Imagine a job where good work is rarely praised and people can only complain that you somehow messed up?
Imagine a job where you had to spend all your time ensuring industry analysts (whom are all, of course, very nice humble people) had their facts straight and you hoped liked your firm enough to say good things?
Imagine a job where you had to constantly be nice to your executives, to make sure they showed up on time to all these analyst meetings, and didn't say anything stupid?
Welcome to the world of vendor analyst relations (or simply known as "AR" in the biz). If I do some really bad things in my life (which, of course, I haven't yet, but may do so in the future), I will be brought back to this planet as an "AR pro". This is a no-win profession - you have to be nice to absolutely everyone and pray you won't get fired because your firm somehow didn't make it far enough onto the right hand-side of some analyst's chart.
So we asked one truly unsung hero from this much-beleaguered profession to share with us how they actually succeed (avoid messing up). Bring forth Wendy Shlensky, one of Infosys' lead AR folks, who somehow found a few stolen moments away from her 120-hour a week job to share her secrets with us. Normally, at this stage, I introduce some hobby or past-time to add some color to our guest, but I've never assumed the poor girl has time to do anything beyond staring aghast at her email inbox...
Wendy's World
I am an AR (Industry Analyst Relations) professional. I succeed and fail based on my ability to maintain and leverage relationships between many different parties –
Posted in: Outsourcing Advisors, Outsourcing Heros