Our Blog: The Podium

5 Useful Tips for Reading Body Language in a Business Environment

By Dennis Walsh, Senior Consultant & Director of Social Media at Sharon Merrill

In business, people aren’t always completely honest. I know…stop the presses! As investor relations professionals, we are constantly playing a poker game with Wall Street. So how do you know if someone is not being completely truthful with you? Read their body language.

Nonverbal communication, or body language, often sends a different message from the spoken word. The way a person shakes hands, gestures while talking, or even crosses their legs, sends subtle but clear signals about the real meaning behind the message. Even a simple touch of the nose may indicate that a person is being untruthful.

Many Wall Street firms have hired body language experts to train analysts and portfolio managers to identify the nonverbal cues that executives give. So it’s beneficial for CEOs and CFOs to recognize these signals, to ensure they aren’t unwittingly conveying the wrong message.

A Halloween Lesson with Apologies to Charles M. Schulz

By David Calusdian, Executive Vice President & Partner

Year in and year out, Linus sits in the neighborhood pumpkin patch trying to impress Charlie Brown’s little sister Sally with a personal introduction to The Great Pumpkin. She forgoes trick or treating to wait for the Great Pumpkin as he “flies through the air and brings toys to all the children of the world.” But every year, The Great Pumpkin disappoints, and as Linus puts it, there’s “nothing compared to the fury of a woman who has been cheated out of tricks or treats.” Now there’s a holiday icon in desperate need of reputation management. Here are three tips to reestablishing a positive personal brand whether you are a fictional cartoon character, disgraced athlete or corporate executive.

1) Determine Your Desired Brand Identity

Before you begin the reputation rebuilding process, decide what you want the essence of your new personal brand to be. Philanthropist? Industry expert? Respected business Leader? After you’ve determined your desired personal brand, develop a strategy to take action and then communicate to your key audiences. For example, in the years after Jimmy Carter’s failed presidential re-election bid, he re-branded himself as a humanitarian very successfully through his work with Habitat for Humanity. As for The Great Pumpkin, I’d recommend taking the same approach as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and finally make good on his toy delivering promise.

By David Calusdian, Executive Vice President & Partner

I recently spoke at the NIRI Fundamentals of IR Seminar on “Media and Communications,” and the part of the presentation that generated the most discussion was on how to conduct “media training” for CEOs, CFOs and other corporate spokespeople. Of course, the most difficult part of media training can sometimes be convincing the executive that they need help. But once you clear that high hurdle, there are three basic steps to help prepare senior management for a successful interview.

1) Establish key messages. Without significant interview experience or preparation, your CEO is likely to a) offer rambling responses to questions, b) divulge too much information, and/or c) miss an opportunity to convey the messages you want to get across to customers, investors, employees or other important stakeholder audiences. Prior to the interview, create three to five key messages and supporting proof points that you want to make sure appear in the story. When you are developing key messages, think about the audience for the particular interview and the points that you want to convey to that specific stakeholder group. Look at it this way: if you were writing the article for the reporter, what messages would you include? Those are the messages that management should use in the answers to the reporter’s questions whenever possible. Politicians often do this very well. For example, earlier this year British Labour leader Ed Miliband famously repeated his position on strikes taking place in the UK in several successive questions during a BBC interview.

By David Calusdian, Executive Vice President & Partner

The firing of Red Sox manager Terry Francona offers a few valuable lessons in crisis communications, especially those relating to the unexpected departure of an executive. For those of you outside of Red Sox Nation, let me offer a little background: the only living manager of Boston’s professional baseball team to win a world series (twice!) is now unemployed after missing the playoffs following a disastrous September collapse. To be technical, Francona wasn’t fired; the team declined to pick up the option on his 2012 contract. While the debate over letting Francona go is an ideal subject for a sports-focused blog, the way the decision was communicated offers two valuable lessons to anyone in crisis communications.

