How to Create Great Roadshow Briefing Notes for Your Executives

EY reports that 82% of institutional investors credit NDRs with providing a key non-financial factor in their buying decisions. 

And this is confirmed by a 2019 study that found that, out of the 12 most common investor relation channels, IROs at 610 publicly traded companies ranked NDRs as the second most important behind the earnings conference call.  

Martin Luenendonk of Cleverism talks about the planning that goes into an NDR: 

“It costs money – a lot of it – to organise a roadshow. However, if you plan it well, and you execute it properly, the returns are likely to be more than the cost incurred in putting it into motion.”

This article will tell you everything you need to know about crafting the perfect briefing notes for an event roadshow — notes which will provide solid building blocks for your non-deal roadshow. 

What should your roadshow briefing notes contain?

When creating your briefing notes for executives before an NDR, you have to consider the most important factors that will help to rebalance the knowledge between them and the investors. Shareholders will come to the meeting well-prepared and fully knowledgeable about your company, its performance, its industry and peers, whereas executives cannot possibly research all the investors they will meet in such detail. This is where the briefing notes come into play. Here’s what should be included.

Itinerary

Your presenters need to know what the day holds for them. An itinerary allows them to better prepare for the event and create notes ahead of time, helping them get ready for meetings with investors they remember from previous roadshows, for example. 

An itinerary also makes it easy to see when speakers are available to take phone calls and perform other work duties if they need to. 

Information on the audience

Each meeting during the all-day events should have its own briefing sheet, detailing the institutional shareholders or retail investors that will be present. It should note whether they are key investors or not and whether they are likely to be friendly or adversarial.

This helps the executive presenting the roadshow to familiarise themselves with their audience and tailor their presentation to the people in front of them. It’s certainly a time-consuming task, but one which is at the core of a successful presentation. One way to speed it up is by outsourcing your shareholder analysis but also to make sure that all your investors’ contact profiles and interactions with them are stored in a regularly updated CRM. Within this section, you should include:

• Investor profile – note their total assets under management (AuM), the positions in the company of the individuals attending and their peers, the portfolio’s sectoral exposure in your industry, and similar details
• Investor moves – list the portfolio’s recent moves within your industry and other relevant sectors
• Portfolio performance details – relevant details about the performance of the portfolios AuM over the last twelve months (LTM), what its current cash position is and any other associated data
• Individuals’ details – CEOs need to know who they are talking to and many like to have a photograph of the individual on their briefing page so that they can easily identify them in a larger group.
  
  

You should also include details such as whether they are key investors or not, and whether they are likely to be friendly or adversarial. Preparing the presenters means that there are no surprises throughout the event. 

Meeting history

An easily digestible meeting history in the briefing notes can help in two main ways:

• It offers a rundown of frequently asked questions from previous investor roadshows and meetings, letting the presenter know which topics often arise and allowing them to formulate answers in advance.
• It can provide information on the topics that each individual investor has brought up previously. This allows you to tailor the presentation to their concerns and to concentrate on reassuring them on the matters that mean the most to them.
• It serves as a basis for future briefing notes. Remember that notes taken during a meeting provide the content of the next briefing notes for a future meeting with the same person or institution.  

Using a tool like IR.Manager allows you to report back on investor engagement performance following roadshows using intuitive dashboards, which help you plan ahead for the next roadshow. 

Goals of the event

You need to ascertain the goals of your event in the early stages of planning. The presentation must reflect these goals at all times, always concentrating on the value that the shareholders will receive by attending. Whether you are looking to build trust, celebrate excellent performance, communicate your ESG credentials or anything else, these aims inform how you plan the roadshow. 

Including the goals in your briefing notes maintains the focus of the presenter and reminds them to steer all conversation to what your organisation wants to achieve. 

An event without focus can seem like a waste of time for attendees because it appears to have no purpose behind it. Staying on message carries a momentum that sweeps the investors along with it and that is helped by a handy reminder on the briefing notes.

Main theme

Connected to the goals of the event is the main theme. It is what brings the various moving parts of the roadshow together, giving them coherence and a story. Presenting a roadshow to stakeholders is very much a storytelling task and having a common theme on which to hang the various aspects of the presentation helps with that. 

Once again, keep the main theme on the briefing notes to ensure that your executives remain focused on the theme for the entirety of the event. 

