We’re back with our Best of Earnings Season series, this time covering Q2 2026.
As always, we looked at what companies are refining or doing differently around earnings. This quarter’s examples range from AI-friendly earnings results (Target) to customers interviewed live on an earnings call (Salesforce), and some more cool ideas.
Here’s what caught our attention.
Target started publishing its quarterly results and commentary as structured content on its IR website, in addition to a press release and PDF materials.
Two things worth noting. First, it makes it easier for investors to find and read the results without downloading anything. Second, because the content is on the website (in HTML), it’s significantly easier for AI tools to parse and analyze. We also wrote about this shift in How to Make Your IR Website More AI-Friendly.
Takeaway for IROs: Your IR website is increasingly part of the earnings experience. Given your website and resources available to you, if you’re able to publish the earnings along with commentary on your website directly, your results will be easier to access for AI tools.
For its latest earnings call, Salesforce invited three customers to join the conversation live during its preshow, broadcast from San Francisco. Xero CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy talked about how an AI agent is now handling support for 100% of Xero’s customers, cutting a 62% deflection rate across 200,000-plus interactions [7:39 → Cassidy on Agentforce]. Legora CFO David Eckstein joined remotely to discuss why Salesforce remains the company’s system of record as its teams work across a growing mix of AI models and interfaces [15:24 → Eckstein on the system of record]. Replit CRO Ghazi Masood talked about why Replit chose Salesforce as the backbone for scaling its go-to-market operation rather than building the system in-house [22:06 → Masood on scaling with Salesforce].
The format let customers speak directly to how Salesforce’s products are driving results inside their organizations, something a slide of metrics can’t replicate.
Takeaway for IROs: Similar to what we’ve suggested for Investor Days, in some situations (and especially if you’re dealing with something like a SaaSpocalypse, which Benioff got visibly fired up about by the end of the call, calling it “nonsense” outright), it may be a good idea to bring customers into the earnings webcast to talk about the impact of your products firsthand. It’s a different kind of evidence, and it makes an impact with investors.
Reddit has been using r/RDDT as an investor channel for some time. What’s interesting is how its IR team keeps finding new ways to use it.
For Q2, that included a “Numbers Recap” created specifically for the subreddit. It showed multi-quarter progress against several key benchmarks, giving investors a quick view of the consistency behind the latest results.
Takeaways for IROs: If you have a significant retail shareholder base, ask where your “communities” are showing up. Consider repurposing earnings content to post on those communities (be it on Reddit or other platforms).
As we tracked new trends this quarter, a few other examples caught our attention.
1/ Colgate-Palmolive’s Q2 “By The Numbers” carousel is as good as a slide deck, just delivered through LinkedIn. It combines financial results, CEO commentary, and business updates across multiple slides, giving the earnings story the depth of a condensed deck.
2/ These earnings videos also caught our attention: BASF, Via, and Sam’s Club. Their IR teams and leadership took different approaches to showing the why behind the results, rather than simply recapping the numbers.
At NIRI 2026, we ran a working session on building a one-page investment thesis and using it to structure your full investor presentation. We built one live for an IRO in the room, and she rated it 8 out of 10. If you couldn’t make it, the offer still stands. Book a 30-minute call with me and we’ll build your investor presentation outline live.
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