How analysts understand your company shapes how the market understands it.
The best analyst relationships help you understand the market as well as influence it.
Skymind Collective helps B2B technology companies turn
analyst relationships into better decisions and stronger market positions.
About Skymind
Analysts occupy a unique position in technology markets.
They speak with buyers, vendors, investors, product leaders, marketers, and executives. They see patterns long before most organizations do. They influence how markets understand categories, vendors, and emerging trends.
Done well, analyst relations gives companies an external perspective they cannot generate internally. It helps leadership understand how the market sees them today and where that perception is moving tomorrow — and it feeds that understanding back into the decisions that shape strategy, product, messaging, and positioning.
Done poorly, it becomes a calendar full of activity that generates little insight and even less influence.
The difference is rarely effort. More often, it's whether the program is designed to learn, influence, and adapt — or simply to execute.
What We Do
Most companies know they should engage analysts.
Fewer know whether those conversations are actually changing anything.
Briefings happen. Inquiries happen. Reports are tracked. But what changed? Did analysts leave with a clearer picture of the company? Did executives learn something they didn't know? Did the organization gain any ground in how its category or strategy is being understood?
Those are the questions that drive successful AR engagements and are also the hardest to answer from inside the organization.
For most companies, the gap between activity and outcome is a sign that the program was designed to create output. We help you make sure it's the right output, and that it brings intelligence back in.
You are not buying analyst relations.
You are buying better strategic conversations — with analysts who shape how your market thinks, and with executives who learn from what those analysts are seeing.
Skymind Collective helps B2B technology companies turn analyst relations into a source of market intelligence and market influence.
We build, repair, and guide AR programs that help companies understand how they are perceived, shape how they are positioned, and make better strategic decisions.
How We Help
Build an analyst relations program that your organization can own.
For companies building AR for the first time—or rebuilding a program that isn't delivering the value it should—we design the strategy, structure, and operating model that turns analyst relationships into a source of market understanding and stronger decisions.
The engagement includes a clear handoff. We help define the permanent AR role, support hiring, and leave behind a program your team can confidently run.
Senior analyst relations leadership without a full-time hire.
We provide the strategic guidance that growing organizations often need but aren't ready to hire for full time. That includes analyst strategy, executive preparation, support for major market moments, and helping leadership make better use of what analysts are seeing across the market.
Our role isn't to manage activity. It's to provide the strategic ownership that helps analyst relations create lasting value.
Who We Are
A vision driven by having been the analyst, the AR leader, and the internal stakeholder.
Skymind Collective is the brainchild of Joyce Tompsett. Joyce spent fifteen years as an industry analyst before moving into analyst relations and product marketing leadership. She received hundreds of briefings, evaluated vendors, wrote research, and advised enterprise buyers. She understands what analysts are trying to learn and not just what vendors want to say.
That perspective shapes how she prepares executives, develops messaging, builds analyst engagement strategies, and helps organizations turn analyst conversations into better decisions.
Inside organizations, she led analyst relations and product marketing at GitLab, Digital.ai, and Celigo, working alongside the teams responsible for turning market insight into product, messaging, and go-to-market decisions.
She has sat on every side of the analyst relationship. That changes what she can see.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Strategic AR in Practice
A Development Platform Enters the Security Market
GitLab became the first software development platform included in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing after a sustained analyst education strategy.
Situation
When Joyce joined GitLab in 2018, application security was not on the AR radar. A product marketing manager came to her with a question: could GitLab be considered for Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing — a category dominated entirely by purpose-built security vendors? No software development platform had ever been included. Forrester's initial read was that it wasn't possible. Gartner's was more open: "If anyone can do this, it's you, GitLab."
The Work
Working in close partnership with product marketing, Joyce led a sustained analyst education effort. It began with inquiry conversations with DevSecOps analysts to understand exactly what evidence would be required — not assumptions, but the specific criteria that would make inclusion credible. From there, she and the team built a presentation and demo program that translated GitLab's security capabilities into the language of the security market. The case was constructed over time, through relationship and inquiry, not a single briefing.
The Outcome
In 2020, GitLab appeared in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing — the first software development platform ever included. The placement gave GitLab a credible stake in the security market and signaled to enterprise buyers that its platform approach to DevSecOps was real. Other DevSecOps vendors subsequently pursued similar inclusions, and the MQ has since opened to that category of player.
This is what category influence looks like in practice. It required knowing how analysts think, what evidence moves them, and how to build a case over time — not how to schedule a briefing.
Analyst Credibility Held Through a Five-Company Merger
Digital.ai maintained analyst confidence throughout a five-company merger while simultaneously establishing leadership in an emerging market category.
Situation
Digital.ai was formed from the merger of five PE-owned companies, each operating in a different technology category. The analyst community was watching closely — for product fragmentation, messaging confusion, and strategic incoherence. Maintaining analyst credibility through that kind of disruption is genuinely hard. Most companies lose ground.
