Is your business ready to attract buyers? Here's how to showcase your growth trajectory.
When it comes to preparing your business for an exit, sale or deal, profitability, EBITDA and other financial metrics are critical. But looking profitable isn’t always the same as looking attractive. Being attractive to potential buyers has less to do with your current EBITDA (although it is, of course, important) and more to do with your future potential.
Specifically, buyers make decisions based on whether they can see how growth will continue once you have left. Marketing’s role in this is often underestimated. Done right, it is not window dressing or polish that puts a shine on an otherwise ordinary company. Instead, it becomes proof of a solid, consistent, revenue-generating machine.
Sophisticated buyers don’t just want founders and CEOs to tell them there is market appetite and future pipeline for their company’s products or services. They want to see it for themselves. In practice, this means buyers expect confidence that your business knows its core customer audience, knows how to win meaningful, viable new business, and has a process in place to acquire customers at scale.
Marketing lifts the lid on those processes, making it easier for buyers to see how your company operates and makes money for themselves. That level of visibility gives buyers real confidence in the level of risk they are taking. Lower risk equals higher valuation.
Ask many CEOs what they think marketing means and you will likely get a similar answer: “a good website and some content on social media”. Those elements are important, but they are nowhere near enough to attract a serious buyer ready to pay a premium on your exit multiple. Those buyers need proof of other core strengths:
Sales demand sourced not just from referrals, or the founder or CEO’s personal network.
Traffic and engagement from defined Customer Personas, rather than random visitors or laypeople.
Clear, consistent narrative and identity across the company’s brand, campaigns and sales deck.
Attribution data that links awareness of the company to tangible revenue.
Lead qualification that shows who is engaging with the company, how often, and what their business could be worth.
Each of these systems proves that you really know your market, your market knows your business, and that your ideal customers are not just aware of your company but actively paying attention to it. Combined, they give buyers confidence that there is a real commercial growth engine at the heart of your business.
Serious buyers expect to see proof of growth that can happen without you. Marketing is how you show it.
Buyers do not care much for surface-level metrics like your company’s follower count on LinkedIn, or the traffic your website gets, in isolation. As part of a compelling story, fine, but buyers are looking for something more important: evidence. Specifically, the kind of evidence that clearly demonstrates your business has a traceable, reliable process in place to ensure future revenue generation.
To buyers, the most important questions you need to answer are:
These questions each ask something different of founders and CEOs, but they reveal the same thing: a measurable, repeatable and transferable marketing process ready-made to keep generating revenue. That is an immensely valuable signal to buyers, and one that is likely to make your business much more attractive to them.
We’ve talked about the green flags buyers look for. What about the red ones? Just as there are positive signals you can send to potential buyers, there are also warning signs which can tell them your marketing isn’t working - and that your growth might not be as robust as your marketing implies. The main causes for buyer suspicion are:
Any one of these problems will slow down your buyer’s due diligence. Combined, they introduce much more risk to their potential purchase, which they could either price into their offer, or end up walking away from.
In recent exits that we have supported, buyers have pulled up the same factors again and again as major ticks in the pro column during their purchase. The selling company had established organic search dominance in high-intent categories. They had also developed clear sales funnels (via behaviour-based email marketing specific to each prospect) that were triggered and navigated by their specific behaviour or interests. They benefited from clear CRM pipelines that assigned a numerical value to every lead. And they had a system in place to distribute content which not only raised awareness of the company itself, but also delivered nurturable sales leads.
Taken together, these differentiators become a set of commercial signals to potential buyers and prove that your growth is happening in your ledger, not just in theory. What could be more attractive to a buyer than that?
Marketing does not need to be flashy to be effective. Its job is to demonstrate your growth and make it easier for interested buyers to become active ones. To attract better buyers prepared to pay a higher multiple with less haggling, don’t just polish up your brand. Put a spotlight on your growth.