Everything IROs Need To Know About Conference Season

As seasons change many in the investor relations community are gearing up for conference season. 

We sat down with one of Irwin’s Account Managers, Sarah Carmo, to learn more about how Irwin is helping prepare busy IROs for conference season. She describes the techniques and strategies Investor Relations Officers and other IR professionals are using to save time and effort on tasks such as investor targeting, benchmarking, communication, and follow-up.

How Are Investor Relations Professionals Preparing for Conference Season?

At certain times of the year, many companies rely heavily on conferences to ramp up their marketing initiatives. This is where companies will ramp up their marketing and outreach. A lot of them will try to reach out to new investors and existing investors and continue conversations that they've had previously. It's a great way for them to get their story out, and share any new projects and milestones that might be coming up for the company. 

Conference season usually entails scheduling one-on-one meetings and prepping conference materials like itineraries. That's where Irwin comes into play; our team and our software help them prepare for these conferences by targeting investors, pulling research and ownership data, and building out their conference itineraries.

What Do IR Professionals Underestimate About Conference Season?

I think people underestimate the amount of preparation required for conferences. It can take several weeks to schedule meetings. You also need to build out your itinerary and have the proper research in place.

This is where our itinerary builder can save a lot of time. A great thing about the itinerary builder is that you get to schedule all of your meetings. You also get tear sheets of the respective institutions and the individuals you will be meeting from those institutions. So that helps prepare the information you need for your management team when they're on the road.

How Do IROs Find Investors to Speak With at Conferences? And Is There a Way to Make Booking Investor Meetings Easier?

For my clients, I suggest using our targeting functionality to supplement booking one-on-ones. Whether you’re attending or exhibiting at a conference, using Irwin to target the city, state, or province you're in allows you to maximize your travel and marketing efforts to further drive your narrative. 

Some other investor targeting tools are our Money Flows feature, which lets you zoom into specific regions and hone into those smaller cities that you haven't thought of before, especially when planning a roadshow. You can also use the peer ownership matrix to see which institutions are holding your peers but are not holding you, and whether or not those institutions are in the conference locale.

We also suggest using Irwin IQ to help you identify investors who have interacted with your website but are not yet present in your IRM or holdings. After your event, you can also monitor which of your target investors have visited your website or viewed certain materials so you can tailor your outreach strategically.

See also: How To Enhance Your Investor Targeting Efforts

What Best Practices Do You Recommend for IROs Wanting to Make the Most of Their Time at a Conference?

I would say pull a tear sheet of target people or institutions in advance, and be sure you understand the scope of their investments, their investment style, and determine if there's a match. I recommend using Irwin Assistant Summaries to summarize all the meetings that have been logged overtime and highlight what key trends and themes you should be prepared to discuss. These summaries will also be available on your tear sheets for you to easily share with management.

You should go through your IRM and see if you have met with these investors in the past. What were they interested in before? See if there are any commonalities with your story in how they invest. For example, if you’re focused on ESG investors, pinpoint if they have a history of investing in ESG or have ESG funds.

You can supplement your one-on-one schedule by creating a target list of investors and reaching out to those people before the conference and seeing if they want to take a meeting.  

How Can Irwin Users Get a Leg Up on Conference Season?

One way is going through the IRM — understand who you've met with in the past, who's been interested in your story, and who will be attending the conference. 

There’s also value in understanding market trends and leveraging research reports. We recommend going through your industry research reports, analyst reports, and leveraging transcripts. Irwin's FactSet integration is a strategic solution that connects the issuer directly with the investment community, allowing issuers to better understand what the street is concerned about. You can further identify some key themes before going into conference season through leveraging research, estimates, transcripts, and more granular financial data. With the Irwin + FactSet integration, Irwin users can also broadcast their events directly to the FactSet investor audience, allowing investors and analysts to engage with the issuer directly.

You also want to understand any movements within your stock, which can be done with Irwin’s charting feature. This gives you insight on the movement of stockholders, historical ownership data, and price and volume comparisons.

Another suggestion I offer my clients is to refresh your story for investors. Highlight project milestones, or if you've had a very successful earnings period, you can work with your account manager to build an email campaign. We can develop pitches to help you start owning your story. Clients also benefit from Irwin’s built-in meeting Scheduler, which streamlines investor meeting setup by sharing your availability, and automatically generates an activity in your IRM for each booked meeting.  

Our clients also use Irwin Assistant to upload itineraries. Our research team helps pull together a list of investors based on the Fit Score on conference attendee lists, which helps streamline the process of 1:1 outreach. Many clients also use Irwin Assistant for AI summaries to save time by summarizing key themes and discussion points using data from their previous interactions and conversations.

Pamela Solly, Vice President of Investor Relations at Vista Gold, describes how she uses Irwin for investor outreach:

“I use Irwin’s database extensively, and it’s a very important factor for us. Whether I’m running targeting exercises in preparation for a conference, sending targeted email campaigns, or finding the appropriate contacts within an organization.”

Learn more about how Vista Gold is using Irwin to save time on investor targeting and email campaigns.

How is Irwin’s Account Management Team Helping Clients Prepare for Conference Season? Can You Give Some Examples of Work You’re Doing to Help Out?

One way we help our clients is by uploading their itineraries. We review conference attendee lists, select the best suggested investors, and help build target lists. 

Another thing that we've been helping out with is assisting with the preparation and strategy of email campaigns, more specifically, coming up with a series of drip campaigns. We assist with email pitch development. These campaigns are not only useful for conference planning but also for roadshow development. If you are a current Irwin + FactSet user, your account manager can pull further insights from transcripts highlighting key trends, and pulling consensus and overall estimates data.

About Sarah Carmo

Sarah has extensive experience working with publicly traded companies. Prior to Irwin she worked at NATIONAL Capital Market where she managed a variety of client's investor relations programs in sectors such as cannabis, technology and mining. Sarah is based on the West Coast and is an avid traveller. She’s lived in four cities and visited over 15 countries in the past five years.