Rollup campaign for PE-backed Financial Services Company

Introduction

The client was a VP at a well-known upper-mid-market PE firm, supporting their portfolio company with a large inorganic growth campaign. The portfolio company was driving the acquisition process, but did not have a specialist internal M&A team. The VP was acting as the interim M&A advisor with the support of their team.

Brief

The client came to us to help them support their portfolio company with target identification. The brief was then expanded, to support the portfolio company’s marketing team in creating an effective outbound campaign to test the appetite among the targets we’d identified for being acquired.

Actions

Initially, we created a ‘long list’ of targets matching the client’s chosen acquisition profile, including assets under management and ownership structure.

This provided us with over 1,000 suitable targets, each of whom had assests under management of between $250m and $3b. We then worked with the client and the portfolio company’s marketing team to compile a verified list of chief executives at these companies and their contact data.

From there, drawing on our experience with direct response marketing, we crafted a multi-touch, integrated direct mail and email campaign to identify potential sellers in the marketplace.

We were able to deliver a very strong 7.8% response rate vs an industry standard of ~2% for ‘cold lists’ (not opt-in mailing lists/’warm traffic’).

Outcome

The client was left with more than 80 chief executives who were open to discuss a future M&A deal. This included companies with several billion dollars of assets under management, as well as many smaller firms with hundreds of millions in assets under management located across the United States. This allowed the client a great deal of choice in meeting their primary objectives: inorganic growth, and a foothold in key key locales.