1) Take a Deep Breath: When a decision is made suddenly to release a senior executive, care should be taken to think through the communications timeline. The Red Sox put Francona in front of the microphones the day after the final game of the season for no reason other than to discuss the final calamitous loss. If ownership had even an inkling that the team would be sending Francona on his way, why put him in front of reporters to awkwardly answer questions about his future? To make matters worse, the very next day Francona held a press conference to announce his departure, which was then followed by another media gathering by the Sox brass to discuss the action. Why two additional separate press conferences? The Sox would have been better served to have one well rehearsed press conference (including Francona and the Sox higher-ups) to address the disastrous end of the season and announce that the time was right for a managerial change. In any crisis situation, take a deep breath, think a few steps ahead and plan all messaging and timing of external communications accordingly.

“Lie to Me.” The name of the prime time drama on Fox is a challenge. “Go ahead. I dare you to try to pull one over on me.” The show’s protagonist, played by Tim Roth, is an expert in detecting deception and is hired by corporations, government agencies and private citizens to analyze body language.

We’ve all heard about how valuable body language is in interpersonal communication, but is Lie to Me more fiction than fact? Not even close. The investment community is now using real-life consulting firms like the one in Lie to Me to analyze the truthfulness of corporate executives.

In his 2010 book Broker, Trader, Lawyer Spy, POLITICO White House Reporter Eamon Javers recounts stories of former CIA agents working with major hedge funds and bulge bracket investment banks. Boston-based Business Intelligence Advisors (BIA) is one firm mentioned by name in Javers’ book. BIA, which consults solely for the financial services industry, including institutional investors and venture capitalists, is comprised of former intelligence community agents.

In a recent blog post, “Giving Life to Your Investor Presentation,” David Calusdian suggests a number of valuable ways to improve not only the investor presentation itself but importantly the delivery of the content. One critical element identified by David is the development of a strong investment thesis that ultimately binds the presentation together. What are the secret ingredients that make for a compelling investment thesis? The answer to this question lies with investors and Wall Street analysts – your audience. As a former equity analyst, global sector head and portfolio manager who’s constructed, presented and reviewed hundreds of investment theses, here are several elements worth mentioning:

Yesterday afternoon I presented a workshop entitled, “Giving Life to Your Investor Relations Presentation. . . and Your CEO” at the National Investor Relations Institute’s Annual Conference. We’ve all seen bad investor relations presentations. But what makes them bad? The purpose of an investor presentation is to convey the company’s “story,” which is essentially its investment thesis. If the presentation does not succeed in articulating the investment thesis in a memorable way, it has failed.

So how do we ensure good presentation slides -- and success? Here are a few tips:

For months leading up to your S-1 filing, you probably have been singularly focused on creating that massive tome. You have spent significantly more time with your lawyers and auditors than with your own family -- and you cannot even begin to imagine a time when you won’t be spending every waking moment with your bankers. So now that you’ve left the long nights (and great food spreads) at the financial printers behind, it’s time to focus on investor relations. You need to hit the ground running with IR as soon as your company prices its offering, so here are 10 “to do” items before then:

1) Develop your IR website. The IR website must be ready to go live on the day of your IPO pricing. It is most cost-effective to hire an IR website hosting provider, which will develop your site and aggregate content such as news releases, SEC filings and stock data. You also need to prepare additional content for your site such as “Frequently asked Questions,” management biographies and fact sheets. Your website is arguably the most important vehicle you will have to communicate with investors, so make sure it has everything that investors need and expect.

On January 4^th, the first business day of the new decade, Dow Jones VentureSource released figures suggesting that 2010 will be a stronger year for IPOs. They reported that eight companies completed public offerings in 2009, raising $904 million. This was a 64% increase from the $551 million generated through seven IPOs in 2008.

Looking ahead, VentureSource pointed to the 25 venture-backed companies that are currently in IPO registration as a sign that the market will improve as this year unfolds. The larger attendance and stronger sense of optimism at the most recent Deloitte Tech-Venture IPO Bootcamp, where I spoke on IPO investor relations, suggests the same thing.

So if the proverbial IPO window does open wider in 2010, a good number of venture-backed companies probably will jump through. This will send them into the hectic time of pre-IPO preparations.

Like skilled gymnasts or freestyle skiers, some of these companies will stick the landing. They’ll see good liquidity and strong underlying demand when their shares begin trading. Others will lose a few style points and generate only a tepid response from investors. For the underperformers, the leap into the public markets will conclude with a painful face plant.