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Across five decades of mid-market investing, ECI has reviewed and commissioned commercial due diligence on thousands of transactions, on both sides of the table. Most deals have CDD, whether commissioned by the vendor, the buy side, or both. That means we’ve seen examples of where it genuinely builds not just investor conviction, but also real value for the company, and, sadly, many where it falls flat.

Lewis Bantin, Partner and Head of ECI's Commercial Team, explains how management teams can get more from CDD, across the investment lifecycle.

1. Treat CDD as a strategic lever, not just a validation step   

Good CDD should work in two steps. The first and essential part needs to establish foundations – size of market, trends, the full competitive set. The second step should build on this foundational layer – how does it relate to your business plan? Is that plan consistent with customer behaviour, the competitive landscape and your own performance?

Unlike financial DD, this isn’t (just) a rearview mirror exercise. It’s forward looking and open to debate. For that reason, the best CDD prompts discussion and helps set the strategic direction – not just validating trends. ECI’s Commercial Team gets involved in the deal so that the commercial insight developed during due diligence carries straight through into the post-deal strategy work with management. CDD should (in our view!) be genuinely strategic rather than confirmatory; the latter being shelved once the deal completes. The best CDD we have seen opens your eyes to new market opportunities, new lines of business – it's how we understood the scale of opportunity in IoT and led to us backing the founders at Wireless Logic!

2. Choosing the right provider: start early  

When selecting a CDD advisor, the most important thing isn’t the name on the door. It’s about the team who will be working with you. They should have spent years immersed in their sector, can talk knowledgeably about stronger and weaker performers as they genuinely know the competitor set, and therefore bring insight and pattern recognition, rather than a template.

Scale matters too, but mainly as it defines cost. There’s a real spread from the global and MBB strategy houses to the boutiques, and in some cases even sole specialists. The right solution is not always the cheapest, but you probably also don’t need a six-figure budget for a customer referencing project. Lean on your network here. Your corporate financier and/or investor will have worked on comparable projects and should be able to direct you to the relevant specialists and right size the pitch. The important thing is timing – you don’t want to be meeting providers as you go. Getting to know the right people in your sector well before a process starts means you’re choosing based on fit and insight, not availability.

3. Build the data foundations for CDD 

One of the delays that often happens during the CDD process is unstructured or missing data, with providers spending their time knitting together various sources and making assumptions, rather than being able to present a coherent picture at the start. Pipeline and conversion data is often an important part of this. Without a quarterly view of how the pipeline is moving, it’s genuinely difficult to predict what the next six to twelve months will look like. Churn is the other areas we tend to see businesses underinvest in data quality. Many companies capture a high level 30,000 ft reason as to why a customer left, often because a drop-down box gets completed by an account manager who understandably wants to move onto the next deal. Things you can set up early, such as recording and transcribing exit conversations, and asking directly whether it was budget, competition, product etc, gives you a better pattern to work with from the start. The same applies to customer referencing more broadly: it's most useful when it's a routine habit rather than something commissioned for the first time in the run-up to a sale. Research shows that management-curated references are unsurprisingly 30-40% more positive than independently sourced customers, so few investors will rely on it wholly. With that in mind, it’s better to have the time to understand and remedy any likely outputs from customer referencing, rather than trying to curate the answer.

4. Be honest about the plan, and don’t overplay your hand 

Management teams, and sometimes their investors, unsurprisingly take the view that a more ambitious plan can support a stronger valuation. But massaged figures or overselling as established strategy something that is no more than a twinkle in the eye, often end up with teams discussing why something isn’t right, rather than why it is – and that can actively hinder conviction. Even if overplaying your hand on AI capability or sales traction gets you through a hot process, it tends to catch up post-deal, ending up with a difficult first year and often a disappointed investor.

The best CDD providers will put you on the right side of the ambition line. Because they aren’t paid on completion, they’re often the most objective read a management team will get on how bullish their own plan really is. That’s why it’s best to treat time with them as a genuine conversation rather than a test to pass.

