Marketing Your Business



Whether you use a business intermediary or not, there are a finite number of places you can market your business for sale. Marketing is an important aspect of the value chain created by business brokers, however - contrary to popular opinion - not the most important one.

While marketing and exposing a business is a vital part of the business sales process, in my experience, finding the potential buyer is only about 25% of the entire business sale process. What that means is that in roughly 75% of the cases after finding a potentially interested and qualified buyer for the business, something ends up derailing a potential deal.

While the reasons for this can be varied (some are addressed in subsequent sections of this website), for now we will talk a bit more about the main marketing and advertising channels and share some of our experience in using each of them.

Some of the main sources that we, as business brokers, utilize to market a business for sale, include: While the largest percentage of new buyer inquiries come from online advertising (through specialized paid sites such as bizbuysell, businessesforsale, mergernetwork, etc.), it is the Existing Qualified Buyer leads and Referrals that garner the highest percentage of buyers that end up purchasing a business. This has to do with the proverbial 90% rule - on average, approximately 90% of first-time business buyers end up purchasing a business different than the one they initially inquired about. This means that a person that has inquired about a specific light manufacturing business with a price tag of $500,000 is as likely to purchase another manufacturing business, or even a service business. Contrary again to common belief, buyers are not necessarily attracted to a single business opportunity, or even only driven by financial returns when exploring their options. Some of the main reasons why individuals look for purchasing a business are: Financial rewards, though important, come third or fourth in the list of main reasons for buying a business. This is an important aspect to consider when marketing and advertising a business for sale opportunity.