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Every IR team runs some version of the same exercise before earnings. Get the executives in a room, list every hard question the analysts might ask, write an answer to each one, call it prep. It feels rigorous. What it actually does is teach your executives to sit still until someone hands them a question.
Francesca DeMartino, Chief Investor Relations Officer at Pfizer, stopped running that exercise about a decade ago. She came up through corporate communications at J&J and Medtronic before moving into IR, and that's where the instinct started: the difference between a proactive communicator and a reactive one. A Q&A document is organized question by question. Her team replaced it with something organized by topic instead, and the swap changes what your executives are doing the moment they open their mouths.
Listen to Francesca on the Winning IR podcast
Why the Q&A format works against you
DeMartino's objection isn't to the content of a Q&A document. It's to the shape of it. "Question, answer, question, answer, question, answer," as she describes it — a document built entirely around anticipating what you'll be asked, and then handing the executive the matching response.
The problem is what that structure teaches, repeated over dozens of questions: wait for the prompt, retrieve the response. An executive drilled that way can still get caught flat-footed, because the document never trained them to lead, only to answer.
What replaces the Q&A document: the message map
Pfizer's team didn't stop brainstorming hard questions. They changed where the thinking goes afterward. Instead of writing an answer to each question, the team writes the strongest statement on each topic, organized by brand or subject, refreshed inter-quarter and sharpened again right before earnings. As DeMartino puts it, "your brain power goes to what are the topics that we're going to get asked," not towards guessing the exact phrasing of the question.
A topic-based map means the message survives no matter how the question actually gets worded on the call. A question-based map only survives if the analyst asks it the way you rehearsed.
The message map, in practice
DeMartino's own example makes the difference concrete. An analyst asks a commercial leader for a product's market share. Trained on a Q&A document, the answer is a number: "Oh, it's 85%, right? And you're done, and you move on." Trained on a message map, the executive opens instead with what she calls the elevator pitch — "a paragraph, a set of sentences that is how that brand performed in the quarter" — growth, competitive dynamics, why it's working, with the market share figure folded in as support rather than standing alone.
The question still gets answered. "It's not to avoid the question," as Mark Fasken, Winning IR host, summarized it back to her, "it's to direct the answer more to the place that you want to end up."
Why this doesn't read as evasive
The obvious worry is that this sounds like spin — an executive dodging behind a rehearsed message instead of answering what was asked. DeMartino's counter is that the rigor doesn't go away, it moves. Her team still has to know the number, the driver, the competitive read cold. What changes is which piece leads. Trained on a topic instead of a question, the same executive who used to hand over "85%" and stop now opens with the performance story the market actually needs to price the number correctly. As she puts it, plainly: "It's a conversation."
Why this episode is worth your time
Everything above is the what — why the message map replaces the Q&A document and how it changes what an executive says on the call. DeMartino's Winning IR episode is where she gets into the how: the tiered bench of spokespeople she's built to carry that message live and how she matches specific investor tiers to specific executives so the right person is already in the room before the topic comes up. That coordination is what makes the message map actually hold under real questioning, and it's best heard in her own words.
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