5. New frontier: AI and defensibility  

If you think about the classic Michael Porter Five Forces framework, that has shaped most of CDD thinking, barriers to disruption and substitution used to sit low on the list of diligence priorities. Technological change and AI now mean that it’s central. Management teams should expect to answer the defensibility question re AI-native entrants and should have a considered view. We cover this in more depth in: How are investors thinking about AI defensibility and opportunity.

Avantia has taken another major step forward in AI with the launch of 'Lyra', a proprietary agentic AI orchestrator built for the next generation of home insurance claims.

'Lyra' builds on Holmes, Avantia's existing proprietary AI claims tool launched in 2025. Lyra provides a sophisticated orchestration layer that sits above Holmes and is built to work alongside other agentic tools. Where Holmes processes individual interactions in the claims process, Lyra can coordinate multiple AI systems in much the same way a senior manager directs a team of specialists. Crucially, Lyra introduces persistent memory across claims interactions, enabling the system to identify patterns, inconsistencies and anomalies over time that would be invisible when viewing individual claims in isolation. The result is an AI-driven claims operation - leveraging multiple AI agents and tools - that is able to scale faster and smarter, with fair outcomes for both policyholders and the business.

The introduction of Lyra does not diminish the human element of the claims experience. A dedicated human operator continuously monitors Lyra’s learning and decision-making, and final decisions on all claims remain with human experts. Homeprotect's model is built on a clear principle: AI handles precision and process, while human claims handlers provide the empathy, judgement and sensitivity that no technology can replicate.

The launch also underlines Avantia's position at the forefront of responsible AI in the sector. It is the first UK personal lines home insurance business to launch AI-enabled policy validation and orchestrated claims processing, and the only insurer taking part in the FCA's AI Live Testing initiative, which supports the safe and responsible deployment of AI across financial services. A robust governance framework keeps 'Lyra' aligned with FCA requirements and the Consumer Duty framework, built on human accountability, dedicated oversight, transparency and auditability.

Dan Huddart, CTO at Avantia Group, says, “Our strategy is to build a fully AI-led operating model that delivers a brilliant customer experience, and I believe Lyra represents the first-of-its-kind, live deployment of agentic AI within the home insurance market. We are continually enhancing our AI capabilities across pricing, risk analysis and customer experience, whilst building the scalability and resilience required to support our growth. We have strong momentum and a clear path to scale our customer numbers from 350,000 today to over one million."

Avantia is the first UK personal lines home insurance business to launch AI-enabled policy validation and orchestrated claims processing, and is the only insurance business participating in the FCA’s AI Live Testing initiative, which supports the responsible deployment of AI in the UK finance and insurance sectors.

Avantia has also implemented emerging web standard WebMCP within its website, reinforcing its market-leading position in the implementation of AI in the insurance sector. Homeprotect is the first UK insurance business to implement the technology, which enables AI agents to interact directly with parts of a website journey, as it prepares for a future where consumers are expected to increasingly use agentic AI to research and interact with insurers.

Consumer Intelligence’s Insurance Behaviour Tracker found that when AI tools and assistants were first included as a shopping channel in April 2026, 18.7% of home insurance shoppers said they had used them to shop around, compared with 17% using the telephone and 14.5% using brokers, suggesting that AI agents are now pivotal to the customer journey.

George Moss, Managing Partner at ECI, says: "Avantia continues to set the pace for AI in home insurance. Lyra’s ability to connect information across claims gives a level of oversight that wasn’t possible before, protecting customers and keeping premiums competitive. The introduction of WebMCP reflects their approach at the forefront of the customer journey, understanding how people look for home insurance today and expanding that into the future, helping Avantia stay ahead of the competition. Congratulations to Dan, David and all the Avantia team on these exciting developments.”

Many mid-market businesses still measure marketing success through impressions, website traffic, keyword rankings, and click-through rates. While these metrics still have their place, they are becoming less reliable indicators of whether your business is actually visible to your audience.

At our recent ECI Unlocked webinar, digital strategy consultancy OMMAX shared their expertise with our portfolio marketing leaders on how AI is reshaping the buyer journey. Their message was simple: "People don't want search engines anymore. They want answer engines."

