Private Equity
Helping owner-activists increase company value and increase profit.
We draw on a full range of industry and functional expertise acquired over more than 30 years as senior-level operators and advisers to large and small companies around the world.
We bring those capabilities to bear helping activist owners and their portfolio company management teams conduct a rigorous assessment of where their business has the best opportunities to increase its value. This effort identifies the most promising near-term initiatives and longer-term strategic opportunities, establishes timelines with milestones, and calibrates the resources needed to meet them.
Then, we specialize in managing the complexities of the middle-market private equity transaction environment, and have built marketing, sales, and operational consulting services on point for private equity investors.
As executive-level middle-market veterans in public, private, and family-run enterprises, our firsthand knowledge lends significant transaction- and transition-related operating value to your management team.
Why Choose Cosgrove Partners?
Our focused skill, judgment and communication provides the emotional and analytical intelligence behind poised decision-making for successful large-scale, rapid business transformation and value-creating growth management.
We leverage our daily immersion in the middle-market private equity environment to guide your management team through the transaction cycle — setting expectations, preparing for transaction stresses, and resolving potential roadblocks in relation to audits, due diligence, and advisor meetings.
We apply cross-functional expertise – marketing/sales proficiency and middle-market operational perspective – to quickly assess complex situations and effect meaningful change.
We provide visibility into portfolio company operations that limits surprises. We offer executive-level counsel with the experience to help you make sound judgments that create a foundation for future growth.
Go-To-Market Model
Profit potential varies dramatically across a company’s customer base, and different customers can have radically different needs and behaviors. Recognizing that simple averages cannot accurately capture the preferences of either your customers or the marketplace as a whole is a crucial step in developing a sound customer strategy.
We use rigorous quantitative techniques combined with real customer interaction-interviews, focus groups, and shop-alongs. We identify opportunities for clients to deepen relationships with the loyal, profitable customers they most want.
We help clients to couple their unique strengths with refined customer insights to maximize the impact their segmentation efforts.
We help clients keep their segmentation insights fresh by utilizing customer feedback to spur innovation, anticipate shifts in the marketplace and navigate their evolving needs. By utilizing this customer-centric approach to every aspect of customer strategy, we help clients allocate their resources, pursue the right opportunities and ensure that they will realize the full revenue potential of their products, services and relationships.
Our Approach
CUSTOMER INSIGHTS
The business world is changing faster than ever, and increasingly companies are finding that timely response to shifting customer needs—their desires and expectations as well as their points of irritation and dissatisfaction—is essential for growing revenue. CP helps companies apply customer insights across the entire business by first asking the big, strategic questions: “Who are our target customers?,” “How do we best serve them?,” “Where do we need to play?,” and then by addressing how to optimize operating models to meet those needs. We also recognize that customers are driven by both rational and irrational mental processes; therefore, it is imperative to spend time with them, observe their behaviors and look for trends.
Our analysis strategies target the data that will help our clients make the most effective decisions. When done incorrectly, segmentation can drown you with superfluous information. Although our analysis is comprehensive, we are careful to keep our clients focused on the data that directly relates to product and process improvements that will generate money.
CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION
Our approach to segmentation begins with a clear understanding of our client’s desired outcomes. We define what it is we’re trying to accomplish first because real business objectives can be obscured in the segmentation process when companies try to reach all customers in all capacities.
When clear objectives have been defined, we focus on identifying the customers who are worth more than others—those who are truly tied to our client’s economics. That does not necessarily mean segmenting on economics alone, it entails discovering which segments allow your company to make more profit per customer than your competitors.
The segmentation and insights process will not yield results if customers’ economic value to your business is not the principle consideration. Our strength is tying targeted, priority segments, and the resulting customer insights, to economic understanding to drive revenue growth for our clients. In doing so successfully, we excel where specialist market research firms struggle.
By identifying segmentation objectives and focusing on economics first, we are the able to work alongside companies to design and implement segmentation strategies that are tailored to their needs. We consider how clients will use the segmentation—through which avenues will they receive the data, how can the information be effectively used throughout the organization, what resulting actions are necessary and how will those initiatives be practically deployed in the field—to build enduring valuable analytic techniques.
