If you’re considering selling your business, then it’s important to realize that your business can be marketed just like any other product or service. With the right marketing strategy, your business can sell quickly and at a fair price, and fortunately, there are only two main steps for packaging a business for sale: identifying your buyer and targeting that buyer.
Identify the buyer.
When identifying a potential buyer for your business, remember that most buyers can be categorized as either a financial buyer or a strategic buyer. As the term suggests, financial buyers are interested solely in your business’s finances and will likely only purchase a business that demonstrates a clear ability to generate instant revenue.
Strategic buyers, on the other hand, are much more future-minded. In addition to a business’s current financial situation, they also evaluate that business’s potential for growth, mergers, and other types of long term business moves. While finances are certainly a factor for strategic buyers, they aren’t the sole determinant.
Target strategically.
After you’ve identified the buyer’s type, you can target them by packaging your business correctly. When marketing a business to a financial buyer, concentrate mostly on revenue, profits, costs, and other basic financial facts. When marketing to a strategic buyer, your focus should shift to your business’s potential, both in financial terms and oftentimes creative terms as well.
While it may seem easier to simply present both types of buyers with the same marketing package, this can actually be detrimental to your sale. Ultimately, by failing to focus solely on what actually matters to the buyer, you risk distracting them from what could have been a final selling point.
Identifying and targeting buyers can be a very difficult task, so many business owners use professional third parties during the sale process. Attorneys, accountants, and specialty business brokers are all great resources, and all three play unique and essential roles in the sale process. The expert transportation business brokers at Tenney Group, for example, help to connect buyers and sellers and also help to negotiate satisfactory and mutually beneficial deals. The Tenney Group works closely with clients throughout every step of the business sale process, from listing the business on the market to preparing the final paperwork.
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