Getting the Most Out of Shorter Biotech Investor Meetings
Do you find yourself rushing to tell your whole story at conference meetings? Milestone Advisors shares some tips to sharpen your storytelling so that short meetings can lead to lasting investor interest.
In recent years biotech investor meetings, particularly at conferences, have become shorter. Many introductory meetings now are no more than 30 minutes, which presents challenges if you don’t go into the meeting with a plan to maximize your time. Investors use these meetings to sift through as many ideas as they can as fast as they can to reduce their investment funnel to a manageable level so they can focus the majority of their time doing more extensive work on top ideas.
Within that context, successful investor meetings hinge on concise storytelling and disciplined investor relations strategy. With that context it is important to understand that the primary purpose of these introductory meetings is to earn a second one where the story can be told in greater detail. The keys to achieving this important goal are:
Customize your presentation for shorter meetings. Your deck should be designed to hit all of the important points in the time allotted instead of trying to either shorten a longer presentation by skipping around, or worse, just trying to go through it faster.
Be agile with storytelling against time constraints. Management teams should be able to tell an equally compelling investor story whether they have 1 minute, 10 minutes, 30 minutes or a full hour and a deck to support any meeting length.
Go very quickly through intros. I have seen companies spend 10 minutes of a 30-minute meeting on intros and barely get through the story before time is up. Save the longer introductions for the next meeting.
Optimize the first 10 minutes. Give them the key points up front. Use the fire alarm test (or the dropped zoom feed test in the virtual world). If the meeting gets interrupted unexpectedly partway through, have you already said 80% of what you came to say?
Save 5 minutes for questions. Questions are always a great indicator of how engaged your audience is, and therefore how likely the next meeting is.
Follow up afterwards with the presentation to give them another opportunity to engage with the story before the next meeting.
With multiple year end biotech investor conferences just around the corner and JP Morgan on the horizon, now is a particularly good time to not only refresh your investor presentation but also think about how to optimize it for these events.
As biotech investor sentiment has clearly brightened, many life sciences investors will be looking for new stocks to add to the portfolios in 2026. Maximizing these important but brief initial investor meetings is a good way to get on their shopping list.