The earnings process offers a key opportunity to communicate your strategic vision and long-term story to the market. Outside of special events, such as investor days and AGMs, it provides the biggest platform for companies to communicate directly with investors, analysts and other stakeholders.
But it’s becoming harder than ever to cut through with your message. Investment professionals cover an increasingly large number of stocks, squeezing the time they have to hone in on individual stories. Meanwhile, macroeconomic and geopolitical shifts dominate the business headlines.
To effectively tell their story, companies need to take a strategic approach to earnings communications. In this playbook, written in association with Visible Alpha, we explore the different ways companies can build a clear and compelling message that resonates with the buy side and the sell side.
This report includes advice on developing consistent communications across multiple quarters, preparing management for Q&A, the importance of consensus estimates data and best practices for post-event engagement. Throughout, you’ll find commentary from experienced IR professionals about how they approach these challenges at their own company.
Furthermore, the report contains the findings from a poll of IR professionals about how they approach different aspects of earnings, such as anticipating questions, managing consensus estimates and use of AI.
Key findings
- IROs say macroeconomic uncertainty and investor receptiveness to their sector are the top challenges to telling their story in 2024.
- The most popular way to prepare for Q&A is reading analyst notes, while a quarter of respondents use feedback or perception surveys.
- When managing consensus estimates data, the top challenge for IROs is standardizing across different analyst models.
- The most critical success metric for earnings is senior management preparedness, followed by quality of analyst notes.
- Just over one in 10 IROs (11 percent) are currently using AI tools to support the earnings process, while 44 percent are considering doing so.
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