Gartner Magic Quadrant inclusion: a positioning case study

Enterprise buyers lower their risk by choosing vendors analysts have already validated, and LiveTiles had no analyst coverage. IT buyers could not find the company in the research they used to build shortlists, so deals stalled in procurement while competitors closed with their Gartner placement on the table.

The deeper problem: Gartner scores completeness of vision and ability to execute, and LiveTiles, built through acquisitions, could not state one vision its own teams agreed on. Each region pitched a different company.

What I did

I ran inclusion as a 12 to 16 month positioning campaign. The groundwork was the portfolio consolidation and repositioning to Enterprise Intranet for Microsoft 365, which gave Gartner a company it could place.

I decided against handing the work to an analyst relations agency, because our problem was substance, not process. Instead I worked with external consultants, former Gartner analysts, who told us plainly what would move a score and what would not. I briefed analysts between evaluation cycles so their read on LiveTiles formed before scoring began, gathered enterprise references across industries and regions, wrote every briefing document myself, and coached the executive team until Gartner heard the same story in every conversation. Keeping four functions on one narrative for a year was stakeholder work as much as positioning, held together by a shared message map.

One rule held throughout: we never bent the product strategy to fit the scoring criteria. We showed how the strategy we already had matched what the market valued.

The results

LiveTiles earned its first Gartner Magic Quadrant inclusion. Pipeline grew 207% the following fiscal year as enterprise deals stopped stalling on the credibility question, and cycles got shorter because a checkmark now did the work that used to take weeks of proving we were legitimate.

The lasting result was the machinery. The positioning framework, the reference list, and the executive briefing discipline stayed in use long after the inclusion, and the same method delivered a second Magic Quadrant inclusion later in my career, at Omnia. Two from one playbook is the strongest evidence I have that it repeats. Today I would add continuous competitive and analyst intelligence with AI, tracking how analysts describe the category between cycles instead of sampling it right before a briefing. On attribution, a year of pipeline growth has many parents. What I can point to cleanly is where deals stopped dying. After inclusion, the credibility objection mostly disappeared from enterprise cycles.