How to analyze earnings calls to boost pipeline generation

Using earnings calls to boost your pipeline generation?

Earnings calls are a goldmine of insights if you're a sales rep looking to drive pipeline generation across your target accounts. Sadly, many sales teams are missing out because they aren’t trained on how to use earnings calls effectively in their pipeline generation strategy.

Agreed, it can seem overwhelming if you've never done it before. We're going to change that now. This guide will walk you through it step by step.

First, let's make sure we know why sales reps should analyze earnings calls to power their pipeline generation efforts. Earnings calls help you do 3 things:

1. Refine your outreach and prospecting strategy with earnings insights
2. Understand company priorities, challenges and changes to help you build a POV
3. Find ways to make deals bigger by aligning your offering to company-wide initiatives

The most important thing is to learn how to extract relevant information from these calls efficiently and use them in your day to day. It can seem overwhelming because nobody gets up in the morning to review a bunch of earnings calls, right?

But, in this guide we'll go through it step-by-step on how you can use earnings calls to boost pipeline generation in your territory.

Once you finish reading and start applying the tactics you will:

• Engage your prospects better
• Show up with relevance at every touch point
• Align your offering effectively with prospect priorities unlocking bigger deals

What is an earnings call?

First things first. What is an earnings call?

An earnings call is a quarterly event where publicly traded companies discuss their financial performance, strategic initiatives, and market outlook.

These calls typically involve executives like the CEO and CFO providing insights into the company’s challenges, priorities, and growth strategies.

Investors, analysts, and stakeholders tune in to assess the company’s direction - and so should sales reps looking to capitalize on emerging opportunities. SPOILER: you can also just get the transcript a few days after the call, more on that later.

Earnings calls serve as a real-time update on a company’s business health and future outlook. They provide a rare moment when a company’s leadership publicly discusses its performance, strategic priorities, and challenges. It's also a way to hold executives accountable to their promises in a public forum.

How is an earnings call structured?

Earnings calls typically occur shortly after a company releases its quarterly earnings report. The call follows a structured format, generally consisting of:

1. Investor Relations Boilerplate Statement

A legal disclaimer about forward-looking statements. This can be skipped.

2. CEO Overview/Quarterly Update

The CEO provides a high-level summary of the company's performance, strategic direction, and market conditions.

3. CFO Financial Review

The CFO discusses key financial metrics, revenue trends, profitability, and investment areas.

4. Analyst Q&A Session

Analysts from investment firms ask questions about the company's performance, strategy, and future outlook.

Most companies provide transcripts or recordings of earnings calls on their investor relations website. You can also dial-in live. Typically you'll be able to join live on a company's Investor Relations (IR) page. 

The easiest is to just Google the company name and "Investor Relations". You should be able to find it in 1 minute. For example, here's the Salesforce Investor Relations page.

Now once you have the transcript you could just  read through it, of course, or search for specific insights. However, our pro tip is to use an AI tool like ChatGPT to analyse it. Keep reading to find out more about how to get the right information for you out of the calls and the best steps to take when using an AI tool!

How to get the right insights from earnings calls

Earnings calls might seem geared toward investors, but they are also a huge (and underutilized) asset for prospecting and outbounding for sales teams.

To effectively use earnings calls to tailor your pipeline generation strategy, focus on these key elements:

Business Priorities & Challenges

What problems is the company trying to solve? If a company emphasizes cost-cutting, security enhancements, or operational efficiency, tailor your pitch accordingly. On these calls companies openly discuss challenges they are facing, which can inform your outreach and messaging.

Growth Strategies

Listen for things like expansion into new markets, acquisitions, or product innovations which signal potential sales opportunities. If a company is investing in a new initiative, product, or market, there may be budget available for solutions like yours.

Competitive Landscape

If a company mentions losing deals to a competitor, position your solution as an alternative. These mentions of competitors can help frame your sales pitch especially if you're already serving competitors in the market with your solution - think good old FOMO.

