New Product, New Market, No Time to Waste: How Q4 Created its Capital Market Events Offering
What do you do when all your customers’ needs change overnight? You get to work!
At Q4, we provide digital solutions that transform the way public companies, investors and investment banks (aka capital markets) connect, communicate and engage.
When lockdowns struck in early 2020, Q4 hustled to develop an online replacement for an established in-person feature of the way capital markets do business: investor conferences.
Our customer in context
The three essential players in capital markets are the perennial “time is money” crowd. When this is your customer, you’d better be responsive — and worth it.
Now, despite all you might hear about algorithmic trading and technological advancements in banking, it’s important to know that capital markets are very much reliant upon in-person meetings. Essential among these are sector-themed investor conferences hosted by investment banks, who bring public companies together with potential investors to talk about opportunities. As with all in-person elements of business, conferences were brought to a screeching halt at the onset of Covid.
Almost overnight, banks were forced to reimagine and reproduce these conferences virtually. They went searching for vendors who could deliver logistically intensive online events, (that often require considerable effort organizing, executing and wrapping up), now.
Given our strong market position producing events for public companies, Q4 saw an opportunity to be a solutions provider of choice in this scenario as well. However, we had not yet served investment banks and their corporate access teams as customers. It was a chance to expand Q4 into a new area of service. But we had to move quickly — and it was Covid lockdown for us, too.
What do you do when all your customers’ needs change overnight?
You get to work! We leaned in to our existing strengths:
- Start with what you know: Stress-free and flawless live event production is a core capability of Q4, after many years of producing company earnings and issuer events.
We had already noticed room for improvement in the data reporting shared back to the banks at the end of the event, where the meetings with investors turns into actual trades by investors — the very lifeblood of banks’ conferences business.
We already knew that by digitally flowing live event data back into the banks, into the hands of the equities sales team and traders, virtual events could offer a big potential advantage over in-person — speed. - Talk to your customers: Using a Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) lens we worked with corporate access partners on three continents to learn their business, understand pain points and determine how to help streamline key conference workflows.
We also worked with banking partners to solve pain points at the pre-event stage around registration, meeting scheduling and reporting tools needed to track details leading up to the event. - Shipped beats perfect: And so, after putting all of the above learning into an offering we could package, sell and deliver, Q4’s Capital Markets Events (CME) product was brought to market — in its first iteration, in January, 2021
A good product is never, truly finished
A novelty in the beginning, conference participants burned-out on virtual quickly; Zoom fatigue was real. Creatively, the sell-side attempted to replace in-person, candid conversations between participants by embedding 1:1 chat widgets in their event platform, or by hosting smaller breakout sessions with live entertainment. Intriguing in 2020, these tactics were exhausted by 2021.
This to say, there is still plenty of room for improvement with the product. Even though the financial set has largely resumed in-person activity, online events have proven themselves to be unsurpassed in one main area: efficiency. The convenience and cost-effectiveness of a virtual conference is undeniable, making Q4’s CME a viable ongoing line of business that we will continue to develop.
Seek fertile ground for ongoing product iteration
In product management, you need to keep a close watch on your customers’ evolving needs. In our case, banks are now experimenting with hybrid conferences formats, by hosting both an in-person and virtual combo. We know this isn’t sustainable, as it’s more work and more expensive to do both than either one alone.
Hybrid is the new fertile ground for iteration as we work to scale our Capital Market Events product to compete with a return to business as usual.
