Last year we started to survey HP customers to find out what influenced their decision to put an IT vendor on the shortlist for products or services. We felt that, even with smaller businesses, the decision about the short list was different from the final decision to go with one vendor – and the obvious is that if you don’t make the short list, you won’t make the final cut.

Since this blog is for the industry analyst community, here is what is important to you. Analyst conversations and analyst reports each played a statistically significant, but different, role in helping IT managers decide which vendors to include on their shortlist.

More of our customers read analyst reports than had subscriptions to analyst services, so it appears that the move toward opening access to the reports is paying off. It also appears that talking to analysts at “events,” and not just formal inquiries, also played a large role.

Few customers were involved with mega-deals – the majority were involved with purchases up to $250k – but the smaller buys happened several times a year. All told, the average sized deal that analysts had a role in was $2.3 million.

Interestingly, when asked how analysts influenced the decision, 45% said they provided new or additional information, while 35% used analysts to justify or validate the choice already made.

Finally, there was little difference between customer behavior in EMEA versus the US, for either SMB or Enterprise customers, but all favored “local” analysts. For us, this validates analyst firms’ decisions to place analysts outside of the firms’ home countries.

The future? We’re not about to give away state secrets, but a hint of which additional influence factor we’re looking at this year is the forum we’re using for talking about this.