Practical Part-Time AR: Episode 03

If you recall from last time, technically this week I’m supposed to talk about inquiries. Hope you’re okay with a pivot – I saw a LinkedIn post the other day that kicked off a really interesting conversation and wanted to weigh in while it was still timely.

A former Gartner analyst, Keith Andes, made the provocative point that the term “Analyst Relations” has always felt weird to him.

Taken literally, it does sound odd — even transactional in a way that undersells the real value of the work.

What Keith was really getting at is this: AR isn’t fundamentally about relationships or self promotion. At its best, it’s a market intelligence function — an upstream, strategic input that shapes product direction, go-to-market strategy, and category positioning.

I couldn’t agree more.

And once you accept that premise, a much more interesting set of questions emerges — especially for pre-IPO SaaS companies.

In large public companies with dedicated AR teams, mislabeling the function may have real consequences. But in earlier-stage SaaS companies, AR is almost always a part-time responsibility, owned by someone who already has a full plate.

Ironically, that makes startups less susceptible to the transactional framing — but more vulnerable to a different problem: misaligned ownership.

If AR is fundamentally about intelligence that informs multiple functions, then:

To answer that, it helps to first zoom out and look at AR ownership as something that matures over time.

Your AR program shouldn’t look the same at $1M ARR as it does at $50M ARR. The ownership, investment level, and goals need to evolve alongside your selling motion.

Based on my own experience — and a helpful framework from Andreessen Horowitz¹ — here’s how AR ownership typically shifts in a pre-IPO SaaS company:

When you’re in the Reactive Stage, selling mostly to other startups or early adopters (see Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm”), a formal AR program can be a distraction. Most likely, your customers aren’t making decisions based on analyst reports yet. Here, the CEO just needs to handle any inbound requests that happen to come in.

As you move into the Proactive Stage and start targeting traditional enterprise verticals, it’s a good time to reevaluate, as those buyers are highly likely to consult analysts before making software investments. The CEO and a supporting team member from GTM or product should start briefing key analysts, but you might not need subscriptions to the big firms yet. The goal is simple: get on their radar. Educate them on the problem you solve and why your approach is different.

Once you have real traction with enterprise buyers, you’ve entered what Andreessen Horowitz calls the Strategic Stage, where it starts to make sense to invest in a commercial relationship. This is where you shift from a one-way monologue to a two-way dialogue, both sharing and extracting intel with/from the analysts. Product marketing can be a great fit to lead this phase, with the CEO and CMO still involved in key moments.

Finally, if the company scales to multiple major product lines and international markets, you may need a dedicated team. This team would manage a portfolio of analyst relationships and act as the central nervous system for market intelligence, feeding insights back into the product, marketing, and sales engines.

The question of where AR should report is central to getting it right. If we accept the premise that AR is a strategic intelligence function, ownership becomes a critical decision.

According to Shashi Bellamkonda³, the most common model is reporting to the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). This makes sense because it aligns AR with corporate communications and other GTM activities_³.

However, other compelling arguments can be made:

The department itself matters less than the function’s influence and access. A successful AR program, regardless of where it sits on the org chart, needs these things to thrive³:

The worst outcome is siloing AR in a way that reduces it to a purely promotional function— a fate that prevents it from ever delivering true strategic value.

For a pre-IPO company just starting out, the question of how to staff AR is just as important as where it lives.

Building an in-house AR team from scratch is slow and expensive. Hiring an experienced AR owner (whether part time or full time) can take 6–12 months, and during that time you may miss multiple research cycles entirely⁴. For companies new to AR, there’s also a steep learning curve around how to engage analysts productively — what to ask, how to brief, and how to turn conversations into actionable insight.

Because of that, many teams turn to agencies as a way to accelerate early progress. Agencies can bring pattern recognition, executional rigor, and familiarity with analyst firms without the ramp-up time of a full-time hire.

That said, outsourcing AR isn’t without risk.

If you’re not careful, agency-led programs can unintentionally reinforce the very problem Keith alluded to earlier: turning AR into something transactional. When success is measured by briefings delivered, reports tracked, or check-the-box activities completed, the function can drift away from strategic intelligence and back toward optics and promotion.

Agencies are most effective when there is a strong internal counterpart who:

Without that internal anchor, even a well-run agency program can devolve into activity without impact.

As AR maturity increases, many pre-IPO companies land on a hybrid model: an in-house AR leader who owns strategy and internal alignment, supported by an agency for execution and scale.

The bottom line: outsourcing AR doesn’t absolve you of thinking strategically about it. Whether in-house or external, the function only delivers value when it’s treated as a source of intelligence — not just a service to be managed.

Whether we call it Analyst Relations, Market Intelligence, or something else entirely, the label is just the starting point to a broader conversation about what the function actually does — and designing ownership around that reality.

There’s no single “correct” place for AR to live on the org chart. The companies that get this right don’t obsess over titles or reporting lines. They align ownership, investment, and cadence to the role AR is meant to play at their stage of growth — and they evolve it deliberately as the business changes.

I’m guessing most of you will be offline for the holidays, so I’ll be pausing the newsletter for the next couple of weeks. See you after the New Year for Episode 4 on planning productive inquiries!

Did You Find This Helpful? I’d love to hear what you thought. Reply to this email with your feedback, and let me know what you’d like to see in future episodes (I read every one!)

Till next time,

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[1] a16z. (2025, June 19). Why You Should Engage With Analysts—and How to Do It Right. Andreessen Horowitz.

[2] Cervin Ventures. (2024, May 23 ). 5 Insights Startup CEOs Should Know About Analyst Relations.

[3] Bellamkonda, S. (2025 ). Where should Analyst Relations sit in your org structure? [LinkedIn post].

[4] Starsight. (2025, January 30 ). Should analyst relations always be in-house?.

[5] Andes, K. (2025 ). As a Gartner analyst, "Analyst Relations" always felt weird to me. [LinkedIn post].