Talking Headless · Analyst Relations
One analyst has covered the same market for thirty-six years. The other built her company's analyst program in about one. Put them on the same stage and the same truth surfaces: the analyst is now an influencer, and the relationship only pays off when you treat it as a standing commitment, not an annual event.
The latest Talking Headless episode put two people on stage who see analyst relations (AR) from opposite sides of the briefing table. Delia Vulpe runs analyst relations at SBS, a fintech vendor, and came to AR after two decades in banking. Sheila McGee-Smith is the analyst on the receiving end of the pitch, founder and principal at McGee-Smith Analytics, covering customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), and artificial intelligence (AI) markets. One builds the relationship. The other decides whether it lands. Their advice pointed at the same handful of practices, and the reasons behind it are worth every marketing leader's attention.
Thirty-six years in one market is a moat that no model can copy
McGee-Smith opens her briefings by stating how long she has covered the contact center: thirty-six years. That number is not a vanity stat. It is the product itself. Her career ran through two years in the field, five years in market research at a telecom giant running customer focus groups across the country, then a decade co-authoring deep reports on a single topic, three to five months per report, and twenty-six years as an independent analyst since. The value that stacks up over that arc is a kind of memory the market cannot manufacture on demand.
She put the point sharply. She remembers the history of the business from before the internet, which means the record she carries was never fully indexed, scraped, or trained on. A large language model can summarize what has been published. It cannot tell you what a vendor promised in a keynote fifteen years ago and quietly walked back, or which executive has made this exact pivot before and how it went.
The history of this business, ChatGPT can't know, because I'm pre-internet. Sheila McGee-Smith, McGee-Smith Analytics
This is the part of analyst value that gets underpriced right now, precisely because AI tools look like they cover the same ground. They do not. The published surface of a market is available to everyone. The unpublished pattern memory, the thirty-year track record of who delivered and who did not, lives with the people who were in the room. That is the asset AR programs should be building relationships around, not the press-release summary any tool can now generate.
Experience shows up as probability, not opinion
The clearest demonstration of what longevity buys came when McGee-Smith described what she can do that a model cannot. A vendor announces a new leader or pivots into a new product area. The question every buyer actually has is whether it will work. She can answer that as a probability, because she has watched dozens of the same moves play out over decades. She pointed to a company that ran a hard leadership change and product pivot, executed it well, and got acquired by a major CRM vendor as a result. Recognizing that pattern early, before the outcome is obvious, is the analyst's edge.
A summary of public information will tell you what a company announced. It will not tell you whether the new executive is likely to succeed, or whether the firm pivoting into a category actually has the people to pull it off. That judgment comes from having seen the movie before, many times, with different casts. For a marketing leader, the takeaway is direct. When you brief an analyst with this depth, you are not buying coverage. You are buying a read on your own odds that no dashboard will give you.
There is a well-known moment McGee-Smith referenced that captures how much this is worth. At the start of the generative AI wave, a technologist posted publicly asking what the best way was to present his product to Sheila McGee-Smith specifically. People who understand the market know that getting the right long-tenured analyst to understand your story is a distinct and valuable outcome, worth asking about out loud.
Do the research before you pitch, or the analyst stops reading
That value has a matching obligation on the vendor side, and McGee-Smith was blunt about it. She gets pitches constantly, and the ones that come out of left field train her to stop opening AR outreach altogether. The fix is unglamorous and entirely within your control. Understand what the analyst has been writing about, know the path their coverage is on, and show how your solution fits that fabric before you reach out.
It's coming to me and understanding what I've been writing about, what that path is, and how your message or your solution fits into that fabric. Sheila McGee-Smith, McGee-Smith Analytics
Vulpe described the same move from the vendor side, and it was the moment both guests recognized each other's method. She reads an analyst's public calendar and speaking schedule to identify what they will be covering over the next six months. That is a trend signal in itself. She then finds the internal subject matter expert who fits and offers the analyst a story on the topic they are already researching. Proactive, specific, and useful to the analyst's own work. That is the outreach that earns a yes instead of the delete key.
