How Leading Companies Leverage Wall Street Research

Today’s business environment requires companies and professionals to stay more informed than ever before. The world has continued to become more digitally connected and the pandemic has accelerated technology trends that are democratizing information. This has not only leveled the competitive landscape but increased the speed at which decisions are made in both the corporate and financial sectors.

Wall Street research enables organizations to operate at this new pace without sacrificing confidence in their strategic decisions. Companies and firms who leverage Wall Street insights are better positioned to recognize opportunities and remain ahead of their competitors.

Access alone isn’t enough when it comes to Wall Street research. It must be leveraged and applied in smart, actionable ways that create value for organizations. Here is how 5 leading companies are using Wall Street research:

Conduct a Comprehensive Competitive Landscape Analysis

Aftermarket research platforms provide a number of resources that give you insights about your competitors and enable smarter competitive landscape analysis. Company documents like annual reports and quarterly earnings call transcripts offer an inside look at what your competitors are prioritizing and quantitative data on market size, market share, and industry forecasts help you better understand your market position. Company documents provide a depth of insight that would ordinarily not be easily accessible, thus making competitive landscaping even more difficult.

Before using AlphaSense, Evoque Data Center Solution struggled to gain a full picture of real-time market insights based on the resources the company was using. “I advocated strongly for AlphaSense and I am glad I did,” Steve Friedberg, Director of Competitive Intelligence at Evoque, says.

When speaking of the products he used before AlphaSense, Steve says they were “solid” but “would only allow [him] to search in a pre-defined area.” He added that “AlphaSense gives [him] far greater flexibility to seek out the specific information that my team members need, across a greater range of sources to which I previously did not have access.” Bob finds “extraordinary value when [he] needs the deeper dive” and adds that the “depth of research and expertise found within analyst reports gives [his] team added credibility.”

Related Reading: How to Conduct a Competitive and Market Landscape Analysis

Make Client Interactions More Effective

Wall Street research can be leveraged to make client meetings more efficient and valuable. While the pandemic brought challenges to virtual client meetings, it can be just as difficult to engage clients in-person. Wall Street research allows you to shift from using client interactions as an information-gathering practice to an opportunity to discuss important information you already know.

Now that we are on the other side of the pandemic, in-person client meetings are only going to become more commonplace. With wall street research, you can better understand your clients, their industry, and their competitors before you ever sit in the same room and increase the ROI of your time spent together.

Rather than having to provide clients quickly with impactful insights, Stephanie Proesel at Merz Aesthetics has 6 hour turnaround time deadlines for the earnings recaps she had to provide for her leadership. As the sole person on her team, when she was faced with 4 calls in one day, she prepared her leadership team that she might not be able to meet the expectation. That was until she started using AlphaSense, which helped her “[meet] every deadline in one day. I couldn’t believe myself.” In leveraging the power of AI, Stephanie noted that the platform allows her to be a “much bigger program.” AlphaSense allows her to get “everything in one place before they’re even expecting it.”

Improve Internal Research with AI-Powered Search

Aftermarket research platforms give you access to thousands of data sources. AI-powered search capabilities increase the depth and volume of your research capabilities exponentially. In turn, you can expand the context, value, and detail of your company’s internal research.

Cody Coonradt, Senior Manager of Global Strategy & Market Development at 3M, knows how specific information can lead to internal company development and growth. “[AlphaSense] has really been a game changer for us. In this strategic and market role you’re often looking for one piece of really obscure information to build an economic model or to solve a question. AlphaSense was the perfect tool to find this information, synthesize this information, consolidate it, and share it. It felt like it was built for us.”

He adds there’s no overlap in his team’s research, allowing them to optimize their time in finding impactful insights. “One of the things that’s made us better at sharing content is I can go and I can highlight a specific section of a document and then share that document highlighted with another coworker on the platform. “We have that nice historical record and it’s not just kind of buried in email or lost. It’s been a huge benefit to us since we’ve instituted the platform.”

Integrate Trend Monitoring to Enhance Strategy

Wall Street research can be a powerful tool for monitoring industry trends and seeing what companies have to say about major themes in a particular industry. Notification and real-time alert settings eliminate the need to perform repetitive searches and allow you to be confident you’ll see new documents and data sources that become available. You can make trend monitoring an integrated part of your research strategy by following a range of relevant topics and conducting periodic internal debriefs.

Since Siemens Market Intelligence started using AlphaSense, Market Intelligence Leader Bob Nelson has cut down on the time he spends conducting competitive research. “In the past, it would take several days to go through hundreds of Google alerts,” Bob says. In the AlphaSense platform, Bob has set up a Watchlist for the companies he’s following and looks through specific time frames to surface the most relevant information for a time period. “Going through 1000 Google alerts is busy work. Now I feel like I can do more high value activities and less monotonous tasks to achieve the same results,” he says.

Automate Processes for Time and Cost Savings

You can save time and costs by automating research processes that previously required lots of manual searching, individual outreach, and report building. AI-powered aftermarket research platforms can sift through thousands of documents in seconds to pull the most valuable information based on search terms and user preferences. Exportable reports eliminate the need to build spreadsheets from scratch and the risk of human error affecting research accuracy.

For the AT&S Marketing Intelligence Team, staying ahead of the competition often involved long lead times and spending large sums of money before they began using AlphaSense. “It took ten minutes to find the information we needed in AlphaSense,” AT&S’s Market Intelligence team’s leader said. “It would have cost thousands of dollars and taken weeks to hire an agency to get the same information.” This allows the AT&S Marketing Intelligence Team to uncover information faster and remain agile in a highly competitive market.

Corporate demand for highly specialized Wall Street, industry, and macroeconomic research has grown and COVID-19 has only accelerated this evolution. Any business making strategic plans or product decisions, conducting competitive analysis, or evaluating M&A should now tap into the deep industry expertise of Wall Street’s top analysts.

Download our comprehensive guide, The Corporate Guide to Wall Street Research, and get the edge over your competition today.