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews… they are now sitting between your brand and your buyer. We look at the ways best in class marketing teams are adapting to the next era of discovery.

1. Understanding brand equity inside LLMs

Visibility within LLMs is now measurable. Tools like Croud's BrandCI can help businesses track:

Disruption – how much of your traffic could be at risk as Google's AI Overviews reduce clicks to traditional search results? New tools can track this, including brand sentiment (is the AI saying good, neutral or bad things about you?), presence (in what share of relevant searches do you get a mention?), citations (how often are LLMs linking to your site?), and disruption (how far Google's AI Overviews have already dented your existing SEO rankings).

Sentiment – is AI describing your brand positively, neutrally or negatively?

Presence – how often does your business appear in relevant AI-generated responses?

Citations – how frequently do LLMs direct users back to your website?

OMMAX has run around 250 of these assessments and found that many businesses appear in about 20–25% of relevant LLM answers. Strong brands can reach 80%, while some are sitting at 8%.  

For mid-market businesses, sentiment matters more than the numbers. As OMMAX put it: "The only thing worse than not being visible in LLMs is being visible with a negative brand sentiment." They shared a client example where, in response to almost every prompt about their brand, the LLM responded with something along the lines of: yes, they exist, but I wouldn't recommend working with them. The culprit? Comment sections on old YouTube videos the company had long forgotten about.  

2. Have you changed channel focus? 

The channels that matter for LLM visibility are not the same ones that drove SEO performance, and your team's channel mix should reflect that.

According to OMMAX, LinkedIn is the most cited domain within ChatGPT, and YouTube is the most cited domain within Gemini. Facebook, on the other hand, is largely unreadable by LLM crawlers. So if your marketing team is putting energy into channels that LLMs can't access, that effort isn't building the visibility that matters right now.  

Third-party content matters more than it used to. With the previous focus on SEO, a mention without a link-back counted for little. However LLMs work differently, they don't just crawl your website, they draw on press coverage, review sites, forum threads, and discussion boards. Earning mentions, even unlinked ones, across independent sources is now a core part of building what OMMAX calls ‘algorithmic brand equity’. 

Paid search deserves the same scrutiny. The view from some leaders is that PPC has been performing for Google rather than for its clients, with revenue up on price even as click volumes fall. If your team's reports show costs per click rising against declining volume, that's the shift playing out in your own numbers, and it strengthens the case for rebalancing spend towards the channels LLMs actually read."

The practical question for your team is, are they actively pursuing coverage, reviews, and presence on the platforms LLMs read? 

3. Has your content adapted?

This one might sting a little but since ChatGPT launched, the internet has been flooded with mediocre AI-generated content. The irony is that to be visible inside LLMs, you need content that stands out from all of that. As OMMAX said: "We don't just need to produce more content, we need to produce better content. Content that stands out from the clutter." 

If you've invested properly in SEO over the years, you have a head start here. LLMs have learned which brands carry real domain authority, and strong organic foundations feed directly into that. But authority alone doesn't win the answer. LLMs then look for another level of insight relevant to the specific question being asked, so content that was broad enough to rank on Google now needs to be developed further and personalised to the questions your buyers are actually asking.

But there's also a structural issue, not just a quality one. The ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Anthropic bots all behave very differently from Google's crawler, and they're considerably less mature. One OMMAX client's website was fully readable by Google, but the ChatGPT bot couldn't access the news section at all, meaning ChatGPT was completely blind to every update the company had ever published. Machine readability across all major crawlers is now a basic technical requirement, not an advanced consideration.

Key takeaways

Having a clear view on LLM performance and adapting channel and content strategy accordingly should be front of mind for all marketers at the moment. Marketing teams are really refocussing on the fundamentals. As OMMAX put it, "Building LLM visibility isn't about tricking an algorithm or finding growth hacks. It's about having a great product, communicating about it effectively, understanding which channels matter, and keeping your content hygiene in place."  