Company positioning and unique selling points

Investors can research all the dry data and facts about your organisation that there is to find, but the NDR is your chance to express the emotion and the excitement behind the business to your investors and potential shareholders. How you position the company can make the difference between people making or not making investments in the future.  

Dedicate a section of your briefing notes to stating succinct but effective reasons why your organisation is unique, why people should invest in it, why current shareholders should hold their stock and why they should increase their holding.

Competition data

Besides selling your organisation on emotion, your executive team should be able to back up that promotional content with data on how the organisation stacks up against its competition in the sector. 

These details are important to have at hand when engaging with an audience. So much of what people think about companies is based on perception and not necessarily on cold, hard facts. If you can show that your product outperforms a competitor, even if their marketing makes them seem more successful and popular than the rest of the market, you can win over the audience. 

When you use our Post-Listing Advisory service, we perform an annual independent perception analysis as the cornerstone of a ‘360° listing diagnostic’. This helps you track other companies’ reputations and understand your investors’ expectations more fully.  

Financial disclosures

As an IRO, you need to align with the executives in question to decide which financial results you want to share. You want to show the company in a good light, but you also want investors to trust that you aren’t hiding anything from them. These numbers have to be benchmarked with analysts’ estimates, which will constitute a side note for executives.

With this in mind, work together to find the financial story that reflects the reality you are offering to investors and show them the potential, too. Having the approved metrics as part of the briefing notes keeps the presenter on track with the theme of the event, without straying off-message. 

Other achievements

It is not just financial results that are important in the minds of investors. There is also an ever-increasing interest in the sustainability and governance of organisations. With investors increasingly interested in ESG indices, you should make a point of discussing the advances your organisation is making in these fields. 

From health and safety and carbon emissions to diversity and inclusiveness within the company, shareholders are increasingly concerned that the businesses in which they invest look to improve their performance in these areas of sustainability and responsibility.  

Being able to recount these achievements during the roadshow offers investors the information they want to hear. A recent study found that €25 trillion were invested in sustainable assets in the world’s five biggest markets, with 81% of millennials wanting to know more about responsible investing. 

How to generate briefing notes with ease

This may seem like a lot of information to research before creating your briefing notes, but it is in fact easy to store and collate these details before a roadshow. You can make use of available digital tools to retrieve the details you need and form them into easily digestible notes for your presenters. 

In this case, a CRM tool can be of great help. It enables you to keep all investor relations data at hand which can inform your engagement strategy and provide the information you need to prepare your executives to meet shareholders. Knowing as much about investors as possible also helps to target them and the topics they care about most in the presentation.  

For example, IR.Manager from Euronext Corporate Services is an intuitive cloud-based CRM into which you can add all the vital details about your investors, ready to extract them ahead of your next roadshow. 

Tips for a successful non-deal roadshow

• Know your target audience before you start to plan your roadshow. If you are not sure about the make-up of your investor portfolio, you can use a Shareholder Analysis service that offers in-depth analysis to help you adjust your messaging to your target market.
• Preparation is key for a successful roadshow. Being able to answer the most likely questions that invitees will have breeds confidence that you have their best interests at heart. Quality planning can bring great returns.
• Combine physical and virtual events. Virtual roadshows allow you to engage with more investors across more territories, but for key shareholders, meeting them in person shows a commitment that will be appreciated. 
• Ensure that you are talking to the right people. If you are not speaking with decision-makers at the investment firm, you could be wasting time. It is more effective to engage the people who are in charge of the investments than to hope that someone lower down the ladder puts in a good word and is listened to. 
• It can help to send your presentation to attendees in advance. You could email it and even hand out hard copies. This allows them to be well informed and up to speed before the roadshow and allows them to formulate questions that really help them get to know your organisation and its mission.
• In this age of online communication and outreach, you should consider a virtual non-deal roadshow to increase the reach of your engagement efforts. With Company Webcast, in particular, you can choose to carry out the roadshow in one of three ways:
  
  

To ensure your virtual roadshow runs smoothly, you must train your presenters to be able to use features such as screen sharing smoothly. They should also be aware of their body language at all times, which comes less naturally when in a digital meeting than when you are in the room with an audience. You should also ensure everyone in your presenting team is on message, which is why the briefing notes are so important. 

References and further reading

• IR.Manager
• Finetune investor targeting
• Corporate governance
• About Company Webcast
• Roadshow Definition