If I'm looking at Sheila's calendar and I know that she's talking about this for the next six months, that's a trend for me. Delia Vulpe, SBS
Position yourself with intention before you position the company
Vulpe's instinct for positioning traces back to a business that did not work. Before AR, she founded ReputationID, built around personal brand and workplace reputation. The company failed, and she says so plainly. The lesson carried. Influence comes from doing and from deliberate positioning, not from asking permission. That is the same muscle AR demands. You build a reputation for the company the way you would build one for yourself, with intent behind every move.
Her internal playbook follows from this. She does not confine AR advocacy to marketing or the executive team. She builds relationships with the general managers of every product line, promotes their work, and acts as the advocate for both the analysts and the internal teams. Buy-in is easier when a former analyst sits in the C-suite, as it does at her company. When that ally is missing, the relationships you build across the product organization are what carry the program.
On AI, Vulpe is clear-eyed. About a year into AR, she frames it as a tool for removing the work nobody should be doing by hand. AR teams are chronically understaffed, and the workload has always been too much for one or two people. AI earns its place by automating the repetitive tasks and pulling the data that informs better decisions. That frees the hours for the part that cannot be automated, the analyst relationships themselves. Her question to the field was about speed of adoption, not whether to adopt.
Treat the relationship as ongoing, and respond fast when it counts
When Vulpe turned the question back on the host, the answer sharpened the whole theme. A strong AR relationship is continuous. It is not an analyst day followed by silence until next year. The second marker of a valuable AR contact is speed. Analysts field questions on subjects outside their daily coverage, and the AR person who can route them to the right subject matter expert within hours becomes the contact worth keeping. A dependable point of contact and regular communication beat the big set-piece event every time.
McGee-Smith added the analyst's version of proactive value. The AR person who stays aware of what the business is building, and who knows each analyst's actual skills, can suggest the right person for a project before anyone asks. A new product with a team behind it needs outside perspective. Knowing who to put on that call, and spending inquiry hours to start the conversation, is where AR stops being coordination and becomes strategy.
There will be no AI analysts, the way there will be no AI products
McGee-Smith closed with a warning about a market reflex. Vendor programs are rushing to add AI analysts, and she has sat in briefings with people carrying that title who could not connect AI to the vertical in question. AI expertise without domain expertise is not enough. The analyst who matters sits at the intersection of AI and a specific market, whether that is the contact center, mobility, or another vertical. AI is becoming a layer across every category rather than a category of its own. The same logic that says there will be no standalone AI products says there will be no standalone AI analysts. Everyone has to understand how AI reshapes the space they already cover.
Vulpe closed on the thread that ran through both conversations. Analysts are influencers. Their opinion moves market perception because of the expertise they have compounded over years, and that influence is exactly why AR is a strategic function and not a calendar chore. The thirty-six-year memory and the one-year-old program agreed on that without hesitation.
What to do Monday
Five moves for marketing and AR leaders, drawn straight from the episode:
- Rank your analysts by tenure, not just tier. Identify who has covered your category the longest. Those relationships give you a read on probability, whether a pivot or a new hire is likely to work, that no AI tool can produce. Protect and prioritize them.
- Audit your analyst calendars. Pull the public speaking schedules and recent coverage for your top ten analysts. Map what each will likely cover over the next six months, and match your subject matter experts to those topics before you pitch.
- Kill the once-a-year model. Replace the analyst-day-then-silence pattern with a standing cadence of contact. Decide now who owns each analyst relationship and how often they check in without a pitch attached.
- Build a fast-response bench. Keep a current map of internal experts so you can route an analyst's off-topic question to the right person within hours. Speed is a relationship asset.
- Send a real analyst bio into every briefing. Brief your executives on who is on the call, what that analyst covers, and why they matter, so the conversation targets the analyst's actual area of depth instead of the full portfolio.
Follow both guests on LinkedIn: Delia Vulpe and Sheila McGee-Smith. Their work is worth staying close to if analyst relations sits anywhere in your marketing strategy.
Watch this episode and the rest of the Talking Headless series on YouTube.
Works Cited
McGee-Smith, Sheila, and Delia Vulpe. Interview by Shashi Bellamkonda. Talking Headless, Playaz Productions Network, 2025.
McGee-Smith Analytics. McGee-Smith Analytics, mcgee-smith.com.