The Analyst Relations Professional Who Pays Attention Changes the Stock Price
A few months ago I wrote about how the most successful software company initial public offerings — Snowflake, UiPath, CrowdStrike — were not just built on great technology. They were built on mature analyst relations functions that engineered third-party trust 24 months before the listing bell rang. That piece was written for chief executives and chief financial officers who needed to understand why analyst relations is not a marketing cost. It is valuation insurance.
But there is a follow-on question that nobody is asking. If analyst relations can move a stock price, what does that mean for the analyst relations professional doing the work every day?
It means the information flowing through your conversations with analysts is worth far more than a briefing debrief document that three people read.
I Learned This in Customer Service
Early in my career I worked in customer service. Every day I was on calls hearing what customers actually thought — what confused them, what was broken, what they wished existed that we had not built yet.
I started walking over to the product managers to share what I was hearing. Not in reports. Just conversations. Here is what three customers said this week. The product managers started looking forward to those visits. Eventually they invited me into planning meetings. Not because of my title. Because I was bringing them a view of the world they could not see from inside the building.
The analyst relations professional has that same access as a well-connected customer service rep — except the person on the other side of the conversation has spoken to your competitors, your buyers, the buyers who chose someone else, and the institutional investors who will decide your valuation.
That is not just useful. In the right hands, that is strategic.
What the Savvy Ones Already Do
Three years into this role, with 25 years of technology marketing behind me, I interact with a lot of analyst relations professionals — formally through my work at Info-Tech Research Group, and informally through genuine curiosity about their journeys on the Talking Headless show.
The savvy ones earn real credibility inside their organisations because of one habit: they treat what they hear from analysts as intelligence worth sharing. They build influence not by asking for a bigger budget, but by walking over to the product manager with something they did not know.
How is this analyst describing our space? Are they using our language or a competitor’s framing?
Which competitors does the analyst reference without being asked? That tells you where the real competition lives.
What problems do analysts say buyers keep raising? That signal arrives here before it shows up anywhere else.
Where is the analyst’s research agenda moving? That is a window into where enterprise spend is heading.
What Virve Said on the Talking Headless Show
On the February episode of Talking Headless, Virve Virtanen — who runs analyst relations and user groups at Mitel — described how she thinks about the flow of information in her role. She said she has direct contact and a channel to customers, hears directly from the market, and relays that to analysts. And then the reverse — what she hears from analysts, she brings back to the business.
Outward and inward. Most analyst relations professionals do the outward part well. The inward part is where the opportunity sits, and where most of the value is being left on the table.
From the Show
“I run analyst relations like a military operation. There is a method in this madness. A constant drumbeat — newsletters, webinars, a personal note just checking in. I want to make it easy for analysts to keep up with the company.”
— Virve Virtanen, VP Analyst Relations, Mitel
“When vendors do not welcome constructive criticism, they end up running with blinders on. That is not helpful to the vendor. They lose sight of how the market actually sees them.”
— Thomas Wieberneit, Principal Analyst, aheadCRM
That discipline — the constant drumbeat Virve described — applied to capturing what comes back in those conversations is what converts the analyst relations function from communications to intelligence.
The Connection to Valuation
In The Invisible Underwriter I wrote about how Snowflake’s analyst relations team worked with research firms long before the initial public offering to ensure their product was seen as bridging multiple categories, unlocking a total addressable market narrative worth billions in valuation. That did not happen because of a clever briefing deck. It happened because someone was listening carefully to how analysts were framing the market, and then systematically shaping the company’s position within that framing.
That is competitive intelligence. That is market intelligence. And it was sitting inside the analyst relations function the whole time.
The Question Worth Asking
If an institutional investor called an analyst today, what would they hear about your company? The analyst relations professional who has been paying attention already knows the answer. They heard it in a briefing last month. They heard it in an inquiry call last week. The question is whether that answer has reached anyone who can do something about it.
The Function That Earns a Seat at the Strategy Table
Analyst relations is not a vending machine. You cannot insert a budget and get trust out. As Virve put it at the close of the show — it is relationships, proof points, and grown-up storytelling.
The grown-up part of that storytelling is knowing what the market is telling you — and making sure that story reaches the people inside the company who are building the next chapter. That is how the analyst relations professional moves from the communications table to the strategy table.
Not by asking for a bigger budget. By walking over to the product manager with something they did not know.
You can watch the full February conversation with Virve and Thomas, and catch up on all previous Talking Headless episodes, on the Talking Headless YouTube playlist.
What is your organisation doing with what your analyst relations team is hearing?
Bellamkonda, Shashi. “The Invisible Underwriter: Why the Most Successful SaaS IPOs Are Engineered by Analyst Relations.” Shashi.co, December 2025. shashi.co
Virtanen, Virve. Guest, Talking Headless Show, February 2026. Talking Headless YouTube Playlist
Wieberneit, Thomas. Guest, Talking Headless Show, February 2026.
Disclaimer: This blog reflects my personal views only. This content does not represent the views of my employer, Info-Tech Research Group.