Managing Your Business for Sale – Importance of a Proper Marketing Strategy

Not just start-ups, but from SMEs to big shots, many of the business owners today are desirous to successfully sell their businesses to make high profits. You can see that one of the most intensive search phrases on search engines is ‘how to sell my business?’

In all sense, preparing a business for sale is a demanding and arduous task, which takes time, and will make you go through highly stressful and emotional situations. Perfect planning and sufficient preparation is the key to success.

If you are the founder of a business, and are in charge of selling it off, then the first thing to do is to make a perfect exit strategy, which should also contain the essentials of how to adequately position and advertise (market) your business.

Objective of marketing

Owners aiming at their business for sale for the first time often tend to underestimate its significance in the market. Instead they focus more on its packaging and presentation to make it attractive to the potential buyers.

However, other pre-sale measures such as marketing also have to be thoroughly planned and perfectly executed to achieve the desired goals. A proper gestation period has to be given to the marketing process in order to generate proper interest in qualified buyers so that your business is sold for a premium rate. However, anyone who had successfully accomplished this will surely say that it is easier said than done.

How to go about it?

While into the phase of marketing your business for sale, here are some key points to keep in mind.

Know the current scenario

If you have a solid aim at selling their business should first start by studying the current scenario of that specific industry. You can also get brokers or business intermediates to do this, but who else knows it better than yourself about your field of business.

Find a fine balance

If you are planning to sell off your business without involving any mediating professional, then you have to find a balance between making it known to the widest possible audience at one hand by keep it away from those who don’t need to know it on the other.

The need for such fine tuning of your marketing process makes it a very delicate task. If you fail to reach enough potential buyers, then you may end up getting into negotiations at your disadvantage, and if you overdo marketing by being aggressive, then there is a possibility that you may end up alerting the vendors, creditors, staff, or customers.

Avoid misassumption

The fact that you are selling off your business may naturally give a misassumption to others as to something is going wrong out there. To avoid this, along with focusing on your marketing efforts, you should also ensure that the day to day operations of your business is carried out with little disruption.

Prepare a perfect memorandum

You should remember that there are many sell my business deals out there. So to make your business stand out, you need to provide your potential buyers enough vital information to help make informed decisions. A clearly descriptive and organised sales memorandum is the primary need here. It should cover all potential areas of expansion and growth, unique value propositions of your business, assets and liabilities, and the key financial figures.

The other general aspects the sellers need to ensure while planning to sell a business is that the physical state of the businesses is in excellent condition, inventory is current, machinery and equipment are in good condition, and premises are clean and presentable. Your business must be in a position to give a well-organised feel to the prospective buyers and inspire their confidence.

The author writes about buying a business and the advantages of buying one as opposed to setting a new enterprise.