You may have noticed that I was, along with the other 1,100+ professionals at Forrester, out of the office this past week. We were all together in Boston talking about our success in 2010 (I can’t talk about that — you’ll have to wait for official results to be reported next week) and more importantly about Forrester’s Vision, Values, Strategies, and Tactics to help make our clients successful. We spent time both looking inward, thinking about how we think we can do better, and scanning the horizon by asking key clients who map themselves to each of our roles to talk about what they do every day and how they are recognized and rewarded within their own companies.

I left the meetings feeling jazzed that we were truly achieving success by putting our clients first and that we had a plan to extend and accelerate our ability to positively affect every leader and every decision. I also left the meetings with that tension all analysts get in their gut: What will this strategy look like in the future? How will our values change the market’s perception of Forrester? How will we be able to translate these intentions into actionable tactics to help each and every one of our clients? What better way to test the ideas than to ask you, dear readers, what you think; so, what do you think? Are we just drinking our own Kool-Aid? Or do we have the “five-hour energy” that every one of our clients hungers for to refine their strategies and accelerate their performance and success in the market? Please weigh in with your opinion of Forrester and our strategy — as well as your suggestions on how we can best help you to succeed — in the comments section.

Forrester defines its values and vision in terms of having the Courage and Integrity to deliver Quality Collaborations with our Clients to inspire leaders and guide great decisions, ensuring success in a complex world.

And for our Vendor Strategy team, we have set our objective to help our clients predict and quantify growth and disruption in the technology industry so that they can set long range plans for their companies that harness the new economics and changing buying behaviors made possible by technology (r)evolutions.

What does this mean for Forrester’s Vendor Strategy team members when we return to the office on Monday — and by implication for our clients?

1. We must redouble our commitment to understand our client’s PERSONALLY, in the context of their role, company, and market. What does this mean? We will be delivering relevant research and actionable consultations that focus on the market disruptions on the horizon and on how our clients can harness them to succeed (e.g., help Sales Enablement professionals build a quantifiable understanding of the relationships between products, buyers, and markets so that they can adapt repeatable, valued corporate messages uniquely for every opportunity).
2. We must improve our understanding not just of what makes our clients successful in their roles, but also of what makes their firms successful in their market. We must help those who read our research to be more successful in their role and career — earning faster promotions and bigger raises — and that must lead to earning profits, growing market share, and increasing market capitalization for their firms (e.g., help Technology Marketing professionals build the programs to tune messages that drive their company’s products to leadership positions in the mind of every identifiable buyer and user group).
3. We must hone our skills in predicting the future and exercise our integrity and courage to be equally open with our clients when we miss a forecast or prediction as when we are correct. More importantly, we will build the processes and capabilities to improve the accuracy and quantification of our forecasts. Our clients can expect to see more data about buyer and user appetites for their products and services across more markets and geographies — and more insightful analysis of what that appetite means for the business models and value drivers that our clients must invest in to succeed.

Does that work for you?