It has never paid my bills, in that I've never worked for an analyst firm.

My bills have been paid by working for vendors, where I have seen how sales and marketing use their reports in action. I have seen the amount of effort engineering and product management put in to try to present the best possible vision of their product and its future potential to these analysts. (I've never been personally directly involved in any of those activities though, I've just observed them from the margins.)

But, it isn't like the vendors have a huge amount of choice – if you refuse to engage with the analysts and utilise their reports in your sales cycle, what happens when your competitors do?