CASE STUDY: ECAP

Ecap discovers and disseminates highly targeted, detailed reports to key institutional contacts within the professional investment community, which consists of pension funds, family offices, hedge funds, private equity firms, venture equity, securities analysts (buy-side/sell-side), stockbrokers, and institutional investors. Utilizing established relationships within their syndicate base, ECAP inspires investment interest and generates quantifiable results.

The Problem

ECAP focuses on identifying founders of SaaS companies that have a considerable amount of monthly recurring revenue and demonstrate a solid product-market fit. However, this approach has its limitations, as ECAP primarily targets well-established and reputable businesses. This can pose certain issues since it narrows down the pool of potential candidates that meet specific investment criteria and disregards other promising opportunities that may not be seeking funding at the moment.

Despite being primarily focused on SaaS, ECAP was willing to explore opportunities in other niches, which expanded the potential candidate pool considerably and gave us more options to reach out to.

The Solution

In order to facilitate efficient growth for ECAP, we recognized the need to conduct an experiment aimed at providing them with long-term analytics. Our plan was to segment founders who have previously raised capital from those who have not yet gone through a funding round. We discovered that ECAP had not previously compiled this data, and we at Centergrowth believed it to be critical to the organization's functions in the coming years.

From the beginning, we observed that the team at ECAP was putting in tremendous amounts of manual labor, not only in sending educations emails to prospects prior to their calls and in follow-up emails afterward, but also in internal manual processes to close deals. Their efforts appeared to be continuous and extensive.

It quickly became apparent that automations were essential to facilitate ECAP's expansion, given their limited availability for other tasks due to their constant back-and-forth communication with prospects and internal processes.

We knew we could help.

Centergrowth to-do list:

• Create Pitch- Create a pitch targeted towards SaaS founders as well as a handful of other industries.
• CRM- Setup and integrate Customer Relationship Management software.
• Automations- Identify the time constraints present in ECAP's processes and remove them by implementing automations.
• Outreach- Start aggressive outreach.

Automations

Upon working with ECAP for approximately a week, we quickly realized that a significant number of their appointments were being missed. As a result, we promptly established reminders for prospective clients and implemented a series of automated messages as follows:

• Send email reminder- 24 hours before scheduled appointment
• Send email reminder- 4 hours before scheduled appointment
• Send text message reminder- 1 hour before scheduled appointment

We are including a link to reschedule or cancel the call in all of these situations. Our aim is to avoid keeping an appointment on the calendar for someone who has no intention of showing up. This strategy has been effective, as ECAP reported that almost everyone is now showing up for their scheduled calls.

After examining the company's business model, we were able to implement customized automations that saved ECAP over 20 hours per week on repetitive internal tasks.

To educate ECAP's prospects before their calls, ECAP was manually sending out individual emails, which was consuming a lot of their time. Additionally, after the calls, they would manually prepare and send follow-up emails. We recognized that this was a repetitive task that could be automated while still being personalized, by including the prospects' names and company names in the emails.

Although we cannot discuss the specific intricacies of ECAP's business model, effective communication plays a crucial role in delivering ECAP's services, which was mostly being performed manually. At Centergrowth, we acknowledge that there are two distinct approaches to enhance a business's efficiency: through automations and systematization. Although many business owners often conflate the two, they are entirely separate concepts. Some business actions are not meant to be fully automated, as they require a human touch.

• Automations- the use of technology applications that perform repetitive tasks.
• Systematization- to arrange into a system, plan or method, how the business operates from start to finish.

Centergrowth automated almost all the top-of-the-funnel processes for ECAP, such as inbound lead nurturing. Subsequently, we analyzed the internal tasks that ECAP had to carry out to finalize deals and handle the workload required for new clients. This is when we established a systematization of their internal business processes. There was a considerable gap between ECAP's departments, analytics, and data, which we were able to bridge by streamlining their in-house processes through our customized systematization approach. By combining automation with systematization, we were able to liberate more than 20 hours of work per week for ECAP's team.