IR Playbook
How to craft your corporate story with integrated market analytics & CRM tools
IROs sit at a unique crossroads within their organization, a link between its internal, strategic managers and the outside world. Maintaining and nurturing the dialogue between management and investors, whether current or potential, is the core of an IRO’s responsibilities.
Like any dialogue or relationship, it works best when it works in both directions, with IROs simultaneously delivering insights into their company’s workings, achievements and future plans, while feeding back to the C-suite investors’ views and movements.
How investors view your peers and competitors is only becoming more crucial to the success of an IR program. In the modern age, having a full suite of market analytics is an invaluable tool to maintain the dialogue between internal and external parties. It is also of central importance to be able to tailor your analysis to your sector, region or whatever might be in focus for your organization at the time.
In this report, we will delve into the role that integrated market analytics – and a dedicated customer relationship management (CRM) system that can directly integrate with them – can play in transforming your investor relations program and feeding through to help craft your corporate story.
How day-to-day IR workflow benefits from having market analytics and a comprehensive CRM system in place
A checklist for how to link your shareholder surveillance solutions to IR activities
How to use peer analysis to inform your own corporate storytelling
Workflows for feeding market intelligence into different IR material, including earnings, annual reports and roadshows
A case study of a leading IR professional who uses peer analysis to help craft his shareholder communications.
To work as an IR professional is to balance many plates – and then be adept at juggling them throughout the day. Whether you are being called upon to communicate externally or internally, that juggling act may require being an expert in stakeholder management, accounting, storytelling or pure logistics planning.
Efficiency is the name of the game and anything that allows IROs to uncover more opportunities, have better conversations and ultimately do their jobs more quickly – while still maintaining impeccable quality – is of the utmost importance.
Surveilling the market is a key part of the job: whether that involves knowing exactly what the buy side thinks about you or your competitors, or seeking wider data points to inform that reading, is one end of the equation. Taking that raw data and turning it into a multi-faceted, rich corporate story is the other.
This explains why many IROs are increasingly searching for solutions to knit their daily workflows together, using technology to integrate their investor targeting efforts with actionable market intelligence to drive impact and amplify their corporate narrative at meetings and events – the most crucial touchstones investor relations teams have with their investor audiences.
Indeed, recent IR Magazine research – published in the IR Benchmarking research report in January 2023 – found that the single-most important factor for teams in measuring the quality of their company’s investor relations is their success in investor meetings and events, more crucial even than investor feedback.
More than eight in 10 IROs (84 percent) ranked meetings, roadshows and events as ‘very important’, giving a rating of 8+ out of 10. More than a third of IR professionals viewed them as extremely important, giving a perfect 10 score.
The right tools for the jobTo serve IROs best at this crucial juncture, it’s important therefore to have access to the very highest-quality news the market has to offer. This is easier said than done, however, and extracting actionable insights from across the exceptionally noisy spectrum of market communicators is a time-consuming and complicated activity.
It’s a big world out there, and filtering through earnings transcripts, news events or analyst models can take time without the right tools. What’s more, having that data alone may not be enough when you are handling a large volume of shareholders or prospective holders. Being able to match the relevant information with the right customer using integrated CRM solutions alongside critical market data, research and analytics is a valuable aspect of this process, and one IROs increasingly want their technology providers to help them with.
Working with a data partner that can help pare down that huge volume of information into distilled, relevant intelligence tailored to your company is one way to do this and is increasingly the preferred option for IR teams that are time-pressed and under pressure to do more with ever-fewer resources.
Below, we provide a checklist of workflows to illustrate how you might integrate investor research and targeting with market trends and analysis to enhance your everyday IR activities.
Search for investors with a focus on your company’s line of business: Find any pools of capital that may align with your company’s geography, market cap or sub-sector. Add target investors to your CRM to include in marketing campaigns and track ongoing interactions or meetings.
Identify investors with an investment style in concert with your business plans: Tailor your investor targets to your business model. Find long-only funds to support your long-term vision or find those with a more cyclical focus.
Evaluate ownership vs peers’ ownership: Analyze your holdings against peer benchmarks and identify any differences. Doing this with as much detail as possible, whether on an entity structure basis or with granular ownership metrics, is crucial.
