replace market presence on the graphic," explaining that this "reflects Forrester's strong belief in the value of customer obsession," and that "vendors with superior customer feedback will receive a more prominent marker on the graphic."

That is a meaningful shift for smaller vendors. Market presence rewarded size, which a challenger cannot manufacture. Customer feedback rewards whether your existing customers are happy, which a challenger can genuinely win on.

How Do Review Platforms Differ From Analyst Firms?

They score your customers, not your briefing. G2's published methodology says a software product's G2 Score is calculated from two components, Satisfaction and Market Presence, using "a proprietary algorithm to rank products based on reviews gathered from the user community as well as data aggregated from online sources and social networks."

The Satisfaction inputs are specific. G2 lists user-focused scores from its review questions on Ease of Use, Meets Requirements and Quality of Support as high importance; admin-focused scores on Ease of Admin, Ease of Setup and Ease of Doing Business With as medium; and general satisfaction scores on Likelihood to Recommend and Direction of Product as low.

Three weighting factors are worth knowing. Review volume is weighted for statistical significance. Recency matters, because "older reviews are weighted less." And quality matters: G2 says more thoroughly completed reviews are weighted more heavily, with "each review assigned a readability score using the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease scale."

Can You Game a Review Platform?

Not safely, and G2 documents the boundary. On review sourcing, G2 says reviews from current users or more experienced users get increased weight, and "reviews solicited without incentive are also weighted more heavily."

Then the rule: "Per the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines, vendors should not segment customers to solicit only positive reviews. Any reviews obtained via segmentation violate G2's Community Guidelines and are subject to removal."

So the compliant strategy is to ask broadly and consistently, not selectively. G2 is also candid about what reviews are worth, noting they are "subjective user experiences, which may be incomplete" and that "reviews do not constitute expert opinions based on objective criteria." That honesty is worth passing on internally when someone treats a grid position as a verdict. The practical mechanics of asking well are in our review site strategy.

What Is the Minimum Sensible Programme?

Four things, in this order. Build a reference bench of at least ten customers who would speak to an analyst, and refresh it continuously rather than during an evaluation. Run a steady, unsegmented review request into your renewal and support flows, so recency keeps working for you. Write one accurate, differentiating product narrative and keep it current, because it is the raw material for every questionnaire. And nominate one owner with enough seniority to get four weeks of engineering and executive time when the kickoff lands.

Notice that three of the four are internal and can be started today with no analyst contact at all. That is the useful insight. Analyst relations looks like an external programme and is mostly an internal readiness programme.

And keep the sequencing honest. If your buyers are not asking about grids, do the positioning work first, because a clear position makes every questionnaire easier and a muddled one cannot be rescued by a good briefing. That is the argument we made in getting B2B SaaS positioning right, and it applies doubly when someone else is writing the summary of what you do.

If you want the website and content side of this built so that analysts and buyers find a coherent story, that is our lane. You can reach us at phoenix.studio.