I have had this conversation before (and have blogged about it with Crowdsourcing business analyst …) where there is lots of time and effort (person years?) devoted to scheduling one-on-one meetings between analyst firms and corporate executives. I may be repeating my earlier post but the problem persists and I see an obvious easier way to solve this.
Auction off 1 on 1 time slots
By doing this the company puts the burden on the analyst community by giving every firm some amount of “analyst buck”s (A$) and then auction off executive meeting slots. In this way the crowd of analysts would determine who best to meet with whom (putting crowdsourcing to work).
Consider today’s solution:
- Send out a list of topics to be discussed at the meeting,
- Have the analyst firm select their top 3 or 5 topics, and
- Have analyst relation’s sift the requests and executive availability to schedule the meetings.
For analyst events with 100s of analyst firms, 20 or more executives, and 10 or more time slots, the scheduling activity can become quite complex and time consuming.
I understand a corporation’s need to make the most effective use of analysts and executive management time, but what better way to make this determination than to let the (analyst) market decide.
How an executive 1 on 1 auction could work
The way I see it is to hold some sort of dutch or japanese auction (see wikipedia auction) where all the analyst firm representatives attended a webex session and bid for 1-1 time slots with various executives. In this fashion the company could have the whole schedule laid out in a single day with the only effort involved in identifying executives, time slots and supplying A$s to analyst firms.
It doesn’t even need to be that sophisticated and potentially could be done on eBay with real money supplied by the company (useable only for bidding in executive time slot auctions) and donated to charity when the process is finished. There are any number of ways to do this on the quick and cheap. However, using eBay may be a bit too public but doing this over a conference call with webex would probably suffice just as well and could be totally private.
Of course with this approach, the company may find that their are some executives that are in higher demand than others. If such is the case, perhaps a secondary auction could be supplied with more time slots. Ditto for executives that have time slots that are not in demand – they could be released from providing time for 1 on 1 meetings.
In my prior post I mentioned the option that maybe the corporation might want more control over who meets who. In that case allocating some A$s to the corporate executives (or A/R as their proxy) to use to augment analyst firm bids might do the trick. Of course providing those firms more A$s would also give them preferential access. Obviously, this wouldn’t provide as much absolute control as spending person years of effort doing 1 on 1 scheduling but it would provide a quick and relatively easy solution to the problem from both the analyst firm as well as analyst relations.
But how much to grant to each analyst firm?
The critical question is the amount of A$’s to provide each firm. This might take some thought but there is an easy solution. Just use last years analyst spend as the amount of A$s to provide the firm. Another option is to provide some base level of analyst bucks to any firm invited to attend and then add more for the prior year spend.
Possibly, a less appealing approach (to me at least) is to give each analyst firm an amount proportional to their annual revenue regardless of company spending with the firm. But perhaps some combination of the above, say
1/3 base amount for any invitee + 1/3 proportional to annual spend +1/3 proportional to annual firm revenue = A$s
would work.
In my previous post I suggested so many A$s per analyst. As such, bigger firms with more analysts would get more than firms with less analysts. But I feel the formula described above makes more sense to me.
Information provided to facilitate the 1 on 1’s auction
In order for the auction to work well, analyst firms would need to know more information about the executive whose time is being auctioned off. But aside from that just a schedule of the time slots available would allow the auction to work. On the other hand, some idea of the company’s org chart and where the executive fit in would be very useful to facilitate the auction.
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That’s it, pretty simple, set up a conference call, send out executive information and org chart, allocate analyst bucks and let the bidding begin.
Auctioning off Lot-132: 30 minutes of Ray Lucchesi’s time …, let the bidding begin.
Comments?