How ECA Partners uses Ren to win in the competitive executive search market

ECA Partners is an executive search firm focused on private equity firms and their portfolio companies. Historically, most of ECA’s business has come from existing client relationships they’ve nurtured for years. It’s challenging, however, to win new business and sustain a differentiated value proposition in a saturated market with low entry barriers.

Setting a higher bar

The key to success for ECA Partners is smarter outreach to the right people at the right time. “Conversion rates are big for us in marketing,” says Jason Blonstein, Managing Director of the firm. “For any marketing campaign, we want to see how effective it is and how many meetings it leads to.”

Until recently, their approach to outreach wasn’t getting the job done. “Our responses weren’t timely and most of our follow ups were pretty boilerplate,” Blonstein reflects. “Our approach wasn’t systematic and definitely wasn’t effectively using technology.”

That’s where Ren’s relationship intelligence transformed the firm’s approach. “Ren solved both of those issues for us. Previously, we had tried a more manual process for what Ren does but it was extremely time consuming and didn’t yield a good ROI,” says Blonstein.

Building a nurture engine

Since deploying Ren’s relationship intelligence platform, the firm has been able to develop a system for consistently nurturing contacts and staying top of mind. One of the early adopters at the firm was able to generate 30 meetings within 3 weeks.

Ren finds actionable and timely news about ECA’s 30,000+ contacts to uncover business opportunities. By understanding their objectives and syncing with their CRM, calendar, and contacts, Ren automates research, meeting prep, and high-impact outreach to help them stand out and win deals.

Ren has been very effective at both meeting generation and relationship building - two key things for executive search.

Jason Blonstein

Managing Director