The good news is that when brands get it right, LLM referrals tend to lead to conversion rates seven to nine times higher than normal because users arrive already informed, looking to confirm a decision rather than gather information. The traffic is smaller in volume but dramatically higher in intent. 

ECI has invested from Manchester for close to three decades - as we mark our 50th year, Stephen Roberts, who has spent much of his career doing deals across the North West, reflects on why the region remains one of Europe’s busiest deal markets and why it is still one of the best places in the UK to build and scale a business.

ECI’s Manchester office has led almost a third of ECI’s investments in its latest Fund. Why is the Manchester office so important?

“Because on some measures Manchester is the second most active private equity market in Europe, behind only London. It is a busy market, with a strong population of PE and VC funds based here, and that activity is particularly strong at the lower-cap end, with many deals which gives us sight of opportunities early. It also has a particular character: it is big, but small too. Everyone knows everyone, it is less transient than London, and that fosters a supportive and collaborative culture, which matters a lot when you’re building a business. And lastly, but most importantly, there’s a lot of innovative growth businesses here. We have been investing here for close to thirty years, and across every fund we have done two or three good deals out of the Manchester office.”

Does being on the ground change anything for the Founders and management teams you back? 

“I like to think so. For a founder, having your investor around the corner is valuable. It means we can meet for a coffee at short notice to talk through a strategic issue, rather than everything being a formal, diarised set-piece. Those informal touchpoints often matter most.”

The North West is often labelled a tech region - is that how you see it?

“I would call it a growth hub rather than a tech hub. The perception that it’s all tech undersells the breadth we see. Partly that’s because some of the biggest success stories have been tech or tech-adjacent - the North West has produced a remarkable run of success stories, from Boohoo and THG to AO and On the Beach, and more recently Matillion. But that’s a real range; e-commerce has always been strong here, as have tech-enabled services. Our own track record reflects that breadth: we have backed businesses like Citation, Great Rail Journeys, Clarke Energy Services, TMG, CPOMS, Moneypenny, CMap and Mobysoft across the North, and what they have in common is that they’re strong, well-run, growing businesses, which is what we look for.”

What has changed in the market over the years you have been doing deals here? 

“The biggest shift is how the advisory community has matured. It is no longer a case of regional teams covering regional deals - senior, nationally focused advisers at the major firms are now based in Manchester rather than London, across corporate finance but also legal and broader advisory. Manchester has become a national deal-doing centre in its own right, not just a regional one. That is true for us as well – personally, I lead the HRtech sector nationally, combining that sector expertise with genuine local presence. We also deliver national and international deals from here. A good example is our recent investment in Paragin Group, the Benelux leader in high-stakes assessment software, led out of Manchester, just as we support TAG on its international growth from here. Being based in the North West does not mean only doing North West deals.”

Do you think there’s a growing confidence in the region, is that translating to deals? 

“There’s a huge amount of foreign direct investment in Manchester - it’s now in the top ten large European cities in the Regions of the Future rankings. You can see it on the ground (and in the amount of cranes across Manchester!) - real money going in from the Good Growth programme, innovation hubs, and a funding ecosystem built around the universities. VC investment in the North West was £2bn in 2024.” 

What would you still like to see strengthened in the region? 

“Connectivity remains top of the list. International travel out of Manchester is excellent, but it can be quicker to reach Amsterdam than Newcastle. We’ve said this for years and progress has been slow, but it’s still the biggest single thing that would help the North build on the past decade’s growth. One of the more dramatic changes that you could expect to strengthen the region is Andy Burnham becoming PM. This will help to shift the country’s centre of gravity away from London, with Burnham talking about a 'Downing Street North', a permanent government base here in Manchester. It is an interesting challenge to the London-centricity of the UK, and I’d expect a renewed focus on devolution with Manchester and the Northwest front and centre, which should be genuinely exciting for businesses and investors in the region.”

What’s your message to Founders? 

“That we are very much open for business. We have backed growth businesses from this region for the better part of thirty years, and we intend to keep doing so for a long time yet. I’m passionate about the success of the North West and North West-based businesses”