What a Best-in-Class Analyst Relations Program Actually Does

The analysts who brief your prospects are also evaluating your company. Whether your AR program is ready for that conversation is a strategic choice, not a communications one.

Most marketing organizations treat analyst relations the way they treat their LinkedIn page: important in theory, underfunded in practice, measured by presence rather than impact. A briefing gets scheduled, a slide deck gets sent, and someone in communications marks the quarter complete.

That is not what Erin Singleton has been doing for 25 years, including her time as Adobe's global head of industry analyst relations (AR). And it is not how Melody Brue, VP and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, experiences the vendors who do it well.

The upcoming episode of Talking Headless brings both of them together. That pairing matters. You rarely get the vendor-side strategist and the analyst in the same room describing what the relationship actually looks like from both directions. The conversation should surface something most marketing leaders never see: what a high-performing AR program actually does, and where the commercial leverage comes from.

The Function Most CMOs Misunderstand

Industry analyst relations sits in an uncomfortable organizational position. It often reports into marketing or communications, but its highest-value outputs feed sales, product, and executive strategy. The AR team briefs analysts so those analysts brief buyers. The feedback that comes back from analysts is the closest thing most companies have to unfiltered market intelligence. Neither of those things sounds like a communications task.

Erin Singleton's mandate at Adobe captures it directly: accelerate the business through a best-in-class AR program focused on driving deals, advancing market leadership, and informing business strategy. Three objectives. Only one of them, market leadership, even sounds like marketing. The other two are commercial and operational.

The reason this matters is the position analysts occupy in the B2B buying process. Analysts at firms covering your category are not just producing research. They take hundreds of inquiry calls a year from enterprise buyers evaluating software. When a VP of Marketing at a Fortune 500 company is shortlisting customer experience platforms, there is a real chance she has talked to an analyst in the last 90 days. What that analyst said about your company is almost certainly more influential than anything your own marketing produced.

That is not a hypothetical. AR professionals have documented cases where a single analyst referral closed a six-figure deal. And Melody Brue sits on the analyst side of exactly those conversations. Her coverage at Moor Insights and Strategy spans Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zoom. The typical Fortune 500 company spends over $40 million a year on the collaboration, communication, and customer experience software stack she covers. The buyers calling her for advice are allocating real budget.

What the Analyst Expects from the Relationship

Melody Brue came to analysis from operating. She held CMO roles at venture-backed companies before making the shift. That background shapes how she approaches coverage: every brief is built around the decision a CIO or CMO must actually make. She has no patience for vendor narratives that don't connect to buyer reality.

That is the filter your AR program has to pass. Analysts like Brue are not waiting to be impressed by product announcements. They are trying to understand whether your roadmap addresses real enterprise problems, whether your customers are succeeding, and whether your positioning holds up against the competitive alternatives their clients are also evaluating. When Adobe briefed her on CX Enterprise — the agentic AI orchestration platform launched at Adobe Summit in April 2026 — her published research examined it through an operator lens: what does this actually mean for a CIO or CMO making a real procurement decision?

High-performing AR programs understand this. They don't brief analysts on what the company wants analysts to say. They share evidence: customer outcomes with specific metrics, product roadmap tied to market problems, competitive positioning backed by data rather than adjectives. The best briefings become two-way strategy sessions. The analyst's questions reveal what buyers are worried about. That intelligence, routed back to product and go-to-market teams, is worth more than almost any research subscription a company buys.

Where Most AR Programs Break Down

The structural failure in most AR programs is treating briefings as output rather than input. A team measures how many briefings it conducts, how many analyst mentions it earns, and whether the company placed well in the major vendor evaluations. Those are lagging indicators of awareness, not leading indicators of revenue.

The programs that create commercial leverage work differently. They tier their analyst relationships based on actual buyer influence, not firm prestige. They track whether analysts are recommending the company in private advisory calls, not just citing it in published research. They instrument the sales pipeline to surface when analyst interactions preceded a deal. And they treat the feedback from analyst inquiries as strategic input that belongs in product and executive conversations, not just in the AR team's files.

Erin Singleton's 25-year tenure in the discipline, and her time anchoring Adobe's program through multiple platform transitions, reflects exactly this kind of institutional commitment. Adobe's category has expanded dramatically over that period, from creative software to digital experience to agentic AI orchestration. The analyst landscape shifted with it. Firms that once covered design tools now publish on enterprise AI platforms and customer data infrastructure. Managing analyst relationships across that kind of category evolution requires a program that is genuinely integrated with the business, not positioned on its periphery.

The Independent Analyst Is a Different Problem

The analyst landscape has also fragmented. The major firms, Gartner, Forrester, IDC, still dominate enterprise procurement influence. But independent analysts and boutique firms have built substantial followings. Melody Brue at Moor Insights and Strategy publishes research, appears in enterprise media, and has an active presence across B2B technology coverage. Analysts like her operate with fewer institutional constraints and often more direct access to buyer conversations.

For an AR program, this means the strategy that worked a decade ago, focused almost entirely on the big three firms, is no longer sufficient. The buyer researching your category may read a major analyst evaluation and also read a Moor Insights brief published the same week. Both shape perception. Both show up in sales conversations. The program that ignores the second tier is leaving influence on the table.

There is also an emerging pressure from AI discovery. As buyers use AI-powered research tools more frequently, the analyst content that gets surfaced in those queries matters. Published research, cited evidence, and third-party expert coverage feed the training and grounding layers that underpin AI search responses. An AR program that creates visible, substantive analyst coverage is also, indirectly, building the documented credibility that AI systems retrieve when buyers ask questions about your category.

What the Conversation on May 27 Should Reveal

Erin Singleton and Melody Brue together give you something most marketing content on analyst relations cannot. Singleton knows exactly what it takes to build and sustain a program at Adobe's scale, across categories that have transformed multiple times. Brue knows exactly what the other side of that relationship looks like, including what separates the vendors she takes seriously from the ones she politely deprioritizes.

The questions worth bringing to that conversation: How does an analyst know when a vendor's AR team is genuinely adding value versus managing appearances? What does a briefing look like that actually changes how an analyst covers a company? How does an operator-turned-analyst like Brue evaluate AR programs differently than a career analyst might? And how has the rise of agentic AI in Adobe's own portfolio changed what analysts need to understand about the company?

These are not abstract questions about communications strategy. They are questions about whether your company controls its own perception in the rooms where buyers make decisions — or whether it is simply hoping for the best.