Well-executed marketing programs drive up both revenue and profits. We work with companies to structure such programs carefully to target attractive customer segments, create the desired image and strengthen the brand.
OUR APPROACH
Our work focuses on brand management, including competitive positioning, and the impact that marketing mix and resource allocation have on sales and profits.
As products and services become more difficult to differentiate, branding that cultivates a strong, trusted image can help build a larger, more loyal customer base. Our approach to brand management, marketing mix and resource allocation consistently drives accelerated revenue growth rates.
We begin by mapping the market share and profit position of the client’s brands relative to its competitors.
We then help clients apply that information to manage brand portfolios, from the development of strategy to tactical allocation of resources. We closely integrate marketing campaigns with coherent and persuasive sales tools to enable channel effectiveness and capture market share.
ur unique approach, called NexGen Selling, is based on our experience of the best demonstrated practices of more than 100 sales organizations in 6 different industries.
FOCUSED OFFERING
Identify and execute on the highest priority customer segments with products and solutions that are bundled and priced for maximum revenue, retention and renewals.
INTEGRATED TOOL AND PROCEDURES
Develop the right cadence for monitoring the results of customer-facing selling efforts in a timely way, and then reinforce it with effective forecasting, lead generation, back-office technology, support and service.
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
Recruit, develop and retain high-potential sales teams; track key measures of their performance and motivate them with pay and incentives that reward success.
RESOURCE DEPLOYMENT
Develop the right coverage model for each customer segment; assign responsibilities and design territories to maximize the use of resources.
OUR APPROACH
We help drive improvements in productivity and growth beginning with an assessment of a company’s selling system. We then work with a company to develop a pragmatic, actionable implementation schedule that can reliably increase sales without disrupting a company’s current revenue streams.
CUSTOMER SWEET SPOT
Precise focus on your highest-value customers. If the salesforce and channels don’t know which customers are most profitable today or in the future, then any segmentation strategy is futile.
COVERAGE AND CAPACITY
Align the right customers and channels. Technological innovations, maturing markets and more sophisticated buyers have opened a host of routes to the customer. Effective sales organizations choose deliberately, selecting the channel that is most cost effective, yields full revenue potential and ultimately exceeds the expectations of their target customers.
COMPENSATION AND INCENTIVES DESIGN
Align individual success with growth. Most sales executives understand that compensation practices affect their companies’ ability to recruit and retain top talent. Yet surprisingly few design compensation plans to achieve growth targets.
REVENUE ACCELERATION
Stop leaving money on the table. Some of the biggest and fastest profit potential comes from selling more—and smarter—to the current customer base. Two fast ways to boost both the top and bottom lines are to tighten up pricing discipline and to engage in focused cross-selling to the most promising segments.
METRICS AND TRACKING
Measure what matters. Best-performing companies base their rewards on outcomes. Those output metrics are clear and support specific business goals. They are also externally focused and regularly benchmarked.
TOOLS AND SUPPORT
Reps’ time should be spent selling. Mobilizing back-office resources to augment field reps’ efforts is a powerful force multiplier. The best sales organizations therefore measure customer facing time and use internal support to create more.
Wallet share is defined as: the percentage of a customer’s spending within a category that’s captured by a given firm. Customers may be very satisfied with your brand and happily recommend it to others—but if they like your competitors just as much (or more), you’re losing sales.
OUR APPROACH
We work with companies to more clearly understand the preferences of their clients and then we help develop compelling programs, brands, and initiatives to grow wallet share.
- When and what to cross sell
- Up sell to customer specific needs
- Expand product lines and assist clients with meaningful purchasing and supply chain efficiencies
We work with our B2B clients to identify, articulate and quantify the value they create for their customers. We help define the systems and infrastructure that allow our clients to reinforce their value promise with their clients and drive long term growth and retention.
OUR APPROACH
Our work focuses on helping our clients with a detailed understanding of the short and long term needs of their customers. We use “voice of the customer” research to help our clients focus on the issues, policies and capabilities that drive customer value. We integrate loyalty programs, train call center staff and insure that the appropriate metrics are in place to extend the customer relationship.