Corporate Visions, a portfolio company of Hammond, Kennedy, Whitney, has acquired acquired Launch International, a communications company specializing in marketing and sales enablement content.
Corporate Visions helps business-to-business companies create more sales opportunities, win more deals and increase sales profitability by improving the conversations salespeople have with customers. Clients such as ADP, Motorola, Philips, UPS and Cisco use Corporate Visions to help them align marketing and sales with a repeatable approach for creating and delivering winning customer conversations. The company is based in San Francisco (www.corporatevisions.com).
Launch International is a strategy and services firm that helps companies build and execute high-performance, integrated marketing and sales enablement programs. Launch helps customers rethink the way they approach interactions with buyers—both through their campaign activities and their sales conversations—to make sure they are insight-based, customer-centric, aligned to the audience and need, and synchronized across both marketing and sales activities. The company is based outside of Philadelphia in Doylestown, PA (www.launchinternational.com).
The Launch acquisition is Corporate Visions’ fourth in a span of less than two years. Previously, the company acquired Executive Conversation, a provider of business and financial acumen sales skills training; BayGroup International, a negotiations sales skills training company; and WhiteboardSelling, a provider of visual storytelling for improving sales conversations and presentations.
The purchase of Launch expands Corporate Visions’ customer conversation system and makes it the industry’s largest provider of consulting and training services for helping companies deliver selling conversations that create more opportunities and win more profitable business.
“Corporate Visions applies decision-making science to our message development and skills training programs,” said Corporate Visions CEO Joe Terry. “Launch International is a perfect fit because their content tools are grounded in the unique dynamics of sales conversations. They’ve proven they can create customer needs-centric marketing content that supports the conversations customers want to have, and put that content into the kinds of tools that work the way salespeople need to work.”
Hammond, Kennedy, Whitney & Company invests in companies with revenues between $20 million and $200 million and EBITDAs between $2 million and $20 million. Over the past 29 years, HKW has completed 44 platform management buyouts of small middle-market companies throughout North America as well as 49 add-on acquisitions. The firm was founded in 1903 and is headquartered in Indianapolis with an additional office in New York (www.hkwinc.com).
2014 PEPD • Private Equity’s Leading News Magazine • 7-2-14