EOS Partners

Eos Partners is a middle market private equity firm based in New York City. The firm has $3.5 billion under management including its latest $600 million fund. The company was formed in 1994 as a private investment partnership with a simple charter — to provide value-added capital to businesses at an inflection point in their development. Eos Partners has a long track record of successfully completing investments which include both majority and minority ownership. Eos believes that the most attractive investment opportunities involve companies poised to benefit from fundamental economic and business trends — both secular and cyclical. The company has a record of creating value by recognizing such trends and committing resources and capital to businesses at critical moments in their corporate lives.  Because Eos places great importance on aligning

management incentives through significant equity participation, they are afforded a high degree of flexibility in tailoring an investment to meet the objective of a seller, management team, or company. Eos also has unique flexibility in executing transactions, closing investments rapidly, and maintaining a longer-term investment perspective where appropriate.

The Information Systems Challenge

The principals at Eos had been managing their deal pipeline and sourcing relationships employing a rough combination of Microsoft Outlook, Excel, and even Word, but it was a painful and time-consuming process. Many at the firm had heard about the benefits of a CRM solution and had discussed it several years ago, but at the time CRM implementations had the reputation of being big, expensive and time-consuming. Even if Eos had wanted to invest in a solution, they felt that most of the alternatives would have been overkill or too rigid for their needs. Fast forward to 2008. Eos experienced significant financial and personnel growth and knew it was time for a solution that would enhance their agility for the future. So they took another look at the current market software solutions.  They looked at some sales force automation systems, but didn’t think the fit was right, since most of those systems are typically built for sales reps pitching and selling products or services. Eos Partners invests in businesses and what they really needed was a solution to help them track and evaluate potential investment candidates. The process of identifying companies to invest in requires elaborate research and extensive relationship management.

“When we are searching for potential investment opportunities, we typically close 1 out of 400 that we come across and assess,” said Stenning Schueppert, Principal at Eos Partners. “At our core, we are finance guys – not marketing wizards – and we needed a system to help us track our business and manage the many relationships that our business involves.”

The Relationship Management Solution

The company set out to find a CRM solution that would not only be flexible enough to meet their unique business needs, but also user-friendly enough to gain adoption among the non-technical users at Eos Partners. They looked at two hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) products, but preferred the control of an on-premise solution. They leaned towards a solution from Microsoft largely based on Microsoft’s solid reputation.

“Since it was Microsoft, we knew it would do what they said it would do,“ Schueppert said. “We knew it would be supported for years and years to come.”

While the company considered Microsoft because of the brand, it was the functionality of Microsoft Dynamics CRM that ultimately won Eos over. Since user adoption was of critical importance for Eos’ non-technical types, the seamless integration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Microsoft Outlook and Excel combined with an interface that was already familiar made it the obvious choice. While conducting their research, Eos searched for companies with experience tailoring Microsoft CRM to the specific needs of financial services firms, and saw Customer Effective quoted in an article about CRM and financial services. While not critical, they also liked that Customer Effective had a local presence with their New York office. From the beginning of the implementation, the CRM experts at Customer Effective worked to deliver a solution tailored to the needs of Eos Partners. There are many different ways that the principals at Eos find companies worth researching for investment. They may learn about prospects through banking or brokerage contacts, lawyers, accountants, consultants or even other executives may suggest investigating a specific company, or Eos may even approach a company that isn’t currently being marketed about the possibility of an investment if the conditions are right. Customer Effective worked hard to understand all of these different scenarios and how they would be translated within

Microsoft Dynamics CRM. And since Eos Partners maintains great flexibility in their business – from the discovery process to the details of individual investments – they needed not only a CRM solution extensible enough to help them track and manage the investment details, but also an implementation partner with the flexibility to get the solution working in a short period of time.

“Customer Effective was great about suggesting ways to tailor the solution the way we needed it to be,” adds Schueppert. “And since we wanted to launch quickly, they were extremely flexible with changing the original work / scope to fit the project, which is not what you usually get with a typical technology vendor. It’s refreshing to work with people who keep their focus on the project’s success instead of getting wrapped up in the details of a static scope of work.”

The Eos solution went live within just three months, and the firm is now utilizing it daily and weekly to track all deal flow, contact management, and even project management instead of having to rely on Outlook and Excel. All material calls, meetings and contacts are tracked within CRM and user adoption has been steadily increasing since they went live.

“We’re very happy with the capabilities of the product itself, and our admittedly non-technical users are getting more comfortable with it,” Schueppert says. “The WYSIWYG customization tool is key for me. I can make my own edits and changes to the system and I don’t consider myself a technical person. We continue to this day with our own minor tweaks to further tailor it for our needs, calling Customer Effective when necessary. The adaptability and flexibility of both the product and Customer Effective made this implementation a success.”

Looking to the Future

The main goal for the CRM implementation at Eos Partners was to help them manage deal flow and contacts, but as data accumulates in the system, the firm will utilize the information to be more proactive in outreach efforts, such as email marketing for better communication, touch

nurture suspects on a more regular basis and also efficiently track their more important deal sources.

“The number one goal of our CRM implementation was to track deal flow,” Schueppert adds. “CRM started doing that 100% about five minutes after we went live and it will accomplish more over time.”

The investors at Eos are excited about CRM’s ability to help provide insight into their business through deal flow history as well. Being able to sort information according to individuals, geographies and sources means they will have an accurate view of their business, something they weren’t able to do before Microsoft CRM. With the right CRM solution in place, Eos Partners can now effectively manage and track the complex relationships and processes involved with purchasing companies. And the flexibility of Microsoft Dynamics CRM will ensure the solution will continue to meet the needs of Eos Partners, so that they can continue to deliver flexibility to the companies they want to invest in.