Earnings is a critical period that requires a lot of work and preparation, and that doesn’t end when your earnings call does. The period after earnings is essential for communicating with the investment community, engaging investors, and furthering the success of your IR strategies. To perfect your post-earnings, here are the key ways you can set your investor relations team up for continued success.
Assess the Preparedness of Your Senior Leadership Team
After your earnings call, it’s vital to assess how prepared your senior leadership team was. In determining this, consider if they anticipated the right questions, if they could respond confidently, and if team members handled the questions they were best suited for. After reviewing your team’s performance, take note of the questions and topics that were trouble areas and plan how you can better prepare so that your team is aligned and able to be even more effective next post-earnings.
Share Relevant Content and Key Take-Aways
It’s imperative to share all relevant information promptly after your earnings event to maximize impact. This means distributing it to all of those who attended as well as sharing it on your investor relations website. The essential content consists of the recorded version of your earnings call, a transcript of the call, the slides, and an email with key takeaways sent to covering analysts and critical shareholders. Ultimately, this allows those who attended the call to absorb your message in their own time and pick up on the information they may have missed during the live event.
Additionally, using social media to spread the word about post-earnings results should not be overlooked. Recent research shows that three-quarters of FTSE 100-listed companies are now using social media for results reporting, and have a combined following of more than 37 million people.
Connect with Your Key Stakeholders
To be proactive, check-in with analysts immediately after the call to make sure they understand what your company is trying to deliver. Gathering feedback after the event, both internally and externally, will help you remove the guesswork by uncovering vulnerabilities, and better prepare for your next earnings call. In collecting feedback, you’re likely to have a more direct relationship with the sell-side, resulting in a straightforward exchange and a better understanding of their opinion of your earnings event.
Alternatively, it’s less likely that you have that same relationship with buy-side investors, which means you should consider putting in a bit more effort and seeking additional means to capture their feedback. To help stream your outreach efforts, Matt Van Tassel, Manager of Global Disclosure Services at Business Wire advises IR professionals to “build a roadmap for all of your stakeholders, share it with them, and don’t forget to test for success.”
Measure the Overall Success of Your Earnings Event
To gauge your earnings event’s success and determine if the right messages made it into the market and analyst coverage, conduct a sentiment survey. A sentiment survey serves as a quick pulse check with top shareholders, to get feedback on how much the message resonated and if it was effectively communicated. Additionally, If your investor community is active on social media, monitor investor relations social channels to assess response and tone after the call.
Leverage Your Collected Insights
The last step in perfecting your post-earnings process is to start preparing your company for the next one. You can begin this process by collecting data regarding the number of attendees, the number of questions, the types of questions, coverage after the event, results from the sentiment survey, and dialing in on missteps and areas for improvement. By diving deep into this data, you can ensure that you prepare and execute earnings calls continually better than that past.
As you start to prepare for your next earnings, download our Ultimate Earnings Guide, which will provide you with ten detailed steps to make sure that your next earnings event is your most effective one yet. Download here.