Technology Investments

Mentions of digital transformation, AI adoption, or infrastructure upgrades indicate potential needs for your product.

Pain Points from the Q&A Session

Analyst questions often reveal areas where the company is struggling or needs solutions. So don’t skip this section! This is also a great opportunity for finding quotes that you can leverage. Referencing direct quotes from the CEO or CFO shows that you’ve done your homework and increases your credibility.

If you’re actively working on a deal with a publicly traded company, monitoring earnings calls helps you stay updated on their shifting priorities.

Use AI to Analyze Earnings Calls

If you want to make your job  a whole lot easier just use an AI tools like ChatGPT or Salesmotion.io which also provides wider info on company updates, changes and past earnings calls. This can dramatically speed up the process of extracting insights from earnings call transcripts.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Get the transcript

Go to the company's investor relations page, a platform like Seekingalpha or use dedicated sales tools like Salesmotion to find the earnings call transcript of your target company.

2. Upload the Transcript

Download the transcript and upload it to ChatGPT or another AI tool.

3. Ask for a Summary

Have AI summarize key themes, including company sentiment, analyst concerns, and major strategic initiatives.

Here's an example of an earnings analysis prompt you can use:

4. Extract CEO and CFO Quotes

Try to find direct quotes that can be used for hyper-personalized outreach. CEO statements during earnings calls often reveal strategic priorities and pain points that you can directly reference and will resonate with a CEO but also others in the organization.

When analyzing the transcript, look for:

• Strategic announcements: "We're investing heavily in AI and automation across our operations..."
• Challenge acknowledgments: "While we're seeing strong demand, our implementation timelines need improvement..."
• Growth initiatives: "We're expanding into new markets, particularly in Asia-Pacific..."

CFO statements are also great. They typically focus on financial performance but often contain valuable insights about:

• Investment priorities
• Cost-cutting initiatives
• Areas where efficiency improvements are needed
• Budget allocations for new projects

Example: Analysing Sprinklr's Earnings

Here's an example of Sprinklr's latest earnings call. The CFO is giving a few great insights into their go-to-market transformation and investments in the new year.

If you're selling sales technology into Sprinklr, this is great insight and can support your pipeline generation strategy.

Manish Sarin, Chief Financial Officer, Sprinklr
(Earnings Call, Q3 2025)

"elevated churn from the past year"

"the changes we are making in our go-to-market efforts."

"we launch new cloud environments in response to new business opportunities."

Example: Analysing Pager Duty's Earnings

Here's another example of PagerDuty. The CFO articulates how they have a really strong pipeline going into next quarter and the changes in sales leadership helped unlock some potential.

Now, this can be used to tailor outbound messaging. In your pipeline generation you might want to talk about how to effectively capitalize on the pipeline, how to track it more effectively or whatever your solution offers.

Howard Wilson, Chief Financial Officer, PagerDuty
(Earnings Call, Q3 2025)

"we've made a number of investments in terms of sales leadership this last year."

"when I just look at the pipeline numbers, for example, for Q1 for next year, the pipeline, as we go into Q1 for next year, is almost 50% higher than what it was at the start of Q1 last year. "

Recap

Now it's up to you to start reaching out to your publicly listed target accounts and use the insights you gathered to generate more pipeline. Appreciate there was a lot to read and digest, so let’s recap: 

1. You know why earnings calls are critical pipeline generation
2. You know where to find earnings calls
3. You know what to look for in an earnings call
4. You know how to use AI to prompt the transcript for key insights
5. You know how to do outreach based on practical examples 

Summary

Earnings calls are a goldmine of insights for sales reps to improve the pipeline generation efforts. Earnings calls provide a wealth of information on pains, challenges, investments and changes at your target accounts and will help you craft compelling and highly relevant outreach.

Even better, after reading this guide you know it does not need to be overwhelming to take advantage of it.

Thanks to AI and other tools it's easy to find the transcripts, extract the insights and use it when you go into your next pipeline generation session.