The Work
Joyce owned the timing and sequencing of all analyst engagement through the transition — tracking when major MQs and Waves were coming, what analysts were asking across each category, and when to put the right executives and subject matter experts in front of them. She worked across multiple technology areas simultaneously, ensuring each product storyline was coherent within the larger Digital.ai narrative. In parallel, she was helping analysts understand a new category the company was staking out: Value Stream Management.
The Outcome
Digital.ai maintained consistent leadership in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools throughout the merger period and beyond — a position the company had held for a decade. At the same time, Digital.ai was named a Leader in the inaugural Forrester Wave for Value Stream Management in July 2020, achieving the highest possible scores in 19 criteria, including product vision, execution roadmap, and predictive analytics.
Analyst credibility is hardest to protect at exactly the moments of greatest internal disruption. This outcome required someone who could hold the external narrative steady while the company was changing — and who understood which conversations needed to happen, in what order, and with what message.
A New Analyst Category Built from the Ground Up
Worked with analysts over time to help establish Value Stream Management as a recognized market category.
Situation
Value Stream Management did not exist as an analyst-recognized category when Digital.ai began pursuing it. The company had a strong point of view on where the enterprise software market was heading, but without formal analyst recognition, that point of view had limited reach — and limited credibility with buyers.
The Work
Joyce worked closely with the relevant Forrester analyst over an extended period to make the case for VSM as a distinct and evaluable market category. This was not a single briefing. It was sustained relationship and inquiry work — helping the analyst understand the underlying market dynamics, the emerging vendor landscape, and why the category warranted formal evaluation. Digital.ai was one of the first vendors engaged in shaping that process.
The Outcome
Forrester published its inaugural Wave for Value Stream Management in July 2020. Digital.ai was named a Leader, with the highest possible scores in 19 criteria. The category has since become a recognized segment of the enterprise software market, with multiple analysts now covering it as standard.
Category creation through analyst relations is one of the highest-leverage things AR can do — and one of the hardest to execute. It requires a long view, consistent relationships, and the ability to make a market argument credibly over time, without the validation of an existing framework to point to.
A Contrarian AI Position Becomes the Market Narrative
Helped position Celigo's "continuum of agency" framework so that analysts recognized it as a more credible view of agentic AI than prevailing competitor messaging.
Situation
In 2025, the iPaaS market was saturated with vendors claiming AI and agent-everywhere messaging. Celigo had a different view: that agentic AI is valuable in some contexts and counterproductive in others, and that customers needed a practical framework for thinking about when and how to use it. The question was whether a contrarian position would land with analysts — or be read as defensive messaging from a company falling behind.
The Work
Joyce led the analyst engagement around what became Celigo's "continuum of agency" framework — a spectrum from fully deterministic integration approaches to multi-agent orchestration, with clear guidance on when each made sense. The engagement began in September 2025, with structured briefings and inquiry conversations across multiple analyst firms. The goal was not just to explain the framework, but to test it — using analyst reaction as real-time intelligence about how the market was forming.
The Outcome
Analysts responded immediately and positively. The framework mapped more closely to actual market conditions than the all-AI messaging competitors were using. By January–February 2026, analysts were telling Celigo it was the first company to articulate this position clearly — and that competitors were beginning to adopt similar language. Celigo had moved from following the market narrative to leading it.
This is the feedback loop working as it should: analyst conversations generated real-time intelligence, that intelligence shaped positioning, and the result was a narrative that analysts recognized as more credible than the competition's. The company didn't just respond to the market — it influenced it.
We Start By Listening
Every engagement starts with understanding how your company currently engages with analysts and what value that engagement is producing.
We ask a lot of questions before we make any recommendations. We look at which analysts actually influence your buyers, how relationships are developing, what intelligence is coming back into the organization, and whether anyone is using it.
From there, we build what is missing.
Sometimes that means creating a program from scratch. Sometimes it means improving analyst strategy, executive engagement, or how market intelligence reaches the people making decisions.
The goal is always the same: a program that helps your organization understand the market more clearly and influence it more effectively.
When We're The Right Fit
We work with B2B technology companies that already have a point of view in the market and want analyst relations to become a strategic asset rather than a collection of activities.
That often includes companies building AR for the first time, organizations whose programs are active but underperforming, teams between full-time AR leaders, or businesses integrating newly acquired product lines and categories.
We are generally most valuable where analyst relations needs strategic ownership, not simply execution.
If you're not sure whether you're ready for AR yet, that's a good question to bring. Sometimes the right answer is to wait.
Insights
Briefings, Inquiries, and AdvisorySeptember 21, 2026
Why Analysts Matter More in the Age of AIAugust 19, 2026
The Economics of InquiryAugust 6, 2026
Let's Talk
Not every conversation leads to an engagement.
We're comfortable with that.
Sometimes the outcome is a project. Sometimes it's gaining clarity that you don't need one yet.
If you're investing in analyst relations and want to understand what it's actually changing, we'd welcome a conversation.
Contact us using the form below, or email us directly.
