Most businesses need to manage relationships with the people (or entities) who finance their projects. While financing may take many different forms – from bank loans, equity, or bond investments to limited partnerships or joint ventures – there is no question that maintaining positive, long-term relationships with financial investors is important.
For larger companies, managing the extensive information around these relationships can be incredibly complicated. As a result, many medium and large companies choose to implement investor relations management software – but with all the different options on the market, how do you know which one to choose?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems aren’t designed to manage investor relations
Companies that wish to optimize investor relations (IR) often turn to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, because they aren’t aware that other tools are better suited to their needs. But why shouldn’t you use a CRM for investor relations?
CRM systems focus on customers, sales leads, marketing, and prospecting funnels. When it comes to evaluating potential investors, connecting them to different organizations, or highlighting relationships between different entities, CRM systems fall short.
Investors are stakeholders
Investor relations teams need to report on business activities, manage communications, and track interactions with investors. They need a tool that can manage relationships with key players: planning, engaging, and measuring outcomes based on the data, and evaluating how those relationships change over time.
Increasing social demands are pushing companies to pursue ‘stakeholder capitalism,’ which focuses on long-term results. This sometimes conflicts with the expectations of shareholders – including investors – who demand quick returns and may not be willing to wait.
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review recommends that companies identify their steward shareholders – those with a financial stake in the company – and then “foster symbiotic relationships with them.”
Since investors are ultimately stakeholders – high-priority stakeholders, at that – stakeholder relationship management software is perfectly suited to this purpose.
Why choose Borealis to manage investor relations?
Borealis is a specialized stakeholder management software (SaaS) that helps teams manage important relationships proactively and strategically, in an organized, long-term manner. The platform was originally developed for the extractive sector, where large-scale projects need to build and maintain relationships with a wide range of stakeholders. These include a number of different groups with diverse interests, such as government authorities, regulators, landowners, indigenous communities, environmental groups, and more.
Having established a solid foundation in stakeholder management, Borealis has continued to develop new capabilities based on feedback from their global community of users and evolving stakeholder engagement best practices.
Borealis software has proven to be equally effective in managing strategic corporate accounts – including investors – by helping teams build flexible, mutually beneficial relationships.
How does Borealis address IR challenges?
Modern, fit-for-purpose tools save time and effort. The right tools are user-friendly and useful, provide value, and help users generate meaningful reports. Additionally, they automate manual work to let teams focus on engaging with stakeholders and finding solutions, rather than managing data.
Borealis offers a variety of well-designed, professional tools to help IR teams address the specific challenges they face. It’s an ideal solution for organizations that require fit-for-purpose investor relations software.
Strategic information is easily accessible and always available
Centralizing stakeholder data across an organization helps break down information silos, ensuring that every team using the platform has access to accurate, up-to-the-moment information about the people and organizations they’re working with. This helps teams identify (and better manage) risks, improves efficiency, simplifies reporting, and reduces stakeholder fatigue.
On top of that, centralized data also reveals a clear picture of an organization’s stakeholder relationships and helps teams create more informed engagement strategies. For example, since all interactions are documented in the system, it can be incredibly helpful to tag meaningful communications and review them periodically as a team. This proven process is quick to implement, and easy to train and report on.
Keep sensitive data private and secure
A non-secure system can jeopardize an organization’s projects and reputation, so it’s important to choose a software solution that can maintain the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your data. With Borealis, there’s no need to worry about sensitive information falling into the wrong hands.
Borealis adheres to the highest industry standards for enterprise security. User access rights determine what each user can see and do in the system. Borealis also includes a Team Data Segregation add-on which can restrict access by project, department, location, and corporate level to protect the confidentiality of sensitive information between different sites or projects. And finally, every action users take in Borealis is traceable, to ensure accountability and transparency during internal or external audits.
