How do you get an investor’s attention?

Be (very) short, simple and memorable

7.00 am: A meeting room at a large investment bank; in the audience, several dozen well-dressed institutional equity salespeople.

At the microphone, a succession of securities analysts, each putting forth one stock that’s a prime candidate for purchase or sale that day. These analysts know their stuff, but that doesn’t prevent audience reaction.

A couple of minutes into one pitch comes a loud voice from the floor: ‘Hey, Joe, is it a buy or a sell?’ It’s a buy. A minute later, from another part of the room: ‘Hey, Joe, what are the bullets?’ Joe says something inconclusive. The man next to me draws a thick line through the name of the stock. ‘Won’t be talking that one today,’ he murmurs.

When the meeting ends, I ask my neighbor what happened then. He explains: ‘I’ll call maybe a dozen people today. For each one, I’ll mention 10 or 15 names. I give my guy two or three bullet points for each one; he says ‘no interest’ or ‘tell me more’ and we go to the next one. If the analyst doesn’t give me bullets for his pick, I’ve got limited time and I’ve got other things to talk about.’

That is, in fact, why I’m in this meeting room. Our firm has been hired to train a few analysts in how to better translate their insights into the ammunition their equity sale force needs to seize the clients’ attention. What I’ve just seen brings the realities of investor messaging forcefully to life.

Hier geht es zum gesamten Artikel, ​veröffentlicht im IR Magazine, am 6. Oktober 2015, Autor James MacGregor​.