This commentary is primarily about Gartner Invest, not Gartner as a whole. Invest is essentially a glorified sales team layered on top of the mainline research. It got big enough to where it should've been behaving as a "grown-up" business unit, and it stagnated enough to where leaders finally started asking those existential questions about where the uncertain adolescence was heading.
- In trying to follow the broader corporate strategy, Invest traps itself in a cycle of over-hiring for its salesforce. By over-hiring, it reduces territories to laughable sizes, which sets up AE churn. By that AE churn, it prevents itself from realizing sustained and sustainable growth momentum. 40+ salespeople to cover a stagnating North American investor end-market is at least 10 too many. With that many people, yeah, you’re going to get a growth number, but your net figure will stay flattish. Don't even get me started on per-AE productivity. Thus the hamster wheel turns.
- In startling contrast to the over-investment in the salesforce is a longstanding refusal/inability to invest in the product. The idea of a ~50mm business investing ZERO in product is somehow, remarkably, true. Product development seemed limited to varieating pricing schemas that sliced-and-diced the same existing deliverables into ever-more confusing permutations. The product sheet, such as it was, was a complete joke. They couldn’t make it more confusing if they tried. Why is crap like AMR and Burton still on there? Why would anyone think that clients understand what that means? Your salespeople don’t even know what it means. But I’m digressing here. The point is that rules of gravity will catch up with a business that throws all its dollars into building a salesforce but invests zero into its product. It shows. And let's be honest, this is what happens when salespeople run a business. How different would the business look if had spent say, 10% of that salesforce overhiring budget into productizing a new Invest-specific deliverable? How many glass ceilings at the sub-60k accounts would that have broken?
- Invest’s dilapidated client servicing apparatus. Whether half that team is brain dead or whether their morale is totally drained, I couldn't tell you. But these guys were set up to fail from the start. The way they measure client managers is totally disconnected from the way the business actually runs. But beyond that, to show you how far the structural dissonance goes, Invest’s CLIENT managers never meet their CLIENTS. I’ve never seen a client-facing organization sequester its client managers into some forgotten broom closet like they did. Ultimately this structural failure results in account executives servicing clients, which suppresses growth numbers, because they’re not out selling. Which leads to overhiring AEs to find growth, which leads to more churn. And thus the hamster wheel turns.
- The one thing differentiating Invest from the rest of Gartner are its “Invest analysts”. It was clear for awhile that something was off. Half the team seemed checked out. The other half was washed up or shouldn't have been hired. Cliff Noting the research or earnings numbers was never the point. We didn't see enough actionable analysis. On the other hand, the salesforce became spectacularly incurious. For the new reps, that was simply the culture they entered, it was unfortunately all they knew. The problems fed each other. Thus the hamster wheel turns. The saddest thing is that there is 100% a need for Invest analysts. Because you can’t win buy-side clients on process alone. You win with differentiated alpha-driving content, bottom line.