A better understanding of your stakeholders
An investor’s interests can change over time and vary from one individual to the next, so it’s important for organizations to have accurate, up-to-date information about their financial partners. Borealis helps users track a stakeholder’s status, contacts, relationships, and interactions with the organization. It lets users document important details about the topics that have been discussed, stakeholder sentiment about a particular subject, their degree of project acceptance, and engagement outcomes. Users can even categorize interactions as “positive”, “negative”, “important”, etc.
Stakeholders can be assessed and mapped by a number of different values (such as level of interest, influence, or authority), and ranked by priority. These assessments can even be archived to monitor how the relationship changes over time.
Better communication
Managing relationships with investors typically involves a series of meetings and interactions. Success or failure depends on your ability to communicate clearly and effectively. Whether you need to arrange an annual shareholder meeting, an exploratory discussion with a potential investor, a quarterly conference, or a call to discuss a number of different topics, effective planning and communication tools are an important asset.
Account management
Engagement Plans in Borealis are powerful project management tools designed specifically for engagement teams. They help users coordinate all of the activities, tasks, communications, and follow-ups related to a strategic account. Engagement plans are incredibly helpful when you need to manage an event or a campaign around a particular issue (e.g., informing people about an upcoming project or managing a crisis), quickly compile lists of stakeholders (e.g., message recipients, interested parties, or potential participants), monitor the status of individuals and organizations, and keep a record of interactions related to the project.
Mobility
Borealis offers a mobile application that’s incredibly useful for users who are travelling, attending conferences, or otherwise away from the office. It makes it easy for users to perform common tasks from a smart phone. For example, they can access and enter communications on the spot, review the latest interactions with a stakeholder before a meeting, and create tasks to ensure that any necessary follow-ups are handled in a timely manner. The app includes a number of time-saving features, like the ability to create new contacts in the system by simply taking a photo of their business card, or to enter notes using a built-in voice-to-text feature. Users can also forward text (SMS) and WhatsApp messages to Borealis using the app to provide a more complete overview of ongoing communications with an investor.
And even if you don’t use the dedicated mobile application, Borealis software is mobile-friendly. If users need to dig deeper – for example, to create or configure widgets – they can access the full version the software from any internet-capable device, including their smart phone.
Email integration
For those who work with Outlook or Gmail, Borealis has developed an Outlook add-in and a Gmail add-on to document information in Borealis without leaving the email environment. With just a few clicks, emails and calendar items can be entered and classified in Borealis, linked to engagement plans, and more. This helps teams avoid oversights, minimizes the risk of data entry errors, and helps keep sensitive data secure.
Activity reports
Because data is centralized in Borealis, it’s easy to generate detailed activity reports for management, regulators, or investors. For example, a company that pays to set up a booth at an important conference may want to calculate the return on that investment (ROI). The built-in reporting tools in Borealis will allow them to easily evaluate the number of visitors to their booth, the number of contacts made at the event, and the number of contacts that led to further conversations (or even actual collaborations).
Reputation management
Any company that already uses Borealis to manage stakeholder engagement (often for public affairs, community relations, or similar needs) can benefit greatly by adopting Borealis as their investor relations software. Any data in the system that shows how the company manages social and environmental risks can be used as proof of due diligence, which reinforces a company’s positive reputation to help attract and reassure potential investors.
What if your company is the one doing the investing?
While Borealis is an optimal solution for managing investor relations, it’s also a great asset for a company that wants to invest in – or even propose partnerships with – other companies. The same great features that allow users to manage investor relationships work just as well to document open files and monitor evolving relationships with targeted companies.
Key points to remember
- Investors are VERY IMPORTANT stakeholders.
- Investor relationships are COMPLEX, and Borealis makes it EASIER to successfully manage them.
- Because Borealis was designed to manage stakeholder relationships, is a PERFECT SOLUTION for organizations seeking investor relationship management software. Borealis is better suited to this task than a CRM.
- Some of the biggest challenges in investor relations involve ACCESSIBILITY OF INFORMATION and FOLLOWING-UP AFTER INTERACTIONS. Borealis was specifically developed to meet these needs.
If you’d like to learn more about how Borealis can simplify your relationships with investors and other strategic partners, please contact us today!
