Everything IROs Need To Know About Conference Season

Everything IROs Need To Know About Conference Season
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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.

Tell us about what Conference Season is and how IROs prepare for it.

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 IROs underestimate about preparing for conference season?

I think people underestimate the amount of preparation required for conferences. It can take several weeks to get meetings scheduled. 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 out 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 who to talk to 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.

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. This all helps build that conversation piece with investors. 

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 data integration is a strategic tool to understand what analysts are saying so you can identify some of the key themes before going into conference season. 

You also want to understand any movements within your stock, which can be done with Irwin’s charting feature. 

Another suggestion I offer my clients is to refresh your story for investors. So 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. 

Our clients can also use Irwin assistant to upload itineraries. Our research team can help pull together a list of investors based on the Fit Score on conference attendee lists, which helps streamline the process of 1:1 outreach. 

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 out is by uploading their itineraries. We go through all these conference attendee lists, pick out 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 Research and Estimates subscriber, your account manager can also help sort those transcripts to highlight some key trends they're seeing.

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.

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