Segment investors or potential investors by geography: Look at your sorted list of investor targets and divide them according to their location, giving you an easy way to judge the cities on which to center your travel plans.
Maintain a detailed record of interactions and meeting plans: Keep any notes in your CRM up to date with details of your latest exchanges with investors, to make sure you are fully briefed.
Produce tear-sheets on meetings for C-level prep: Reduce this information to make easy-to-digest summaries in order to have management fully briefed before investor meetings.
Stay attuned to news and trends within your peer group and industry: Keep on top of the latest events across companies that share your sector, industry or cap size, and see how the market is reacting.
Prepare internal and external reporting: Pull out trends and market forces for consumption by your colleagues or external stakeholders.
Prepare C-suite for earnings call and possible questions: Make sure management is as clued up as you are by feeding back that intelligence in a quick-to-read format.
Storytelling is at the core of an IRO’s wider function. Making an impact on the overarching strategy of your company is a case of aligning your intelligence gathering with the organization’s own outlook, opportunities and challenges, ranging from assessing the latest financials through to judging the impact of a new product launch.
Today, active asset managers are having to make their decisions more quickly than ever to compete with an increasingly automated marketplace. Analysts and portfolio managers are inundated with a wealth of information – on nearly the same scale as IROs – so cutting through the noise and giving them exactly the information they need is critical when it comes to standing out against your competitors.
At the same time, turning that information into a compelling story for investors – and other stakeholders – is as much an art
as a science. Composing a compelling narrative is key: like any good story, it needs a throughline and intentional arc, punctuated by key events like earnings, conferences, product launches and other corporate announcements.
The key to controlling your organization’s narrative is answering questions you want investors and analysts to ask before they even think to ask them. Other important elements are building trust, highlighting strengths or points of differentiation and focusing their attention on your story alone.
To do that, you need to take the market intelligence you collect and feed it through into your IR materials and events. Below, we give a few examples of just how you can achieve this.
‘Deep market analysis is a critical portion of what we’re doing in our day-to-day workflow and a lot of what we’re thinking about.
‘One question we want to answer is: who are the right investors to be talking to? Because we’re a digital infrastructure provider, all things AI are hugely interesting for our investors, so lots of them want to meet our IR team and our executives. A big part of what we do is trying to allocate our time – and our management team’s time – as best we can. Our CRM tools and databases are part of a filtering process to determine how we’re going to do that.
‘Of course, we can’t decide who’s going to buy and sell our stock, but we can determine how we’re going to allocate our executives’ time when it comes to interacting with investors. We are a resource-constrained team: where our management team has only finite interactions with investors, we have to be very targeted and pinpoint how we’re going to maximize the value of our time.
It’s really important to create mechanisms to be able to take that feedback loop from investors, and then translate it back into how you’re talking to them
‘At our conference at the end of September, we used our CRM tool to sort through inquiries we had had from funds, encouraging those we had not had a lot of contact with to have an introductory conversation with the IR team, rather than putting them right through to the CEO. We also used it to log specific meeting notes and track any messages we sent to sell-side brokers.
‘We then bring these notes through to inform our whole preparation process when it comes to earnings. When we’re thinking about developing Q&A, we’ll look at the top 10 questions we’ve been getting from investors over the last three months. For example, AI has been an issue for one of our largest investors, which has asked about it repeatedly. In our most recent earnings call, we were more forward-looking on the topic, and got this investor on a call the next day with our CFO.
'It’s really important to create mechanisms to be able to take that feedback loop from investors, and then translate it back into how you’re talking to them. We run a market intelligence report every single quarter – after 13Fs are filed – to understand our relative weighting versus our peers. That means when we’re going in to talk to investors we can have a proactive conversation – and it means I can keep our team informed. My CFO in particular loves to poke our analysts to get them to justify their reasoning.
‘Every investor has a view, particularly those already invested in us. If we can understand that view, then craft our messaging to either reinforce or counter it, it’s going to be very powerful.
‘If you don’t already have a CRM tool, I would advise you to get one as soon as you can, and to start leveraging your data on a regular cadence and inputting all your meeting information into it.’
